Michael Ortner gives his take on the 8 ways to better lead tracking on the web.

His first point is so very vital I’ve put it here in full:

“1. Understand the significance of your Web site. Your site is the one place that virtually all of your prospects will visit before contacting you. In most industries, even the most technically challenged buyers will view your Web site before considering your product. Your Web site will either move them along the buying process or it will turn them away. So, instead of considering your site an online brochure, think of it as a lead-generation funnel.”

This is so important. Your web site is the world’s window on your business. Just use it as a catalogue without any strategic thought behind it and you’re going to lose sales, leads and referrals. I’ve had clients who thought a single page web site was reasonable.

That’s like producing a sales proposal but not allowing anyone to give it to the prospect or follow it up.

His other points are:

1. 
   
   Use a Web Stats package - how else do you know who is coming to your site?


2. 
   
   Use landing pages to identify where people are coming from for specific campaigns


3. 
   
   Determine how many visitors turn into leads - compare to your “contact us” page


4. 
   
   Centralise your contact information on to one page


5. 
   
   Highlight your “contact us” link on every page - at the top


6. 
   
   Know how your customer found you - ideally with different 0800 numbers for different routes to your site


7. 
   
   Cultivate your leads

I particualrly agree with the last point too. Because although someone doesn’t buy from your site immediately they may keep coming back until they’re convinced you’re right for the job they have in mind.

If you're anything like most other networkers, you're interested in getting better at it.

Well, the Internationally recognised "World's Foremost Expert on Nametags" Scott Ginsberg is here to help.

"Scott who...?" I can almost hear you ask.

Scott is (I hope) possibly the only person in the world who's worn his name tag for a straight 1944 days, counting today.

That means he's worn one since 2nd November 2000.

Why on earth does he do it?

Scott's aim is encouraging people to become friendlier and more approachable.

Get Networking Articles

To further that goal he's written two books, is a regular columnist and was interviewed on The Today Show, CNN and USA Today, among others.

But the interesting thing for your purposes is that he's written lots of useful networking articles.

Check them out here: http://www.sideroad.com/Business_Networking/index.html

Test Your Approachability Quotient

Scott has another site where you can test your AQ or Approachability Quotient! http://www.hellomynameisscott.com/default.aspx?SiteArea=AQ

Mine's 295 out of 360 so I guess I've a bit more practising to do before I get it right.

Scott has further useful articles for people who create name tags, use name tags or look at name tags on his site at http://www.hellomynameisscott.com/articles.aspx

So I wish you happy networking and watch out I may be trying out my improved networking skills at an event near you!

---

Google: Networking, Scott Ginsberg, Technorati: Networking, Scott Ginsberg, Del.icio.us: Networking, Scott Ginsberg

The video craze is hotting up.

Certainly the enormous leap in the population getting broadband is helping.

But you know how I know video is getting more important?

It’s because Google started dabbling in late last year.

And now I’ve got affiliates badgering me to get a course on making marketing videos.

As an aside I’ve looked at one of these courses and it was all “how to make a video” stuff. Technical stuff you could learn from a night school course, or maybe the manual of your video recorder.

Anyway, many months, probably years ago now, I decided to sign up for a large number of internet marketing and vanilla marketing ezines. The reason was so I could look and see who was promoting what and the wrinkles each affiliate applied to their promotion of a product.

As time has gone on its been educational to find how certain affiliates (super affiliates) put a sales letter out to their list days, sometimes weeks, before other affiliates do.

And the same has happened with this video course. The super affiliate selling first followed by the “normal” affiliate.

What’s my take on it?

I would say try it yourself with your own camera.

In the end intriguing the prospect to watch the video is the most important thing needed and the second is the offer. Neither of which you need to video!

That’s not to say I don’t think video is a good thing - I do. It’s just that I react badly to over-hyping.

Salesmen like discounting because buyers find it attractive and the saleman gets more sales.

But should you discount?

I’ve created a table (as an Excel file) that shows the extra number of units you’d need to sell at your discounted price to get the same revenue you would have got at the original price.

I tried to copy it as a table into blogger - one unhappy blog editor!

So if you'd like a copy email me with the words "discount table" in the subject and I'll send you the Excel file, email to web at AcornService.com

Anyway, let me explain by drawing two examples from the table

If your current profit margin is 15% and you reduce your price by 5% you need to sell an extra 100 units to get to the revenue you enjoyed at the original price.

Now look what happens if you discount slightly more to say, 8%.

You have to sell another 400 units to get the same revenue you had at the original price.
Now you tell me does that make sense?

The easiest answer is it, "depends whether your salespeople get all, or most, of your sales."

If you have one salesperson they’re going to have to work 400 times harder to get the same revenue. Or you recruit enough sales people to sell the same amount. Whichever way you do it you’ll either extend the length of time needed to sell the original gross revenue or you’ll increase the costs of sale massively.

But there’s worse to come. Because the discount puts a pressure on the firm (often hidden by excuses and “explanations”) the customer loses out on the value they should be getting for their money.

So think carefully before offering a discount. Is it appropriate for your business?

Marketers should look very seriously at the research on User Search Engine usage by www.DoubleClick.com (see the report here).

The findings relate to buyers of Clothing, Computer Hardware, Sports & Fitness and Travel.

The key findings are:

1. Users tend to search well in advance of a purchase


2. Users tend not to use branded names in their searches until the last weeks of their search process


3. Short term search results (ie clicks that didn’t convert to sales) don’t reflect the reality of actual later purchases.

That means that marketers need to keep data for longer before deciding whether a campaign is making a profit or not.

Also the fact that branding is not used in searching until the last week(s) of the search means that your brand is no protection to losing a sale.

Like I said Branding for small to medium businesses is not as important as getting a great offer for your customer. After that customers can get reassurance and logically justify their purchase by pointing to your brand.

It occurred to me that I’ve published a few articles on the wonderful web that you might well be interested in checking over.

So I’ve listed them below for you:

• Does Blogging Get You More Sales - steps to set up a blog and the advantages and downsides of running a company blog


• What Does Honest Abe Lincoln Have To Do With Company Growth? - gives two powerful ways of maximising training for your company


• Do You Know This Secret Method To Learn More? - gives the secret to effective and sustained business improvement and growth


• How To Score Your Own Goals With SARAH - A great way to help you achieve your goals


• Do Your Adverts Get You More Sales - explains the difference in ads and how you can improve your own

The article titled Do Your Adverts Get You More Sales has been picked up by the most ezine publishers and is also the most read on the site I placed it on. Funnily enough I found it had been copied by someone from Singapore and placed into a Yahoo marketing group with them as the author- there’s a compliment for you!

I didn’t just show you these so you could read them. They’re there to show that you can write articles too to show your own expert status.

So I encourage you to have a go. But remember you have little control over where your article ends up. Also they stay on the Internet for a long time, so don’t write articles that predict stuff and which have a high risk of looking stupid in a years time.

Web Design - Even The Experts

Get It Wrong

Here is my top 10 pet peeves of the way web sites turn off your friendly prospects or stop them getting to your site at all:

1. It’s a one page site “holding site” with nothing of interest to the prospect


2. Enormously bloated unoptimised graphics that take ages to load, few people wait for them


3. Meta descriptions and keywords not completed - you need every angle you can to win the search rankings


4. Button labels don’t match the page you end up on


5. No headlines on any pages or just “Welcome”, “Contact”, “Press Room” - you won’t get far in rankings with those headlines


6. The headlines aren’t tagged as headlines and so aren’t treated as more important than the rest of your copy.


7. The written text - the information a browser looks for - is minimal, doesn’t tell your story, or is boring


8. There is no way to contact the company from the site


9. The text is written on a dark background and makes it almost impossible to see


10. The site has no way to capture the email details of the browser, no email no follow-up, no follow-up no sale!

And finally two bonus ones

1. Registration - no, please no. Unless your site is selling stuff and you need to track, or you have a forum you don’t need registration


2. Flash - don’t use it for things that are static parts of your site. We don’t all need introducing to your site whenever we go to it. And we don’t have the time to sit through yet another “samey” flash intro.

I’ve got more to say on the subject of web design and its importance for direct response marketing. And it's coming later this week.

Coaching - different things to many people

.How do you differentiate yourself from the thousands of coaches that are floating around?

Ones that are trained through academy's, others that work from related experience and others from unrelated experience.

I came across a very interesting set of questions that helped me understand how to look at my coaching.

To get the same intriguing information replace coaching with your own service or product.

The questions were as follows:

1. What is the danger to your client if he doesn't hire you?

2. What is the danger to your client if he doesn't utilize you regularly?

3. What is the danger to your client if he uses a less qualified coach?

4. What is the danger to your client if they wait to hire you?

So as I sell myself as a business and marketing coach, I approached the questions with that in mind. I could equally well have used the word copywriter instead of coach. Below are the questions again and the answers that came straight off the top of my head. There are no rights or wrongs with this approach it's simply to highlight how you can sell yourself better.

A) What is the danger to your client if he doesn't hire you?

• He's unlikely to ever find out tactics that can make his business much more profitable and if his competitors do he'll be overtaken and forced to sell up/move/bankrupt
• He'll continue to work in the business and without work on the business he'll simply be busy, busy all the time. The result is that he'll be in a job rather than a business. That's why there's so many one man businesses around.
• He'll have to work longer and longer hours simply to make the income he needs to maintain his families life style until eventually he loses his family because they never see him.
• He'll become more and more desperate not knowing whether he's reinventing the wheel when it comes to marketing and actually doing it wrong. Thus throwing money at marketing without any hope that it will work.
• His competitors will make much more profits than he can and their lifestyle will measurably improve and that will be a pressure on him from his family to have a life style like his competitors family.

B) What is the danger to your client if he doesn't utilize you regularly?

• To stay focused on continually improving his business and his marketing he needs a regular sounding board and someone who can offer advice if the plan deviates from the expected. If he doesn't he'll make ill considered decisions that will affect cashflow and ultimately the company.
• If he has nobody to complain to without fear of reprisal about his company, or getting well intentioned but useless advice about his staff, his suppliers his customers he'll start to be bottling up emotions that will affect his relationships at work and home leading to divorce and possible loss of the company.
• His attention can be diverted from the plans that are in place simply by working in the business. That could mean the plans fail and ultimately the company fails to grow and thrive.

C) What is the danger to your client if he uses a less qualified coach?

D) What is the danger to your client if they wait to hire you?

• If they wait to hire me they could lose an opportunity to review the business now and quickly respond to their market with a need that may be gone in 6 months time. If they lose that quick win the cashflow could be affected and their market will already be using their fleeter foot competitors.
• If they wait they wont make the extra money they would have made. That extra money could be the difference between the company surviving and going under.
• They may make decisions that with a coaches help could have been improved significantly and thus they could make the company bankrupt.

So like I say an interesting and useful exercise.

It certainly gives you the ammunition you need when people ask why they should use you.

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Before I even started in business myself I received an audiotape on which someone called Peter Thomson narrated the story of two frogs. That was 8 years ago. I just loved this story. With your permission I'd like to tell it to you:

The Parable Of The Two Frogs

The story is that there were two frog brothers. They lived in a sunny place near Manchester. Each day they used to hop up to the local dairy farm with their other froggy friends to try and catch any spilt milk as the cows were milked.

One day they arrived and found that a bucket of milk had been left and forgotten just at the back of the barn.

They were so amazed when they looked over the edge that they both fell in.

At first they loved it. Drinking the milk and doing backstroke inside the bucket.

After some time had passed they started to get a little tired. They tried to scramble out of the bucket. But couldn't.

They looked at each other and realised they couldn't get out so they started shouting to their friends for help.

The commotion they caused prompted their friends to gather around the bucket. Soon all their friends were shouting, "you can't get out of there the sides are too steep", "you're failures" and "you're going to die!"

One of the frogs heard all this and realised they were right and gave up and simply stopped swimming and soon sank to the bottom of the bucket and drowned.

The remaining frog began to swim round and round in the bucket.

As he thought harder and harder he swam faster and faster.

As he swam the milk started to become more difficult to swim through. Then, as I'm sure you've guessed it turned to butter. So the deaf frog simply hopped onto the butter and out of the bucket.

What can you get from this story?

1)Ignore The Doubters In Your Life

I like the fact that despite the other frogs best efforts to put him off the deaf frog was able to achieve what he was being told was impossible. Because the doubters didn't know everything!

Now isn't that just like business life sometimes? Partners, relatives or friends can get a bit negative about what you're trying to achieve.

2) Training Would Have Helped

The first frog wouldn't have died if he'd trained with another frog who'd survived the milk pail (like his brother).

It's the same in business, or life, there may be one thing that will stop you from going under. But without luck, or training you may never find it.

I didn't want to discover everything in business using trial and error.

I wanted positive and regular support even before I started in business myself.

The frog parable made me realise how true the following quote from Henry Ford is:

"If you think you can or you think you can't, you're right"

So I signed up to Peter's Achiever's Edge and never looked back.

The sort of things I get from his audio programme are:

• Monthly guest interviews with a successful person chosen from people around the world and Peter's had people like:
  
• • Sir John Harvey-Jones, The Troubleshooter and ex ICI Chairman
    
  • Richard Bandler (Co-founder of NLP)
    
  • Paul Daniels (master magician and very, very astute businessman)
    
  • Professor Robert Cialdini the famous author of "Influence Science and Practice" and a must read for any copywriter
    
  • Steve McDermott one of Europe's top motivational speakers
    
• tips on personal effectiveness (the Edge)
  
• Ways to communicate better
  
• sales tips
  
• improving customer service
  
• A guest presenter sharing expert knowledge and tips
  
• Useful extracts from Nightingale-Conant's self and business development programmes

Referrals are not the best way to get business.

When I go networking I'm often asked what the best method for getting business is.

Usually I reply, "referrals."

The reason?

Because it's the one bit of marketing most business owners can do relatively easy and cheaply.

As long as they've a process for getting them in the first place. But that's another story...

So the main point about using referrals is that people will do it. So it gets results.

What if you don't follow them up?!

When I'm coaching people I find that this is a common problem.

We all know that we should follow up quickly on any referral.

My own shortcomings in this were highlighted for me today during a phone call this afternoon.

The MD of an engineering company had noted two likely looking companies that might well benefit from my coaching.

I hadn't followed them up at all.

Did I have an excuse?

No. And really there is no excuse for it. I simply put off the phone call to qualify them.

Anyway both companies are still on my to-do list.

This is something I would not have allowed a coachee to get away with. It just shows how important it is to have someone at your shoulder prompting you to take the helicopter view and see that as well as servicing current clients you must act on referrals too.

There is another aspect to referrals - that's there unpredictablity. Because you're not always in the top of someone's mind there is no real hurry to give you referrals. There's nothing you can do about it because we all lead busy lives. So just factor it into your whole marketing strategy.

So if referrals aren't the best way to get business what is?

Really the point is don't use just one tactic as the best way to get clients.

The best way to get business is to use a number of different tactics. So if your referrals suddenly dried up you'd still have the other tactics to get new clients.

You're probably thinking what other tactics could be as good as referrals.

Here's the beginning of a list - you can definitely add more:

I could go on, and on but I'm sure you get the picture.

The key here is that you need a business strategy that actively spells out the exact tactics you're going to use to get customers.

From that strategy you need to create a procedure you'll follow to get customers.

Then stick to it.

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A New York Times article about Paid Email Marketing was picked up by Marketing Sherpa who commented on the story.

This email tax is about AOL and Yahoo's indication that they are going to charge for guaranteeing delivery of email. If carried through it's going to sharply increase the costs to everyone who uses email marketing.

The talk is that they're going to use a company called Goodmail to process and charge for high volume email.

So, what does that mean if you're doing email marketing, or thinking of it?

1. "Normal" email will continue as now, for the time being
2. Cost to send bulk (thousands) of emails is going to skyrocket
3. Guaranteeing delivery to inboxes still doesn't guarantee emails are opened
4. Email lists will need to be cleaned more thoroughly so you're not paying for gone aways and inactive accounts
5. Email marketing will become more narrowly targeted, so emailing is cheaper due to lesser email volume
6. Marketeers are going to encourage their customer lists to move to RSS

The big question people are going to ask is, "does this move slash Spam at a stroke?"

The answer is "No."

When you think about it spammers will continue while their campaigns continue to make a profit - even if it's less because they're paying for email delivery.

Why do I call it an email tax?

Because it's a way for companies like AOL and Yahoo to make more money from their golden goose: email. It's not necessary, it doesn't deliver any real guarantee of extra sales and it'll be universally unpopular.

Just like TAXES!

Finally, The New York Times that raised this story originally added a correction to say that Yahoo and AOL hadn't even started testing this approach yet. So watch this space ...

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I wrote about the death of blogging way back in my early blogging days in a post titled Is This The Slow Death of Business Blogging?

In the article I noted that Jay Abraham and Gary Halbert were still blogging. In fact Jay stopped in October 2005 although Gary is still going strong.

I did a little further research on the business blogs I looked at right back when I started in January 2005 and found:

1. Jay Abraham's last posting on the "Jay Abraham Blog" was 10th October 2005
2. Debbie Weil is posting less regularly but posting well on Blogwrite for CEOs and her latest posting is 2nd February 2006
3. Bob Bly (well known copywriter in the USA) is posting well too at Bly.com Blog his last post was 27th January 2006
4. The Michael Fortin Blog is getting posts too. The last being on the 3rd February 2006
5. Jim Edwards' multimedia blog was posted to on 3rd February 2006. Again Jim's posting well
6. Dan Kennedy's Direct Marketing Blog started in January 2005 when I started this blog. But it has has very few posts. However, Dan does appears to be posting more and his last posting is January 11th 2006
7. The first T. L. Pakii Pierce blog I found was called "How To Blog for Fun And Profit". Its last post was 4th October 2005. Yet it really has some great content too. Fortunately T.L. is still posting to another of his blogs : Upgrade Your Mind! - Daily Success Motivation & Positive Thinking for Powerful Life Change
8. The free traffic tip blog from Tinu Abayomi-Paul is also alive and well with its latest post dated 21st January 2006
9. Bob Lutz, the Vice Chairman of GM, is still blogging. His latest post was 27th January 2006
10. Seth Godin's blog is also going great guns with several February postings, including 6th February 2006

Blogging Conclusions

So what conclusions can we draw from my brief saunter through the Blogosphere?

1. There's still some great business bloggers out there
2. Blogs are providing great and often very relevant content, unlike many web sites that simply stagnate
3. Some blogs have been going consistently for more than two years
4. A few marketing people have their focus elsewhere than their blogs

Returning to the question I asked in Is This The Slow Death of Business Blogging? which was:

Should you stop
blogging?

The answer remains that it "depends on your strategy" and that you must remember that a blog is simply one more marketing tool.

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I'm not keen on focus groups because they try and predict behaviour and all they're predicting is intention.

Statistics of actual behaviour I believe are a better indication of future behaviour.

However, despite that I was interested in this survey on Internet marketing tactics.

In particular these were some of the tactics that most annoyed consumers (in descending order of annoyance):

1. Pop-ups
2. Requirement to install software to view the site
3. Dead links
4. Requirement to register and log-on before viewing the site
5. Slow-loading pages
6. Out of date content
7. Confusing navigation and too many clicks
8. Ineffective site search tool
9. No contact information (other than a web form) available

There were 6 other annoying tactics that you can check for yourself.

What was most amazing was that 76% of consumers surveyed said that if any of their pet peeves on a site would prompt them to leave and never return.

In general I agree with almost all the survey. However, properly targeted pop-ups actually increase sales. So it may have been better to word the question "wrongly targeted pop-ups".

For some time pop-ups were a "no-no" on the web, but as long as they're targeted they seem to be making a come back. After all if you're about to lose a browser for ever there's no harm to you to use the pop-up as a last ditch attempt to interest them in you and/or your site. Is there?

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