Top 3 Tips to Increasing Your Webinar Sales Results

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Internet Strategist

Webinars serve a lot of purposes for a business, including product/service education, presales, lead generation, and income generating.  When using the last purpose, you will need to make sure you have certain things in place that will increase the number of attendees who are willing to pay to attend your webinar.  So what are the top 3 things you will need to do to increase the amount of attendees?

1) Add your publishing credentials to your sales page

This may be one of the more difficult ones to accomplish, but it is well worth it in many areas in addition to webinar sales. When teaching information, one of the things that will go through your visitor’s minds who don’t know you is whether or not you know what you are talking about.  Being a published author adds a great deal of credibility about your knowledge for the visitor, even if they haven’t read your book, and a visitor will be more likely to purchase a seat in your webinar.  If you aren’t a published author, you should consider publishing your knowledge in at least an ebook/kindle book format.  Physical books published through a publishing company will give you even more credibility.

Make sure the title of your book is on the webinar sales page with an image of the cover, who published it and where it can be purchased so your visitors can do some research on you if they want to.

2) Know what kind of content to include in your webinar.

If you are charging for your webinars, you will need to deliver the content.  This is not the time to promote your product or service.  People don’t want to have to pay to be sold to.  The kind of content that should be in your webinar should deliver business skills, or the HOW to do something.  You will need to make sure on your webinar sales page that you list the topics or skills that will be taught in your webinar clearly and in detail.  Also list what benefit these skills will give the attendee of the webinar as well.

3) Make sure you market your webinar up to the day of your webinar.

75% of your paid for webinar registrations will sign up within 48 hours of your webinar.  This is because when they first hear of your webinar, they will want to make sure that they will be available on that day, so many people wait until the last minute to register.  You will want to make sure you remind them the 3 days before the webinar as well as the day of the webinar itself, as people get very busy and will tend to forget.  The use of social media is  very helpful to market your webinars as well as press releases and email marketing.  If you don’t have a big email list, put ads in other email lists that have audiences in the target market of your webinar.  If you do this however, you will need to understand your web conversion rate and the metrics of the lifetime value of a visitor so you know how much you should be spending on this kind of advertising.

These are some of the biggest things that will make a difference in the success level of paid for webinars.  When you have this system down, you can automate this process via marketing tools and webinar replay software.  Once this system is automated, you have created an additional revenue stream for your business.

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5 Steps to a More Effective Website

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Internet Strategist

Having a website is certainly a necessity in today’s business environment.  However, if you want to have your website become more than an online brochure and be an active marketing partner for your business, you as a business owner need to make your website an effective lead generating tool.  So what are the differences between a standard online marketing brochure and a website that generates revenue?  Here are 5 steps to a more effective website.

1) Get a more narrowly focused section of your target market.

The more focused your target market is, the better you can connect with then.  People make decisions emotionally and justify it intellectually.  The more similarities your target market has, the easier it is to emotionally connect with your market through words, niche phrases, images, colors, offers, etc.  An example is if you are selling insurance, and focus on Gen Y’s vs. 2 income family Gen Y’s with small children who live in single family homes in urban areas.  As you can see, Gen Y’s are a very diverse group that have very different needs and interests, so by more narrowly focusing on the group, you will be able to more easily connect with the needs of your target market and communicate how you can serve their needs.   If you serve a more diverse market, separate your market into more narrowly focused groups and change your website to add landing pages that address each of these markets.  This step alone should increase the response rate of your website.

2) Include the most pressing problems your products/services solve/alleviate

It should be prominently displayed/communicated on your website about how your products/services are the answer to your target market’s needs.  Because you are communicating with a narrowly focused well researched target market, you should intimately know these problems and how to address them on your website, which will show them you really understand them and can truly help them.

3) Place a clear call to action on your website that relates to your target market

This is one thing that more websites than I care to consider aren’t really doing.  As a business owner, you have a website because you want it to do something, like sell products or services, or capture leads.  The key is to tell people what you want them to do on your website.  Make what you want them to do obvious and easy to understand because no a days, people don’t want to have to figure out what your website is about or what you want them to do. There are too many easily available competitors out there that are happy to fill that role for them.  Make the call to action font or image stand out so it is easy to find as well.

4) Put an enticing and target market oriented offer on your website

Because you have researched your target, you should know what kind of offers will best support them.  Do you need to offer different price options?  Should you package products and services together?  Do you have an upsell system in place?  How do you incorporate your product/service delivery to fit the needs of your target market?  When you have a highly supportive offer on your website, you will get more sales from your website.

5) Have a powerful way to capture leads for your website.

You want to be able to have as many different non-invasive ways to capture leads from your website to be able to follow up with later.  The more information you can capture the better.  However, you will have to consider that if you ask for too much information, you won’t get as many leads because your web visitors won’t feel comfortable leaving their information.  For those that may need more interaction before they make a decision (the vast majority of your website visitors), you will need a strong followup sequence to convert you prospects into customers/clients.  One method that has been proven to greatly increase the percentage of leads received from your website is to have a website receptionist to meet and greet your website visitors.  This method has been shown to more than triple the amount of business you receive from your website.  This is affordable because it only costs about $2/hr to have on your website.  For most businesses, they will get back more than they invest in this system.

Your website is more than your online business card.  It can be an active marketing tool to sell your products/services but a system needs to be implemented with your web strategy to turn your website into a money maker.

To get the 5 other key steps that you will need to fully implement your online strategy, call us at 720-432-0621 and we will give your business a thorough online business strategy checkup and construction.  Let us figure this out for you so you don’t have to.

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Online Business Strategies – How Does Your Website Maintenance Fit In?

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Internet Strategist

Sometimes the best blog posts are stories that illustrate a point.  Well this one is one of those posts.  I am sharing this with you from a story I heard and realized the importance and how it could have been prevented.  So if this post saves only 1 person from  potential loss of online business, then I’ve done my job.

An Internet Business Strategy not only includes how to build business from your website, but how to maintain your website through upgrades as well as your exit strategy.  How do you exit yourself from an established website that is earning revenue for your business?  These stages are just as important, if not more than building up your website.

Maintenance as far as this post is concerned includes content management (blogging goes under this), upgrading software, changing the branding/look and feel of the website, and adding new features to the website.  Each of these situations should be implemented via a well thought out strategy and business process.  It can be very simple and as easily documented via a spreadsheet of a Word document, but it is followed religiously.

In the case of updating your website or changing your website platform, (say from a static website to a wordpress website) you will need to have the following or a similar strategy in place before you make any updates.

  • Coordinate the list of  your service providers whether internal or external….  Web hosting, web developer, online business strategist consultant, SEO consultant, marketing consultants, graphic designers, and social media consultants.
  • Document in detail, the desired changes you want to make on your website, and how you will make them.
  • Send these changes to your service providers and ask them how these changes might effect how well your website will perform after the desired changes are made.
  • If you have a maintenance contract with your service providers, they will look at if for you and give you their reviews on changes you may need to make to your current proposed changes.  For those you don’t have a maintenance contract with, you can do an hourly contract to get their input.
  • Make any necessary changes that you receive from your team.  If you have picked your team where everyone is on the same page, you won’t have many points of contradiction in their feedback.
  • It is worth it to go another round and send back the updated report and get any additional feedback, or get the thumbs up.
  • You can feel comfortable that moving forward will not upset the flow of business, or at least bring it to a minimum.

Why is this so important?

I recently heard of a story that one of my colleague’s long term clients recently update their website to WordPress.  This colleague had been doing SEO for this client for the last 2 years and their work in positioning their pages allowed their client to get on the 1st page of Google for a large number of targeted keyword phrases.  Not a shabby place to be.  In any rate, their client decided to upgrade their website to WordPress, and in the process, completely renamed all of their pages that were in the search engines… As you can guess what happened…..  Their site completely fell out of the search engines, and their traffic dropped dramatically.  The client sent a frantic email to their SEO consultant asking what happened and when the consultant looked into it, they quickly determined the cause.  The search engine saw a completely different site because ALL of the relevant keyword pages it knew about had disappeared, so even their main level domain fell out of the search engine rankings as well.

The fortunate thing is that this won’t be a permanent situation, and if they rename the pages back to their original names, they should rise back into the rankings again over time.  In the meantime, they are losing business.

All of this heartache would have been avoided if the client had brought their SEO consultant in on their website update plans.  The SEO consultant would have been able to tell then right away what they needed to make sure to keep the same page names (good ones anyway that know how WordPress works would have been able to do that).  A little cost and time upfront saves a lot of cost and time down the line.

That’s my story for today….  If you are in the process of updating your website, then you should ask your experts what to watch out for before you implement it and it be too late.  Believe me, it is worth it in time, money and heartache.

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10 Ways to Generate Revenue with Your Website.

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Internet Strategist

Your website is much more than an online brochure.  It is actually an online asset.  It can be used to generate residual revenue for your business.  There are a number of ways to create residual revenue streams for your business from your website that can be a healthy income addition to help fund your business growth.

So what are the ways in which you can create an income with your website?  There are 10 ways to generate revenue with your website.  Depending upon the site you have and your business, some of these ways may work better than others.

So what are the different ways in which you can create an income with your website?  Here they are:

1) Ecommerce – selling products and services from your website.  Even if you are a service oriented business, you can sell your expertise in the form of an ebook.  This is an excellent way for consultants and coaches to additionally monetize their knowledge.

2)  Affiliate Marketing – selling other’s products and services from your website.  If you specialize in offering a certain expertise, and you believe that offering a complimentary product or service will serve your clients, then if they have an affiliate program, it would be a great way to support you clients/customers while creating additional income for yourself as well.  When a visitor you refer to the vendor purchases their product, you receive a commission from that sale.

3) Text link advertising – getting paid for clicks on your website.  One of the most well known and popular text link advertising is Google Adsense.  Everytime someone clicks on one of these links, you get paid.  Other text link companies include Kontera, and Chitika.  Some work better than others depending upon the topic and type of website.

4)  Website sponsorship – Having a business sponsor your website which will give them prominent placement on the site.  Sponsors can pay a monthly, yearly, or one time fee to have prominent placement on your web site.

5)  Paid blogging posts – there are programs out there that will pay you to blog about a specific product or service.  This isn’t really residual revenue because it requires your time to do it in order to get paid, but it is a way to generate revenue with your website.

6)  Featured directory listings – you can place a directory on your site of products and services related to your niche.  You can charge for featured placement in the directory.  It’s easiest to have software that can manage this for you. There are several different versions of this directory software out there to take advantage of.

7)  Email marketing – promoting products and services via your email list.  This works for your own products and services or another’s as an affiliate.  Placing a sign up box on your website for your mailing list and growing that list should be everyone’s objective.  The larger and more targeted your mailing list, the more you will receive from your email marketing efforts.

8) Sponsored Email Marketing – selling ad space on your mailing list.  You can also allow other businesses premium exposure to your mailing list via a sponsored link or banner in your email with a thanks to the sponsors.  Again, the larger the email list, the more you can charge.

9)  Membership sites/Premium Content – having a place on your website that only members have access to.  Membership sites are a great source of residual revenue and a way to monetize your content.  The thing you have to remember is to really offer value to the paid members.  The content they receive in the paid section would be content that can’t be found anywhere else.

10)  Lead generator – getting leads for you business or to sell to other businesses.  You can use your website to collect qualified leads of people who want to know more about a specific service to fulfill their needs.

These are 10 ways to generate revenue with your website.  If you know of others, please share them in the comments.  I’d love to hear them!

Of course, you can use more than one method at a time, but make sure they don’t step on each other.  For instance, if you have a membership site, putting lots of banner ads and adsense inside the premium area will drive away your members, and devalue your offering in their eyes.

If you want help in monetizing your website, contact me through this website.  I’d love to support you in turning your website into an online asset.

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Online Business Strategy – the Top 3 Things You Need to Know to Lock in Online Success

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Internet Strategist

Creating success online is like creating success in any other endeavor in life.  You first will need a roadmap of where to go and what to do at each step of the way.  There are so many tactics and techniques out there that anyone can get confused and overwhelmed about what they can do to create ultimate success for their own business and online presence.

What most website owners don’t realize is that many of these courses available about how to be successful online cover some great information, yet they only cover that one small topic, and not necessarily how it fits into the whole.  For instance, there might be a course on how to set up your website to be on autopilot in creating residual revenue through Clickbank, and the ideas are very sound, yet they don’t talk about how  to send the traffic to your website to make the sales, or how to determine which kind of traffic is best to send.

Understanding your overall online strategy first before you either hire out someone to implement part or all of it for you, or end up taking the training you need to be able to do it yourself will give you the edge because you will know what kind of training you need, what the courses must cover to know if the will be helpful or not, and the ability to immediately implement what you have learned in the courses.

So the top 3 things you would need to know that will set the right foundation for your web strategy include:

  1. Who is your target market?  – This is absolutely crucial because this will determine how you need to communicate to your visitor, where your website should show up on the web, and what kinds of offerings would be most desirable to your client.  This knowledge affects the content on your website, the way you do your search  engine marketing and what kind of ecommerce solution you should use, if you are selling your products and services.
  2. How does your web presence fit into your business plan overall? – What do you want to use your web site for?  Is it to be an online brochure?  Is it going to strengthen your brand?  Is it going to sell your products and services, or be a lead generation source for you?  What is it going to do for your business?  Knowing this answer will let you know how to set up your website and what functions it needs to perform, also what kinds of things can be automated to give you more time to do what you do best!
  3. How do you want your web presence to generate revenue for you? – If you decide you want your website to crate income for you and be an online asset, then you will need to know how to set up your website to do that.  Your website can generate revenue for you in 12 different ways, from sponsor advertising, to affiliate marketing to email marketing to selling your own products and services.  All of this will determine how you need to set up your web site and interact with other potential web site owners as well.

There are a few other things you will need to know to solidify that online plan,  but these are the things you must absolutely know and understand in order to really take the maximum advantage to any of your web marketing efforts.  The secret is in creating the foundation and then taking the necessary actions consistently to create the online success that eludes so many.

Take advantage of an Internet Business Strategy year end special plan that will include these points and more so you have a complete roadmap of what to do and how to do it.  This way you won’t have to take the time to wade through the thousands of products out there that teach you only a piece of the puzzle.  In actuality, you need the whole puzzle to experience that online success.  Year end special is almost 40% off of the regular price!  Click the link below to take advantage of this huge discount as it will go away at the 1st of the year, unless I forget to change it in all of the New Years revelry aftermath.  But rest assured, it will be changed shortly after that!

Internet Business Strategy <– click here

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How do I get my web presence to generate more business?

Posted on December 5, 2011 by Internet Strategist

This is a very common question that really has several parts to it.  Overall, generating more business can mean 1 of 2 different things, or both things together.  The first step is to have an overall business strategy.  You will need to decide on a target market and connect to that market.  Who is it you love to serve?  That passion will show itself on your web site, and that is what gets the clicks, phone calls, sales, email signups, etc.  That passion cannot be communicated to your target market if it isn’t there.

Another factor in generating more business from your web presence is being very aware of where your traffic is coming from.  What is your strategy for placing your links out on the web?  Random link exchanges and placing your links on directories that are filled with junk websites will not bring you visitors worth anything.  Those links may get you some search engine ranking clout, but in the long run, it’s what you receive is not worth the effort it takes to do all of that insignificant directory submissions.  4 or 5 good, quality and targeted directories will give you better results than 300 poor quality general directories.  So take the time up front to develop your strategy before you move forward on some random tactic here and there.

So what are the steps to generating more business?

  1. Determine your target market – the more defined and the smaller the better.  – you will be able to more easily connect with that market when it shares more characteristics in common.  Find out as much as you can about that market.  What are their hopes and dreams?  What are their issues and problems?  What kinds of questions do they generally have?
  2. Find out where your target market hangs out online.  Think outside the box on this one.  That is why knowing as much as you can in the beginning is helpful in this step.  If you know their issues, you can go to where they would go online to find the answers (until they know to come to your site of course).  It’s all about placing yourself in front of that market.  The more out of the box your strategy is, the less competition you will have.
  3. Make sure your website emotionally speaks to your visitors.  People make decisions emotionally, so when they are on your website, it needs to connect with them emotionally.  Are your images, words and layout connecting with them and encouraging them to follow up with you?  Is your website consistent with the links your visitors follow to get to your site?
  4. Have a clear call to action. – Tell them what you want them to do.  Don’t give them 50 choices.  Give them the 1 choice you most want them to make.

Having these 4 steps in your online strategy will go a long way in getting you more business from your web site.

Click the link if you want your own Internet Business Strategy

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Are your website visitors leaving as soon as they get to your website?

Posted on November 27, 2011 by Internet Strategist

Your website is your online chance to connect to your target market.  It is the chance to influence them to follow your call to action to have them call your sign up for your mailing list or even purchase something.  So if your visitors are leaving as soon as they get to your website, then you are leaving business on the table.

A website metric that you want to pay attention to is something called the bounce rate.  The bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your site on the same page that the landed on your site…. so basically what that means is they come to your website, look at the page for about 5 seconds and then hit the back button or enter another URL in the browser address bar.  A bounce rate of about 75% means that 3 out of every 4 people who come to your website leave as soon as they land on your website.  This isn’t a good rate.  You want to get your bounce rate down to below 30%.

What could be going on with a high bounce rate?

  1. Your traffic is not targeted at all.  People are coming to your website and expecting something else entirely.
  2. Your traffic is targeted and whatever page your visitors are landing on, they don’t feel connected to your website, or like they can get what they need from your website.

You can place a form on your website asking visitors if they have found what they are looking for.  That should give you some insight into your target market and what they are expecting, or what they feel is missing from your website.  The information gathered from this informal survey will help you to discover what can improve your bounce rate, and therefore conversion rate on your website.   Sometimes this information can open up a brand new product line which will increase the revenues for your business.

Getting targeted traffic to your website isn’t as difficult as it may seem.  Strategically placing links to your website on the web will go a long way towards that targeted traffic as well as clearly describing what you are linking to.  Making sure your links are on related sites goes a long way to making the traffic more targeted.  It may reduce the number of visitors to your website, but those visitors that do come to your website will be highly targeted visitors.  Remember, the key isn’t getting the most traffic, but making the most sales.  So you would do better sending 100 people to your website if 40 of them converted into sales as opposed to sending 1000 visitors to your website if only 10 of them converted into sales.

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WordPress.com VS WordPress.org

Posted on November 20, 2011 by Internet Strategist
Wordpress logo

wordpress

I get asked this question from time to time…  “what is the difference between

wordpress.com and wordpress.org?”  Well they are both wordpress software, however the biggest difference is that wordpress.com is the solution hosted on WordPress’ servers (for free), and wordpress.org hosts the software files you can download so you can host the software on your own server.  WordPress.org also has a thriving community where wordpress users can exchange ideas and get help to some of the problems they may be experiencing.

“So great!  Why would I want to pass up free hosting?” you might say.  Well, a big thing to take into consideration is that wordpress.com offers limited functionality than hosting the software on your own server.  There is also the case that if you are selling a product or service and you are using your blog to do it (like affiliate marketing), then you would be violating wordpress.com’s terms of service, and at any time, your blog could be shut down.  There is nothing like having your lively hood taken away overnight.  I once had a client ask me about this very question as she had her blog hosted on wordpress.com and was wanting to use it to promote her business.  I told her that it wasn’t a good idea and that she should invest the $10/month to host her own website using the wordpress software from wordpress.org.  I told her that it may be a while before wordpress.com shuts her site down, but for $10/month, I think it’s worth the piece of mind.  That’s like what, 2 1/2 lattes a month?  If you have your Internet business strategy set up properly, you would be making much much more than  $10/month  anyway.

So are there times when it makes sense to use wordpress.com instead of wordpress.org?  I have make a list of when you would want to use either one.  In fact, I use them both for specific purposes as pieces to an overall puzzle.

Use wordpress.com when you want to…

  • start out with a new blog to build your brand awareness.   It’s easier to rank your new blog postings in wordpress.com
  • take advantage of the traffic from the wordpress.com community.  You really have to know what you are doing, and be willing to participate by commenting on other’s blogs and making sure you really tag your posts well.
  • create a simple blog and aren’t interested in using it to promote anything or use it as a tool to directly generate revenue.

Use wordpress.org when you want to….

  • build a website that actively markets your products and services
  • build a website that sells your products and services
  • build a website that you want to create into an asset or turn into an authority site
  • build a website that requires more customization and requires the use of additional wordpress plugins
  • build a website that promotes firearms, tobacco, or porn

One nice thing however is that you can migrate your wordpress.com blog over to your own hosted wordpress.org solution without a huge amount of effort.  Because of the limited functionality that you have on wordpress.com, you won’t have to worry about things not working when you make the transfer.

Want to know more about WordPress?  How to build a site in WordPress and how to optimize your WordPress blog?  Sign up for these webinars using the link below!

WordPress Training

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Web Conversion – What is Missing?

Posted on November 18, 2011 by Internet Strategist

One of the biggest factors that determine the success rate of your web conversion is do your visitors feel like you can help them or solve their problems?  If they feel connected enough to the message you have on your web site then they will follow the call to action.  If they don’t feel connected, then they won’t follow the call to action.  Pretty simple.

There is one factor that will also determine if you web site is connecting to your visitors…  That is having the right visitors in the first place.  Pre-qualifying your traffic is something that most people don’t think about.  They focus mostly on getting as much traffic to their website as possible but they don’t focus as much on how relevant is that traffic to their website?  Remember, not everyone is your client.  The more specialized you are, the more you can charge.  The “less is more” concept totally fits this situation.

I’ll give you an example….  a friend of mine, who focuses on teaching people to connect to their love so they can live the life they dream about, years ago had the domain name securelove.com.  She was getting a lot of traffic but no one as calling her up.  Well it turns out that securelove.com attracted the crowd of people who were into S&M and bondage.  Well, not really her target market was it?  Needless to say, that was why her conversion rate was so abysmal.  Putting more focus on targeting your traffic will have a phenomenal impact on your website’s conversion success.

What are some ways to really target your traffic?  Stick to relevant websites that are related to your target.  SEO is also a very effective means of generating relevant traffic to your website.  Another thing that helps is easing the mind of your website visitors by providing a way for them to emotionally connect to your website.  Remember, people make decisions emotionally, and not intellectually.  Related images, phrasing and live chat software has a positive effect on your website visitors having an emotional connection to your website.

Call B. Hopkins at 720-432-0621 for a free website conversion assessment and see how you can easily triple your website’s conversion rate.

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