Internet Business

Using Your Website to Generate Quality Leads for Your Business

Your website is more than just an online brochure.  Your website can  actually be an active marketing partner for your business.

Think about it; your website is a sales rep for your business that works for you 24/7, takes no holidays or paid vacation (unless your hosting server goes down, but that shouldn’t be once a year and if it is, you should find a new hosting server).

The more business your website brings to you, the more your website is worth, and the ore your business is worth should you decide to sell it.  The systems in your business, especially the successful ones, are worth more than your client base because if you have successful systems established, then someone can come in and buy your business, because your business isn’t you, it’s your systems.

So let’s discuss systems that can get your website to be an active lead generator for your business…..

1) Autoresponder Followup Systems

In todays world, it takes an average of  7 touches to move a prospect into a client.  You want to have automated systems in place to begin to convert your prospects into clients and an autoresponder series is a perfect example of that.  Develop your autorespo nder series so that it does more than just send out a dozen emails about your products and services.  These emails should be thought out and take the prospect one step closer to wanting you to be their service provider.  One autoresponder tactic is to have an email series that discusses in detail the top X problems your […]

By |September 4th, 2012|Internet Business|0 Comments
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  • Strategies to use in conjunction for powerful SEO results
    Are You Making These Mistakes in Your SEO Strategy? Are You Making These Mistakes in Your SEO Strategy?

    Are You Making These Mistakes in Your SEO Strategy?

Are You Making These Mistakes in Your SEO Strategy?

In a WholeBrainGroup blog article I read the other day, it discusses the ‘7 deadly sins’ of

SEO.  Basically the article listed the sins as:

  1. Only feeding search engines (sacrificing good content for search engine tactics)
  2. Using industry lingo (not using what your market is truly searching for)
  3. Poorly created URL’s
  4. Not using enough analytics (useful for selling and converting)
  5. Generic sitewide tag descriptions
  6. Expecting overnight results
  7. No implementation of a long term strategy

In my opinion, the last two, while very heavily similar, are the ones that hurt business owners the most.  Not looking at the long view and seeing SEO as a quick one time shot in the arm, like a vaccine.  Because the search engines change their algorithms regularly, they tend to require the consistent SEO implementation activities to keep their web pages relevant and current.

Another big mistake on the part of business owners is that they oftentimes stop their SEO activity too soon.  Getting into the organic search engines is a process that must be implemented willingly and  persistently.  Be prepared to allow it to take  some time.  If you have very competitive keywords, and you are on a tight budget, it can easily take a year, especially if you don’t have the bandwidth to do many of the extra needed activities yourself.  It can be done sooner, if you have enough resources of time/money.  If you target the less competitive keywords first, you can end up on the 1st page in a couple of months or less with consistent activity.  My record was 30 minutes, but that […]

By |July 11th, 2012|Internet Business|10 Comments
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How to Know If You Need An Internet Business Strategy

Having an online presence is one thing,  Having an active online marketing tool is another.  What is the difference?

Online Presence:
An online presence can be something as simple as a website.  Many websites are online brochures that aren’t set up of for active marketing.  These kind of websites can be used for branding your business, but the only way your target market is going to see it is if you happen to send people there personally.

An online presence is the starting point for a business if their target market is found online.  Unfortunately most businesses stop here and don’t go any further.  They know they need to be online, so the put up a website and they think they’re done.

An Active Online Marketing Tool:
When you web presence is an active marketing tool for your business, this is another ball-game altogether.  An active online marketing web presence is something that is generating continuous leads and business from your website.  Your target market finds your website and calls you up, or purchases your product or service without you having to send anyone there on your own.

So how do you, as a business owner, know if you need to have an Internet Business Strategist on your team before you move forward?

You should serious look into investing in an online business strategist if you:

  1. Are looking to add additional services to your online business, or are looking to change services.
  2. Need to get more traffic to your website and aren’t sure how to go about it
  3. Want to get more business from the traffic you are currently getting
  4. Want to incorporate Social media marketing and you want to keep using your traditional marketing methods.
  5. Want to rank better in the search engines
  6. Want to generate […]
By |April 22nd, 2012|Internet Business|0 Comments
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Internet Strategy Tips for More Traffic

Getting more traffic to your website is not about a tactic, or an activity… it is about an overall Internet strategy.  There are many ways to get traffic to your website and many

different kinds of traffic as well to send to your website as well.  Before you begin your journey of getting more traffic to your website, you will need to be clear about who you are marketing to and how you intend to get your web presence out there in the Internet.

1) Keywords for SEO traffic:

When you understand your target market, you will know the keywords that they are using to try to find you and your products or services.  This is one of the most important yet basic pieces of your online strategy.  Knowing your target market to this degree will give you the ability to not only know things like the keywords, but also knowledge like how much your target market will be willing to pay for your products and services, and what kinds of value propositions that would get them to buy… but I digress.

2) Know which social networking mediums your target market hangs out on:

You need to get your website in front of your target market.  The popularity of social media means that there is a good chance that your target market is on one or more of the social media platforms.  You will also need to understand how your target market would tend to use this social media platform so you can know which marketing tactics, if any, will be effective on this social media platform. […]

By |April 16th, 2012|Internet Business|3 Comments
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Top 5 Ways to Repurpose Your Web Content for Profits

Content is still king on the Internet and quality content is the emperor.  With so much spam content out there, it isn’t too hard to come up with quality content.  So what is quality content?  It is content that your readers deem important, or valuable.  Some types of popular content considered to be of quality amongst website visitors and blog readers, is content that can solve a problem, share a solution, or take the reader away from reality for a while.

So once you write that piece of content, (it could be something as simple as a 500 word article), you will want to get as much traction as you can, because that will draw in the visitors that you want because they will be more likely to purchase your products and services.

Here are the top 5 ways to repurpose your content:

1) Create a blog entry with your content
If you have a blog, placing the article on your blog will do a few things.  1) it will help you get more established in your field an more established as an expert.
2) It will help send more traffic to your website.  Each new blog posts has a chance to be picked up by the search engines as well as other blogs.  I have links back to specific blog posts on my blog all the time from other blogs sharing the content topic with their readers.

2) Create a Video Version of your content.
This can be done in a few different ways, probably the easiest way would be to make a mini power point of your article and then do a voice narration of the article as you go through the slides.   Software such as Camtasia […]

By |April 1st, 2012|Internet Business|1 Comment
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How to Calculate Your Web Conversion Rate

Your web conversion rate is an important statistic to know because it will allow you to know the health and effectiveness of your website.  Most business owners don’t really focus on the web conversion of their website because they are more focused on getting traffic to their website.  This is only 1/2 of the 1-2 punch that you need to have a successful online presence.

To determine your web conversion rate is theoretically simple.  It is the number of people who take your desired action on your website divided by the number of people coming to your website.  So for an example if you have 100 people that come to your website and 2 of them purchase your product or service, and that is the action you want them to take, then you would have a 2% conversion rate.

So while it is technically easy to determine your rate, the more difficult part is to determine the correct number of visitors to your website.  Some of the less expensive statistical programs don’t filter out spam traffic.  There is a lot of automated traffic out there that is used for spamming websites, and writing automated comments to blogs.  This traffic isn’t real and therefore shouldn’t be counted as it can give you an incorrect conversion rate.

The traffic that you want to count is the number of visitors to your site.  Page views, and hits don’t give you an accurate result either.  Make sure you look at the visitor statistic as most programs will give you page views and hits as well.

Google analytics gives a more accurate visitor rate and it seems to filter out some of the spam traffic.  Some other things you can do that require […]

By |March 25th, 2012|Internet Business|2 Comments
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3 Tips on Converting Web Traffic Into Sales

It is one thing to get a lot of traffic to your web site, but if you aren’t receiving any benefit from your traffic, then you have to ask yourself what needs to be changed in your online strategy.  If you want to generate sales from your web site then there are a number of things you must have in place in order to convert the traffic that comes to your website into sales.  In this posting, I will discuss 3 things that can make a significant difference in the response rate of your web site.

1 – Narrow your target market

The more focused your target market is, the easier it is to connect to your target market because it becomes easier to communicate directly to them in their language and emotionally connect to their needs.  For example if your business focuses on serving women’s needs, you would need to narrow that market down because women in general are so diverse.  They are in different stages in their lives, different cultural groups, different socio economic groups, different hobbies, interests, and different goals.

A better target group would be newly married working women with children on the way and a combined household income of over $100,000.  This target market has specific needs that can be directly addressed in your marketing material and on your website.  Addressing this market with content, images, videos and other forms of medium can really build a powerful enough message that will encourage your website visitors to connect with you.

2 – Concentrate on what you offer your target market

After you have thoroughly researched your target market, you will know their issues, problems and desires.  The thing that will get your target market interested […]

By |March 19th, 2012|Internet Business|1 Comment
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  • Webinar Preparation
    Top 3 Tips to Increasing Your Webinar Sales Results Top 3 Tips to Increasing Your Webinar Sales Results

    Top 3 Tips to Increasing Your Webinar Sales Results

Top 3 Tips to Increasing Your Webinar Sales Results

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.  […]

By |January 30th, 2012|Internet Business|0 Comments
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Online Business Strategies – How Does Your Website Maintenance Fit In?

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 […]
By |January 16th, 2012|Internet Business|0 Comments
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10 Ways to Generate Revenue with Your Website.

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 […]

Related terms:

By |January 9th, 2012|Internet Business|2 Comments
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