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I love WordPress, and others small business owners and marketers should too.
Over the past two years, it has become my web design platform of choice.
“Why?” You might ask….
Simply because a WordPress website can do everything an old-fashioned website can do, and about 100 times more.
When Warren Buffet speaks, people listen.
Recently I happened to catch Warren Buffet on TV talking about how leaders should set business priorities.
Buffet was saying that you should run your business like it’s a family business–one that you are going to hold onto for 100 years, and the #1 thing you should think about is how to build a sustainable competitive advantage, like building “like a moat around your castle.”
If you look back to medieval times, moats were excavated around castles as part of the defensive system–an obstacle immediately outside the walls–and usually they were filled with water.
A good moat made it difficult for your enemy to access your walls with siege weapons, such as towers and battering rams, which needed to be brought up against a wall to work effectively. A water-filled moat made it impossible for your enemy to dig tunnels under your fortifications in order to effect a collapse of the defenses. A good moat protected your castle and everything in it.
The wider your moat, the longer you can protect your profits. The deeper your moat, the more profitable you are.
The biggest mistake people make when it comes to Google Adwords is to create one ad, send it to the home page of your website, and choose all the keywords that Google Adwords suggests.
That’s a great way to go through your entire budget fast with zero results.
The trick to getting higher higher response on pay-per-click ads is to create a separate landing page for each of your top keywords in three easy (but time-consuming) steps.
One of the most challenging and most commonly misunderstood components of successful business-to-business marketing is lead generation and nurturing (or ‘demand generation and management’).
Starting with how you generate inquiries through the challenging hand-off and follow-up by your sales force, and most importantly how you measure the results, this ”discipline” sees more wasted money, more missed opportunities, and more downright mistakes than any other area in business-to-business (B2B) marketing and sales.
Now that some of the more traditional direct mail disciplines (multivariate testing, A/B splits) are being used on the Internet (web design, email marketing, search engine marketing, pay-per-click advertising, landing page optimization, social media, web 2.0), it has made the the demand generation and management process more complex and more difficult than ever.
But this really presents businesses the greatest opportunity for three reasons:
Once you’ve established a unique identity, you need to create a web presence that works for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year with an offer that engages your prospects and prompts them to contact you.
How do you get your prospects to engage with you? Top search engine rankings are nice, but it really doesn’t matter if you’re not converting traffic into inquiries, and inquries into sales.
Here’s the secret: “It’s not about you.”
Direct Marketing Old Timers will tell you that the success or failure of any marketing program is attributable to:
If you’re not getting the response you think you should be getting, look at the offer first.
The strategic process in old-fashioned Direct Marketing is matching up the right list with the right offer… segmenting the list into micro-segments (or “splits”), and tailoring specialized offers to make the offer more relevant.
The 3R’s: It’s not Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, but…
A ‘Gravatar’ is a ’Globally Recognized Avatar’.
An avatar is an icon or a little picture you see next to comments in a website, and is used to or distinguish yourself from others. In other words, a Gravatar is an Avatar you can take with you. Created by Tom Werner, and available at www.gravatar.com, gravatars make it possible for a person to have one avatar across the entire web.
One of the factors in achieving higher search engine rankings for your website is what’s referred to as “off-page optimization,” which is determined to a large part by how many influential websites with a high page rank link back to your website.
Everyone’s looking for results. Is there a sure-way method to find them?
Many companies think they’re practicing “Direct Marketing” without taking the time to measure and report the results… they enjoy the results, but they don’t try to figure out how they could do better. Like Direct Marketing, Lean Marketing is targeted, personalized, measurable, but most importantly, it’s improveable.
As consumers, We’ve all seen successful examples of Direct Marketing. You go to your mailbox, open your mail, and there’s a letter that stands out — it comes from a real person directly to you with an offer designed to delight you and make you want to respond.
As marketers, if you use Direct Marketing regularly, you know that for every $1.00 you spend you can get $20 back, or $24.00, or whatever. Predictable return on investment helps you with your budgeting, your cash management, and your profitability.
Lean Marketing is Direct Marketing with a commitment towards improvement, it’s Quality Management or Continual Improvement applied to Marketing, which can be illustrated by the PDCA Cycle that was popularized by Edward Deming, who is widely recognized as the forefather of improving design (and thus service), product quality, testing, and sales.
Everyone loves Constant Contact.
It’s a simple easy-to-use tool that I have used to help many clients communicate periodically with their customers.
One of the drawbacks of using Constant Contact though is that the subscriber forms they are just plain ugly.
Fortunately, Constant Contact has made it possible to create a normal-looking webform, and put it on your website through the use of their API.
What is she thinking?
We’d all like to know what others, particularly our prospective customers, are thinking.
And that’s what the discipline of Market Research is intended to do. But how do you conduct research on the web that’s cost-effective, and that produces results?
We’ve all seen them. Those Netflix popups that are generated when you’re leaving a website. They’re annoying and inneffective. The best way to conduct market research on the web is to be honest with people. Let them know up front what they’re getting into, and give them the option to say “Yes”, or “No” upfront.
