Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at
10:38 am, By
Les Proctor
What’s Inbound Marketing and Web 2.0, exactly?
The time is now.
Why is everyone talking about Inbound Marketing and Web 2.0? Who cares about the “Real-time Web?”
Several years ago when Google modified its Pagerank Algorithm, and started factoring in how other influential websites link to yours, few people really could imagine the explosion of social media engines like Linked-in, Facebook, and Twitter. Your search engine visibility is determined not only by the quality of the content on your website, but by who is linking to you.
Just recently, Google has launched the real-time web. Now more than ever there is an extraordinary opportunity for small businesses to carve out a niche in their social media marketplaces — effectively creating their own channel to communicate with their customers and prospects.
In an article in Huffpost by Manish Mehta, the Vice President, Social Media and Community at Dell Inc. (who can attribute $7 million in sales to Twitter for doing nothing at all!), Mehta affirms “Social media isn’t a means to further a corporation’s strategy, it’s a means to help determine it.”
Sometimes pictures (or mindmaps) are better than words, so I’ve created a Mindmap that illustrates a general Inbound Marketing/Social Media Strategy.
Inbound Marketing and Web 2.0 Strategy for Small Businesses
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Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at
10:16 pm, By
Les Proctor
Why WordPress is the Best Choice for Small Business Owners and Big Company Websites alike
Wordpress is awesome
I love WordPress, and other small business owners and marketers should love it, too. Over the past three 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.
10 Reasons Why WordPress is the Best
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Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at
9:03 am, By
Les Proctor
Are you looking for ways to Get More out of Pay per click?
Google's not the only game in town
The biggest mistake people make when it comes to Pay per click Marketing is to rely solely on Google Adwords, create one ad, send it to the home page of your website, and choose all the keywords that Google suggests.
That’s a great way to go through your entire budget fast with zero results.
The trick to getting higher higher response rates and clickthroughs on Pay per Click Marketing is to create a separate landing page for each of your top keywords in three easy (but time-consuming) steps.
4 Easy Steps to Get More out of Pay per click
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Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at
9:10 am, By
Les Proctor
Why and How to create a Gravatar
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.
Why is this important?
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.
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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.
Best practices require that you ask permission first
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What’s The Four Way Test?
“If you apply The Four Way Test in your professional and personal life, you will be very successful.” ~ My grandfather Charles J. Proctor, Rotarian (in his office at the Travelier Motel in Columbia, Mo, to me when I was 10)
Rotary International
Herbert J. Taylor (April 18, 1893 – May 1, 1978) was the creator of the “The Four Way Test of the Things We Think, Say or Do” (see below). He wrote this 24-word statement of business ethics in twenty minutes as he set out to save the Club Aluminum Products distribution company from bankruptcy.
Founded in 1923, Club Aluminum Cookware was sold by door-to-door salesmen until the Great Depression made this method of sales too costly. In 1932, it teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. The then-Vice President of Jewel Tea Company, Herbert J. Taylor, was asked come and help out in the hopes of avoiding insolvency. After he settled the law suits pending against the company, Taylor concluded that Club Aluminum was $400,000 in debt with no chance that existing sales could service even the short-term debt. He was advised to file for bankruptcy. Jewel Tea had concluded that the situation was hopeless and asked Taylor to return full-time.
Instead, Taylor left his $33,000 salary at Jewel and became President of Club Aluminum, with a salary of $6,000. And, using his Jewel stock as collateral, he purchased the controlling interest in the Club Aluminum for $6,100. When Taylor took over the situation was so desperate. In developing his plan of action, his first priority was to change the ethical climate in the company. “If the people who worked for Club Aluminum were to think right, I knew they would do right,” he affirmed. ”What we needed was a simple, easily remembered guide to right conduct – a sort of ethical yardstick- which all of us in the company could memorize and apply to what we thought, said and did.”
Is a Customer Winback Program worth the hassle?
Seek to understand
Emphatically “Yes”!
There are lots of reasons, other than the economy, why you might be losing customers. Customers could’ve been frustrated by delays, or aggravated by one bad experience. They could be annoyed by lack of response from you, or seduced away by your competition.
The point is: “If you are losing customers—do you know why?”
There’s a big difference between customers who are gone and customers you can win back. Unfortunately, most sales managers and salespeople don’t make that distinction.
And many executives neglect to direct their managers to ferret out the reasons why customers are defecting. Why? In the rush to get new business—we ignore lost business—even though in many cases the closing ratio for winning back lost customers can be much higher than the ratio for new business. And the reasons for customer defection are vitally important.
A customer winback program is valuable for three main reasons (1) you win back “lost” revenue (2) you can uncover potential weaknesses in your organization, and (3) you can discover potential threats from the competition.
4 Steps to Customer Winback Success
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Do you have what it takes to succeed in business?
"You have what it takes"
Yes, you do… if you’ll just get over yourself and do what it takes to succeed in business.
From my experience, 99% of people have everything they need to succeed. The only thing holding them back is… themselves.
It’s all about actions…. creating a presence, promoting yourself, finding someone who has a need, showing them you can fulfill the need, confirming that they understand you can fulfill the need for the price you’re proposing, creating a formal proposal and closing the deal.
Yes, it’s important to have a website, business cards, and a cell phone… but you don’t really need a lot more than that.
The Cowardly Lion had what it takes to succeed in business
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