Vision Of Success

Remember when businesses could survive without a website?

I’ve been online and had at least one website working for me for over 14 years now. Yet I also know that even though I’ve embraced technology, and couldn’t live without it, there are still people out there that have never created a site for their business. In fact, I currently have a half dozen business cards in front of me without an email address on them.

Let’s look at a few stats for a moment. In 2000, Google indexed about 1 billion pages. By the end of 2004, those numbers had risen to 8 billion. Currently, the latest estimate is that Google has indexed about 14 to 15 billion pages. All of this means people are adding a lot of content to the online arena – and its growing not just in America, United Kingdom and Australia. It’s growing in the far corners of the world.

Doing business online has truly made it to the mainstream. And for all of you that have a website and realize the importance, you’ve probably contemplated the next step. SEO, or search engine optimization is about getting your site ranked and in front of your prospects and your customers. But what most people don’t realize the strategy it takes to make that move.

When you think SEO, what does it bring up in your mind? Getting ranked high in the search engines? Magically appearing in ads? Getting more traffic than you can handle?

All of that may be a part of SEO, but unless you create a strategy, it will never happen.

I recently sat down with Jeff, a business consultant. He created a small website a couple of years ago, and left it up more as a brochure than anything else. It didn’t go into a lot of detail about his business; it just gave a brief explanation about Jeff and his business. He received no business from his site, and he was looking to change that.

After a five-minute analysis, I began to see some definite areas where we could make changes. Jeff had a friend who designed his site. This friend dabbled in web design on the side, and did it more for fun. But he now had a new full time position, two kids – and no time to help Jeff make changes. The first problem was Jeff’s friend had used an old “template” for the design, and all of his keywords were from an entirely different industry!

Next, because Jeff knew very little about SEO, he only had one goal with his online strategy: to be number one under the keyword “business consultant” in Google. He spent a few hundred dollars on Google’s Pay Per Click strategy, but recently gave up when he had little success.

Jeff had never sat down and created an online strategy that would truly help his business. He was guilty of the most common problem made by today’s small business owners – he listened to all the wonderful stories about the power of the Internet, yet he never captured any of it for his business because he never did anything to get his site noticed.

We went on to discuss SEO, and what it means for him, and for any small business owner. SEO means finding out what your clients are looking for online, and being there when they search. You don’t want to show up under “business consultant” if your clients are searching for “small business marketing coach”. And you won’t magically appear under the term “small business marketing coach” unless you work with your content and your marketing to make it happen.

Like it or not, business is competition. And thanks to the Internet, that competition is fierce. In years past, the people in your local market were your competition; but now that field has spread across the globe. For you to get to your target audience, and to capture sales, you have to work at it.

But the good news is it’s actually the best time in history to get started in online marketing. For both service and product businesses, the tools available today are amazing. In just a few short months, with the right planning, we’re able to capture high rankings under the terms most often searched. And it’s not just a big business strategy – even small businesses can create a lot of magic online.

And it all starts with a strategy.

In the pre-Internet days, communicating with your customers took a whole lot more effort. You had to plan a promotion, create the marketing piece, print out address labels and attach them to the marketing piece, head to your post office and buy a bulk mailer or buy individual first class stamps and stamp each piece individually. Then drop everything into the mail. The whole process could take anywhere from several days to several weeks, depending on your use of graphic designers and printers.

But then the Internet rolled around, and everyone jumped on the bandwagon of email. Email is a quick form of communication that allows you to send anyone anything at little or no cost. Of course the problem with email is because of its low cost, everyone does it. It’s not uncommon for someone to get several hundred email a day.

With that kind of incoming messaging, your communications have little to no chance of making it through – and creating the sale – unless you provide your customers strong value and they anticipate and even wait for your arrival.

As a part of your marketing strategy, consider the following when building a campaign.

1. Don’t just send email because of its value to you. Give your customer the value. What do they want to know? What do they care about? They don’t care about the details of your business. They care about how your business affects their lives.

2. Send email on a regular, anticipated time interval. Tell your customers when to expect email from you, and what to expect in the email. “Sign up for my weekly ezine in which I provide you with simple 5 minute tips on organizing your home office.” This gets straight to the point, tells people when they will receive your information, and how they can use your information. People can decide before they sign up if this type of correspondence is for them.

3. Don’t overwhelm your customers. Different industries have different email patterns. If you are emailing to a consumer, they may only open up personal email once or twice per week. If you send one or two email per day, you’ll quickly overwhelm your customer, causing her to opt out of your email. If you email business owners, they may appreciate daily correspondence, and like quick tips to start out their day. Find out what your customer prefers, test your responses often, and give them what they want.

4. Don’t forget about the mail. Just because email is a great system that’s inexpensive to use, don’t forget that snail mail can be equally effective. Try working the two together. Email your customers to watch for a new promotion you’re about to put into the mail. Send out your postcard. Then email a week or so later asking if they received the postcard, and giving them further incentive to make contact with you.

5. Instead of emailing people with all of your information, offer them choices. Autoresponders are a great way of emailing people only the information they are truly interested in. If you have a new product coming out, give them a chance to sign up on another list that will provide more information. They will receive a variety of emails based on this new product, and their desire for your information.

Above all, keep trying. If something doesn’t work, look at the possible reasons why. Is it your timing – maybe it’s a holiday. Is it the message – refine the way you say it. The important thing is to be consistent, and be willing to change to reach your fullest potential.

Lori Osterberg has created three successful businesses in the past 10 years, and along the way discovered the secrets of taking a local small business and turning it into a worldwide success. She now shares this passion with people all over the world, and speaks, writes and mentors on using technology to grow your business – and stay small at the same time! Receive her FREE ezine at http://www.visionofsuccess.com/

I often volunteer in my daughter’s school, and love helping out when I can. As the school year came to an end, I received a stack of thank you notes from the kids. For the first time in my life, I was told:

“You da bomb!”

Huh?

Of course after my daughter translated for me, I figured out being “da bomb” was a good thing.

People communicate in different ways. They think differently. They talk differently. And they search differently.

It can be a difference in ages. Or a difference in communities. Or a difference in cultures.

When you’re communicating one on one with a person, you can compensate for the difference in words and phrases.

For instance, I was on a business trip in Boston a few years ago, and asked a woman if there was a pop machine near by. She had no idea what I was talking about until I finally corrected myself and said “soda machine”. I could see her confusion, and changed my wording until we came up with familiar phrases.

Online, you can’t see your prospects confusion. You can’t tell what they want, or what would make them understand what you have to say. You have to know your business well enough to understand what they want ahead of time, and share that information online.

1. Just because you understand what you sell, doesn’t mean your prospects will. Take a look at your site through your clients’ eyes. Better yet, talk to people that aren’t connected with your business, and find out what they think of your site. Is there any confusion?

2. Give people what they want. Some people love statistics. Some people love long stories. Some people want just the facts. Some people are visual and want lots of graphics. Provide different pages with different things, and give people the choice to move around for more information. People read what they want and need to make a decision.

3. Make your copy speak to your target audience. Don’t use technical lingo, or industry related material that your prospects won’t understand. Don’t use slang or phrasing that might not make sense in different cultures. Be as plain and matter-of-fact as you can be.

4. Get started. Your site doesn’t have to be perfect at the beginning. The important thing is to get it out. Build from there. Everybody has to start somewhere, and having a five-page site is a great starting point. You can always add the detail as you go along.

5. Don’t skimp on the information. You don’t have to put up a five-page brochure site and leave it unchanged for years to come. Instead, get your site online, and build supporting pages as you go along. Your first “services” page might describe all of your products. Over time, create detailed pages on each product, and describe it thoroughly.

6. Never assume your prospects will understand. You understand your business. You live it every day. But your prospect may be brand new to the industry, and know nothing about the details. Websites have the potential to describe and define as they go along by using description boxes, and linking to other pages for further explanation. FAQ pages are also good starting points for people that need further information.

7. Ask questions. Find out what made your prospects turn into customers. Use this information to add and change your online strategies.

Above all, be flexible. Marketing isn’t something you do once. You work at it month after month for as long as you’re in business. What works today may not work tomorrow. But if you’ve developed a large variety of tools, you’re more apt to capture the attention of a new visitor. And turn them into a customer.

Then YOU will be “da bomb” too!

Lori Osterberg has created three successful businesses in the past 10 years, and along the way discovered the secrets of taking a local small business and turning it into a worldwide success. She now shares this passion with people all over the world, and speaks, writes and mentors on using technology to grow your business – and stay small at the same time! Receive her FREE ezine at http://www.visionofsuccess.com/

You have a website. You know it has the potential to bring you in leads (and sales). But is it working for you? Do you know if it’s working for you?

For many businesses, the only way they drive traffic to their website is by telling their customers to visit it, or to list their web address on their brochures. If this sounds like your business, let me ask you a question. Are you concentrating on gaining rankings in the search engines?

Take a few minutes and spend some time in Google. I have a sample image here for you. When you type in a search phrase, Google provides results in several ways.

1. The top section, highlighted in a light color, is top sponsored links. These are results that the companies listed here are paying for.

2. The right hand side also contains a variety of sponsored links. Likewise, the companies sponsored here are also paying for links.

3. The terms listed in the main body section are the natural results. These companies worked hard to achieve top listings under popular search phrases.

Think about your own search patterns. When you do a search, how many pages do you click through to find a site with relevant information? Chances are you look through the first page of results (the first 10 pages of top producing results), and you may click through to the second and third pages, but you probably don’t go much further.

Which means if you aren’t ranking in the top 10 under your key phrases that people are searching for you on, you’ll never come into contact with the people looking for you.

As a business owner, you have two jobs when it comes to Internet marketing.

1. Figure out what people are typing into the search engines to find you.

2. Consistently get top rankings under those key terms for more exposure.

Tip: You don’t always want top placement under the most obvious key word.

Let me give you an example. As many of you know, I have a photography background. So we have a site dedicated to helping photographers.

Ranking under the term “photography” would only bring me minimal results. Instead, we’ve focused our efforts on the terms that people are searching for us under.

Under the terms:

Photography Business - we’re 14 out of 272,000,000
Photographic Studio Secrets - we’re 1 and 2 out of 1,400,000
Wedding Photographer Equipment Checklist - we’re 3 and 4 out of 990,000

I could provide many more examples, but I’m sure you’re starting to see the value. As people search for things relevant to my business, they are finding my site, clicking through to my site, and buying from my site.

Is your site doing the same?

Lori Osterberg has created three successful businesses in the past 10 years, and along the way discovered the secrets of taking a local small business and turning it into a worldwide success. She now shares this passion with people all over the world, and speaks, writes and mentors on using technology to grow your business – and stay small at the same time! Receive her FREE ezine at www.VisionOfSuccess.com.

What kind of response rate are you getting from your email? Think about these statistics for a moment.

* A recent study showed that over 50 percent of all email sent out each day is spam (with tens of billions of email sent every day).

* Top ISP’s (your Internet service provider) are blocking about 25 percent of your permission based email. This is the email that you have requested, or that is coming from clients and peers.

While these numbers may frighten off small business owners, and make them wary of using email as a marketing tool, there are things you can do significantly improve your delivery rates.

Here are 5 tips to help you overcome delivery problems:

1. Get Permission.
With dozens (or even hundreds) of emails coming into a persons email box every day, don’t send regular email out to someone that hasn’t requested it. When you are out networking, by all means add these people to your mailing list. But don’t automatically put them on your email list. If you have an ezine, send an email thanking them for speaking with you, and give them the link to sign up for your ezine. Never assume they want your information, even if you meet with someone regularly.

2. Attract attention by your From and Subject lines.
People learn to scan their email boxes quickly to determine what to delete, and what to keep and read. If you always send things from one email address, they will recognize you instantly. Also, be descriptive with your subject lines. Don’t use “Hi” or “Thanks”, describe what your message is about “I enjoyed meeting you at Wednesday’s Networking Group” or “Thanks for spending 5 minutes at my booth Tuesday”. Depending on their email program, they may not see long detailed subject lines. But getting to the point provides you with a greater chance of having your email opened.

3. Get your email through the spam filters.
Spam filters are constantly changing, but there are things that automatically rank high when your email account is determining deliverability of a message. All capital letters, excessive punctuation, repeated phrases, specific words/phrases, and continual talk about selling/buying will all trigger spam filters. If you use a good delivery system, many have spam assessors that will let you know the status of your email.

4. Create a structured email, and use it again and again.
Keep your emails similar in nature. If you use ezines, develop a template. If you send text email, build up a style. People develop relationships online because they like the way you write and the information you provide.

5. Tell people upfront what to expect.

Tell people upfront what you will be delivering. If you are sending autoresponder series, use your first one to provide the details of the remaining emails. On your website, sell your ezine and tell people what they will be receiving each delivery. Put samples to give people an idea of what to expect. And be consistent.

Lori Osterberg has created three successful businesses in the past 10 years, and along the way discovered the secrets of taking a local small business and turning it into a worldwide success. She now shares this passion with people all over the world, and speaks, writes and mentors on using technology to grow your business – and stay small at the same time! Receive her FREE ezine at www.VisionOfSuccess.com.

I’ve worked with many small businesses, and countless owners think of Internet marketing as a separate entity from their traditional marketing methods. Instead of working them together, they literally separate the two in to two functions.
If you’ve fallen in to this trap on more than one occasion, take a look at these 5 ideas that will get your traditional and online marketing methods working together.
1. Create postcards specifically for an online promotion. Hand them out to every customer that enters your store, and mail them out to your current client list. Make sure your promotion that isn’t available in your store or office. Compel your customers to logging in to your website and making the purchase online if they desire your product or service.
2. Create a class or seminar either in your store or office, or at a local community location. During the class, reference a product or a report that is available on your website. Offer that report or small gift for free if they go to your site and register for your online newsletter. Promote that free report or gift throughout the class.
3. Join local associations and networking groups. As a part of membership, you gain access to the list of members. Create a postcard specifically announcing your website, and send them to the members on the list several times of year. Change the postcard announcing new features or promotions.
4. Do you advertise in the local newspaper or magazines? Instead of asking them to call or visit your location, have them visit your website. Again, give them a reason to visit your site. Offer a report or a free gift for taking the time to visit your site, and fill out the necessary information.
5. Work the idea of offline promotion in reverse. In order to entice your walk in customers to sign up for information online, offer in-store coupon promotions that will be emailed in an ezine once a week. A local restaurant has done this, and has created quite a stir with their coupons. Once a week, they email out coupons for items like appetizers, entrees, wine and take-out orders. And they have fun with the whole campaign, creating “take the kids out after soccer for a pizza” and “leave the cooking to us on Friday night” emails.
Lori Osterberg has created three successful businesses in the past 10 years, and along the way discovered the secrets of taking a local small business and turning it into a worldwide success. She now shares this passion with people all over the world, and speaks, writes and mentors on using technology to grow your business – and stay small at the same time! Receive her FREE ezine at http://www.VisionOfSuccess.com/

It happened again.

Almost every day I hear the phrase, “I want to be at the top of the search engines”. What does that really mean?

Unfortunately, most people say that phrase without actually thinking about what they mean by it. Do they want more visitors to their sites? Do they want more money to come into their businesses?

Simply being at the top of the search engines does nothing for your business. I can send thousands of people to any site on the web. But if I send a thousand vegetarians to a site selling steaks, is it going to be of benefit?

Instead, what people really are asking for is to get noticed. To have quality people come into their site for the opportunity of creating a sale some time in the future. People want leads.

Good quality leads can come from a variety of sources. Just like with traditional marketing methods, you’ll find clients in a variety of different methods. If you take a look at your last five clients, you’re likely to discover they came from a variety of sources. From places like:

· a referral from a past client;
· an ad in a niche targeted magazine;
· a direct mail postcard;
· a meeting at a local networking group; and
· a friend of the family.

The key to traditional marketing methods is not putting all of your eggs into one basket; instead relying on a number of different sources.

But up until now, the Internet has been somewhat different. People are still putting up websites, and expecting people to magically find them. Or they expect to be placed on a search engine in the number one position (out of millions) and be instantly recognized.

A good Internet strategy takes its cue from a traditional marketing plan. It realizes there are dozens of ways to reach a potential customer, and finds ways of capturing each of those methods. So a well marketed site might receive visitors, and ultimately purchasers, from things like:

· a banner ad on a complimentary site;
· a click from a pay-per-click ad;
· a referral from an article on an association site;
· a link from an ezine; and
· yes, a top placement on a strong keyword within the search engines.

Having a clear vision for your business allows you to market your business directly to your ideal target market. The same applies to your website. The clearer you are on your ideal client, the easier it is to reach out to them.

With the Internet, a lot of your marketing strategy relies on searches – what are your customers searching for when they reach your site? Different people search for different things, yet all wind up on the same site making an identical purchase.

How do you capture those visitors?

It’s a matter of thinking like your customers. Why do they come to you? If you don’t know, start asking how they found you. Did they see you in an advertisement, or was it a referral from another company? What were they searching for when they found your company?

As you find different techniques, concentrate on building advertising methods using those techniques.

While many business owners have the belief that a top ranking placement of one keyword will bring in the traffic, in truth concentrating you efforts on multiple, less searched keywords is an easier task to accomplish.

Instead of being at the top of the search engines for a strong keyword such as “marketing”, concentrating on a more targeted phrase such as “small business marketing for health spas” may in turn help you gain more business.

The word “marketing” is huge, and can contain hundreds of different meanings, depending on the searcher. Yet when you narrow your focus to “small business marketing for health spas”, your focus becomes clear, and you have a much greater chance of gaining the attention you are seeking.

And when you have focused on key phrases, it will open up other marketing opportunities. You may find a directory to place a banner ad, or an ezine that is looking for quality articles. Your focus leads you to better quality contacts.

And isn’t that the real reason to be at the top of the search engines?

Lori Osterberg has created three successful businesses in the past 10 years, and along the way discovered the secrets of taking a local small business and turning it into a worldwide success. She now shares this passion with people all over the world, and speaks, writes and mentors on using technology to grow your business – and stay small at the same time! Receive her FREE ezine at http://www.VisionOfSuccess.com/