Most User Friendly Online Shopping Sites

04/12/2012 by Joseph Baker

There’s nothing worse than spending hours browsing through an online store, finally finding exactly what you want, then getting bogged down in a poorly designed, convoluted checkout.

Either you have to load about 12 pages just to buy one tiny teeny little thing, or they want you to open an “account” that for some mysterious reason requires you to enter in all of your personal information from birth to the current day, or they require your first born child – just to order a stupid headband, or whatever it is that you’re shopping for.

Bad checkouts can make you want to throw your laptop through the window, jump in the car, and head down to the mall. In fact, 63% of online sales are thwarted during the checkout process — probably because shoppers are so irritated that they just give up.

Luckily, not all online retailers are that bad! Some have even figured out that a smooth, quick and easy to navigate checkout might just, you know, be good customer service or whatever.

If you’re sick of writing your autobiography when you just want to enter in that 20% off promo code, pay with your Paypal account and get it over with already, check out these outstanding e-commerce sites. They’re all known for their user-friendly checkouts and are virtually guaranteed to help you keep on avoiding the mall for as long as is humanly possible.

Amazon
Target
Busted Tees
Loop 18

Amazon is known for its user-friendliness, from browsing to checkout. Users have the option of setting up an account; if they opt in, the process is quick, easy and doesn’t require a notarized copy of your birth certificate. Plus, every time you buy something in the future, your information is accessible in a single keystroke. Amazon literally provides a one-click shopping experience.

Though Target.com requires registration, its easy, non-intrusive registration process stands out. Instead of requiring lots of forms to fill out during the shopping process – otherwise known as annoying barriers to browsing – the Target site doesn’t make you create an account until checkout. Once your account is created, you can just sign in and get to shopping.

It may not be a household name, but Busted Tees – an online retailed of quirky tee shirts and eclectic gifts – has the right idea when it comes to checkout. Consumers can choose to create an account or not. The registration process is quick and easy; once you’re done, you’re linked directly to your Paypal account to simplify the process. Plus, if you sign up for the Busted Tees e-newsletter, they’ll send you a promo code every now and then that deliver significant discounts.

Loop 18 exemplifies one-stop shopping – with a one-stop checkout. This retailer’s site allows shoppers to browse through six stores at once – like Sonsi, Lane Bryant, Cacique and Fashion Bug – and pay at all of them through a single checkout. Plus, there aren’t any surprises when it comes to shipping charges; they’re clearly defined on the home page. And, if you choose to register, you can checkout with a single click.

So don’t despair: Many online retailers are discovering that customers simply want to buy their stuff and get on with their day. In fact, one study showed that a majority of websites are working on increased transparency and ease, an emphasis that should manifest in a greater number of user-friendly, easily navigated and quick checkouts.

Filed Under: Blogging, Contributors, Social Media, Strategy & Business, Technology Tagged With: business development, engagement, facebok marketing, guest blogger, marketing, online social networking, web marketing

Alternatives in the Cloud: Knowledge is Power

04/05/2012 by Joseph Baker

All the cool kids at the water cooler seem to have one phrase on the tip of their tongue: the cloud. Everybody is talking about the cloud. However, thanks to various advances in cloud computing, not everyone is referring to the same thing when they reference the cloud.

Essentially, anytime someone mentions the cloud, they are referencing computing that exists as a service rather than as a product. Instead of a bulky disk that downloads a program onto their computer, cloud computing exists outside of their computer. The resources, software, or information that are provided as part of the cloud exist on a grid or network, which in most cases is the Internet. When companies use the cloud, they can expand their capacity and functions without having to add any extra infrastructure, hire any extra staff or purchase any software. For instance, if a company needs to engineer a large-scale project, they no longer have to waste weeks planning to buy new servers or other equipment. Instead, they can simply sign onto a cloud computing service that offers them this functionality without requiring them to spend piles of cash.

When many people think of cloud computing, they immediately think of the cloud services offered by Amazon or other big names in the industry; unfortunately, a relationship with any of these companies can be costly whereas a relationship with a smaller company may be just as effective or even more effective for less money.

Although most people are referencing the same set of advantages and the same general ideas when they refer to the cloud, there are several different forms of this emerging technology.

Six Types of Cloud Computing

Web-based clouds. With the right web based service, business owners can avoid using expensive applications that may require a lot of space on their computers. Instead, they can perform the same functions from a web-based program. For example, they can use an API for something as ubiquitous as Google Maps, or they can use a mash-up of various programs so that they can perform routine tasks like payroll or payment processing easily and efficiently.
SaaS (Software as a Service). This allows multiple users to access the same web based software from their own browsers.
PaaS (Platform as a Service). This layer of cloud computing allows businesses to run a stack of tailored applications on the cloud’s infrastructure without purchasing the software or servers that would have been necessary to run these applications a few years ago.
Utility cloud services. Instead of employing a host of geeks to add memory here and there, businesses can now safely and easily store heaps of data on the cloud using the cloud’s utility services.
Managed services. Businesses have been using this version of cloud computing since years before the phrase was ever used commonly. In this version, the cloud provider rather than the business employees uses the application. Managed services are commonly used for things like anti-spam services that many business owners find useful to outsource.
Service commerce. A combination of SaaS and Managed Services, service commerce cloud computing gives the end-user access to a number of services from a single application. These applications act like personal assistants, and they can do almost anything for a company from helping them to track their expenses to helping them to organize their payroll.

These six iterations of cloud computing are just fractions of what cloud computing is capable of. As the technology continues to emerge, new ideas will come into play, and the types of cloud services that providers can offer will continue to expand and evolve.

With so many cloud-computing options, more and more business owners are looking to the cloud for their particular needs, and they have many different providers that they can opt to work with. There are companies like Amazon that have massive, sprawling cloud servers for enterprise businesses. For companies and individuals looking for an Amazon alternative, there are many smaller cloud service providers that offer the same services for lower rates.

Filed Under: Blogging, Contributors, Strategy & Business, Success, Technology Tagged With: blog, business development, marketing, online social networking, search engine optimization, social networking, twitter

Future of Mobile Social Media

03/22/2012 by Joseph Baker

When Apple released the iPhone and effectively changed the entire mobile communications game forever, the price of entry was so high that only super savvy tech fans and the 1 percent could really partake. Now, the landscape looks much different. Increasing numbers of viable competing devices and falling data prices have opened the market to a larger segment of society. Since the debut of the modern smartphone, they have grown into a piece of society in a real way. When a band takes the stage at a show, how many phones do you see come out? Does anyone even look at another person on the train anymore, or are they glued to their 5 inch screens? Smartphones (and tablets) have become an extension of the body, and one of that function’s most important assets is its ability to connect with social media.

Most smartphones are filled with a stable of social media applications. As the hardware that runs those applications change and evolve, so too must those applications. The release of the iPad 3 this past weekend gives a little indication of what’s next for mobile: high definition and faster speeds. Compared to other advancements, though, that’s not very exciting. What we will see in terms of information sharing, cloud storage and mobile interaction in the next few years – all with regard to social media on mobile devices – is set to blow some socks off.

The Future of Social Media

Researchers at Stanford University envision a world where users can share data between two smartphones, as well as between a smartphone and a computer, with a single action. Still confused? Watch this video: Inventing an open-source mobile social media future at Stanford .

From the Stanford website:

They have formed MobiSocial to ask the most fundamental questions about this rapidly burgeoning field, questions that seem obvious now that mobile and social media are firmly entrenched, but which weren’t so obvious as the technologies were entrenching themselves: Can social be done better? Can it be even more social and more fun? Can it be more open? Can it be more secure? And, if so, how?

The idea is to find a way to synthesize the best parts of mobile and social, then streamline them so that switching between apps and connecting with multifarious networks is seamless, whereas now it’s all just collected in a device.

Another example of this new technology is Sparsh, which allows social media users to transfer data from one medium, such as a smartphone, to another medium using only their touch. That means that each person effectively becomes an organic vessel for information.

These new software systems will have to be powered by robust mobile application development platforms. Mobile application development platforms, such as Brew, will also shape the future of social media. Development platforms continue to incorporate new options for creators of mobile applications, which translates into more sophisticated social media apps in the future.

The Issue of Privacy

Social media claimed its coveted position in popular culture so quickly that many social media platforms were unable to keep up. Along with the widespread use of social media platforms came a lack of privacy and increased vulnerability to identity theft and other social crimes. As mobile social media applications move into the future, it’s likely that they will address these concerns as effectively as possible. For example, since new mobile social media applications will allow users to quickly transfer data from one medium to another, the applications handling the transfer will use encryption to prevent third parties from intercepting the data.

Consolidation

One of the common aims of future applications will be consolidation. There are already apps available that consolidate social media profiles into one location, but it is likely that these apps will become more sophisticated in the future. In addition, new mobile apps will consolidate personal data into an “individual cloud” that a person can use to make purchases, share video and photos with other individuals, and swap valuable information. However, in response to privacy concerns, these new apps will protect your data using more sophisticated security measures.

Filed Under: Blogging, Contributors, Social Media, Strategy & Business, Technology Tagged With: analytics, blog, business development, facebok marketing, facebook, online social networking, social marketing, social media, social networking, twitter

The Future is Now, but For How Long?

03/08/2012 by Joseph Baker

Years ago I sat in a library computer lab at my university and thought, “Wow, the MySpace era is over, upended and replaced by Facebook, but how long will the victor stay on top? If MySpace could fall, surely Facebook will as well. What will Facebook do in the future to lose users in the same way?” Of course, Facebook has done very well for itself since and successfully defeated social media challengers or integrated them into its sweeping empire. That does not change the fact that technology is cyclical and someday Facebook will give rise to a new brand that will occupy that space.

This is especially important to marketers who specialize in social media and technology trends. Facebook built its empire on the sale of information and created a sharing platform irresistible to the masses. That model has changed the DNA of our interaction with the Internet and will likely continue on into the future.

Twitter is growing into a mature platform for short-form discourse and advertising. Pinterest is currently being mined for its marketing potential. Sites with a heavy social leaning are cropping up all over the place and nearly all of them present an avenue for marketing products, but marketers have to ask how long social media will continue to be a trend.

You can register your business on as many social media websites as you see fit, and you may find a way to sell products and generate traffic through one of them that is revolutionary. However, in addition to experiments in cutting edge social media, web marketers must keep in mind the foundations of the business that will always exist with the web. As marketers explore the final frontier of marketing on the web, it’s important that they maintain a foundation of solid tactics that will more than likely continue on into the future.

No matter how easily you are able to join a social media site, they remain inherently complicated as far as meeting business goals. Since they were designed as social networks that eventually incorporated a business aspect, they don’t always lend themselves to infiltration by brands.

Longevity

Social media groups are inherently driven by popularity, yet the most successful products experience the fastest rate of growth when they are still new and undiscovered by the masses. While it’s understandable to want a presence on the new, cool site the unfortunate rules of middle school still apply: by the time everyone has it, it is no longer exclusive and desirable. Social media marketing isn’t going anywhere next year, or the year after that. But someday there will be something new, and when that day comes we will have to fall back on a foundation of strategy that is typified by plain old good content.

All this to say that it is very important to stay abreast of new technologies when developing new ways to create brand identity on the Internet. It is equally important to maintain best practices for the innovations that got us to this point and continue to propel us toward the marketing future. Maintaining a solid newsletter, engaging the customer, and some campaign management software will go a long way when the frills of social networks begin to fall away and its successor rises from the ashes.

So yes, get on the social networks that make sense for your brand, but also remember the basics that got us to this point, because sooner or later we may have to rely on them again.

Filed Under: Guest Bloggers, Social Media, Strategy & Business, Success Tagged With: blog, branding, business, business development, marketing, ROI, search engine optimization, SMM, social marketing, social media, web marketing, working from home, world wide web

Websites That Work!

02/23/2012 by Joseph Baker

I don’t know if you got the memo, but Google basically runs the world.

They control more than half of the Internet search market, and more than 90% of mobile search. Their ad system is genius and their products ubiquitous. Thought the company has branched out recently, their bread and butter is still in search and in order to succeed in Google’s world, you have to play by Google’s rules.

Google populates search terms by indexing websites and plugging them into an ever-mysterious algorithm. Over time, SEOs have determined the most important factors in that indexation and they are speed, relevance, freshness and content.

What does that mean? It means that if your site is not easily indexed in Google, you may as well cease to exist.

SEO has been around since kids were trying to sneak into adult chat rooms on AOL, but the industry and its methods change as often as the Internet does: every day. Many entrepreneurs are just getting started with a serious site and have only just heard about SEO. For those people, here is a quick guide to building a website that works well with Google’s search index and will help you rise in rank and increase your views and potential for conversion.

Title Tags and Domain

This is the most basic rule of site building in SEO. You want your domain to be easily remembered and easily found. The subject of your blog should be very, very clear in your URL. If you are selling air conditioning services, you probably don’t want your domain to be Plasticmugs.net, right? The title tags appear in the title bar of your web browser and as the headline in most searches. The more relevant your title tags are, the higher you will rank for searches using those keywords or co-occurrence terms.

FRESH

Google’s freshness update was enacted earlier this fall in order to give newer content a bit more priority in searches. For example, if you search for Super Bowl tickets, you’re likely looking for seats at this year’s contest in Indianapolis, and not to the 1993 Super Bowl. Freshness is designed to present you with the most up-to-date information insofar as it is relevant to the search. What that means for you is that if your site has a blog, you can benefit from more frequent updates. Google will read frequent updates as positive activity and bump your site up a bit since it appears to be offering valuable content to a responsive audience.

This is more valuable to sites that deal in constantly changing information. For example, a site about Chicago events has to update constantly because its main subject is always in a state of flux. Sites that sell space heaters or list facts about James Van Allen were not affected by the Fresh update because their topic and content are largely unchanged.

Locate

Relevance has been the key to SEO since the Panda update, which wiped out four score of bad, spammy sites to greater enhance the user experience. The more relevant your content is, the more Google will like you! Websites about what to do in St. Louis should mention The Loop, Cardinals and all the other things associated with the city. Google will see all those terms connected, and will connect that site with other sites about St. Louis, giving that webmaster a highly targeted audience (people searching already want to know about what to do in St. Louis) and less competition, though the competition is tougher because they all want to bring the searcher to their St. Louis events site.

It’s a long road to good SEO and brand recognition, but a healthy site is a positive and essential first step.

Filed Under: Blogging, Contributors, Featured, Social Media, Strategy & Business, Technology Tagged With: blog, business development, facebook, marketing, online social networking, search engine optimization, SEO, social networking

In-House Social Media Teams on the Rise

02/09/2012 by Joseph Baker

I don’t need to tell anyone here about the rise of social media and how it has been injected into the DNA of doing business in the 21^st century. Nevertheless, it can be an eye-opening experience to watch just how much social media is catching on.

It’s no secret that social media has real effects and results for businesses that do it right; more and more companies are seeing the light. The most recent trend in businesses of all sizes is hiring in-house social media teams to handle brand management, customer engagement and digital marketing.

Savvy marketers have long praised the growth and efficacy of social media on the whole. Facebook has ballooned to more than 800 million users in the wake of its OpenGraph platform – the behind-the-scenes protocol that allows integration with Spotify, news sites, and all that other cool stuff. Perhaps it is this continued success for Facebook that led to its recent and long-awaited IPO.

More companies across the board are following the lead and cultivating in-house teams dedicated to social media. They generally operate within the realm of a marketing department, though their tasks are more dedicated solely to social media.

The big question is how this will affect firms that have helped companies with social media strategy up to this point.

The importance of business-suited social media is also evident in the backlash Google+ received when users learned they could not create business pages – an innovation Facebook pioneered – that have since become standard procedure for any real social sharing network. YouTube’s announcement of brand channels was welcomed with ringing bells and banging drums by enterprise businesses.

More often than not, a business will enter into a social media campaign believing there are fans of their brand out there waiting to have a place to congregate and spill their guts about just how much they love a company. What we’ve seen is that, though that is sometimes the case, most people are waiting for a tweet offering free coffee or a grocery coupon. “Liking” a brand on Facebook is more indicative of an interest to receive something for nothing than it is a genuine curiosity about a brand.

Rather than be pulled into these campaigns by outside marketing firms or agencies, businesses have elected to develop their own in-house teams that will take a perspective that emphasizes the companies’ strengths instead of just diving into social media because they read 100 blogs on the internet telling them it was the right thing to do.

These in-house teams are culled from freelance social media professionals or marketing gurus who have the wherewithal to understand what social platforms work for the business by which they are employed. Whereas some shoddy agencies have put companies that sell plumbing services to the residents of Muncie, Indiana on Twitter and Vimeo without any real reason, these in-house teams are being assembled with the mindset of the company taken into account; hopefully, these in-house teams will understand which of the many, many social platforms actually present an opportunity – and which should be ignored.

If this trend continues, social media marketing companies like Back At You will have to start leveraging their expertise in order to stay relevant. And the case may become harder to make as more experienced social media professionals are snatched up to work exclusively for big brands.

Filed Under: Contributors, Social Media, Strategy & Business, Success, Uncategorized Tagged With: analytics, blog, business development, facebook, marketing, online social networking, social networking, web marketing

Prioritizing Your Marketing

01/26/2012 by Joseph Baker

Small businesses are presented with the challenge of getting their name out to potential customers. Business owners want people to think of their business first when they need something. The Internet has made this process easy and accessible to more businesses than ever before.

Whereas only large companies could formerly afford major marketing campaigns, now even sole proprietors can make use of the World Wide Web to enhance their advertising and boost sales. If you can get your company ranked in the top position in search engine results pages (SERPs), you’ll have an easier time attracting the customers you want and driving profitable conversions on your website. The process of ranking your site in a search engine is called search engine optimization (SEO) and will gain you increased exposure across the Internet, more customer interaction and information useful for further SEO campaigns and other Internet marketing strategies.

How Can a Small Business use SEO to Their Advantage?

As a business owner, you want as many people as possible to be aware of your product, which requires a marketing endeavor that focuses on educating people on who you are and what you have to offer. The challenging part of this approach is finding the right market on which to focus. To help find the right market, consider using email marketing to gain knowledge about certain customer bases by creating multiple targeted campaigns that use different landing pages. This will allow you to test several methods separately and maintain data to determine how well each approach works in comparison to others.

There are many steps you can take to increase your SEO effectiveness. Start a blog and post weekly (or daily if you can); focus on the products and services your business offers, but don’t be afraid to educate people on industry terms. Start tracking browser and search engine referral data to learn how people are finding your site. Armed with that knowledge you can begin targeting keywords in your SEO efforts.

Once you have a blog up and running, take a moment to consider opening a Twitter account. Twitter accounts allow people from all over the world to communicate with each other and stay up to date on news from their favorite companies and celebrities. If you want to gain followers, produce engaging, relevant tweets that generate discussion. If you can lead the discussion, or even help shape it, more people will begin to recognize you.

Small Businesses and an SEO Company

It can be difficult to juggle the responsibilities of running your business and creating valuable SEO content. If you find yourself in this position, you may want to consider using an SEO company that can help you determine what areas to target, provide you with website design advice and manage your keyword campaigns.

Find an SEO company that uses strategies proven to work for small businesses. If you or your SEO company use any black hat (or possibly even gray hat) SEO tactics, you might find yourself delisted from major search engines for policy violations; evaluate any company you’re considering using to ensure they are on the up-and-up. SEO isn’t a set it and forget affair, either, so you’ll need to continuously compete with others for the top spots for your keywords. Get into SEO with the long game in mind, not short-term results. A good SEO company will base their strategy on what the company offers and the people who make up the company’s customer base. Having a correct focus produces quality results for the small business.

The benefits of using quality SEO practices gives you increased visibility in the eyes of the public, it gives you a better knowledge of the people you do business with and provides more sales. If you’re concerned that you can’t keep up with your business and the demands of Internet marketing, consider seeking out an SEO firm that will suit your needs. Their help will set you on the right path to business success.

Filed Under: Blogging, Contributors, Social Media Tagged With: business development, online social networking, search engine optimization, SEO, social media

Free Marketing Society

01/12/2012 by Joseph Baker

How can you get your business noticed on a budget?

Starting a business is difficult, but the real challenge comes in keeping that business going. Finding capital and cultivating a brand can be thrilling aspects of owning a business, but then there are the more mundane things like operations planning and payroll solutions. These “mundane” things are essential, so outsourcing them to firms that know what they’re doing can free up your time to handle what is, in my opinion, one of the most challenging, rewarding facets of business: marketing.

Getting the word out about your business is one of the most essential processes you can engage in. It’s particularly difficult for new small businesses that are just beginning to gain footing in the market and have to convince potential consumer to trust in a brand that they likely have never heard of. What’s invigorating about this daunting task is the clean slate it gives you. You essentially have the power to sculpt your brand from square one and Think about the Apple 1984 commercial and how iconic and influential it was on the brand.

Of course, we don’t all have the money to write a commercial and hire Ridley Scott to film it. Luckily, the Internet has democratized marketing in such a way that makes getting the word out about your company easy and cheap. There are multitudes of marketing strategies and tactics that small businesses can employ that help them effectively extend the brand outward and save some loot in the process.

Despite living in the Tron age, many of the best marketing techniques are the most traditional. There are lots of marketing dollars behind spreading the word about local business as evidenced by the successful Small Business Saturday and Shop Local campaigns, and the oldest form of marketing for local campaigns is word of mouth.

Finding opportunities to participate in your community at highly trafficked events increases visibility for your brand and business – hopefully giving you a chance to get people talking to you and to each other about your business.

The most accurate analogue for word-of-mouth in the digital space is probably Twitter. Yes, you’ve heard it a million times before, but Twitter truly is a stellar vehicle for generating buzz about your business to a large pool of consumers. Of course, it’s not easy to cultivate a group of influential Tweeters willing to interact with and broadcast your tweets to their followers. But if you have a business that fits the Twitter model in the first place (tweeting solely about the hours your gym is open doesn’t make for an interesting feed), you can win over followers and free publicity at the same time through relevant tweets and a wicked sense of humor.

Through the twilight years of the 20^th century, you might buy a listing in the local Yellow Pages in order to make your information available for people who were searching for an arcade, or a juice bar or whatever type of business you run. Today, it’s all about search engines, and in the same way you want to increase your visibility in a business index – perhaps by buying ad space – SEO strategy and digital marketing techniques help raise your visibility in search engine results. Customers can’t patronize you if they can’t find you!

Another way to build the profile of a business through marketing without breaking the bank can be achieved by setting your business up as a thought leader; this will help build your status in the community and pull people through the doors of your business, digital or otherwise. An example: a friend of mine runs a super high-class restaurant; it only seats maybe 50 guests but is built around a very intimate dining experience. In order to establish himself in the city, he would host free grilling classes once a month and train customers on how to use serious kitchen equipment. Once word got out about how great the place was, reservations fell in like waterfalls. He still does the classes but has enough clout now to charge three figures.

On the Internet, this can be achieved through setting up a site that builds your brand as one that has a pulse in whatever industry you’re in – maybe through a blog or other content distribution method. Angie’s List recently unveiled a comprehensive guide to plumbing that is designed to become a resource for a wide swath of customers.

These are just a few of the many free marketing techniques in the toolbox of the nascent small business owner on a budget. A lot of initiative and a little creativity will go far in the first years of marketing your business.

Filed Under: Blogging, Contributors, Social Media, Strategy & Business, Success Tagged With: business development, facebook, guest blogger, online social networking, social media

The Foundation For All Sales Success

12/27/2011 by Lauren MacEwen

The art of prospecting is not gone.

Call it what you want… lead generation, business development, canvassing, door to door, talking with referrals, follow up from a networking event, asking for referrals or even making the “Dreaded Cold Call.” You can disguise it anyway you want. You are prospecting!

The bottom line with any of these activities is that you are prospecting for new customers or new business from existing customers. There, I said it. Let me say it again. You are prospecting!

Prospects may come from a variety of sources that include your warm or natural market. You may also receive a steady flow of prospects from centers of influence, such as attorneys, doctors, accountants or VIPs in your community. What about referrals from clients or friends? You can even advertise or belong to associations and business networking groups. You may even receive prospects through social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter (compliance permitting).

Skeptics say that prospecting is dead. It’s not. And it never will be. The decision to prospect is yours alone.

True, the old way of selling is dead and gone forever, but prospecting continues to be the foundation of all successful businesses and salespeople. So what is prospecting?

Prospecting is defined as “in search of” or “to labor for”. What are we all searching for? We should be prospecting for (or searching for) new customers, or new business from our existing customers. It’s that simple.

Think about it for a minute. Let’s go back to the mid 1800′s. Prospectors were in search of gold. When they found a gold nugget did they stop prospecting? No. They continued to search for more. What happened when the gold mine dried up? Did they stop searching? No. What did they do? They loaded up their tools, looked for another mine and began the process all over again. They continued to prospect. They did not give up.

Today prospecting is the art of putting new potential clients, or new business from existing customers into our sales pipeline. Since 1980 I have observed thousands of salespeople fail. The thing they all had in common is they stopped prospecting.

Question – If you had the cure for cancer, how many cancer patients would you approach each day? Of course you would approach as many as you could. Make sense?

Why then, do we stop prospecting? The simple answer is that it is hard work. We get lazy and complacent. After all, it’s easier to check your voicemail or email isn’t it? Voicemail can’t object, email doesn’t challenge our value. We get caught up in all the stuff that really doesn’t matter. I love this quote from one of my favorite motivational speakers, Les Brown, “We give our distractions more attention than our destination.” How distracted are you, what’s your destination?

In closing: The following quote from Frank Bettger’s book ‘How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success” says it straight out, “You can’t make a sale, until you write some business; You can’t write some business, until you have had a conversation; And you can’t have a conversation until you make the call!”

Are you ready to have more conversations, write more business, and make more sales? The decision is yours and yours alone.

ABOUT STEVE: For more than 30 years, Steve Kloyda has been creating unique selling experiences that transform the lives of salespeople, prospects and customers. As Founder of The Prospecting Expert and The Producer’s Toolbox, Steve helps his clients attract more prospects, retain more clients, and drive more sales Email Steve at steve@theprospectingexpert.com. Visit his blog at www.theprospectingexpert.com.

Filed Under: Contributors, Strategy & Business Tagged With: business, business development, foundation, gold, gold mining, new business, prospecting, sales prospecting, sales success, success

YOUR SEO SUCKS: A Guide to Effective Optimization

12/21/2011 by Joseph Baker

You need to form a comprehensive strategy if you hope to see any real return on investment with your SEO efforts. Everyone has their own methods for success, and they may achieve it to varying degrees; you have to find the method that works best for you. That being said, there are certainly universal tactics and a clear battle plan you can draw up using basic SEO strategy.

Branding

Your brand is the personality that defines your product. It is the flagship indicator of culture. There are more than a half billion brands in the world and they are all vying for attention. How does yours stack up? Few people are aware that branding is the real purpose of content-focused SEO.

Let’s take Groupon for example. As a nascent company, Groupon hired on a number of talented comedians from the Second City, an improv group as famous as Oprah and infamous as the bloody gang battles fought in many a Chicago hotel. The culture of Groupon is steeped in that talent pool and flows through their every email, notification, and web page. When people see the cat with the gold chain around its neck, they know it is Groupon.

Developing that kind of brand takes time and effort, but what do you do once the brand is cultivated? Send it out!

Groupon approaches their target market across multiple platforms.

Mobile – The Groupon application for smartphones and tablets used to just send you an email about what deals were available that day, but the company announced Groupon Now, a hyperlocal deal finder targeted at users on the go. By keeping the name and essentially launching an offshoot to their already successful service, Groupon carries over many customers who are familiar with the brand and attracts new ones who have heard good things. This model fits their company very well, but it may not work for yours. Nevertheless, developing a mobile strategy is key in finding success in a world where the computer means less and mobile Internet is growing exponentially.

Email – As mentioned above, the Groupon emails have become the calling card for the company. Evocative and provocative, the emails use humor to connect with their consumer base and do so on a daily basis; it is as much a part of their brand as their logo, color scheme and rugged low deals. Other culture sites like Thrillist attempt to use humor in their daily emails, though they take on a decidedly “edgier” tack in order to differentiate themselves.

Social – When targeting a demographic of young professionals, maxing out social media potential is key. Again, the brand must come through and for Groupon it does.

WHAT NOT TO DO

When Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, announced that Netflix would be separating its DVD by mail service, the service that made the company famous into a separate entity called Quikster, the Internet went into a riotous frenzy. This is a big no-no. Not only was it a bad business decision, but it segmented the brand’s base, forcing them to choose between Netflix and “Quikster”. Users who wanted both would need two separate accounts for what used to be included under one umbrella. It was a costly mistake for Netflix; they lost nearly one million customers after the announcement and subsequent price hike.

Your brand is going to be the first thing about your company that people see and you literally have seconds to pull prospective customers in. Using SEO and digital PR to amplify that brand and its messages is going to be paramount to achieving success in the digital present and future.

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