Web Savvy Marketers Ideas, Thoughts & Tips

If it Seems too Good to be True…It Is!

October 20, 2009 Beth Devine

I’ve been hearing more and more about people getting scammed by on-line companies when attempting to set up their own site. In fact, I recently spoke with a client that spent $4,700 plus $39.95 a month for a website and several months later has nothing to show for it. Now don’t get me wrong, there are many legitimate companies out there on the worldwide web, but if they’re talking large returns with little or no sales, marketing and effort – it’s not going to happen.

When it comes to creating or re-designing your website you’d be more productive if you focused on the planning of the site and hired someone else for the programming. Deciding before hand exactly what you want from your site and clearly communicating that with your web partner is the most effective way to build a website.

Too often people decide what they want their site to do for them after they’ve created it. For example a site that’s created to drive sales is much different than one that’s strictly for informational purposes. It’s imperative to determine the direction in advance so that you don’t end up having to re-design and re-program the site afterwards. In addition, what you want from your site will determine the type of tools used.

The bottom line is… If someone contacts you from an on-line company, look them up. A simple Google search can provide you with a lot of information. In addition, although these companies may promise incredible deals, nothing can replace the one-to-one relationship with an established, local company. It’s always nice to be able to speak to someone whose name you know.

Deep Six All Clichés

October 1, 2009

For the health and well-being of your business writing, deep six all clichés. It’s as plain as the nose on your face.

As far as the eye can see, they multiply like rabbits. It’s hard to swallow the hare- brained idea that we cannot avoid these old as dirt phrases. Rely on clichés and people will think your elevator doesn’t go to the top floor or that you’re a few fries short of a Happy Meal. Don’t you see eye to eye with me on this?

Say what you will, clichés bore us to tears. Even if you must burn the candle at both ends, find substitutes for them. Doing so is more than a feather in your cap. It means your copy can fire on all cylinders and won’t read flat as a pancake. Even a writer as dumb as a bag of hammers, knows that variety is the spice of life and that clichés have lost their salt.

So drag those squealing, stinky rodents of writing to the paper shredder and show no mercy. And don’t shred on me, I’m just the messenger.

What Net Neutrality Means to Small Business

September 16, 2009 Carolyn Griswold

The internet, in it’s short history, has been a great equalizer for small businesses. Small businesses are free to put up websites that promote their business, sell their products, services and applications and are assured that their information is served to the consumer in the same way that everyone else’s content is served. It gives all businesses the possibility to attract a worldwide market. Many of today’s internet giants–think Google, Yahoo, E-bay–started out as small businesses with great ideas. Because their ideas were allowed to be served to the public in a fair way, they were able to develop into highly successful businesses.

Some of the major network operators are trying to change that. They want to set up a tiered payment system for content providers. Theoretically, the premium fee would ensure the fastest download speeds. And lesser rates would result in slower websites. What does that mean? Network providers could decide what content is shown on their networks and at what price. Suppose AT&T decided they wanted to expand their web hosting business. They could effectively eliminate the reach of web hosting competitors’ sites by raising their rates or slowing the delivery of their material to an unpalatable crawl.

Given the fact that there are actually very few network providers in the US — especially in rural parts of the country — shouldn’t we be trying to ensure that everyone has access to all information on the internet no matter what network they can access. In some parts of the country consumers may only have broadband access through one provider. Even in populated areas the choice is usually limited to the phone company or cable provider for the area. Shouldn’t we ensure that your website is as accessible to everyone as your competitor’s website?

Do we really want want big business deciding what is available on the internet? If not, we need to ensure that net neutrality remains in effect. Please support the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009.

Keep consistent styles in your WordPress posts

August 25, 2009 Carolyn Griswold

There is nothing that screams amateur like a website with a mishmash of fonts and styles. Sometimes people copy and paste posts from a document they’ve already created in Word. Unfortunately that can also copy the Word styles and fonts into the WordPress document. In order to keep your styles and fonts consistent in your WordPress posts, click the “paste as plain text” icon in the toolbar. It will delete all the Word code and paste nice clean text into your post that will use the styles in your WordPress theme and keep your blog looking well-designed and professional.

Kill That Buzz

August 19, 2009

Creating a buzz about your company is a good thing but using buzz words in your marketing copy is not. Buzz words are those words everyone else is using: crispy to describe potato chips; state-of-the-art to describe technology; quality to describe any product. Yes, you can still use these words, but if you do, back them up with proof. Better yet, come up with a new way to describe the same thing: noisy potato chips; out-in-front technology; or the valedictorian product of its class. Old buzz becomes a drone.

Two business limericks for fun

August 11, 2009

There once was a writing project from hell,
You can imagine, it didn’t go well,
The client was upset,
I, the writer, had regret,
Do I hear music or is that my death knell?

E-mail, e-letters and e-zines are great,
Paper is saved and docs aren’t late,
But I must warn you,
One thing I won’t do:
If you offer your hand I won’t e-shake

Guerilla Marketing: Could I ask for a few mouse clicks?

July 7, 2009 Carolyn Griswold

This morning I received an email from one of my clients, Trevor Eissler. Trevor’s a clever guy who is marketing a book he wrote. The subject was “Could I ask for a few mouse clicks?” The email was addressed to friends and family and asked if they’d mind spending ten minutes to complete 3 of 6 items on a list.

Here’s Trevor’s list:

Post a review of the book on Amazon.com. (If you haven’t read it yet, feel free to improvise. Pretend it’s one of your all-time favorites!)
Paste the address www.montessorimadness.com into an entry you write—in support of the book—on a site geared toward education, parenting, or early childhood such as www.mothering.com, www.parenting.com, or other big name sites, or even smaller blogs such as www.themoveablealphabet.blogspot.com, www.montessoriforeveryone.com, www.educatingforlife.wordpress.com/category/book-reviews, or any other relevant site you can think of. If you can’t think of anything to say, you could cut and paste or cite the review at www.michaelolaf.com/store/product1032.html or any of the reviews at www.montessorimadness.com.
Join the Montessori Madness! Facebook group and post a link to www.montessorimadness.com on your Facebook page.
Hold a sandwich board, emblazoned with the book title, outside your local Barnes and Noble bookstore.
Tuck the book under your arm next time you’re on Oprah.
Tattoo “Montessori Madness” on your forearm (using other body parts tends to discourage sales).

Trevor’s common sense approach to spreading the word about his book is simple and brilliant. By asking a favor of friends and family who I’m sure want to see his book succeed he’s leveraging the power of their networks. With Facebook, Twitter and other networks it’s easy for Trevor’s friends and family to help him spread the word.

I also like that he asked us to “Spend ten minutes to complete 3 of the 6 items.” By telling us how long it will take us (not long) I think that the average friend or family member would be more likely to complete the request. And by giving us a list of six and only asking us to complete 3 items it seems an even easier assignment.

Items 4 -6 are kind of funny and are a little beyond what most of us are willing or able to do, but that makes the list more brilliant. By process of elimination most of us are likely to complete items 1 -3 and that was probably Trevor’s goal. But it’s not beyond belief that someone in someone’s network knows Oprah – so spread the word friends! Good work Trevor!

More information about the book – Montessori Madness! A Parent to Parent Argument for Montessori Education

Free Shipping Closes Sale

June 22, 2009 Carolyn Griswold

A couple of weeks ago, I received an e-mail Father’s Day reminder from a store where I’ve bought gifts from online before. Since I typically put off holiday gift buying to the last minute and end up paying extra for shipping, I was grateful for the reminder.

Lesson one to online merchants: EMAIL MARKETING WORKS!

With over a week before Father’s day I thought the ample lead time would save me some cash on shipping. I clicked through to the website and browsed to find some sweet treats for dad. I quickly found a nice gift of sweet snacks at a reasonable price and clicked through to the checkout page. Where I stopped. The shipping charges nearly doubled the price of the goodies. Call me cheap, but if there’s one thing I learned from my dad growing up on his farm in Minnesota it’s the value of the dollar.

That reasonably priced gift now seemed tremendously overpriced. If I was going to spend that kind of money – it had to be a better gift. So I abandoned my shopping cart and Googled “Free Shipping Father’s Day gifts”. Multiple stores came up and I quickly found a gift. It was much nicer than the original gift. I did end up spending the same as the other gift would have cost with it’s shipping charges, but I now felt like the gift I was sending was worth the money I was spending.

Lesson two to online merchants – FREE SHIPPING WORKS! Consider the value of your product. If shipping costs make your item seem extraordinarily overpriced you will lose sales.

Lesson three to online merchants. CLOSE THE SALE! If your e-mail marketing campaign is driving traffic to your site but you’re not seeing corresponding sales, make sure you look at the value you’re offering to your customers. It’s a shame when something like high shipping costs causes them abandon their shopping cart when you’ve successfully drawn them to your store with your e-mail marketing campaign.

Choosing a merchant account provider for your e-commerce website

June 15, 2009 Carolyn Griswold

If you’re setting up an e-commerce shop and need to accept credit cards, what’s the best solution?

Merchant account/real-time gateway?
Paypal?
Google Checkout?

There are many factors to take into consideration. First, which method will make your customers feel most comfortable in making a purchase from your website? Recently, I took a poll on LinkedIn to gauge how people feel about various methods of payment.

Poll Question: When buying something online, which method of payment do you prefer?

Here are the results:
Take poll and see results

In addition to how your customers may feel about the process, you should understand how each process works and how it will tie into your website, to your accounting practices, to your budget and to your sales expectations.

Integrating payment processing into your website:
Most “off the shelf e-commerce shopping carts” will integrate easily with merchant accounts and real-time processors such as authorize.net, or with Paypal or Google Checkout. But check with your web developer to see which method they recommend for your particular application.

Accounting and costs:
Merchant account costs seem to be increasing substantially these days with the challenging economy. Plus providers are requiring merchants to undergo an annual PCI DSS compliance that adds another expense to the annual costs. PCI DSS compliance usually requires a subscription through a company like Trustwave. Trustwave measures your risk factors through a questionnaire about your practices and through security tests of your server.

With the merchant account/real-time gateway process, merchants can expect to pay a monthly fee for the account, a monthly fee for the gateway plus the transaction fees for any charges put through to your account. It can be about $40/month before you take an order. Add in the cost for PCI DSS compliance and it’s a substantial monthly fee for some business models. For small businesses–especially start-up businesses with low-budgets–Paypal or Google checkout might be a more cost-effective solution. Both solutions have no-monthly fee plans and both have competitive transaction rates. And they are both PCI DSS compliant. In my opinion, both are also well known brands that most customers will feel comfortable using for payment.

Based on my poll, Paypal seems to have a slightly greater acceptance factor than Google Checkout. I suspect Paypal is more familiar to more people than the relatively new Google Checkout.

Whichever method you choose, make sure your client’s credit card information is encrypted as it is transmitted and that you safeguard the information. One of the advantages to using a realtime gateway like Authorize.net, or an outside vendor like Paypal or Google Checkout is that the credit card is processed and you are never in possession of the credit card number. By limiting access to your customer’s credit card information, you are limiting your liability of being involved in any sort of identity theft scenario. Plus, the transaction is automatically processed and deposited into your bank account thereby minimizing your workload.

Debunking Great Myths of Selling

June 5, 2009

Selling is hard enough, but we make it much harder by believing sales myths. Here are a few sales ideas I’ve heard expressed many times. I’d argue each is a dangerous myth that you should avoid.

Myth #1: There’s Something Distasteful About Sales

Business is all about selling. People who avoid sales and leave it to others because they think it’s “below them” are wrong. The most rewarding, the most exciting part of running a business is making a sale.

Myth #2: Market And Advertise More And You’ll Generate More Sales

Believe this myth and you risk ignoring the quality of your marketing materials. Today with the Internet and TV and squawking ad boxes at gas stations and phone ads and more, we bombard people with 3,000 marketing messages a day. More isn’t more effective. Salespeople who focus strictly on pumping out more marketing can easily lose track of whether they’re reaching people who really want and need to hear their message. Getting ten people to love your product is much better than getting a thousand people to like your product.

Myth #3: Great Salespeople Focus On The Close

This is backwards. A great salesperson focuses on the opening, on the relationship, on the first impression. When you focus on the close, you put your need before the client’s need. You need the sale; the client doesn’t. The client needs a trustworthy business relationship. When you start the sales process, focus on getting to the truth, finding the prospect’s pain, or uncovering a problem you can solve for them.

Myth #4: To Sell Well You Must Persistently Pursue Prospects

Dispelling this myth may be tougher. You must think counterintuitively. When you stop pursing people, they become drawn to you. Who do you want to see – the salesperson who is always calling you up or the salesperson who is hard to get in front of because he’s so busy helping other people? Persistently pursing prospects smells of desperation. Yes, you need to work hard to gain new prospects but that doesn’t mean texting them every 15 minutes.

Myth #5: Sales Are Made On A Rational, Thinking Basis

Tsk, tsk if you fall for this one. We like to think of ourselves as rational, thinking beings. In some ways, we are rational. But what truly motivates us to act or to buy is emotion. Just watch the commercials on TV and count how many are emotional appeals. People will buy more often because they feel an emotional connection than they will buy because the sale makes sense.

Myth #6: The Sales Is Lost Or Won At The End Of The Process

Are you beginning to see how many of these myths are related to one another? This myth is similar to Myth #3 above. The most important part of the sale is the beginning, not the end. At the beginning of the sale you must establish trust, build rapport, show value, and demonstrate a primary interest in the prospect. It ain’t about grabbing prospects by the neck and injecting them with a closing argument serum. It’s not about us selling them; it’s about us letting them buy.

Myth #7: The Best Way To Handle Objections Is Overcoming Them

This is a great way to start an argument with your prospect. Try overcoming a belief prospects have and their natural tendency is to fight for their belief. You risk offending the person you’re trying to sell. Instead, Australian sales guru Ari Galper says to acknowledge the legitimacy of the objection (in the eye of the prospect). For example, if a prospect says they don’t need you as a vendor because they already have one, you might say, “I understand your concern and I don’t want to replace your current vendor. I just want to see if you’re open to some new ideas that only our company can present to you. Would that be okay?”

Myth #8: You Either Sell A Product Or You Sell A Service

This myth used to be true. Today, smart companies and smart salespeople are beyond selling just a product or service. Companies like Disney and Intel use their products as props and their services as a stage to sell an experience. Tim Sanders, former Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo! spells out this concept in his book, Love Is The Killer App: How To Win Business and Influence Friends. Macdonald’s doesn’t sell food; they sell a clean, quick, enjoyable family experience.

Myth #9: Top Salespeople Are Independent And Self-Sufficient

The only truly independent salespeople are those no one else wants to relate to. Keith Ferrazzi, in his best selling marketing book, Never Eat Alone, says “Autonomy is a life vest made out of sand.” In sales, independence is less important than teamwork, cooperation and communication. Givers gain. You teach someone a sales technique and guess what? You learn more in return. You share sales leads and guess what? Rather than having fewer sales leads, you find more leads flowing your way. Top salespeople give freely of their time and expertise and the pie gets bigger for all of us, including them.

Do watch out for these myths. Live by the sales truths that really are truths, like this one from Zig Ziglar, “You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”

Chris John Amorosino
Amorosino Writing, LLC
Writing Business Stories That Live Profitably Ever After
amorosinowriting.com