Sales
Step One, Create a Brand
Gary Vaynerchuk is one of the best people to help you understand what it takes to create a popular brand. In the video to the right he is speaking at a Web 2.0 conference in New York (2008) about creating brand recognition using social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Be warned before watching the video, it may not be considered “safe-for-work” language, he swears a lot actually; it’s well worth a watch though before trying to market anything. If you’re trying to market some dumbed down and boring, safe-for-work product or service, you might just be shooting yourself in the foot before going to the race. The point isn’t about being controversial to get noticed, it’s about being genuine and true to yourself; People notice this and aren’t usually going to continue any fascination with what is perceived as being fake. In the next video we’ll be touching on these same topics. If you didn’t already know about Gary Vaynerchuck it’s imperative that you check out his Wine Library and Wine Library TV sites, we suggest you read his book Crush It as well.
What To Do
As Gary said in the video; you should be using all of the social networking sites that you can. The moral of the story is to keep your brand out there and recognizable, once you have grown a base of recognition it is much easier to put yourself in line for making money pursuing your passion. The obvious first step is to determine what you love and what you don’t, we like to call this “Join the new rich” thanks to Tim Ferriss, check out his video to the left describing how you can remove complication from your life, hopefully this will help you gain the time needed to build up your business and brand much quicker. The video should also solidify a concept we hope you’re taking from these videos: Personality is a major part of any successful brand. What you like to do, and what your personality is basically make it very easy to decide how to move forward; Each step should simply be another choice you can agree will make your day a good one, will enable you to do what you love, and will put you in line with your goals.
Tim Ferriss is the author of The 4-Hour Workweek, and if you haven’t heard of him definitely check out everything you can (he’s all over the map, literally and figuratively).
AllStruck Sales is branding, SEO, SEM, SMM, and more…
Generally websites are created with one end goal in mind: Increase profits by generating sales. We put this at the top of the list in the three main categories we use to group all website creation and management topics. The sales category contains every aspect of websites which should be part of any online sales strategy, and in the case of any website projects with goals other than to generate revenues many if not all of these processes are the same: The goal here is actually to do one thing which we split into two areas: Increasing traffic, and increasing conversion rates (that is the percentage of which people buy of those who visit the site, or those which click on external links of those who see it, etc.).
In order to do this effectively there are two main requirements: First you must be able to monitor the traffic on your website, and then you must track visitors all the way to the point of purchase with as much detail as possible. Once you are able to see which keywords, which referral sites, which advertisement images/text/video generate exactly what amounts in desired actions (purchases, downloads, views, etc.) an entire new potential of growth is reached.
Before we go any further it is important to keep one thing in mind: Your growth potential is always going to be most effected by the quality of everything you do. If you are a business with an amazing site but have a broken business process, this will impact your online success. Everything we do and teach is about striving for perfection, mostly in providing exactly what people want and need, this above all else will grow your level of sales, views, or any desired action from the outside. What we teach you is everything after that, starting with how to be open and communicate with the quickly growing set of website sales, design, and logistics tools.
Get more impressions and clicks.
Results are achieved online just like they are anywhere else: The advanced sales process. Online techniques are actually just using new tools to do the same thing: Keep your business open to as many lines of communication as possible while focusing on those with the most amount of traffic in your industry. You are probably hearing a lot about search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) already, we provide all of the details you need to learn about these techniques and tools in the link.
Focus your campaigns, reach your target more accurately.
You can get more captures with less expense if you learn from experience gleaned from intelligence gathering and analysis.
You maintain a thumb on the pulse of your audience and eventually you’ll spot patterns and trends so that you’re not just successful, you’re increasing that success continually. If you’re not moving up you’re moving down; In order to make decisions that increase your success you must move ahead faster and lead the future trends by building on them. If you’re not thinking about increasing your online presence today you’re already losing out on potential sales. Every single major search engine comes with a wide range of additional resources which all must be used if possible, from mapping to calendaring to document creation. You should be making use of more than three search engines, more than ten social networks profiles, and three solid sources for new leads and revenue. On top of that you still have to keep watch on new trends and be ready to at least experiment with new ideas as they come along. One small example of this is using Google Website Optimizer, which allows you to experiment with using different versions of various portions or entire versions of pages on your site; The experiment runs by introducing visitors to different versions, tracking of this information indicates a clear “winner” and you can move forward knowing you made the best design choice.
Turning Visitors into Customers
Once you have people viewing your website what should you do? How are you supposed to convert them? Just putting your contact details isn’t enough, it may get you something (especially with lots of traffic) but you are missing out on the real potential of each visitor.
What you must do is make things dead simple. Think of all of your visitors as being one of two types, not your typical list of those who buy and those who do not, but as those who buy instantly and those who may buy later. By offering simple yet effective choices to each of these types of people, you will find that many of those visitors you would have labeled as non-customers were actually potential customers all along; It makes sense, some people just take longer to decide before purchasing. You should instantly recognize this as a buyer yourself, a business decision takes time and effort to make, and you’re already busy as it is. Before trusting any product or service to handle your important business you need to understand it completely first, knowing full-well what it will provide and how. You are more likely to purchase from a vendor which has maintained steady contact with you throughout this process, it turns out more than half of customers are just the same. The investment of a little time and the philosophy of thinking of even those who do not purchase today as potential customers is one of the most rewarding changes you could ever make for your business.
Hopefully you are already doing this in some ways, hopefully you would not turn down any customers simply because they did not wish to purchase at your demand. It turns out that many businesses still have a great distance to go in realizing that it is not the direct sales process that will convince people to buy, and being ready for the sale does not just mean keeping your lines open and business running; To be ready for a sale you have to be in the mind of the customer at the time they buy, and this could be several weeks, months, or even years after their last visit. Ask yourself, “How will my customer remember me in a week, a month, a year, or more?”
An email newsletter, possibly even offering some free gift for joining, is one of the most effective means for staying connected with these potential buyers. This will keep you in their mind, and with a positive feeling associated with valuable insight if you actually keep them on your list and continually reading your materials. A large part of why this is so effective is the information it provides you, by connecting with a larger crowd of people of which you will see new
It really is as simple as having an email newsletter (of valuable content and with regular updates of course), this one little periodic message keeps you in the mind of the potential customer, and this is what it means to be ready to take the sale once they are ready. All to often potential customers will be lost to competitors, imagine how painful this can be to your business when you were the sole provider of the customers knowledge about your industry and were it not for you they never would have bought such a product or service; You have essentially worked hard to sell your competitors line-up! Potential customers do not have time to keep checking up on you, give them an easy and effective way to do so, along with valuable information, and you will build clients for life well before they ever purchase one thing.
Infusionsoft, MailChimp, Zoho CRM, SalesForce, GetResponse, and AWeber are all fine examples of software that you can integrate with your website and business processes in order to keep an open line of communication with customers and leads, all of which can be automated to perfection and is extremely cost effective. You will literally not believe the increase in profits seen from the correct usage of these Email Response and CRM tools.
Online Rankings Impacted by Business Quality and Customer Experience
What!? This is no joke, how well you handle customers will have a very direct impact on your SEO efforts! It may be hard to grasp at first, this is why most firms would never go out on a limb to try to explain this, but it’s so true that we must do our best to impress you with this hard, cold, truth.
It is actually quite simple: Search engine rankings for example are directly impacted by people searching; If someone performs a search for “red office stapler” and they click on result #2, the search engine takes this into consideration, and when it notices a trend of people selecting the second result rather than the first they will move it up the list (it is their job to return what people expect, and what better indicator that what people actually chose?) So if you anger a customer or two, just imagine how it looks when the feverishly hunt online for a new provider, each time they search you can count their click goodbye and it hurts your ranking.
Now imagine an angry customer writing a bad review, this having impacted many readers online. It’s plain to see this will impact your sales directly since they themselves will be less likely to buy, but if they then also skip your links in search engine results this can snowball into an even larger problem quickly.
Online Marketing is Just Marketing, Online
With five different possible names listed on Wikipedia (internet marketing, i-marketing, web-marketing, online-marketing, or e-Marketing) it certainly doesn’t appear basic from the onset. Despite this we encourage you to throw out your inhibitions and prior disillusions and try to parallel offline sales techniques and tools with online sales techniques and tools. Before you will be able to completely see this it’s likely that you’ll need to read on about each of these tools and techniques, but before you do try this out first: Imagine all of your sales techniques as three basic principles. They are Breadcrumbs, The Path, and The Loop.
We use these ideas to help us remember our objective on a complete and pure level, and to relate it easily to any other marketing technique. Basically you need to leave Breadcrumbs on The Path (that you at least partly create for your visitors) in order to lead them into The Loop, the objective at the end of the day is to get as many people into The Loop as possible. Who doesn’t want to be in The Loop, right? It’s very simple thinking of things this way, Breadcrumbs are just any marketing materials like fliers or commercials, business cards and all of the rest of your traditional advertising pieces on any medium. The Path is the actual process you design for visitors and customers, how you expect them to get from learning about you to buying from you, then beyond. This gets us to The Loop, while it may seem like a pointless trap, we like to think of keeping our customers attracted to us by informing them of the things we have learned and know will be valuable to them.
Breadcrumbs
Every visitor you get at some point was pointed in the right direction by you, or something you have created. In the real world this is easy to see as a sign on a store-front, a yellow-pages listing, newspaper ad, or anything you have put out there for people to see that you exist and what it is you can provide them with to entice them toward you.
In the online world these come in other forms but are almost identical in nature; A web link, graphic ad, streaming video, or any other online content can be used in the exact same way that any physical medium can be used to advertise with.
Before you can even announce yourself as available there is one requirement if you expect any sort of success; You must lay out The Path visitors will take, to get to you, and even to visit you, be it a physical location on an accessible road near to people, or with a phone, a fax, an email address, a web form, live online chat, and hopefully some combination of this and more.
More? Yes, much much more… This is where most people start to wander off: PAY ATTENTION HERE. Online tools are springing up periodically which sweep up users in the millions, what used to be a MySpace web is now very much all about Facebook, there is a reason. These and a few other major players are giant playgrounds for some of the largest pools of people, because of how easy they make it to connect with what they need and want, and help people to build relationships around these things. Built into these systems is a communication tool more powerful than your phone, email, or any other system so far. Opening a channel on Facebook for example will list your “Page” publicly online, as you identify your brand here people will visit it without any need to advertise further, much like a new phone number though any immediate calls will often not produce any real results and additional work is needed to get the line to ring with real customers. Are you thinking Breadcrumbs now? You should be, and Facebook is essentially a Breadcrumb generation tool, also becoming a part of The Path.
The Path
In the real world The Path is easier to understand, you can feel ground as you walk into a store, you can see the smile of a sales person behind a counter, or hear the voice of a telephone representative (or computer system).
Your website and all of the other public channels you open are just like every other communication system you use to build The Path. From allowing walk-ins, to utilizing a live online distance conferencing solution, every new form of communication you allow visitors to use for reaching you widens The Path that leads to you, leads them into The Loop, and at the same time widens The Loop.
The Loop
We will cover now what is actually just the final part of The Path; The Loop is where you put customers in, and by widening this you are creating a new path that allows customers to become loyal clients, your fans, your network.
To explain, both The Path and The Loop are all of the processes designed behind how you handle leads, customers, and clients. Just continue to think of a store location, phone numbers, support and sales departments, and every little detail that goes into all of this. The Loop is all of this process that pertains to a customer, after that first sale you have a new objective of keeping their business with you.
Actual Tools and Techniques
“How am I supposed to apply all of this philosophical sales technique anyway?” We know you’re wondering, and letting you down is something we just can’t do. If you’re new to online marketing, and especially if you are just starting a business and need a boost, you’ll be pleased at how many amazing tools are freely available and can be set up today, many require that you have a website, while others can nearly be your website altogether. Just to get started here is a long short-list, hopefully not too long and not too short, of free online tools every website should have as a companion.
- SEO
- Google Webmaster Tools / Analytics / Website Optimizer / Trends
- Yahoo Explorer / Bing Webmaster Tools / Ask
- dmoz
- SEM & Paid Online Advertising
- Google AdWords / Keyword Tools /
- Microsoft Advertising
- Facebook Advertising
- Commission Junction
- ClickBank
- SMM
- StumbleUpon
- Digg
- Bit.ly
- Delicious
- Su.pr
- Last.fm
- Tumblr
- Meebo
- Plaxo
Design and Logistics
Can you utilize these tools and techniques successfully with a free website building service? Can you utilize these tools and techniques successfully using free web hosting or free domains? N. O… Don’t get us wrong, we have seen amazing things for “free”, even hosting and websites, but currently the usual choices we see people make here will not serve them best. The Internet is filled with hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions of potentials for you, and to reach that potential you must yourself obtain the highest caliber of products and service where it counts the most, in this case that is your actual website (and content) Design along with the Logistics (all of the technology tools, setup, and maintenance behind it all). It’s not hard to see why this a problem most websites suffer from, these technical fields are still very new and change more often than in almost all other industries. Many people still do not even realize that a web host is at the root just a computer with internet access, the more you pay, the faster and more reliable this computer and internet access will be. The bottom line for us remains as always very simple, in order: Security, Reliability, Speed, Accessibility, Value, and Age. Your websites must never be hacked, always be functioning properly, download in less than 3 seconds (the lower the better, shoot for < 1 sec.), remain usable on various browsers including for blind/deaf visitors, contain material relevant to the audience, and be updated often. We are able to get all of this at prices starting as low as $0.015 per hour, less than $12 per month for high quality virtual-dedicated RackSpace Cloud Servers. Domain names start at only $10 per year with private registration included. We usually use WordPress (download from .org, not set up a free site on .com) which is free and allows us to completely customize the appearance and functionality for each customer. These costs are bottom line, and unavoidable, yet still do require some level of experience or patience in setting up and customizing (read: a developer is often required).
