1. Add products – This is the number one thing we have been doing for ecommerce sites AND lead generation sites. Instead of selling 1000 products start selling 2000 products! If you offer 5 services think of unique ways that you can offer 10 services. This will naturally increase your sales overall then just wait till the slower economic times are over and you might pleasantly find you doubled your bottom line.

2. SEO-When you add these new products or services make sure you SEO all your new pages very  well while constructing them. Additional optimized content will mean additional traffic and possibly higher ranking in valued keywords or high rankings in new targeted keywords.

3. Email Newsletters- Offer weekend sales, cut prices on inventory/services that are not moving. Get people to your site via newsletters to make purchases.

4. Start a forum or blog- This may enable customers both past and present to share ideas, photographs, talk about how they used your product and even write reviews.

5. Send out a print catalog- Print catalogs are relatively cheap to produce and carry huge returns. Pick your top products and use your customer database to mail out catalogs. People change their email addresses, so emailing newsletter does not reach 100% of people. Sometimes people move as well, so if your catalog delivers to an address where a new person is living you might have just picked up a new customer. A well designed catalog will lay around someone’s house for much longer than an email or a simple direct mail piece.

6. Write additional technical details about existing products and services. Make some how to do videos and post them to You Tube. Not only will your customers love the videos but you will also find traffic on You Tube as well. Make sure you link your videos to related pages on your website and to service pages as well. If you make good videos people might blog about them giving your website extra links and traffic.

7. Get involved with message boards in your industry. Become the subject matter expert and the go to person on message boards that relate to your industry. Answering questions will help bring in traffic and sales.

8. Make a lot of “Do it yourself” instruction pages for products that are complicated to install. Remember, if someone can save $1000 from hiring a contractor verses doing it themselves, that might make or break a sale.

9. Keep an eye on your inventory. If it slows, replace it with something that sells better. Keep experimenting with different products. Test new products, analyze the results and make changes if necessary.

10.  If you are not taking advantage of free marketing things such as Google Base then you should spend some time there. There are other free shopping engines you can submit products to as well.

11. Take advantage of tough times. Buy merchandise from failing competitors. We have seen this happen more often lately. Recently one of our clients was able to buy the books from a failed competitor. It was a lot of business and they even hired several of the former competitor employees saving them further training costs. The company that has cash is able to purchase customers at steep discounts.

12. Keep an eye on your competitor websites. If one of your competitors goes bankrupt and they let their domain go, buy it up when it becomes available and 301 redirect it to your site. We find this is happening more and more lately. This should bring some of our competitors repeat traffic to us.

13. A/B Split Testing. It seems that few Web sites take an experimental approach to their conversion rates. I have found that many times you can increase sales/leads by changing, testing and analyzing seemingly small elements on Web pages. Split testing is a cost effective way to increase the bottom line.

14. Push hard and build.  A falling economy is an opportunity for those that look carefully. Businesses that make it through tough times generally are the industry shakers on the other side of the recession. The weak fail and the strong end up being stronger than ever. So whatever you’ve got to do to keep going-  do it.

15. Pick up the phone. You don’t need a storefront to pick up the phone and call people. This is a proactive way to earn business – rather than just waiting for the phone to ring. Don’t sit around and wait.

16. Call all recent contacts. Reach out to all the people that contacted you in the last 90 days but didn’t make a purchase. In many cases people don’t buy right away but they do after 90 days. You may have been their first contact, but if you’re still there in 90 days to touch them again you may get the sale then.

1. Pick a dot com.

A COM domain name has become synonymous with “established”.  From overpriced commercials to the vast majority of the most popular websites on the Internet, dot com is the most visible domain extension. Most people who use the web still make the automatic assumption that .com is all that’s out there – don’t make the mistake of locking out or losing traffic to these folks. The dot com extension is even more in demand with the release of many new extensions. If you are running anything but a dot com you risk looking like you were late to the party.

2. Start with your top keywords.

Brainstorm your top keywords that best describe your business and then pair them up together or with different prefixes, suffixes or locations. For example, if you have a Chicago mortgage company you could look at “mortgage, finance, home equity, interest rate, house payment” etc… until you have a good list. Try different variations with ‘Chicago’ in the front or other descriptive keywords.

3. Keep it short or memorable.

Ideally, you would have both short AND memorable, but that can be very expensive in today’s market. Be sure you don’t sacrifice quality just to have a short domain. Having a domain that is short but does not describe your business is not going to help your business.

4. Be Unique.

Avoid domains that are similar to other established domains – especially if they are in the same industry.   It can be easy for people to think they are on your website when in fact; they are on a competing site.

5. Avoid Hyphens and Numbers.

Both hyphens and numbers make it hard to speak your domain name without having further explanation, “That’s Chicago Marketing.com…. put a hyphen between ‘Chicago’ and ‘marketing’.  Speaking over the phone can at times be frustrating or embarrassing. Expecting people to remember to type it in correctly when searching can inadvertently lead them to other websites.

I know that sounds very basic but I have long stopped being surprised when I come across Web sites that block Google from indexing their own site. Typically, this happens because when the site was designed there was very little time devoted to information architecture. Without a plan for moving information across the Web site either through visitor interaction or search bots – things break down once the site gets beyond a certain size.

How do you stop Google from fully indexing your Web site? By having two few incoming links, improperly targeted incoming links, an internal linking structure that places pages too many steps from the entry page or a combination of all the above.  For the sake of this article I am discounting instances where Web developers accidentally block the search engines through improper use of robots.txt, meta tags, error pages etc.

Try looking at the following when analyzing why Google will not index more of your Web site:

• If you have a paginated list of pages (a page of links or content with pages 2 through 20 linked to at the bottom) try increasing the size of each page. Instead of having 20 links to products – increase this to 50 links to products. You can then reduce the number of pages in the list.
• Instead of having a deep site architecture with ever deeper categories flatten this out with fewer categories and more pages within each category.  Here is a deep link structure – “home/kitchen/utensils/silverware/forks.html”. It is going to be difficult to have pages at the ‘forks.html’ level be consistently indexed – and have a strong internal Page Rank. Reduce this structure to something like, “kitchen/forks.html”.
• If there are sections of the site that are not being indexed or being indexed poorly you should point external links to some of these pages in a tactical manner. Watch your link text and spread the links around in a natural manner for best effect.
• Depth & frequency of linking to pages on the domain – it is important to maintain as many deep links as possible when starting your online marketing or making major changes to a Web site.  Deep links are very important to indexing more files and increasing Page Rank.
• Sometimes the reason for poor indexing is the server where your Web site is being hosted is slow. This will directly impact the rate of crawl by the search bots. Your Web site must be on a fast server. At least it must be on a server that is not slow or giving the occasional server error.  In 2010 Google has said they will be adding page load time to their list of on-site elements that determine search result placement. It’s time to fix your slow site.

Almost daily I speak with a marketing director, business owner or other managing type who is beginning to think their keyword focus is out of touch with real world business needs. Most often as these conversations move along I end up breaking down preconceived notions on how keywords are chosen and what makes them important. Here are my top 5 tips on common keyword mistakes. 

1. Focusing on a small number of the most popular high volume keywords and not spending much time on long tail keywords. Long tail keywords generally convert better than the more general popular keywords.
2. Choosing keywords that are common industry-speak rather than using keywords that are more accepted by consumers.
3. Believing the various sources indicating likely keyword traffic are, in fact, accurate. Most keyword traffic tools over estimate the amount of traffic that can be expected. If you use Google’s Keyword Tool make sure you set the keywords to EXACT match. While not always accurate, it will be much closer than the default setting.
4. Not performing split testing or other analysis to determine if the keywords chosen are actually those that convert into sales or leads.
5. Not building the Web site pages around keywords. Too often, proper keywords are chosen after the content and page structure has been finished. Shoehorning keywords into page content is less effective than starting with a good keyword plan.