Some persons, however, will take those falling leaves and turn them into mulch. They can use them to provide nutrients to the soil, and be able to have a great garden come spring. That’s exactly what a small business can do with the dollars they spend on the Internet- rather than just throw away their money on costs that bring no return, they can use that Internet budget to actually bring in new business in the future.

How do you go from burning your dollars to investing them in future sales? An effective Internet Marketing Plan is essential to getting the most from your efforts online.

To set up an effective Internet marketing plan, you need to take into account the following major areas:

1. Keyword Selection/website copy
2. Inbound links
3. Landing Pages
4. Blogging
5. E-mail marketing

Keyword selection/website copy
It is critical that you understand the terms used by persons searching for your solution to their problem. To do this, you need to do some research through tools made available by search engines such as Google. This will help you identify the best keywords to target with your online efforts. What makes a good keyword? A large number of searches with low competition is ideal. A search professional can help you with this process, and should be able to identify the best chances you have at achieving success online.

Once you have identified these keywords, you need to use them on your website. Rewrite the copy on your pages to include your targeted keywords. This will make it so that your website is more relevant for those terms.

Inbound Links
One of the major factors Google and other search engines use to determine the importance of a website is the number of other websites that have links pointing to it. A search professional can help you find other sites that will link to your website. This may involve linking back to those websites, as well as finding directories for companies in your industry that will link to you.
Next week we’ll send information on landing pages and blogging, and the following week will be a message on effective e-mail marketing. For more details on any of these topics, reply to this message to say that you want to stop burning your money like dead leaves and we’ll send you our whitepapers on Internet Marketing Plans and E-mail Marketing. Have a great weekend!

Mark Deo
mark@markdeo.com

Again the focus should NOT be to talk about our company, product or service but rather ask genuine, creative questions about the prospect’s experiences, feelings and vision of the future. The only way to incite change is by getting the prospect to realize, of their own volition, that their current solution or current collection of possible solutions are inadequate for their very specialized needs. When this occurs the prospect will begin to move toward us rather than away from us. This is what is meant by creating attraction. It is not an OVERT thing that we do but rather a COVERT realization in the mind of the customer.

Here are some questions that can allow us to create PAIN in the mind of the prospect without making them feel we are trying to move in on their space:

1. What are some of the solutions that you have already tried?
2. How did they work?
3. What kept them from being the most effective solution?
4. What were they missing?
5. How will you avoid this from happening again in the future?
6. What is it that most of the vendors that you speak with just don’t get?
7. Why are your needs so “specialized?”
8. What would happen if you cannot get this project properly completed in time?
9. What happened last time?
10. What is the cost of staying with your current solutions?
11. What do you like most about your current vendors?
12. If there was one thing that you could change about them what would it be?

There are many other PAIN questions that we can create. Think of a few and share them with your colleagues. Ask these questions of your existing clients and prospects and see the PAIN you force them to face, and then help them resolve those issues. Let me know how it goes.

Be well and enjoy success this week.

-Mark Deo

If you are a finding that you clients are putting more and more pressure on your firm to reduce prices then it’s about time you change your clients! That’s right often times price erosion is not so much a problem with your pricing strategy or product selection or service but rather your customer profile.

Continually reducing our price is like prostitution. WE can never become cheap enough. In fact the cheaper we get, the less valuable we are perceived.

I encourage you to look at your customer pool and begin to segment them not so much by demography or psychographics but by “value perception.” Do you understand why those specific customers are “willing to pay more?” What is it that they value that the “price-oriented” customer do NOT value? Why? Then you can create a NEW customer profile and focus on those clients that find great value in your product or service. Perhaps you can even discover a way to create evangelists who trumpet this value claim.

I encourage you to check out this brief video of a seminar where I discuss price sensitivity and what you can do about it.

In one article it outlines how fast an ad campaign can become saturated in this time starved, relationship savvy culture that we live in. Why? “Because people tell other people about things they think they don’t know about. If you want to spark word-of-mouth virus, the first thing you need to do is realize it’s not about you. Word-of-mouth only works if your give people an amazing story to tell so that THEY are the introducer of something new, cool, different, interesting, or outrageous.

This 2.5 hour class will help you to customize a strategy for your company.
– Reduce your advertising while at the same time increase demand for your product/service.
– Fully integrate the marketing campaign with a parallel selling strategy.
– Set your company, product or service apart from the competition like never before.
– Ensure that every participant establishes their own personal marketing plan.

When: Friday, June 5, 2010
Time: 10:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Where: Dale Carnegie Training 2525 Cherry Ave. Suite #380 Signal Hill, CA 90755
Who: Presented by Mark Deo, Bestselling Author of The Rules of Attraction
Tuition: $49 Investment

To sign-up call 562-427-1040 or email mark@markdeo.com

Don’t modify the position to fit the person, find the person that fits the position.

Join me today as I interview the former Assistant US Secretary of Labor, Al Angrisani. He talks about why this dangerous trend exists and what we can do about it. We will discuss the three main issues that are threatening small business survival in the current environment:

1. Washington’s blind spot for free enterprise solutions to the recession, effectively overlooking small business assistance in the stimulus bill.
2. Small businesses are experiencing rising state and local taxes to fund state revenue shortfalls and are anticipating a federal tax increase in 2010 or 2011.
3. Rising employee costs in the form of minimum wage increases and added health care costs.

I plan to confront him about what we can do regarding the power that lobbyists and labor unions have in the legislative process. Who better to answer this question than a former cabinet member!

Listen to the show any time after 4pm today, Monday, November 2, 2009 at: www.smallbusinesshour.com

Have a great week!
-Mark Deo