Actually, I was the person being whisked across country, a few years back, to negotiate the sale of a web site I had built. With a lot of hard work and a carefully executed positioning I created the opportunity to make more than I thought possible from what had started as a just for fun web site marketing project.

Whether you are a builder, accountant, realtor, market researcher, or manufacture loudspeakers or baseball bats, the way you position your firm can determine your success.

Do you want prospects to seek you out?

Do you want people to pay you more?

Do you want to stand head and shoulders above your competition?

With a simple positioning strategy you can get more attention than you imagined and bring in those high-margin projects and the profits you want. Here’s how I positioned one of my ideas for success.

1. IDENTIFY A NEED
In 1999, a new search engine was appearing on the Internet almost every week. Some were much better than others. Knowing which search tool to use was confusing. Through my own interest in finding better tools to navigate the web, I’d discovered a common need.

2. EDUCATE PPROSPECTS TO DEMONSTRATE YOUR KNOWLEDGE
Based on four years of study of search engines and a book I’d written previously on marketing to the search engines, I’d become an expert on how they did and didn’t work. To help my own online research and to help others, I built a web site that provided a directory of search engines and reviewed their usefulness and functionality.

What are your areas of expertise?

The objective of my site was simple. At a time when most people were just discovering the web, I wanted to help them find the best possible search tools for their particular task. My mission was to educate people about how to find what they were looking for online. The site primarily focused on the growing number of reviews I authored. Instead of leading with information about my credentials, I used the content on the site to demonstrate my knowledge.

What can you do to educate your prospects?

How can you demonstrate your expertise?

3. IDENTIFY AND REACH YOUR TARGET MARKET
Now I needed a way to get people to the site. While my target market was almost infinite – anyone searching the Internet – my advertising budget was zero. (Remember I was doing this as a back pocket project while maintaining my small business marketing consulting practice.) How could I attract attention and get people to come back to the web site again and again?

I identified online editors and reference librarians as identifiable, approachable groups with a high level of interest and influence. I started an ezine directing readers to current search engine reviews and updates on the site and published approximately once a month.

What is your stay-in-touch strategy?

RESULTS
After just three issues of my ezine reporters started calling me for radio interviews and magazine articles. I received an offer to buy the web site with the price tied to the number of monthly visitors and page views. Three months later I had grown traffic to the site from thirty thousand to three hundred thousand page views per month and closed the deal.

POSITIONING YOUR COMPANY
To position your product or service for success:
A. Identify a Common Need
B. Identify a Market
C. Demonstrate Your Expertise to that Market
D. Continue to Stay in Touch

If you’ve been in business for three years or more you’ve accumulated a wealth of experience and knowledge. The more you share your ideas, the more people will view you as an expert and seek you out. Give your prospects examples of your expertise and they will think of you when they need your products or services.

You can use an ezine, your web site, a book, workshops or public speaking to demonstrate your knowledge and put your firm ahead of the competition. Using the strategy outlined above and a little effort you can position your business for success and put yourself in front.

You might be surprised to know that in most cases, the answer is NO. You could generate ten times the business you’d gain through advertising by using the three marketing strategies detailed below.

Yes, advertising should be part of your overall marketing strategy, but don’t make it the centerpiece of your strategy when there are more effective – and more cost effective – ways to generate leads and sales.

What are the limitations of advertising?

Advertising is expensive –

The high cost of advertising can sink a new business before it has a chance take off. TV ads can cost millions, print ads in magazines with national reach like Fortune or Forbes cost tens of thousands, and radio spots can run you thousands of dollars. Even a micro, pay-per-click ad in Google can cost four to five dollars per click, depending on your keywords.

Advertising disappoints -

Ever run an ad and get only a handful of leads and even fewer sales? Many small businesses spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on ads that don’t pay off in increased sales – or just barely do. Has this ever happened to you?

Advertising doesn’t get noticed –

The average American is exposed to thousands of marketing messages every single day. Advertisers compete harder and harder to get our attention, with more ads in more places every year. The result of this increasing abundance of advertising is that it’s harder and harder to get people to pay attention and respond to your ad.

Advertising isn’t believable –

Not only is your audience saturated with ads and information, they’re sophisticated and skeptical. Most people dismiss the claims made in ads. Even if your ad is completely factual, your prospects’ tendency is to not trust it.

Advertising is touted as the miracle pill for growing your business. You pull out your checkbook or max out your credit card and pay for your ad campaign. But for many small businesses, the results rarely justify the cost.

Don’t get me wrong, advertising can work, if you know when and how to use it but there are better ways to generate leads and sales that you should be focused on first, before you turn to advertising.

Discover exactly how to grow your business with the 5 fundamental strategies you need to take your business to the next level. Use this link to claim your copy >>

What works better than advertising to grow your business? Here are three strategies you’d be nuts not to use:

1. Give Away Something For Free

People love getting something they want and need for free. I use a free 20 page marketing guide. Financial planners give away free seminars. Pfizer gives away free samples of drugs to doctors and some auto dealers give away travel certificates to motivate prospects to visit their showrooms.

Business Week ran an article on March 12th about Chipotle’s successful give-to-get marketing strategy. The fast food restaurant chain has handed out tens of thousands of free burritos and tacos as way of building a loyal clientele. In just one day Chipotle gave away 6,000 burritos when they opened a mid-town location in Manhattan.

This customer-satisfying strategy cost them $35,000, just about the same amount they would have spent for a half page black and white ad in the New York Times.

Let your prospects sample your ideas or your products. It’s the fastest way to help people understand the value of what you provide, to trust you and to want to do business with you. Chipotle has leveraged this strategy to become one of the fastest growing restaurant chains in the country. Imagine what this marketing strategy could do for you!

2. Get Free Publicity

When your prospects read an ad you wrote, they tend not believe it. When they read an article by you in a magazine or newsletter that is published and distributed by a third party, you have instant credibility. Write and distribute your articles widely and people will see you as the expert to turn to.

3. Use Email To Build Profitable Relationships

Once you have a lead, write and send series of emails that give your prospects information they can use. Demonstrate the value of your products and services. This simple strategy can convert a high percentage of prospects to new clients within one or two weeks.

I’m not suggesting that you stop advertising altogether. But use advertising as a supplement to the three business building strategies above, not as the mainstay of your marketing. Here’s why:

Spend $12,000 on advertising online, and if it works perfectly, you could generate up to 2,400 leads and convert those to 1,000 sales. Spend the same amount implementing the three strategies outlined above, and you could generate ten times the business; that’s 24,000 leads and 10,000 sales.

Ready to discover what really works to generate leads and sales online? Like you, I hate to waste money. I’ve detailed the fastest and lowest cost ways for you to make your business a success on the Internet. Use this link to claim your copy >>

Wouldn’t it be great to have a business where the cash kept coming in whether or not you were at work?

I’m taking a few days off this week and won’t be online to answer people’s emails or process orders — but I certainly don’t want my business to stop making money. I’ll be heading up to Vermont to spend a few days at our condo.

I’ll be spending time with my wife hiking, biking and enjoying the fall foliage. Now, I love my work, but while I’m away, I want to enjoy myself and not think about business. The condo has a phone but we don’t have internet access because my business runs itself while I’m gone.

So, how do I keep making money while I’m on vacation enjoying the fall foliage?

Even while I’m on vacation, I want to continue to:
• Grow the number of qualified prospects,
• Convert more prospects into paying clients,
• Process orders and fill up my bank account so I can continue to afford condos in Vermont and my passion for skiing.

There are two key ingredients I use to keep my business growing even when I’m on vacation. The first is knowing what to do, the second is having a way to do it.

Over the last nine years I’ve developed a web marketing strategy that has been highly successful for me and for my clients. This is the strategy I used to grow my first million dollar site, which I sold six years ago.

I wrote ‘Creating Web Sites that Sell’ to show you exactly how to use this exact same web site marketing strategy to build your online business. In it you’ll find everything you need to know in it, from how to market your site to the search engines to how to convert visitors to buyers.

Use this link to discover how to get your Clickthrough marketing in gear so you make money 24/7 with your web site >>

Having a web site marketing strategy that works is the first ingredient to wining at business. The second is having an easy efficient way to implement your marketing plan.

One of the biggest challenges is staying in touch with prospects and converting them to clients. Each week four to five hundred people sign up for my free marketing guide and I want to make sure they download it. Then I want to go to work converting them from prospects to buyers.

When they are ready to place an order, I want to process it immediately so they get what they want and I can accept their payment.

If I had to respond to each inquiry and process each order manually, I’d need to hire dozens of assistants and have to manage them. Neither of which I have any interest in doing.

So how do I manage the business while I’m gone?

I use an email broadcast system and shopping cart system that handles all of the above tasks automatically. I write emails and schedule their delivery, or input the sequence of emails I want a new subscriber to get and it is sent automatically.

For example I wrote this email and article last Thursday. Then I scheduled it in the system to go out Monday at midnight.

One of the keys to successful web site marketing is having the systems in place to stay in touch with your prospects and clients and keep the sales pouring in. If you’re ready to automate your online business, whether you need to use simple email broadcast services or want to set up a full fledged online store, I recommend the following service. Get the details >>

There are a lot of systems and schemes you can find that promise increased income, but how long do you need to wait to see results. A month, six months, a year?

Wouldn’t you like some ideas you can use today, this week and this month to attract more clients and add another ten or twenty thousand dollars to this month’s income?

Help more prospects buy from you with these six ideas.

1. Improve Your Marketing Message
Most people talk about their work and advertise their products and services with marketing messages that don’t pull in new prospects. Whether you are selling services or products, the most effective way to attract prospects is by telling them how you can help them.

When you tell people you are a real estate agent or sell travel incentives or a lawer, you’re only talking about yourself, not what you do for your clients. To get your prospects attention you need to talk about what you do and your products in terms of solutions and benefits.

If you’re selling oranges, which is most likely to get a sale.

a. “The best oranges anywhere.”
b. “Quench your thirst right away with this organic and satisfying source of vitamin C.”

A good small business marketing message helps prospects understand what you do and why they should contact you. Whether you are selling oranges, real estate, training or fitness memberships, write your marketing message from your prospects’ perspective.

Discover how to find the right words to explain exactly what you do. With a brilliant small business marketing message you’ll attract more clients right away. Create more opportunities today >>

2. Give People a Reason to Contact You
Whether you want prospects to email you, call you or come to your exercise facility, your objective is to get them to contact you. When they do, you can go to work and start converting them to client status. How can you prompt a prospect to contact you?

Everyone loves the chance to get something for nothing. Offer a report, workshop or consultation. Make sure its something related to what you’re selling and that your target market loves. Over 30,000 people have signed up for my free marketing guide ‘7 Steps to Attract More Clients’.

3. Establish Your Pricing in Terms of Value
Several years ago I paid a lawyer over thirty-five thousand dollars to write a contract for me. Why? Because it helped me make almost a million dollars. When the company I was dealing with had financial problems, thanks to my lawyer’s work, I still received every penny.

Whether your product or service sells for nineteen dollars or nineteen thousand dollars, your clients buy because they have a clear understanding of how your product can help them and the value it provides. Use your business marketing copy, images and video clips to help people understand how much better off they will be when they use your products and services.

When prospects are confident they will get what they want and expect, price becomes far less important.

4. Build Credibility
People buy from those they know and trust. How can you get prospects to know and trust you?

Whether you have been in business for one month or one hundred years, endorsements from others are the most effective way to establish your credibility. Place testimonials prominently in your small business marketing materials, demonstrate to prospects that you know what you’re doing and that your products and services work.

Discover how to position yourself and your business for success. You’ll find out where to start and how to focus your marketing to attract more clients and increase revenue. Grow your business >>

5. Start a Conversation to Create Opportunities
One of the key steps to helping prospects buy is to find out what they need and want. Once you know what their interests are, you can show them the service or product that’s the best solution and you’re on your way to completing a sale. How can you get the conversation going even if you’re not face-to-face with a prospect?

Query them. Ask prospects what they need and want and give them a chance to tell you. Even if you’re not face-to-face with a client you can use your web site to generate a steady stream of qualified leads. Often all that’s needed to close the sale is a follow up call.

Discover how to use your web site to generate more leads and income. Get the details >>

6. Instill a Sense of Urgency
Have you ever put off buying something that you needed or wanted? How can you get your prospects to avoid this black hole of procrastination?

Give prospects clear directions. Tell them what to do when and why. If you want them to fill in a form, tell them how and why to do so. If you want them to buy your book, tell them how and why. If you want them to give you information about themselves, give them a reason. If you want people to make a purchase right away, motivate them with an impeding deadline.

If you want more people to buy, you need to eliminate each and every obstacle that is getting in their way.  Find out how with this link >>

Not every prospect will purchase your products or services today, but you can help them along. Use these six marketing strategies to attract more prospects and you’ll be more successful every day.

Getting articles about your business published on the Internet is one of the most effective ways to get attention, demonstrate your expertise and increase visitors to your website. Why isn’t it working for Stephanie?

There is one simple technique that will get editors and prospects to read your articles and read the marketing copy on your web site. Let explain with the following call that made me laugh.

Tanya is Chinese and has a web site that sells various forms of Ginseng. Her site was attractive and professionally done but was only generating a trickle of inquires or sales. After all her hard work putting the site together, Tanya was frustrated and called me. She knew that she could be making more, if only her web site marketing worked.

Sound familiar? Could you be making more from your website?

In our conversation Tanya explained that she thought was a boring person and her web site was boring too. Have you ever had someone call you up to tell you they were boring? I had to laugh, but Tanya knew exactly what the problem was and I had to agree with her about her web site.

Are you frustrated with your web site? Are you upset that it’s only making you a fraction of the income it could be? Discover how to make it 5-10 times as profitable with these insider strategies. Get the details >>

Want an editor to read your article or a prospect to read your web page? If it’s boring, they won’t and all your effort will just be a waste of time and money. So what’s the secret technique to get people to read your articles and or your web site?

Give editors and prospects a reason to do what you want them to do, which is to read your article or your web marketing copy. Give them information about something that’s important to them. It sounds obvious, but 99% of the web sites, articles and ads I review make the internet marketing mistake of not providing the reader with a compelling reason to keep reading.

Start by reviewing the title.  For example:

“Growth of Home-Based Business – Part 1″

What do you think? Would an editor grab this one and say to themselves, it’s a must to publish?

If you thought the title was boring, you’re right. Some alternatives include:

“Why Home-Based Business Profits Are Skyrocketing”

or

“The 7 Secrets to a Successful Micro Business”

Whether it’s the title of your article or the headline on your web page the purpose is the same, to get the reader to read the next line, and the next and the next.

Without a reason, prospects won’t respond. Give them compelling reasons to:

• Read your articles,
• Go to your web site,
• Read the first line of your web site,
• Read the first paragraph,
• Read everything from your individual product pages to your bio,
• Contact you even if they’re not ready to buy,
• Place an order today.

Just providing stellar products or services isn’t enough. To generate interest and to get prospects to buy you need to also supply them with the motivation to act at every step of the web site marketing and sales process.

Don’t kill your sales by boring your prospects. Grab their attention with a reason to read and motivate them to buy from you. Do this and you’ll generate more leads and sales than you ever imagined.

Each time you look at your web site and then at your sales figures, how to you feel? If your site currently isn’t bringing in all the clients you can handle its not all of a sudden going to start selling like crazy.

To ramp up your web sales, you’re going to need to make a few changes. Discover exactly what to do before another prospect leaves your site without making a purchase. Find out what to do >>

Click here to view sample ads

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As a business owner or someone responsible for marketing a business you want to do the opposite. Instead of remaining hidden from view, you want to make it as easy as possible for members of your target market to find you again and again.

You may have a PhD, worked for big name clients, provide outstanding service or have a new ground breaking product but if people can’t find you it is tough to build revenue. What you want is to be found so prospects contact you and you can convert them to client status.

What happens when someone is looking for a new product or service? More and more customers and consumers use the internet to search for the goods and services they need, to the point that ‘google’ has become a verb. They may also use the search engines provided by Yahoo, AOL and MSN.

A prospect types in a set of keywords, your name or your company name into a search engine, with Google being used by far the most frequently. Can they find your website? Go to www.Google.com and try the following three tests:

Help people find you the first time and again with “Creating Web Sites that Sell“. You’ll learn how to structure your site and how to write web page copy to rank high in the search engines and attract prospects.

If you’ve had trouble getting people to visit your site or getting them to contact you once they do visit, “Creating Web Sites that Sell” shows you how to get better results with your web site.

Here’s the link to order your copy of Creating Web Sites that Sell.

1. If a prospect hasn’t heard of your company they won’t be searching for your firm by name. Instead they will be searching using keywords that describe the problem they want solved or the type of information they are looking for. If they are looking for ways to motivate employees, that’s what they will type in the search box. If they are looking for adventure vacation ideas for Costa Rica, they’ll enter that in the search box.

My prospects might enter, ‘attract more clients’, ‘marketing coach’, ‘web marketing plan’, ‘web lead generation’ or ‘marketing services’ in Google. When they do, they’ll find my site at the top or at least in the first 10-15 listings.

Type the problem you solve or the solutions you offer into Google’s search box. Is your site listed at or near the top of the listings? Is it even in the top 100?

2. Type your own name in the search box. Does your web site come up at the top of the page or in the first 20 listings?

3. Type your name and/or your company name in the search box, for example, “Charlie Cook” or “Marketing For Success”. Did Google find your site in or near the top spot?

If you aren’t happy with the results of these tests, your search engine marketing needs work.

How to Avoid Playing Hide and Seek With Your Business
A Smart Domain Name
Choose a domain name that is simple and obvious or simple and memorable. If your company is called Bollard and Jones Realty (or whatever) try to obtain bollardandjones.com as your domain name. That way, a prospect who knows your company name can type it into their browser and easily find your site.

The simple and memorable strategy is to use your domain name to describe what you do. Once prospects have found your site through a search engine, typing in the domain name will reinforce the ways you can help them. For example www.marketingforsuccess.com or www.printondemand.com.

Keywords That Work
While they are many ways to improve your use of keywords on your web pages, you can boost your ranking in the search engines simply by using your keywords in your page title tag, your metatags and 4 to 6 times in the text on your page. Make sure to use them in normal, well-written sentences.

Do you want to increase the number of visitors to your web site? Do you want to create more opportunities and generate more business with your site? “Creating Web Sites that Sell” shows you how.

With Creating Web Sites that Sell you’ll l earn how to make your site search engine friendly and get people to it. You’ll also learn how to convert site visitors into paying clients and customers.

Here’s the link to order your copy of Creating Web Sites that Sell.

Flash and Splash Pages
When you submit your site to the search engines, they are
looking for text. Pages full of pictures or with just your company logo (splash pages) or mini-movies (flash animations) may look pretty but they won’t help the search engines judge what your site is about. In addition, research shows that 90% of visitors find these entrance Flash and Splash pages annoying. Rather than move further into your site, most visitors will leave. Avoid home pages full of pictures, movies or with minimal text. They may look nice, but they won’t help people find you.

Build Links
One of the best ways to boost your site’s rankings and thus get more visitors is to get other sites to add links from their site to yours. An extremely effective way to do this to write articles and distribute them to sites visited by your target market. Most site managers and ‘webmasters’ are hungry for relevant content. Provide these sites content they want and they’ll be happy to use it and link back to your site, as they do to my marketing services site.

Stay in Touch
Offer an incentive to get site visitors to give you their contact information, and join your e-mail list. You can also follow up with a call or a mailing. Once a prospect has been to your web site, you want to regularly remind them of the problems you solve and the services you provide. Don’t let your prospects forget you when they are ready to make a purchase.

Avoid playing hide and seek with your target market. Help more people find you and you’ll grow your business. Tune up your search engine marketing strategy and your web site and you’ll have more site visitors, more prospects and more business.

A top listing in the search engines, especially in Google, can increase visitors to your web site and help. Let’s say you sell web design services. If your site was at the top of the list when people searched for “web design” in Google, it could increase the number of people who know you exist and know what you do, by a factor of ten or more.

You may already know that a top listing in Google will help your business, but at present you are having a tough time even finding your site in the Google search engine listings. Your search engine marketing is just not working.

What can you do to help Google find your listing and put it as close as possible to the top of the list?

Submitting Your Site
Google uses a “spider” to look for links from one site to another and to add information about additional sites and web pages to its database. Google’s “spider” is very active and may already have found your site. If any other site has a link to your site and is listed by Google, Google may have found your site on its own. To find out if your web site is listed, just type in www.yoururl.com into the query box at www.google.com and press search.

If your site isn’t listed, you can prompt Google to spider to at http://www.google.com/addurl/ Submit your primary url and Google will find the rest of your site.

Getting your site listed by Google and the other search engines is the first step. Next you need to make it easy for the search engines to code your site pages correctly and move them towards the top pf their listings. Here’s how to improve your search engine marketing:

Picking the Right Keywords
If you want your prospects to find your site use the words and phrases most commonly associated with your product or service in your web pages. These are called keywords. In selecting your keywords, think about the problem your prospects want to solve. If you sell ergonomic chairs, which will work best, “comfy chairs” or “eliminate back pain” or
“ergonomic chairs”?

Pick keywords that people use the most frequently. Test different keywords and keyword combinations and compare the number of searches that result from each using
inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Using Your Keywords
To help the search engines know what a web page is about, use your top keywords 6 to 8 times on a page. If you sell a number of different products and services, build individual pages for each set of keywords.

Make sure you don’t just repeat your keywords more than 6-8 times. In this case more repetition is not better. Search engines reject pages with too many keyword repetitions. Use natural sounding copy and integrate your keywords so the copy reads well for both visitors and the search engines.

Learn how to translate site visitors into sales with ‘Creating Web Sites that Sell‘. This essential website marketing manual shows you how to use your site to generate qualified leads and how to convert prospects to clients.

Linking Your Own Keywords
Once you have your individual product or service pages optimized for your keywords, link other pages on your site to them using your keywords again. If you have articles on your site on back pain, link your keywords to the corresponding optimized page from 4 to 5 other pages.

Building Incoming Links to Your Site
The above steps lay the groundwork for getting noticed by the search engines. The next step in getting your site listed at the top of the search engines, and particularly Google, is the number of links found from other sites to your site.

Your site’s “link popularity” is one of the most important factors the search engines look at in ranking your site. When the search engines see that hundreds of other web sites have links to yours, they rank your site higher than those with fewer links.

How many links do you have to your site? Use http://www.linkpopularity.com to see. You can also use this site to find the number of links to your competitor’s sites, and identify who has links to them.

Getting other people to link to your site is easy. Ask for a link, ideally one using your keywords, and offer a link in return. Create a links.html page and when businesses link to your site, provide a link back.

Link Example:
Get Charlie Cook’s FREE Marketing Plan Guide to learn how to attract more clients and grow your business. Highly recommended. It will help you develop a better marketing plan. Lots of great marketing manuals too. http://www.marketingforsuccess.com

Get noticed by the search engines to improve your web site marketing and many more people will visit your web site so you can market your products and services to them.

Learn how to increase sales with a better web site marketing strategy. Click here!

FEATURED MARKETING TOOL
Want to learn everything there is to putting your site at the top of the search engines? Here’s the subscription service I use to stay current with the search engines. Well worth the money.

The Challenge: Do you use mailings to promote your business? Are you struggling to get a better response?

The Solution: You can triple your business when you understand which marketing strategies to use.

Listen to Charlie’s Small Business Marketing Podcast

The Resource: The Insider Secrets to Attracting More & Better Customers >>

With assistance Spotsmith.