• How to Earn More by Visualizing Your Success

• Marketing Busy-ness or Marketing to Build Your Small Business?

• Marketing for Votes and Business

• Removing Obstacles to Sales

• The Key to Eliminating Objections

• Turning Site Vistors Into Clients

Like the incumbent president and the democratic challenger, you want people in your target market to make up their minds to vote for you. The difference is that the presidential race is focused on getting people to go to the polls on one critical day. Your small business marketing involves getting people to vote with their wallets and buy your products and services on a weekly or monthly basis.

Your marketing plan can incorporate the same small business marketing strategies used by presidential contenders and other highly successful marketers. Discover the secrets >>

When you apply the 5 essential principles to marketing your services or business you’ll attract many more clients and see your business grow.

Learn how to get your marketing message across to get attention and win the hearts and minds of your prospects with “15 Second Marketing: Creating 0pportunity with a Brilliant Marketing Message”. You’ll find yourself and your firm generating more leads and more business.

Your business and the presidential contenders require similar small business marketing objectives and strategies. Your marketing plan should consider the following:

A. Marketing Goals
Presidential Contenders – To convince over 50% of voters to vote for them.

You – To help people in your target market make the choice to purchase from you.

B. Marketing Issues
Presidential Contenders – To appeal to voters’ greatest concerns, hopes and fears, whether it’s health, safety, or prosperity.

You – To appeal to your prospects’ greatest concerns, hopes and fears, wants and needs.

C. Solutions
Presidential Contenders – To demonstrate that their solutions to current economic, educational, environmental, and safety problems provide the greatest value to the American voters.

You – To demonstrate that your products and services provide high value to your prospects.

D. Credibility
Presidential Contenders – To establish their own credibility. Too often, politicians try to do this by undermining their opponents.

You – This is one area where I recommend your small business marketing objectives and strategies differ from the presidential candidates’ negative approach. Establish your credibility by standing above the competition. One of the best ways is by getting past clients to describe the value you provide.

E. Staying In Touch
Presidential Contenders – Repetition, repetition, repetition is the strategy here; staying “on message”.

You – To make sure your prospects and clients remember you when they have a need and want to do something about it. Regular contact works.

Want to save time, attract more clients and increase your revenue? Discover how to plan and implement an effective marketing campaign >>

Get your marketing message across to win the hearts and minds of your prospects with “15 Second Marketing: Creating 0pportunity with a Brilliant Marketing Message”. You’ll find yourself and your business generating more leads and more sales.

Your Marketing Campaign
You may not be running for President of the United States, but you are the one responsible for running your company’s marketing campaign.

Goals – What’s the percentage of your target market you want to win over this year?

Marketing Issues – Relative to the product or service you offer, what are your prospects’ primary concerns? What do they want and need?

Solutions – What is the solution you offer and how can you demonstrate its value?

Credibility – What do you do or could you be doing to help establish credibility with prospects?

Staying In Touch - What’s your strategy for making sure your prospects remember you when they have a need?

Want a winning marketing strategy, one that helps you save time, attract more clients and be more successful? If so you’ll find “Earning More by Marketing Smarter” a valuable training manual.

You’ll learn how to generate more leads and close more sales. In “Earning More by Marketing Smarter” I’ve mapped out in detail how to create a steady stream of prospects, referrals and clients.

Here’s the link to order Earning More by Marketing Smarter.

How do people get to be president of the United States? Regardless of their party or experience, the key is their ability to win voters’ hearts and minds. How do they do that? By understanding and being highly successful marketers.

Whether you want to be President of the United States or just part of a highly successful company, you need to win the hearts and minds of your prospects. Apply the marketing strategies used by the Presidential contenders and you’ll be a winner, no matter who wins on election day.

What’s wrong, and what can you do to change this picture?

John from Wisconsin called with exactly this problem. He owns a firm that provides financial services to people planning to sell or pass on family businesses. Located in a small town, his business is steady, but, well, small. He built a web site to reach a broader market and signed up with Overture.com to advertise it and attract visitors. (Overture posts the sponsored links you see at the top of your search results on many sites.) This is when his biggest problem became apparent.

The problem wasn’t with John’s business idea or Overture. He had identified both a need and an underserved target market. His Overture ads worked so well they generated thousands of clicks to his site. In no time at all, John had run through his advertising budget but hadn’t translated any of the visitors into leads or sales.

What should he have done differently?

What can you do to create a web site that sells?

Discvoer how to structure and design your web site to generate leads and sales.

You want the people that visit your web site to buy your products and services. Making a purchase is the end point in their decision-making process. Do you know what the preceding steps are and how to move people through these steps?

If you are running a Web ad campaign, you will attract two types of visitors. The ideal prospect is one who is looking for a solution, one which hopefully your product or service provides. This should be an easy sale, but you still need to demonstrate that you understand their concerns and can solve the problem or meet their specific need.

The sequence of information you provide and the specific copy you use can either keep them reading and move them to buy or lose the sale.Take a look at your web site marketing. Is it obvious to you what you want them to do?

Can people see from the use of the page layout, use of type and graphics what they are supposed to do first, second and third?

You don’t have to be blatant in what you want visitors to do but the sequence should at least be obvious to you. Guide visitors by your placement of elements on the page and use of size, color and placement.

The majority of first time visitors to your site will browse your content following their whims or interests. If you don’t include the right elements on your site in the right places on the page, it may be the last time they visit your site. Even if you provide the perfect product or service, you can’t rely on people to make the effort to find what they need: give it to them.

Whether you sell consulting services, plus size clothing, business coaching, golf apparel, or manage recording artists, you can use your web site to generate leads and grow your business. The key is to guide prospects to take action to become qualified leads and clients.

Learn how to use your web site marketing to attract more clients and grow your business with ‘Creating Web Sites that Sell’

All of these marketing activities can keep you busy, and take time and money. But if you’re not careful, these small business marketing activities will limit your growth or worse yet, put you in the poor house.

When I first talked with Judy in Chicago, her business was about to close. Despite having many satisfied clients, an active advertising campaign and a web site, she wasn’t developing a steady stream of new or repeat clients. Each week her spending on marketing was costing her heavily and her income wasn’t keeping up.

Judy knew that she needed to bring in more clients but her conclusion was that advertising and web sites don’t work, at least not for her business. She was busy with her marketing but it wasn’t working to grow her business.

Is your small business marketing strategy providing you with a steady stream of new clients and customers?

If you’re not attracting as many clients and customers as you’d like, there is a good chance that you’re busy with marketing but not marketing to grow your business. What’s the difference?

One is focused on day-to-day activities and separate marketing tools, such as advertising or a web site. The other is based on a business building strategy that helps you generate more leads and clients each month and each year.

Wouldn’t you rather be marketing to a larger and larger group of prospects each month?

Ron, who owns an electronics parts supply firm, business was growing, but he wasn’t generating new customers with his web site. While profits were rolling in from his telemarketing efforts, he was missing literally millions of additional dollars in revenue he could have been earning through online sales.

What’s your small business marketing costing you in lost revenue? How much more could you be making if you added ten new clients a month, a week or a day to your business?

With “15 Second Marketing” you’ll learn how to write a marketing message that prompts prospects to contact you. Using the step-by-step process you’ll have a marketing message and elevator speech you can use within hours and you’ll learn where and how to use it to build your business.

“Creating Web Sites that Sell“, shows you how to use the web to generate more leads and profits. If you’ve already got an under performing web site, you’ll learn how to fix it. With “Creating Web Sites that Sell” you’ll discover the simple steps you can take to grow your business.

Here’s how to earn more with a business building marketing
strategy.

1. Attract prospects by focusing your marketing on the problems you solve. Instead of talking about yourself, use prospects concerns to get their attention.

2. Use your advertising, web site and other marketing activities to prompt people to contact you and add them to your qualified prospect list.

3. Attract both buyers and potential buyers. For each person who is ready to buy, there are another twenty who are interested and you could convert to client status.

4. Focus on building relationships. If you want prospects to trust you and buy from you, it helps to create a dialogue and to demonstrate your expertise.

5. Regularly stay in touch with prospects, otherwise they’ll forget you and won’t buy your products and services even if they have a need.

6. Use helping instead of selling as your marketing model and you’ll convince many more people they need your products and services.

Want a business building marketing strategy you can use to attract more clients each month?

“The Insider Secrets to Attracting More & Better Customers” manual maps out both the strategy you need and how to apply it to increase your revenue. It’s been called the “marketing bible for small business owners”.

After shifting to this business building marketing strategy, Judy is no longer in debt; in fact her company is prospering. She still advertises, has a web site and spends time on marketing tasks but these activities now all reinforce each other and work to help her build more prospect and client relationships each month. Instead of being busy marketing, she is busy growing her business.

Don’t wait until you’re in debt or losing millions in potential revenue because your busy with marketing. Use a business building marketing strategy to generate more leads and you’ll be earning more each month and each year.

But each time I watch this track event, I have the same reaction. If they just went out on the track and removed those barriers, it would be a heck of lot easier to get around the track. The athletes could run faster, more smoothly and wouldn’t risk falling (as the accomplished Flo Joyner did).

If you are struggling to attract clients, you may feel like you’re running the hurdles. Obstacles like limited promotional budgets, ads that don’t sell, web sites that don’t generate leads, prospects that aren’t ready to buy or who think your prices are too high, all get between prospects and the sale.

Do you find yourself struggling to overcome hurdles to getting the sale?

You can clear the track of the hurdles that are getting between you and potential clients once and for all and create a clear path for prospects to become clients. If your target market knew you and how you could help them, understood the value of your services and contacted you when they were ready to buy you’d be rolling in revenue.

Is this how your business works?

Are you getting a steady stream of calls and new clients?

What can you do to remove these obstacles and increase your sales?

Learn how to eliminate obstacles to sales and grow your business. Open the door to more business with a small business marketing system that builds business each year.

Generate more leads and more sales with your online marketing. Learn how to use your web site and your emails to pull in prospects and convert them to clients.

If you haven’t already identified your small business marketing obstacles, start by doing so. The first step is to list them. Once you know what are your biggest obstacles to increasing sales, you can look for ways to get rid of them. (If you have other staff involved in sales, get their input too.)

Below are two common obstacles to sales For each I’ve included some simple strategies for removing these obstacles. Once you understand that marketing obstacles aren’t permanent you’ll discover that you can remove more and more impediments and clear the way for increased sales

Lack of Awareness
You’re just starting your business. No one has heard of you, and, given your lack of revenue you have little to invest in advertising. What do you do?

Use lead generation strategies that are free or almost free
During a severe downturn in the economy, a local financial services firm offered a series of workshops for free to private investors. Within a year the firm grew their assets under management from $5.5 million to $15 million.

Using an ezine I sent to librarians and online editors, I grew the value of a web site about search engines to almost a million dollars, without spending a dime on advertising.

This strategy works equally well for established companies. Les Schwab Tire Centers fixes flats for free, giving away over $10 million in repairs each year. Building goodwill with giveaways like this and an unusual dedication to customer service, this chain of 300 tire outlets earned estimated revenue of $1 billion in 2003.

Want to generate more leads and increase sales?

Discover how to use your web site to improve your lead generation and profits.

Lack of Results from Advertising
You’re not getting a positive return on your ads, should you buy more ad space? How much? Where?

In my experience, there are two obstacles to increasing sales with advertising. Its either the message or the audience. Both can be fixed and to increase sales

If you want people to respond to your advertising, get their attention and prompt them to contact you, write your marketing message, ads and marketing copy from your prospect’s perspective. Identify and address their concerns.

Learn how to get attention with your small business marketing message and your elevator speech. You’ll attract more clients when prospects know how you can help them.

No matter how good your marketing message is, it won’t help you unless its seen by people who want your products and services. Even if you do your homework up front, there is no guarantee your ad will improve your lead generation and draw sales.

Track each ad campaign and each sale to determine which ads sell. No matter how good your copy is or how many people see your ad, if the ad audience doesn’t include people who want your services and are ready to buy, it’s the wrong audience.

Drop those ads that bring in meager results and identify additional advertising opportunities, ones that will be seen or heard by people who want to buy your products and services.

Stop wasting your time struggling to jump over marketing hurdles. Instead, you can identify the obstacles that get in the way of lead generation and sales and eliminate them one by one. Make this shift and you’ll attract more clients and be more successful.

• Do Your Small Business Prospects Know What You Do?

• How to Generate Referrals and Grow Your Small Business

• Small Business Marketing to Attract the Right Clients and Avoid the Wrong Ones

• Positioning Yourself as an Expert with Product Research

• Getting Off the Advertising and Sales Roller Coaster

• Using Two-way Business Marketing Communication to Attract Clients

• Using Your Web Site to Increase Online Sales of Products and Services

Nancy called me from Portland, Oregon with just this problem. Every time one of her ads appears in a local publication, customers start walking in the door of her home furnishing store. A few days later the number of prospects and sales goes down. Her advertising gets results, but the thousands of dollars she is paying each month is killing her profits. What can she do?

Whether you advertise your consulting business in The Harvard Business Review or your interior decorating service in the Penny Saver, your ad will cost significant dollars.

How can you make your advertising pay for itself?

How can you use marketing and advertising to create a STEADY stream of business?

Learn how to create a steady stream of qualified leads with your small business marketing plan. Apply “The Insider Secrets to Attracting More & Better Customers” and you’ll find more and more people contacting you on a weekly basis.

Make your web site a lead generator. Learn how with “Creating Web Sites that Sell“.

Write Your Ad to Sell and To Generate Leads Of all the people who could benefit from your products and services, what percentage is likely to buy today? Hopefully a few, but the majority are more likely to need your services tomorrow, next week or next month.

Write your ad to prompt people to buy and if they’re not interested in making a purchase, to contact you. When you write your ad:

1. Sell your products or services by selling your solution.

2. Prompt prospects to buy. Include a call to action.

3. Motivate prospects to give you their contact information.

For each person who responds to your ad and makes a purchase today, you should be able to get ten qualified prospects to contact you. Once you have their contact information, you can send them a regular email or postcard for far less than it would cost to run your ad on a weekly basis.

Explain what you do in your ads, and with your elevator speech and marketing message so that you prompt prospects to contact you. Get your copy of “15 Second Marketing” and get your prospect’s attention and their business.

Follow Up On Your Advertising
An ad can be the first step in marketing your products and services but unless you follow up, it may be the last. Its what you do after your ad runs that determines whether you’re able to make it pay for itself in the days and months to come.

Let’s say your ad works in getting people to visit your web site, call you or come into your store. What’s the next step? How can you follow up to increase your sales?

1. Make sure you get their contact information so you can follow up.

2. Whether people stopped by your web site, left a phone message, emailed you or visited your store – follow up promptly. Get back to them within the day, if not sooner. A prospect is most likely to buy or start a profitable relationship when he/she is looking for a solution. Let your leads linger and they’ll go stale. If you wait prospects may contact other service providers or stores, and you’ve given them time to make their purchase through someone else.

3. Respond immediately. Use a phone call or an email to let them know you understand the problem they want solved and that you can help them. Even a personalized autoresponder message will do the job.

4. Market to your in-house list of contacts. If you want people to remember you when they have a need and are ready to make a decision to buy, make sure they think of you as the solution provider. The best way to do this is to regularly provide ideas, tips and information that your prospects want.

5. Create opportunities for personal contact, whether through your print mailings, ezine or web site, you want to prompt prospects to contact you to discuss their needs and / or place their order. Ask them what they want, what they are looking for. When they send you an email, follow up with a call. Tell them how to contact you, how to schedule a personal conversation and then follow up with a call.

Learn how to use your web site to prompt people to generate leads and get people to personally contact you so you can help them with your products and services. I use these web strategies to generate over a thousand new leads each week. Learn how with “Creating Web Sites that Sell“.

Advertising is an expensive ticket to marketing your products and services. Use these strategies to make sure you get your money’s worth and you’ll find your advertising paying for itself over and over. Instead of getting your thrills from watching your business go up and down, you’ll find yourself enjoying the excitement of watching your profits steadily move up.

• Eliminating Objections to Increase Small Business Sales

• Getting Noticed by the Search Engines

• How To Get Lucky With Your Small Business Marketing

• Keeping Your Small Business Marketing Healthy

• Taking the Mystery Out of Small Business Marketing

…Index
of Small Business Marketing Articles and Marketing Ideas & Tips

Tom called me with a question about how to increase sales. from his web site. Despite having spent three thousand dollars to build an attractive web, he wasn’t generating leads from his site. Only a small handful of people had contacted him since the site went live two months ago.

Do you have a web site? Are you disappointed by the number of leads and sales. your site is generating?

I asked Tom what percentage of daily or weekly visitors to his site contacted him. He didn’t know the answer. I asked him how many people visited his site per month. He didn’t know. I asked him, how many sales. of his books and coaching services had been generated by his web site. He didn’t have that information, either.

If you want to improve the perf0rmance of any marketing effort, whether online or offline, make the effort to collect and evaluate the results. You can use easily available numbers to help you fix what’s not working and improve what is.

Ever go on a diet? How do you tell if your eating and exercise regimens are working? You step on the scale and look at the number of pounds you’ve lost or gained. This simple figure gives you the truth about the success of your dieting efforts. To improve sales., track response and conversion rates.

Discover how to generate more leads and sales with your web site with “Creating Web Sites that Sell”

1. Response Rates
If you spend m0ney on advertising to drive people to your business web site, you want to know how many people responded to your ad and visited your site. If you’re only getting a handful of responses, the problem could be your ad. Something as simple as changing the marketing message you use in your advertising or in your search engine listings could increase your response rate.

Discover how to write and use your marketing message to get more attention and prompt people to contact you so you can convert them to clients.

If you’ve had success with the ad in another publication, it may be that the particular ezine or web site isn’t reaching your target audience and you’d be better off spending your advertising dollars elsewhere. If you track your ad results you can quickly discover where to avoid spending on advertising that doesn’t work and make changes to get more out of each advertising dollar.

2. Conversion Rates
If your web site draws lots of visitors, you’ll want to know what percentage of those visitors are buying, and if not buying, at least signing up for your ezine. With these conversion rates you can determine how to increase your online sales.

Barbara has a subscription-based web site that pulls in over twelve hundred visitors a day, yet only seven people a day contact her and the site only generates sales. a couple of times a week. Is this the best she can do? Probably not.

You can generate more leads and sales. with “Earning More by Marketing Smarter“.

You can prompt 10-50% of the people who visit your web site to contact you and then work on converting these qualified leads to sales. For Barbara, all it took was a few changes in her layout and copy for her to add two to three hundred people a day to her list of qualified leads and increase sales. to dozens each day.

One of the most important things to identify and measure is where sales. come from. If you advertise with Google or in ezines and see that an ad has more than paid for itself in leads generated and sales., you’ll know its worth running again.

Just asking people where they heard of you or how they arrived at your web site is useful. When I asked one client how they found my site, they explained how they had been searching the web using the phrase, “marketing services” and how difficult it had been to find the site.

My advertising hadn’t targeted the phrase “marketing services”, so I quickly added it to the list of keywords for my ads. The result? The next day someone came to my site via my targeted ad and bought every small business marketing manual I sell.

Here’s the link to order “Creating Web Sites that Sell” to help you generate more qualified leads and increase sales for your online or offline business.

Don’t let marketing be a mystery. Start analyzing what is and isn’t working so you know what to fix. If your small business marketing is working, use these same numbers to set new goals for lead generation and sales. conversions and be even more successful.

Luck had nothing to do with it. Jeff asked to be put on my mailing list after we meet. He gets my weekly ezine, full of strategic marketing ideas he can use. Over time, I’ve demonstrated my expertise to Jeff and he trusts me enough to refer me as a speaker.

Are you relying on luck to get people to remember you?

When Jeff had a need or when someone he knew wanted an expert in marketing, my name came to mind. Why? Because I have a SYSTEM for promoting my marketing products and services that helps people remember me when they have a need.

Do you have a system that generates a steady stream of clients?

Over the years I’ve perfected a marketing strategy that generates a steady stream of prospects, clients and income. It is based on five core marketing principles and associated marketing tactics.

Why use a small business strategic marketing system?

When you have a system, each one of your marketing efforts works to support your other marketing efforts. Each action you take builds on the previous action. Your marketing is cumulative. In my case this means that each month, I have an additional thousand or more qualified prospects interested in my services and products.

What are some of the elements of a successful small business marketing
system?

Discover how to market your products and services systematically to generate a steady stream of sales.

1. Attract Attention
Learn how to explain what you do so that people quickly see how you can help them. All you need is a one-sentence description of who you help and the problem you solve; a marketing message or elevator speech. Use it on your business card, in your brochures, on your web site and in your ads.

Discover how to craft your small business marketing message and elevator speech and get attention and business.

2. Establish Your Credibility
Provide proof of how well your services and products work. Testimonials describing results work well. Articles, case studies and helpful tips show people how you think and how you can solve their problems.

3. Prompt Qualified Prospects to Contact You
Use your free report, test drive, workshop, etc. to prompt prospects to give you their contact information. If they read your ezine, or visit your web site, give them a reason to tell you what they need and want so you can contact them.

4. Stay in Touch
Whether a prospect came to you as a result of an ad, referral, web search, or a mailing, regularly send them mail or email and demonstrate your expertise with ideas they can use.

5. Educate Your Target Market to Create Demand
One of the biggest barriers to sales. is that your prospects don’t know you, the range of your services you provide, or why they need your products and services.

Discover how to use your web site marketing to generate interest, educate your target market so you have more qualified leads and sales.

Prospects won’t hire you if they don’t understand the need or the benefit. Use your regular communication to educate prospects about the problems you solve and to create a perception of need on their part and then they will want to use your services.

Still waiting to get lucky with your marketing? Use a systematic approach to marketing your business and generate a steady and reliable stream of clients and customers.