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Archives for July 2010

My “What Web Designers Don’t Tell You” Rant!

It makes me crazy!

OK, I’m on a rant.  Yesterday, it happened again!  I’m sitting across the desk from a business owner who already has a website and doesn’t understand why he isn’t getting any online business.  I don’t think I will ever be able to stop that feeling of my blood boiling when I hear business owners, especially my own clients, tell their stories of how they were innocently duped by some fancy pants web designer into spending thousands of dollars on a website that is useless!  Those of you who know me, know that it has almost become a crusade of mine to help the businesses in my geo-market to STOP the insane song and dance put on by some web designers who want to sell you either:

A.  A useless (but pretty) flash website, or

B.  Some “just like all the others” and equally useless web 1.0 static website

I just can’t NOT rant about it!  It makes me crazy!

These guys, (and gals to be fair), approach business owners and tell them all they need is a website and they will “be in business online”.  What a croc!  All you need is a website?  Shame on you if you are one of these designers who has your pocket book in mind instead of your customers best interests!  What about the ability for businesses to have interaction with their customers?  How about RSS, on page SEO factors, off page SEO factors, list building, social media, and marketing the site, just to name a few of the things you need to be found online! There is so much more to it than that!  You DO need more than a website and the next time one of these “take your money and run designers” comes along, just say NO!   Let me give you some questions to ponder and a video to watch to see if I can get a “hell no, we’re not going to take it anymore” from you.

Are you getting the results you expected when you hired that web designer to put you “in business online?”

Are you being found on the first page of your favorite search engines search results for the words that you want to be found for in the search engines? or, more specifically Google?  Did the web designer even ask you what words you wanted to be found for?  Was any keyword research done?

How are people finding you online? Are they finding you online?

And most importantly, are you using social media to market your business?   Did your web designer tell you what it can mean to you to use social media? Not yet convinced that you need social media?  Watch this video and let the information contained in it help you to make a new decision.   Social Media is NOT a fad!  Are you ready for social media?  Is your website?

Well?  What do you think?  Pretty impressive isn’t it?

When you are ready to start thinking seriously about how you will bring your business online, give us a call.  We WANT to help. 843-647-0489 or out of the Charleston area toll free at 1-866-945-9707.

Oh, and thanks for letting me get that off my chest.  Whew!

Online Traffic Offline – Free Teleseminars Via Conference Calling

The best part of free teleseminars via conference calling is not that they are free. Nope, the best part is that it could bring you free online traffic offline. I’m talking about good high quality, targeted traffic, not just some random person who happened across your website and clicks right off. Anyone could get thousands of people to click on a link to their website but today I’m going to talk to you about a way to get people to your website that are already looking for your product/service, increasing the odds of your conversion rate.

So I know what you’re probably thinking…”How is this free? Either I have to pay for a conference call line, a toll-free number or my callers may have to pay long distance charges.” Well when I say free, I mean free. But before you even schedule your call you have some things to think about, so we’ll get back to “free” in a moment.

What will your call be about?  It’s important to do a little research to find out what’s “hot” right now in your field. What are people searching for and asking questions about? You can use your social media resources and let everyone know that you are planning a free teleseminar and ask what they might like it to be about. If you already have an idea on what you’d like your call to be about you can use that same avenue to compile a list of FAQ to answer on your call.

Once you find out what topic you will be speaking about you might want to think about whether or not you want to have a “guest” on your call. This is a form of Joint Venturing. If you have yet to establish yourself as an expert in your field you will want to try to get someone who is relevant to your call but not your competition. You will have the opportunity to get their leads as well if you can get them to promote that they will be a guest on your teleseminar to their list. Be sure to send them a list of the questions you’ve compiled so they will know what to expect during the call.

Making an agenda for the call is the next step. Write down your main points that you want to make sure to touch on during the call and fill in from there. Don’t forget your call-to-action! What do you want the callers to do with this information? Are you selling a product? Offering a free product on your auto responder and looking for more qualified leads? You’ll want to mention this two times during your call. Make a smooth transition somewhere in the middle of your call to your “commercial”. Tell them a little about it but you don’t want to give it all away just yet. Keep them hanging on to their seats to find out what it is and share your great offer at the end of the call.

Figuring out the timing for all this isn’t easy. You never know what is going to happen on a live call. You’ll want to plan on the call being about 45 minutes. This will allow for some “unexpected events” as most teleseminars run about an hour. If all goes well (knock on wood) and you have a little extra time you’ll want to get your audience involved and ask if they have any questions. Now, if your call isn’t going great, you’ll want to have some relevant stories to share to ease into the next segment.

Hmmmm…what was next? I know I was supposed to come back to something but I just can’t put my finger on it! Oh that’s right…”FREE”! Ok, so let me explain.

First things first you want to make sure your potential clients/customers are taken care of. In this day and age most people who still have landlines are on some sort of “bundle” package through their phone company that includes free long-distance. As far as cell phones go, if you’re worried about your callers being charged for their minutes, make sure not to schedule your conference till after 9 pm or hold it on the weekends when minutes are free. Sure people might not want to stay up that late or spend their weekend on the phone, but we’ll talk about offering bonuses in a little bit.

Let me first tell you how this will be free for you. Allow me to introduce you to FreeConferencePro and explain the benefits:

-The most important one is that you get to brand your business. You can edit the recorded greeting message that callers hear.

-It’s easy to set up. You can set up a call within minutes and have your call as soon as you’ve notified the participants.

-You get to pick the access code for the call, pick something that is easy for you to remember so when the time comes to promote your teleseminar you don’t have to go searching for it!

-There is no time limit for the conference call but the number of callers is limited to 200 (this does not include multiple callers calling in on one line using speaker phone for example, this would count as 1 caller).

-The control panel allows you to monitor the call via your computer allowing you to see who is in attendance, who was late, who left early, etc.

-You can record the call. Be sure to share with the participants that the call is being recorded. There are many benefits of recording the call; I’ll touch on that a little later.

-If you do have a lot of participants on the call or there is a lot of background noise from one of your callers you can mute out participants to alleviate distractions.

So you know what your teleseminar is going to be about and you’ve scheduled it, now it’s time to promote it. If you don’t already have an auto responder on your website, the time has come. Having everyone sign up through your auto responder will make it very easy to make sure everyone gets the access code for the call. This will also help capture leads for future events, products, etc. You may want to offer an additional bonus for free for signing up for the teleseminar on a thank you page.

The social media sites that you mentioned about doing a teleseminar on should be the first place you announce the details of the call. They have been patiently waiting in anticipation of your response. Hopefully they have mentioned it to their followers boosting your attendance. Also, if you are going to have a “guest” on the call, send them a link to share with their lists. Send the news out in a newsletter to your current list. If you have a blog you will want to make sure to write a little something on the topic there to promote your teleseminar.

Please note that not everyone who signed up for your teleseminar will be able to make it for one reason or another. Some may have shown up late and others may have had to leave early. Good thing you recorded the call. Even better is that since you had everyone sign up through the auto responder you now have all their email addresses! So make sure that you get a copy to all those people, you don’t want them missing out on your “bonus offer”.

If you are planning on doing more teleseminars in the future on related topics, you could save them and when you are finished with the series you can turn them into a product and sell the series to all the lists you’ve just created! You can also upload them to iTunes. Keep in mind that you can edit these audios if the teleseminar had a few hitches.

Whatever you do, just make sure to do something. People seldom reach their dreams by not taking action. You are already one step ahead of the game because you took the time to read this and are actively pursuing success. I wish you the best in all your endeavors!

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