I am glad to be back.  I posted a few cool (and short) videos at Gravity Unknown.com, which is my mental relief blog for posting business ideas, science thoughts, and some funny stuff.

There is so much catching up to do on a huge backlog of work but I will be responding to emails, posts, comments, links, and messages this weekend.

Greece is beautiful but they are not great at tourism.  I understand that they might not even want to be but they could take some lessons from other countries.  They have an excellent road system, though (and crazy drivers).

I have some great new posts coming up.  Thanks for hanging in there for me.

I am still revitalizing (re-optimizing myself) in Greece. Please keep your emails and messages coming in through MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, and email. I will respond to everyone as soon as I get back next week.

Take care,

Chris

I will be in Greece this week for a little bit of both.

In the meantime, please sign up for my feed with one of the links above or sign up for the email list.

If you want to contact me or exchange links, please let me know.  We will catch up as soon as I am back.

See you soon,

Chris

Believe it or not there are still numerous small companies that do not have a website - at all. Many of the small (and medium) businesses that create a website often fall short somewhere along the way to having a great website that is effectively integrated with the company’s marketing and branding efforts. This is something of a New Website Marketing 101 for small companies.

Good Site! Follow Through

Let’s say your company has recently created a new website - maybe even your first website. It is beautiful, has great content, excellent contact forms, and even draws some decent leads. Now! Follow through with your site branding! Your domain name should be everywhere and I do mean everywhere - on everything you print, send out, give away, ship, sell, use, pass along, email, or leave behind. Every customer, vendor, or partner touch point should have your domain name prominently displayed on it. Site branding is about attaching your domain name to your products, your services your messages, and yourself.
Site Branding Blitz

Get the domain name to your customers and tell them visit the website. Tell them why they should visit it - to save money, better quality, first of it’s kind, free stuff, or new products.

Small companies cannot typically afford major media advertising but should do something more for site branding than just hoping for the best. Depending on the geographic size of your market, choose the most cost effective way to get your name out to as many prospective customers as possible. If your company serves a fairly small market, try a local radio station if there is one whose demographic matches your target audience. Try local magazines, newsletters, newspapers, or flyers.

Postcard Site Branding

Postcards are an excellent and inexpensive method of off-line site branding to get your name out to a lot of people for pretty cheap. I use Postcardmania when I do mailings for small businesses because they have excellent service (a dedicated rep), great card and image quality, and manage my postcard campaigns from end-to-end. I basically just send them the list of addresses and fill out their questionnaires. They design the cards, ask me to give the ok, and voila! Little specks of branding fairy dust are scattered to prospects across the lands.

Effective postcards work. You can see it in sales and in the above-normal site traffic that follows a mailing.

I like postcards for two main things - to educate and revive. Postcards are good for cheaply putting your website (site branding) and company on the radar of prospects who are not actively looking for vendors but who are receptive to learning about them. If you can get people to a lead optimized website a profitable percentage will buy and others will keep you in mind for later or tell someone about the site. Postcards also revive old customers by reminding them you are still out there and ready for their next order.
That’s enough about getting the word (and website) out - on to following through with the message.

Customers Should Hear What They See

Here is the front side of following through. Make sure everyone in the company is tuned in to the latest marketing efforts and knows about your website. You can use posters, emails, speeches, or pep-rallies to inform your employees but when prospects respond to your marketing the person they speak to should have an idea of why they might be calling - and what you are offering.

This is a usually a bigger concern if you are pushing special promotions or overstock items or the newest and latest products but a mixed message sends a powerful message to someone with money in his hand and it sounds something like, “return your money to your wallet and back away slowly.”
Sometimes this happens in small ways, too. Does your receptionist know your products well? Does he/she know what you do? What do you think you would hear if you asked? I have talked to receptionists who sounded like a spring morning on the phone but didn’t seem to know where they worked.
One method I like to use to make employees familiar with a website is to make the website a tool for everyone.
Ed Roach at Small Business Branding helps reinforce the idea of branding consistently and how expensive and wasteful it can be to NOT consider all of your brand stakeholders.

Keep Working on Site Branding

Site branding is not a one-time up-front task. Use email campaigns and newsletters, mailing lists, postcards, word of mouth, t-shirts, decals, a blog, and give-aways. Your website should be effectively pushed at all times by every method you can imagine. Get creative. Put your domain name in places you have never seen anyone write something (ok, don’t get carried away).

Your website is the only 24/7 salesperson you have. Tell everyone about him every chance you get.

Cade Krueger at Write to Right submitted this article about consistency in email campaigns to for the June 15 Lead Optimize! blog carnival. I spent some time meandering around Write to Right and found a number of good articles.

While I have to admit many of the thoughts are difficult to follow and the paragraphs do not always match titles or headings, Cade does express many good ideas that are relevant to small business owners and sales people. Cade’s article will be included in the Lead Optimize blog carnival and I will be returning to Write to Right. There is a lot of information there that is relevant to lead optimization and generating qualified sales leads.

The best article I ran across on the site (I read maybe eight articles) was Do You Know Your Prospect? It is a good article for salespeople and business owners alike. The main points lined out in the article are to get to know your product(s), your company, your prospects’ needs, and to listen carefully. I like his tips to help you get to know your prospects and sound more confident when speaking to them.

Here are some tips to help understand your prospects and create the avenue to help them understand themselves:

1. Write a list of all of the potential reasons people would buy your product.

2. Why would they buy it from you?

3. Why would they buy it from your company?

4. What would be all of the problems that can be solved through your product?

5. What would be the benefits of any client having your product?

6. Ask each of your sales what caused them to buy from you.

In Cade’s own words, Write to Right is dedicated to educating people on make money business opportunities. He also offers a free backlink.

Related Articles for Lead Optimization

Nurture Leads to Increase Sales

Follow Up! Manage Your Sales Leads

The Close - Getting the Lead from Your Website

This is “inspiring, brilliant” - as I stated in “the crowdshout” on DontClick.it.

Take away the *click* and what do you get? No dead space? Clicks = wait time, nothing happening. DontClick is an ongoing experiment dedicated to evaluating a revelation - no, an evolution - in navigation. Clickless navigation. Crazy! Insane! It can’t be done.

Upon your arrival at the site, it takes a moment to understand that you are reading an explanation about what you are about to take part in - and you might realize you just tried to click on something because, well, just because that’s what you do.

*Click* When you move on to the next page - the one time you will need to click - objects spin, roll, flip, and tumble in response to your mouse. Why? You are scanning with your mouse, which is just following your eyes.

*Click* Then, the site turns to static and wakes you up to the fact that you just clicked - on nothing.

Navigate around a little and get the hang of clickless navigation. There is a lot of information about how it works, proposed alternatives to clicking and submitting (you can try them), a comments section (crowdshout), how-to-contact sections, statistics on how many visitors click accidentally, information about how clicking is used to track, measure, and drive internet marketing, and lots of general information about the project. Learning to navigate it properly takes about five minutes, during which you will learn a great deal.

It is a beautiful site that brings some innovative ideas to the front of the mind. I am not so sure the future of the web is in this anywhere (maybe this is Web 3.0?) but the interactivity of it is stimulating. You might feel like you are actually paying attention to the content as you look at the site instead of just scanning and clicking impulsively.

Other companies use flash for a more interactive setting but the method by which you select your next destination in the site is conventional. I have always like the way the Diesel Clothing company uses flash to create an interactive and artful experience but for the Diesel site artful is the point of it. They want to create an atmosphere but are not smashing any design barriers. Oh, and they require clicking (the nerve).

Dontclick.it is about finding a different way to navigate and I think they might be on to something - a more thoughtful way. Can we increase sales leads from our websites if people are thinking more deeply about the content and options? I would like to find out. What do you think?

I have been thinking about highlighting effective offline methods to generate sales leads for a while and I just ran across this video (on YouTube) produced Erik Holmes of SendOutCards.com. They don’t have an affiliate program that I know of and this is NOT a paid endorsement.

The main lesson in the video is to send personal, handwritten, thoughtful, cards instead of sales-driven, logo-riddled, letters that go straight to the garbage as junk mail. Essentially, it is more effective to send a “Happy Thanksgiving Day” card with no sales information than to send a letter reminding your leads or prospects about what you sell.

I liked this video because Erik actually gives a how-to lesson with strong examples of what makes a good card and what makes a bad card and they don’t sell themselves until the very end.

The basic rules for creating an effective card include:

• Letter size envelope
• Handwritten address
• Real stamp
• No logos or advertising
• Nice greeting card with handwritten note

Although the cards from SendOutCards are machine printed, they are printed with your handwriting and signature which you give to them by downloading their form, filling it out with your handwriting, and mailing the form to them. You can include a family picture and even a pre-paid gift card (many to choose from).

I also dug up a few good blogs about using postcards (aka self-mailers) and direct mail marketing. The postcardsmart blog includes some good information and the site has a good article about incorporating your website into your postcard marketing. The Sharpe & Direct direct blog has a great article covering the advantages and disadvantages of using self-mailers (ahem, postcards) in B2B direct mail campaigns.

And finally, Kevin H. Johnson of Acxiom discusses a few of the differences between online and offline direct marketing.

Due to the cost of offline contact, traditional direct marketers must carefully select their target audience for maximum potential response.

The typical direct marketing campaign starts with an offer and the universe of consumers. Direct marketers then “cut a list” – a small subset of the prospect universe – by carefully eliminating great swaths of the population who are less likely to respond to the offer. Thus the key to good direct marketing is good list selection.

“The true divide between digital and direct marketing is driven by one simple economic fact: cost per incremental online contact is effectively zero.”

Good e-mail marketers, on the other hand, take precisely the opposite approach. They start with every person for whom they have permission to mail and then carefully select the best offer for each individual on the list – every ZIP code, DMA, Simmons segment, Personicx cluster, every single address.

Digital marketers have no economic reason not to contact everyone, short of increasing opt-outs through over-mailing. Hence the key to good digital marketing is good offer selection.

I have used direct mail campaigns to increase the awareness of a website (and the company) across a given region and have been successful but direct mail marketing does not work for every situation.

In a B2B setting, I have found direct mail marketing is most effective for website promotion when you are marketing to a group of buyers who historically look no further than the people they have been buying from for years. In this situation, direct mail marketing is an excellent way to introduce yourself as a new option.

If you ever want to chat about website promotion and lead optimization, email me at chris@leadoptimize.com. I love this stuff.

How to Generate Sales Leads: Top 3 Factors

Selling complex services or products that require some coaching, education, engineering, or complicated logistics is a different game than getting people to click-and-buy simple easily shipped items. I am not saying it is always more difficult - just that it USUALLY is. I have been asked if I can narrow how to generate sales leads online down to just one rule and my answer is no.  The closest I can get to is 3.
In fact, there are a multitude of tricks and tips to improve your site’s sales lead generation rate. The folks over at GrokDotCom say there are more than 1100. In my experience the top three factors to generate sales leads from your website are reasonably straightforward. Drum Roll…

1. Clear Content
2. Professional Images
3. Contact Opportunities

Clear Content (Yes, Quality Too)

Clear content tells customers they came to the right place. Your site’s content should be very clear about what it is you do. Seems obvious, right? Sure it does but pay more attention to how many sites you leave immediately after entering.

Learn how to write well online. Use keywords, bold letters, numbered and bulleted lists, short paragraphs, easily visible links, and clear images that draw attention to your best and most profitable products which brings us to…

Professional Images (Bright, Clear, Recognizable, Telling)

Use lots and lots of quality images. Give them alt tags and captions. Make sure the pictures are clear and descriptive even without captions. They should be bright and even enchanting. If you have to question the quality of a picture, don’t use it - ever! Go take more pictures if the ones you have are not good (i.e., too dark, old, faded, ugly, etc.).

You will find that many visitors to your site are looking for what they want NOT what you sell. Providing pictures of many of your projects gives your visitors more opportunities to see what they are looking for. Countless site leads say, “I want a (blank) like the one in the 3rd picture from the top on the left side of your page about (blankables).”

Now that they know they are on the right page and they have seen a picture of the thing they want…

Contact Opportunities (aka: Calls to Action)

Give your site visitors numerous opportunities to contact you. As a general rule, sites I design for clients have at least three locations for contact opportunities on each page of the website. Each contact opportunity has more than one contact method such as, “Call me at (832) 628-0987 or contact me online to discuss Lead Optimizing your website.”

To Review:

1. Clear Content
2. Professional Images
3. Contact Opportunities

Happy Sales to You…

Until We Meet Again

If you want help or guidance with how to generate sales leads call me at (832) 628-0987.

Related Lead Optimize Articles

Nurture Leads to Increase Sales

The Sales Leads are in the Details

Misleading Sales Leads

How to Reply to Contact Form Leads

Here is a way bloggers and online marketing professionals can really help each out.

Quality links determine Search Engine popularity and relevancy. Unless your site or blog gets some quality backlinks – the popularity you might be gaining with each new post is short lived.

The only way to stay ahead of the game is to get quality backlinks consistently. This is not about link farms, link exchange sites or anything similar. I’m talking about a New Concept – Viralink.

Read the details below to learn how to participate.

I got this from The Digital Nomad but the concept was originated by Andy Coates and it is quite different from what you may have previously seen. You can read the full details at Read more details on Andy’s Site and participate by copying and pasting information below to your site:

———copy and paste the Viralink and instructions below this line———

Below is a matrix of 120 stars, I have already added a link to my blog onto one of the stars, all you need to do is copy and paste the grid into your blog or website and add your own link to one of the other spare stars, and tell others to do the same! You also may want to change or edit the first few paragraphs, and the last paragraph to suit your blogging style.

Viralink

********************
********************
********************
********************
********************
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When I receive a ping back once you have added the Viralink to your site I will add your link to this grid, and each person who copies the grid from this blog will also link to your site!

Rules
No Porn Sites
One link per person only! (do not hog the viralink!)
DO NOT change or tamper with other individual url’s
Enjoy!

Here are how the numbers add up, I will use the term saturation to describe the spread of the Viralink with Zero being your blog 1 being 1 link down, 2 being 2 links down and so on.

Saturation - Backlinks

0 - 0
1 - 3
2 - 12
3 - 39
4 - 93
5 - 336
6 - 1065
7 - 3252
8 - 9813
9 - 29,496
10 - 88,545

The above numbers rely on 3 people copying and pasting the Viralink onto their blog and that being replicated 3 times continuously 10 times. The numbers are quite staggering, there are 119 spaces left on the Viralink from this page and I expect that there will be allot of clones which begin to pop up. The best strategy with this is to start early and tell all of your blog and online friends!

You may be wondering what happens if you are at the end of the chain when the Viralink is full ? What would be the benefit to me? Well there is no reason why you can’t add another line of dots to the bottom and keep the process going. You also can start another form, but please retain a link to this site.