Now this doesn’t happen to me, but i’ve noticed that good looking men and women cause quite a reaction when they walk into a room. Like it or not and basic as it seems, attractive people ‘attract’.

On a slightly (only slightly) deeper level people are attracted to people like them. Could be similar tastes, characteristics, hobbies whatever…

Guess what… this very simple truth works with your marketing too.

Most successful businesses are aware of the power of attraction marketing to generate sales and increase their long term client base.

If this is so simple, why do so many companies get it wrong?

Well, most businesses get it the wrong way around. Through lack of a proper plan, they decide to pursue new clients. A bit like the guys you see in the pub that hassle the pretty women after they’ve had a load of beers.

Even when no-one responds to their letters, emails or phone calls; they carry on regardless blaming the recession for the lack of sales.

Here’s an example of a better way…

We are obviously a web development and SEO company. People find our blog and newsletter reasonably funny, informative and useful. So that could be described as ‘attractive‘. Many people have downloaded our free guide to SEO, which in many cases has helped people generate more sales for free.

SEO is a market full of scamsters. By being open, honest and giving away solid free information, we set ourselves apart. People then link to our site and tell others about downloading our material and joining our newsletter.

When we send out details about SEO seminars we host, people respond well and we fill them because people trust us.

So, without spending anything on ANY traditional forms of advertising, there’s tonnes of people who know all about Calloway Green and our ability to help companies rank high on Google and produce great sales results.

THEN whenever someone who follows us decides they want to embark on a full blown SEO campaign, hopefully they come to us.

Now, does this take more time and effort? Yes.

Does it work better than banging out crappy flyers and emails in a shotgun approach, hoping someone will use your product or service? Yes.

So think about your strategy to become more attractive to your potential customers. Remember, people don’t like to be sold to, but they do like to buy. As I found out today when my wife came home with a new pair of shoes!

As Andy said in his last post, our SEO Birmingham event was a great success. We had a real mix of people from one man bands to Directors of multinational businesses.

We realised that although people are all at a different stages in their online marketing. Some had created their own sites, some had invested a lot on an agency to create them a slick corporate site. BUT… the biggest issue people had was not getting enough traffic.

Without traffic you can’t tell whether your site is working or not…

Without traffic you have no idea how to enhance your site…

Without traffic you can’t build a list of people that you can turn into clients…

THE LIST GOES ON!!

We believe that a website for vanity purposes is a waste of time and money, you must get people there. Not just any people either, you need motivated buyers in your market coming to you first.

At the seminar Andy showed us a load of ways to get the right people onto your site and how to keep them coming back. We’ll be doing the same again on the 25th November 09.

Come and join us.

Years ago I worked as a consultant at part of the NHS that was working on knowledge management and complex search tools to help doctors find out about drugs and side effects etc. Dull story so far, but bear with me. The interesting stuff came as I began to look through the various documents that looked at symptoms and gave an idea of what could be wrong with you. You see, it’s not as easy as “runny nose = cold” or “aching lumber = backache”, the list of symptoms and the potential illnesses was huge and involved complex cross-referencing and investigation. It’s a difficult job requiring years of training and experience.

There are arguments to say that it’s just as difficult to diagnose what’s going wrong with a website, but let’s face it, a website is unlikely to kill you…

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Oh hum.

Now. It’s kinda the done thing for people in our industry (web marketing etc.) to put a list of websites they are doing SEO for and then show the keywords they’re working on for them. We love ourselves you see. But we don’t do that. We’ve never done that and I really couldn’t explain why we hadn’t done that until today when Chris (the chinny one) sent a link to a site that was doing that and it made me think – “Us SEO lot really are very stupid sometimes”.

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Isn’t it just strange how people can elevate themselves to a position of ‘expert’ simply by running a seminar and charging an entrance fee? For the second time in as many weeks I’ve received invitations to seminars about Twitter run by companies that are going to tell me all about how this amazing tool can revolutionise business, but do they use it? If they do, they’re very stealthy…

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Over the past month I’ve been taking part in the Hub Challenge where a bunch of us are trying to write a crazy amount of articles in a month. I’m up to 36 now and as it’s sometimes late at night when I write them, I do try to spice them up a bit with a ‘different’ title.

Didn’t think anything of it; thought it might add a bit of humour to the proceedings to. One of them was ‘The mailto: command, a great way to harvest email addresses”.

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It’s search tool open season at the moment! A few weeks ago ‘WolframAlpha’ was launched with a fanfare and the headlines saying it was a ‘Google Killer’ which it obviously was not, and now it’s Microsoft’s turn.

Having pretty much failed to set the world aflame with ‘Live Search’, they hope their next big thing will be ‘Bing’.

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If there’s one thing that we can be sure about with the Internet, it’s multiplied the number of people who will attempt to extract your cash many times over. Today I have been reminded of a scam by Brad from 4-Security (CCTV Installations – check them out), who points me to something that’s returned after a couple of years in the wilderness…

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This might be a crazy idea, but as part of our knowledge-base project (actually, I haven’t told you about that have I?), we’re going to be including details of other companies that do what we do.

Why?

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If ever there was a social networking tool that divided opinion, it’s Twitter. The views on it are almost polarised between “It’s a waste of valuable time and money” to “it’s the best thing to happen to the Internet since email”.

Well, neither of those statements can explain the real worth of the network to businesses, but maybe this news will make it all clear.

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