“Turn Your Website into a Sales and Marketing Machine”

We have decided this month that we will be donating half the money from the tickets to Barnardos. They are an awesome charity (in our opinion), running 415 projects across the UK.

Whatever the issue from drug misuse to disability; youth crime to mental health; sexual abuse to domestic violence; poverty to homelessness; Barnardo’s believes we can bring out the best in every child.

So we thought, as a business, let’s get more exposure and money to them so they can do more of what they do best.

We hope to see you at the event if you can make it.

BOOK HERE… http://www.eventelephant.com/onlinemarketingevent

This has caused some queuing outside the O2 shops across the UK. Apple seem to be quite clever in the way they use scarcity to build their brand and there’s some kind of assumption that it must be amazing because it’s hard to get hold of one.

Doesn’t really work on me, I just carried on walking past the queue.

Then imagine my amazement when I saw a full size Dalek talking to the kids in the street while threatening to ‘exterminate’ them.

Great! Some company was combating the Apple hype with a marketing ploy of their own.

My only question was ‘what the heck are they selling?’. Surely it’s something related to Dr Who.

No…. it was a pet shop. Yes, a pet shop.

For some reason, one of the owners had got their hands on a full size Dalek and thought that this was a great opportunity to tell people about the two for one offer they have on dog toys and cat food.

Wrong.

As I walked briskly away to McDonalds, these two questions came to mind:

1. Do companies really know who their target audiences are?

2. If they do know who the target audience is, then do they know how to find them?

We’ll be answering these two fundamental questions at our next Workshop in August.

If you’re in the Birmingham area on the 11th August, we’d love to see you there.

This was the joke banded around yesterday after the terrible decision of disallowing England’s second goal even though it was a foot over the line. There was uproar for about 20 minutes, until German scored their third and fourth goal to finish England off.

After 90 minutes, when all was said and done, it was the poor performance people we’re talking about. Not the fact that the goal line technology should be upgraded and they should allow the referee to watch replays.

No amount of technology would have helped England win.

This brings me (get ready for the shoehorn) into something we’ve been thinking about the last few months:

Technology is Useless…

.. if you’re overall business performance let’s you down.

As you know we deliver SEO services for our clients.

It works well and they get more traffic to their websites and subsequently receive more leads and potential business. People searching for what they do find

their site over their competitors. At that point, we’ve done our job well.

But I want to be real with you for a moment and I have to confess…

SEO is Useless…

.. if you’re overall business performance let’s you down.

There, I said it.

Let’s face the truth, not everyone can turn prospects into clients every time.

Also, what about ‘if’ they become a client? Does everyone keep their clients for life or do they often wonder off 6 months down the line and start working with another company.

Do they give you referrals?

Maybe there’s an even more fundamental question. Do you REALLY know who you want to be doing business in the first place?

Do you know what type of client gives you the best return when you invest your time chasing after them?

Now is the time!

Now you haven’t got any more England matches to watch, it may be a good time to take a fresh look at your overall strategy.

I imagine you’re on this blog because you want to know more about marketing yourself online. Which is great. But if you want more than that, we have organised a special one off event on August the 11th 2010 in Birmingham.

We’ve teamed up with a top business coach to deliver this workshop aimed at business owners, marketeers and really anyone that wants to grow their business.

Places are limited and demand will be high!

Chris Green

P.S Even if you’ve been to one of our seminars before, you’ll get a TON of value from this.

I had put off subscribing for a few months because I thought to myself “HOLD ON, all this information is available on the internet”.

However, each time I go into the newsagents, I pick it up and read it. There is still something really relaxing and inspiring about the printed word. Maybe it’s the tactile nature, maybe it’s because you can just take the magazine anywhere… I don’t know, I just know that people love to read magazines.

So this got me thinking. We’ve been meaning to create a small magazine aimed at business owners and marketing people to help them make more sense of marketing online and SEO. People generally don’t have a load of spare time in business, so this will be something they can have on their desks so they can try refer to when planning how to make more of an impact on the Internet.

We’re going to launch this next month. But I have a problem and …

I need your help!

What do we call it?

How do we name a magazine that is helping people build their online brand and build their business?

Please add your comments below and you can win a mention… or maybe something better.

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I have my haircut the conversation can go one of three ways. What’s going on in the world, where am I going on holiday or what do I do for a living.

People are already fed up of talking about the England goalkeeping fumble against the USA, so he skipped that and the holiday chat and opted to ask me what I do.

Now I usually just say we create websites. Most people know what a website is so you can pass the time while he chops my hair into shape. But I thought i’d be daring and tell him ‘we help companies get found on Google and get more business’.

Most people obvioulsy use Google, but I never really know whether people really understand about Google and how it works.

The hairdresser looked at me with a mix of puzzlement and sadness and then said “it’s hard for us on Google because our company name starts with a V so we’ll be down the bottom of the list”.

Now, i’m not critisising the guy. He has more important things to be thinking about than page rank.

But it struck me that some people still assume that Google works like a giant Yellow Pages. Well, it doesn’t.

I just wanted to put that straight.

Google is, however, pretty complicated in the way that it does rank sites, and here’s some blog posts from the past to help you work out what you should be doing if you want to get your site higher up Google:

Getting Started with SEO

Reciprocal linking and its role in SEO

Getting on page one of Google

An easy way to get some good Google link juice

Don’t guess with your marketing – measure and test

What this really means is “I have no idea what you talking about, but I think it involves that website our IT department set up a few years ago”.

If you’ve been reading our blog for any length of time you’ll hopefully know that promoting yourself online is a LOT more than just having a pretty website. If just having a site is your complete strategy, you’re going to find yourself in a lot of trouble because your competitors are getting busy trying to beat you.

Marketing yourself online is not a job that you can pass onto your ‘IT department’.

Online marketing has the same fundamental principles as any kind of marketing.

If you want to do well online, you must invest your time, practice, and dedication in the following four areas:

1.  How do people experience you?

Ok, this question sounds a little woolly, but bear with me.

If you’re setting up a shop in the high street, you’ll be spending a lot of time and effort getting people to notice your store front and coming inside. What people see as they walk in your shop will give them an immediate impression of what you’re about. If the products are any old how or strewn on the floor, then don’t expect people to pay top prices for your goods.

In the same way. If your site is a big jumbled mess, if your site is hard to navigate, or it’s just plain ugly, expect them to move on pretty quickly to your competitor.

Also, with blogs and other forms of social media, people can engage in “conversations” with you. If you have video and audio they’ll also get a feel for who you are as a company.

2. You must be ahead of your competition.

People often use us to run their online marketing because they simply cannot afford the time to keep on top of such a fast moving medium. It’s our job to know all there is to know about our market.

It’s the same for you. You must research your marketplace and discover new trends and opportunities you can leverage to benefit your business and enhance the experience customers have when they use you.

Some of this information you can give away on your site or blog. Some you will want to keep to yourself and use for leverage in your sales meetings to ask better questions of the potential client.

3. Pleasure or Pain?

People purchase for two reasons. Number one is to increase pleasure (like better health or a faster car). Number two is to get rid of pain (such as fixing poor health or fixing the engine on the car). So the focus on your your website should be emphasising one of those. Do you increase please or fix pain?

This takes a bit of time to work out properly. Your current clients are the best people to inform you of the best benefits of using your company. Ask them why they chose you and what they would say to a friend needing your services.

4. Who are you again?

In our industry, we have thousands of people saying they can get you to the top of Google. Most of them can’t, but they’ll happily take your money for you to find that out.

So if someone is going to use us, how on earth do they know they can trust us?

The key is to ensure your customers, prospects, friends and employees see you as a company of value. On the internet, people can easily give you a bad report if you’ve really let them down. Your credibility is paramount, it’s also one of the easiest things to destroy.

Slowly but surely, more and more people have started to understand how Facebook can be an integral part of your marketing. The question we hear now is ‘how do I get more fans onto my fanpage’.

So we created the following video with 5 really easy ways to get more fans:

If you have anything you’d like us to create a video on, please leave a comment below.

It is becoming increasingly harder to get ranked high in Google these days.

Google has become the ever changing beast. Just when you think you know the best way to get your site to number 1, they tweak or change the goalposts and the algorithms. Also, the truth is that no-one really know 100% how Google works. If they tell you they do, walk away quickly.

Although this is a pain, it also is an advantage. If you can keep yourself informed and keep testing what works and what doesn’t; then you’ll be beating your competition to those top spots and getting the sales that go hand in hand with being number 1.

However…

If you don’t have endless hours to work it all out like we do, you could do one of two things…

Download our newly improves DIY SEO book for Free. Yes Free.

Or if you are in the West Midlands you could come to our SEO seminar and training.

There is a third option, but it’s a secret for now…

Put your hand up if you want to be top of Google and get more inquiries and sales than you can handle?

Keep your hand up if you’ve achieved this.

I may be wrong, but I reckon most hands went down.

It’s not that there isn’t enough information on the internet about how to get your company to the top of Google. I could name you several thousand sites right now that are packed with information on SEO.

So what’s the problem?

Well, we’ve just started running a three day training course helping people really understand and implement SEO. Someone asked me why people would pay to come on a course when you can get the information free from lots of sources. This is a valid question that deserves and answer, so here’s a few thoughts.

1) Where the heck do you start?
Many people say that we live in a time of information overload. I tend to agree. If I wanted to, I could start browsing for information on SEO and still be reading blogs and forums till Christmas.

2) What comes after the website?
Most people we talk to already have a decent website. Problem is that they think it’s decent, but do the customers? How would you know if people are being put off? How would you know where they go if they don’t come to your site?  Do you have enough content? Too much content? …. the questions are never ending.

3) “I just want more traffic to my site”.
This is what we hear a lot and this is the point that many give up with online marketing.This is a big one. Again, there are a ton of questions. Do you pay for traffic? Do you use social media? Is Facebook for business or just for my mates?

At our first full SEO training day yesterday, all these questions came out. They got answered, and people went away with an action plan for their online marketing. We destroyed a lot of myths and helped people focus on the actions that will create them sales.

If you’re still reading this, then i’m going to take a stab in the dark and assume you have some of the issues above. So I have one question.

Is SEO training for you?

• Have you already spent money with an SEO company that didn’t get you any returns?
• Are you spending a lot on Google adwords, but you don’t really know why?
• Is your competition coming up above you on Google searches, but you don’t know what to do about it?
• Lastly, but probably most importantly. Are you serious about your success? This course is not for dabblers, it’s for people that want to succeed in business.

Get more info or to apply for a seat? Space IS limited!: SEO TRAINING

Or you could just give me a call on 0845 0573420

Chris Green

P.S .. If you are in the West Midlands, you may be entitled to funding!

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!