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!

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.

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”.

You see, it’s REALLY VERY EASY TO GET ON PAGE ONE OF GOOGLE.

If you choose keywords that nobody uses, trust me, you can get on to page one easily.

So, when you see a list of keywords that someone is saying they’ve worked on, I’ll give you the run down on how to actually check them out and see if they’re really ‘all that’.

Check they really are on page one

OK, this should be a no-brainer because unless the company really is run by Mr & Mrs Stupid, they will have checked that what they’re saying is true. Those sites will all appear on page one.

Check that somebody is actually using those search terms

In order for a search term to be relevant, people need to be typing it in and finding sites. Remember, the Internet is full of people, billions of ‘em and so if a keyword is known, it will be used. If someone is number one on absolutely every search engine for a term that is never used, it’s pointless.

Really. You might think that you’re great for being number one for ‘karate books‘ or something, but it’s absolutely pointless if nobody’s searching for it. So, go to Google and type in ‘Google Keyword Tool’ and you’ll be sent (unsurprising enough) to the Google Keyword Tool.

Type in the keyword that the crazy company are saying they’re so bloody good at and see how many searches were actually done last month for it. It will tell you there in black and off-white.

Now remember that unless they’re number one for that term, they will only get 60% (ish) of the clicks. Then remember that the average visitor conversion rate is about 3-5% and that will tell you how many potential enquiries that customer got. They’ve then got to turn those visitors into customers.

I did this on a list promoted by a rival in our industry (no, I won’t tell you who, I’m not that nasty) and across all of the keywords they mention are on page one there were potentially 28 enquiries. And that was being optimistic.

So, all those page one postitions are pointless.

Well, if you are clever and actually use it for what it is and engage with your customers. If you’re the sort that thinks all this Internet malarky is for other people then you won’t, but maybe we should all sit up and listen when a name, a big name announces they’ve made a bit of cash from the social networking site of the moment…

I shouldn’t get angry, but I do. You see, I know what I’m doing. I do it well and I do it every day but when I meet people who say “that’s not for us” or “it’s just a fad” when they’re talking about new technology then I just see red.

I still meet people who say “This Internet thingy – it’s just not for our type of business”. Now, in the past I would have stood and argued and explained how it is for them and how with careful management you can actually do quite well out of it thankyouverymuch. But now I just shrug my shoulders and move on. Unless they are provoking me in which case I glare, and them move on.

It irks even more because most people I meet like this are in my own region. In the Black Country, right in the middle of the UK. Right where industry thrived, you know, the new stuff. Industry took off because a select few people threw away the old way of doing things and replaced it with lots of new technology that many people said “that won’t work”. They went against prevailing thought and decided that they would embrace new things.

But the Internet is different. We’re being overtaken by other areas, other companies and other industries because people round here just don’t get it. And that’s annoying.

I’ve just come back from a very wet week in Devon. Do you know, every single attraction that I wanted to go and see was available on the Internet? Every one! Not only that, nearly every specialist baker, butcher or candlestick maker had a website address on the outside of their shop.

They’re in the middle of a recession too and they’re not seeing the amount of visitors they used to see, but it doesn’t matter because they’re not just marketing to the short-wearing, hanky-sporting grey-haired Saga-louts of old, no, they’re selling their stuff to the world. Stuff the recession, they’re doing well anyway.

Look at this: www.tram.co.uk. What a fantastic domain name!! And it’s just a small tram that takes you on a 25 minute drive to a neighbouring town. And I can get prices, timetables and all the information I need through their website.

But hang on, let’s get back to the point. Twitter and that two million.

Dell have recently stated that their Twitter account has been directly responsible for sales of $2 million – read about it here : Dell.

Amazing huh?

Not really, you could do it too. I mean, I know you’ll say “Ahhh, but they’re Dell and they sell stuff and we don’t…” Blah blah.

You’re missing out and you’re not being left behind, you’ve been left behind.

I was right. When I ran my magic ranking tool it found hum down at number 67, quite a difference.

“But when I search I’m number five!!” he exclaimed.

“I think you’re suffering from personalisation vanity disorder”, I said. I just made the actual condition up but I’ll stick to it seeing as it kinda rolls off the keyboard.

Anyway, people experiencing PVD do so because they are simply using Google a lot to find their website when they search for certain keywords. For example, if I had, say, a website that described the many ways in which I can clear out my septic tank, I could go and start searching by typing in ’septic tank’. I might find myself down on page seven and I’ll click on it.

Now, Google thinks “hey, he’s found that page so it must be right for him” and out of the goodness of its circuits it begins to bring that particular page up higher in the rankings. You think “yay! I’m doing well” when really you’re only doing well to you.

So, you live under the false assumption that everyone in the world looking for a really top-notch septic tank cleaner dude will be able to find you, but the visits remain low and the phone never rings. You then call up your web designer and say “my site sucks, it’s not converting customers…” And a nasty cycle of blame, counter blame and general nastiness occurs.

What Google’s doing is it is trying to get you the best results for your search and it believes that your site is the best one because you keep clicking on it. But you can fix this disorder (kinda), but simply making sure you are logged out of Gmail or your Google account and clearing down your cookies.

What I do is I use a ‘proxy’ server to make sure I never give Google the chance to get used to me. Works a treat and I always no that the results I get are the real ones, good or bad.

So the moral of this story is this : Don’t rely on the search results you get, they may be completely rubbish.

Public service announcement

If you are affected by any of the items mentioned in this blog, reboot. If it’s still happening, give us a call.

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”.

All my Hubs get broadcast on Twitter (so do  all my posts, ask me about it sometime) and this was no exception so it went out to the great big world.

Now, to explain. Harvesting email addresses is a ‘Bad Thing’. It’s the way that web scraping robots get a lot of their email addresses to be used for spam. They go around, find websites with exposed email addresses and then they add them to their big spam database and send you lots of emails about Viagra and dating sites etc.

My Hub was actually about stopping this from happening on your site not about how to do it, but that didn’t stop someone from ‘un-following’ me on Twitter with the message below:

From @Synthaetica : yes, @andycal , when you post about “harvesting email addresses”, you are not going to be on the follow list. buh-bye.

Hmmmm. Point missed methinks.

At first I was going to post this as a warning with the line “don’t confuse your customers with crazy headlines”, but I’ve changed my mind. It hasn’t actually affected my Twitter follower count (it’s actually gone up), but I would make this comment to those who get upset at headlines in any media – “read the book, not the cover”.

We are surrounded by attention grabbing headlines on both the Internet and in traditional print – but the headline is only an extract of the story itself. You might read the rest of the story and discover something completely different – I know I do all the time.

So is there a moral to this? Well yes – many people go into ‘corporate mode’ and their online persona is completely different to how they behave in real life. It’s a bit like those people you meet down the pub who you share a pint with but then discover they’re complete arses when you phone them at work. This doesn’t wash on the Internet or in social media like Twitter, you need to be natural. If we’re all just keyboard tapping robots churning out what we think people want to here in order to never damage our brand then it would be boring.

The answer therefore is – “Be yourself”. I’m going to keep on writing headlines like this and you should do it too. Here are some of my others:

How to ruin your search rankings quickly

Cloaking your site to destroy your google ranking

I could rename them to something less ‘controversial’, but that would be a cop-out.

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

You see, a small pizza shop in New York has been using it to promote their food in innovative ways and have saw Twitter bring in 15% of one day’s business alone.

How would you react if a free service increased your sales by 15% in one day? I’m guessing you’d be pretty happy – but wouldn’t you have to pay for it?

But that’s not all – this story holds a much more interesting bit of information and I’ll quote it verbatim because I don’t want to get it wrong:

“Every phone call was tracked, every order was measured by where it came from, and it told us very quickly that Twitter is useful,” said Jeff Leach, the restaurant’s co-founder. “Sure, there’s the brand marketing and getting-to-know-you stuff. … But we wanted to know: Can it make the cash register ring?”

They measured everything.

And that’s the whole point of everything to do with marketing. If you do something to market your business and it works, you need to do it more. But how can you do that if you don’t know what works?

You can’t. And it’s no good expecting Google analytics to do it either. Analytics are only any good for people ordering through your site and staying entirley within the digital realm. The minute you leave that, you lose electronic tracking. People might phone you up or send you a letter or email and you’ve got no idea where they came from.

There’s a really easy way to fix this, of course. Ask them. Here is the most powerful marketing technique I have ever given, hold tight.

When a new customer contacts your business, ask the question:

How did you hear about us?

And make a note of it. That’s it.

As Damian McBride discovered to his downfall, you really shouldn’t try to use email to bring down the opposition because you might be the one looking for work.

Technology and its (mis)use seems to be hitting the headlines every other day at the moment and you’d think that the machines have had enough and are wreaking their revenge. For so long we’ve seen technology, computers and mobile Internet as great liberators and freedom givers, but are they actually restricting what we can do and making life far more difficult?

Writing emails has just become too easy. Many people fire them off without even considering the content or what we may be saying too or about other people. The ease with which we can rant at someone or air our grievance without having to face them means that send button can very easily cause offence.

So, how can we ensure that we’re careful with what we say, do and write about and save yourself the embarrassment of having to apologise? Follow a few really easy steps and you’ll be OK:

Remember, email is open, don’t say something you wouldn’t say to everyone.

Unless you encrypt your emails in some way then essentially, they are really easy to intercept and read by someone else on their way to the recipient. Email is the technological equivalent of a postcard and your IT staff can very easily pop in to your account and pick them up.

Do you have your emails hosted by a third party company? It comes through a web server, right? How do you know they’re not taking a copy of each one? It’s possible and it’s easy. Someone with the right password could just access the server and read everything you’re saying about them.

Never, ever, ever say something in an email that is disparaging about someone else. Just don’t do it. I have a rule – don’t disrespect anyone through email be it a customer, a colleague or an employee. It’s far too easy for them to read it and get upset. Moreover, your email to another person about someone else could be seen as bullying – want to be on the wrong end of a harassment trial? Exactly.

Delay your email – think before you send

Add a mail rule to your sent items that puts a five minute delay on each email. Yes, this annoying if you’re trying to send something quickly but it can also save your bacon. Outlook makes this really easy, just do it.

Never blind copy

Why would you BCC anyone? What’s the point? I’ve had this happen to me so many times in the past that I can say from first had what an absolute danger it can be. For some reason those who use the BCC function seem to think that by ‘letting someone in’ on the conversation that the original recipient doesn’t know about will somehow give them some brownie points.

Not so. A work colleague from years back decided to blind copy my boss in on some emails that he was sending to me, berrating my customer relationship technique (I always thought it was good to be nice to customers, he thought otherwise). Because I knew the power of email, every single one of my responses was measured and very carefully written – I could see this could end in tears.

I didn’t have to worry. My colleague had sealed his own fate and was now wrestling with a P45.

In summary, email is dangerous – be careful what you say and who you say it to and you’ll be OK, but if you get angry in an email and begin to send the flames of anger across the Internet, don’t be surprised when someone pulls you up on it.

You see, no matter what it is you’re selling, if you really want to make a difference to your website ranking for a particular keyword, you need to do it using in-bound links. Get some good soul to link their website to you and blam- instant recognition in the good ‘ole search engines.

If you do this well and use some clever keywords, then you can beat those low-lifes who see fit to fill their website with hidden text. Not only that, you’ll probably knock them out of the top ten, so how to do it?

OK, it’s easy. Take this keyword ‘Carlisle Shredder‘ – this should get us a good ranking for the words ‘Carlisle Shredder’ because it uses the keywords I want my page to be found for and if I can get it on a highly PR ranked site, I’ll get plenty of link juice.

But what if the page I’m linking to doesn’t have the keywords on it? Well, it’ll be harder, but as inbound links means more than on site keywords (in the grand scheme of things), it probably won’t matter.

Thing is, you need a balance. Stuffing a page with keywords is a bad idea not just because it looks rubbish, but because you’re concentrating your efforts on one aspect of SEO. Turns out to be the wrong one too.

Still think you shouldn’t be on the Internet?

In a press release today, we hear:

Toys’R'Us has reportedly paid $5.1m (£3.6m) for the Toys.com domain name, hinting at a deeper commitment to online retailing for the toy giant.

Would you believe it? Well yes, I would.

You see more and more businesses are seeing the decline of traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ business as digital media takes over. It’s happening more and more and the current recession is accelerating it. As companies look to reduce costs, they are seeing that the online route is safer, cheaper and more efficient. No other medium is so quick to adapt and yet so cheap – it’s changing the landscape forever.

So what can you do about it? Well, you don’t need to spend a fortune on a domain name to get going on the web – you just need to do something, but you need to do it now.

Compared to bricks and mortar, setting up a business on the Internet is inexpensive and you can test the water without going into massive debt. But you can also adapt. Add pages here, alter images there – you can out manoeuvre, outwit and out sell traditional business for a fraction of the cost.

Interested?