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.

We announced last week that our next SEO event will be on the 12 October.

We’ve had some great times at the last few events in Wolverhampton, so now we thought we’d take the show on the road and see how we get on in Birmingham. As soon as I sent an email out we had 10 people book over the following days, so it’s looking like this one will be a full house like the rest.

Here’s the link to book: http://www.callowaygreen.com/seo-birmingham-event/

BUT WE HAVE A SURPRISE!!

If you’re a Midlander (or even if you’re not), you’ll no doubt have heard of the BOSTIN t-shirts created by Donato Esposito.

Well, Donato will be doing a guest post on Social Media for us on the 12th!!

Donato is a social media expert and a special adviser to Digital Birmingham, a Birmingham City Council Initiative which ensures the benefits of digital technologies can be available to all in the city

He started Bostin Group as a way of communicating an optimism and positivity for our local area and has include products including T-shirts, a Blog, online games and also an online Comic which is now in print. His main experience was in using his skills of Social Media and Crowdsourcing to develop Bostin Group with MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and now Twitter.

One of his projects has included an online campaign in Facebook to have a Black Country version and has so far amassed a membership of  over 30,000.

So join us and meet Donato on the 12th at SEO Birmingham!!

(UPDATE.. ONLY 9 PLACES LEFT)

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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..yes.

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…

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A number of times now I’ve met people who tell me that they’re really proud of their ‘number five’ position for a really competitive search term. A couple of months ago it happened and the guy was quite smug. I took a look at his site and thought “there’s no way that bag of crap is number five…”

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

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It’s been a while since we had a competition here at Calloway Green. We’ve been thinking of a good idea for a prize for July and here’s what we came up with.

The BIG Twitter Follow Me Free Logo Design Competition

Catchy eh? We are going to be giving away a logo design for you website. Maybe you’ve been thinking about freshening up your existing logo, maybe you have a new venture that requires a new identity

Want to win one? Here’s all you have to do.

1) Follow @iamchrisgreen on twitter.
2) Simply tweet the following exactly:

“Just entered to win a brand spanking new logo for my business. Just follow @iamchrisgreen and retweet. http://tinyurl.com/nhxfhm”

This contest is open to people anywhere in the world and is free to enter.*

As I write this I am starting with 2,000 followers, we’ll end the competition when I get to 5000 followers. We will then choose one twitterer at random to be the winner.

Such an easy contest to enter!

Good luck!

*Just to clarity, you will get a 1 hour phone call to discuss the logo you require. Then you’ll get 2 variations to choose from and 2 changes to the design to get it right for you. Then you will receive the logo in a pdf, eps and jpg formats to do with as you please.

One of the question I’m always getting asked is “how do I get links to my site”. This is a good question because I’m always banging on about how it’s a great way to get good search results and everyone should be doing it, but some people haven’t yet cottoned on to why it’s good and how it can be achieved quite simply.

So here’s an answer. It’s not the only answer, but it’s one that will get you some great results very quickly and it’s all about taking part..

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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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Social Media is becoming one of the most valuable tools in our marketing arsenal.  It’s a lot easier now to reach our audiences (and target market) in a way that costs a lot less money and builds a lot more trust.

Used well, Social Media tactics can rapidly increase your businesses. However, used badly, it’s going to be a massive a drain on your time.  In some cases, done wrongly, it could even damage your reputation to the extent that it ruins the business.

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