Increase Your Sales… September 11, 2008
Posted by Virtual Assistant in Digital Coaching, Fun Stuff, Interent Marketing, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Productivity Coaching, Virtual Services, Web Marketing, entrepreneur, small business, solo professional, solopreneur.Tags: customer thinking, customer thoughts, customers, free report, henry pellerin, increase sales, Marketing, sales, sales success, selling, success, vantaedge
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In the Mind of the Customer
Have you ever wished you could understand how your customers think? After all, how much easier would it be to generate business and how much more value could you provide to your customers?
Henry Pellerin, has graciously provided some great, eye-opening information about learning how to understand your customers and build effective long-term relationships with your customers.
In case you don’t know Henry, he is the President of VantaEDGETM where he helps companies dramatically improve their sales. What is interesting about Henry is that he is not some sales guru that is untouchable. In fact, quite the opposite, he actually gets out in the trenches. He feels that is the best way to truly be able to understand and develop programs that help people.
When you visit this website you will see a f*ree video that describes some statistics on what customers, business owners, and buyers are saying about you.
There is also a free report that provides a few valuable tips to help you understand your customers and build long-term relationships so you can:
- be more effective at sales and business development – more sales with less effort.
- understand customers better – to have customer relationships that pay and last a life-time
- see the importance of selling value instead of competing on price – understanding how to effectively communicate value
I think you will find this information very valuable.
Oh and I almost forgot to mention that Henry also put together some case studies of sales professionals, business owners, and coaches that explain the details on how they have used this information to increase their business.
Who Is Your Website Audience? July 25, 2008
Posted by Virtual Assistant in Digital Coaching, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Productivity Coaching, Virtual Services, Web Marketing, entrepreneur, small business, solo professional, solopreneur, web design.Tags: web design, website, website audience, website visitors
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Understanding the type of people who visit your site is a very important task because you can use that information to enhance your site to suit them. As a result, you will gain more loyal returning visitors that come back again and again for more.
What is the age level and what kind of knowledge does your audience have? A layman might linger around a general site on gardening, but a professional botanist might turn his nose at the very same site. Similarly, a regular person will leave a site filled with astronomy abstracts but a well educated university graduate will find that site interesting.
Take your audience’s emotional state into consideration when building your site. If a very irritated visitor searches for a solution and comes across your site, you will want to make sure you offer the solution right up front and sell or promote your product to him second. In this way, the visitor will put his trust in you for offering the solution to his problems and is more likely to buy your product when you offer it to him after that.
When you design the layout for your site, you have to take into account the characteristics of your audience. Are they old or young people? Are they looking for trends or are they just looking for information served without any icing on the cake? For example, introducing a new, exciting game with a simple, straightforward black text against white background page will definitely turn prospects away. Make sure your design suits your site’s general theme.
Try to sprinkle colloquial language in your sites sparingly where you see fit and you will create a sense that your audience is on common ground with you. This in turn builds a trusting relationship between you and your audience, which will come in useful should you want to market a product to your audience.
Google Learns to Crawl Flash Sites!!!!! July 2, 2008
Posted by Virtual Assistant in Interent Marketing, Internet Marketing, Web 3.0, web design.Tags: adobe flash, crawling sites, flash, flash graphics, google, Google crawlers, search engines
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I am soo excited about this news! If you have any sort of flash on your site you will be excited too! Check out the post I read…
We’ve received numerous requests to improve our indexing of Adobe Flash files. Today, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins—software engineers on our indexing team—will provide us with more in-depth information about our recent announcement that we’ve greatly improved our ability to index Flash.
Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now?
We’ve improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.
Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.
In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.
Q: What about non-textual content, such as images?
At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.
Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.
Q: How does Google “see” the contents of a Flash file?
We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can’t tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm’s effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library.
Q: What do I need to do to get Google to index the text in my Flash files?
Basically, you don’t need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability (see next question).
That said, you should be aware that Google is now able to see the text that appears to visitors of your website. If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a “copyright” or “loading” message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to us.
Q: What are the current technical limitations of Google’s ability to index Flash?
There are three main limitations at present, and we are already working on resolving them:
1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.
We’re already making progress on these issues, so stay tuned!
Building a Website? Here are Important Rules to Design By… March 13, 2008
Posted by Virtual Assistant in Internet Marketing, Marketing, Virtual Services, Web Marketing, small business, virtual assistant, web design.Tags: flash, how to use flash graphics, web design, website design, website rules, website tips
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Whether you are designing your own website or looking to outsource the design there are important rules to design by. Extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.
1) Do not use stand alone splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page. If you have a flash movie use it as a brochure like I do in my website check it out here: http://www.ondemandvirtualservices.com/about.html
2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements
Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.
3) Have a simple and clear navigation
You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.
4) Have a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “jump ship”!
5) Avoid using audio on your site
If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine. I have audio on my site however there are controls at the bottom to
Auto Responder Two Step! March 5, 2008
Posted by Virtual Assistant in Digital Coaching, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Productivity Coaching, Web Marketing, small business.Tags: auto responder, emarketing, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Web Marketing
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What would happen if you combined both of these powerful ideas? A nifty and thrifty two-step.
Try this two-step tip:
1. Collect leads with your auto responder. Ask for mailing addresses and telephone numbers, too, for additional ways to follow up with each person. When you download the e-mail digest of everyone’s e-mail addresses and other information from those who requested additional information from your auto responder, follow up multiple ways. Send postcards. Call. Mail sales letters and other promotional pieces.
2. Publish a price list of all the products and services that you offer in an insert, direct marketing package and / or .pdf to be made available via auto responder. You could also include order forms, product descriptions, and other sales material. Then send to the people in #1 above with monthly updates, announcements of new sales and products / services, and a request for referrals. So why not improve your closing ratio and reach out even further at the same time? Just do the two-step!
