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.
Website Customization: What can we do? August 29, 2008
Posted by Virtual Assistant in Virtual Services, entrepreneur, small business, solo professional, solopreneur, web design.Tags: internet design, web customization, web design, website design
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Nowadays, in this trendy world, people get very uptight when they do not look entirely presentable. This would also be the case in web designing.
Every individual would definitely want their website to look good, if not, to the best they can. Here are a few things we could look out for when wanting to create a professional looking webpage.
Color Schemes and Themes.
When designing, always choose matching colors. An example of a matching color would be to have a dark background, with visible words and designs. With the dark theme, try not to mix too many bright colors into the design. What we should NEVER do, is to mix two very different colors, such as purple and yellow. Now, of course, it would depend on the purpose of the website, but those two colors are too striking for one who wants it to look more professional.
Themes must always suit the company or rather, the organization / etc. If the website was made to cater for a food company, it would be wise to stick to that particular category, rather than to revert to a different theme, such as machinery.
Fonts should be used in regard to the formality of the website. A simple sans-serif font would suffice in most cases. Exceptional cases such as design and art groups might want to use fanciful designs and fonts. Of course, that’s only if you know what you’re doing.
Finally, we must always try to think of our visitors, see the way they see. The resolutions and file sizes of the pictures must not be too large in terms of size. This is to allow maximum compatibility and cater our visitor’s needs.
So, planning is something we should always do, before attempting something.
Reducing Website Load Time Through Image Optimization August 2, 2008
Posted by Virtual Assistant in Interent Marketing, Marketing, Virtual Services, Web Marketing, small business, solo professional, solopreneur, web design.Tags: graphics, images, media, web design, website
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Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a large portion of the web’s population is still running on good old dialup connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you’re designing your website, and a very major consideration we have to make for dialup users is the loading time of your website.
Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly large images on your website, and it is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.
You should also go to a greater length and optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. What I really mean is to use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance.
If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the “quality” of the JPEG image — normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image’s file size.
On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in GIF format — the image editing software clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!
Search Engine Friendly Pages July 28, 2008
Posted by Virtual Assistant in SEO, Virtual Services, web design.Tags: search engine, SEO, seo tactics, web design
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There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.
Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.
If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.
Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.
Stop using wrong HTML tags like <font> to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.
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.
Free Virtual Assistant Test Drive… July 11, 2008
Posted by Virtual Assistant in Administrative Assistant, Fun Stuff, Marketing, Productivity Coaching, Virtual Admin, Virtual Services, entrepreneur, small business, solo professional, solopreneur, virtual assistance, virtual assistant.Tags: free virtual assistant, marketing services, VA, virtual assistance, virtual assistant, virtual assistant services, virtual assistants
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I cannot wait for the 16th. I am going on a very much needed vacation!
Just thinking about being in the sun by the pool has totally inspired me to be giving! So for a limited time I am offering a fabulous deal…
FREE Virtual Assistant
But you have to hurry because it will only be available in August 2008!
If you have always wanted to try out a virtual assistant or just have some extra tasks you haven’t been able to complete, get them done for FREE!
In August you can Test Drive our services! When you purchase just 2 hours of administrative or light marketing services you will receive 2 hours FREE! Now that’s buy one get one!
Our usual Test Drive is great but you have to buy five hours in order to get your free 2 hours – I told you I was feeling generous!
Visit us today and fill out the form on our contact page to inquire about this specific Test Drive program!
http://www.ondemandvirtualservices.com/contact.htm
