10 Most Effective Questions for Take-Action Testimonials

Client testimonials can make or break a web site. They are a vital factor in establishing a relationship of trust with new visitors to your site. Visitors want to see that others just like them have hired you or purchased your products and have successfully overcome some hurdle or some issue. Better yet, when the testimonials specifically note how the client’s life or business has been enhanced by buying your product or service, the visitor then begins to believe that it will help her overcome a similar issue, as well.

Several years ago I updated one of my sites. I continued to get phone calls from potential clients who wanted to hire me, but the calls were much different than I had gotten previously. The difference was that I spent the duration of the phone call in sales mode to convince them to hire me, which is something I hate to do. I’d never had to do that before. Typically when someone would call me, they were already sold on the concept of hiring me and just wanted to know when we could get started.

I racked my brain to try and figure out what in the world was going on and what had changed with these prospects. Suddenly it hit me that in the update of my site, my client testimonials had gotten lost in the process and weren’t on the new site. This gave me the motivation I needed to get additional testimonials from satisfied clients and determine how to best display those testimonials for maximum impact. Once I added those to my new site, things returned to normal and those rave reviews did all of my selling for me.

So, now you know that testimonials can serve as an important sales tool on your web site. How do you go about getting testimonials that say something more compelling than, “Jane is great to work with!”, which is useless for all practical purposes.

Here are ten questions you can ask your clients to get results-oriented testimonials for your online business:

1. What factors made you to choose my business to assist you with ?


2. What were your preconceived notions about using . For example, “What were your perceptions about working with an accountant before we started?”


3. How has that perception changed since you hired me/bought my product?


4. What do you like most about working with me/using the product?


5. Did you expect it would work as well as it did?


6. Did you have any objections/hesitations before you decide to hire us/buy the product? If so, what were they? How did we overcome your hesitation and objections?


7. What are the three biggest benefits of working with us/using the product? OR How has your life changed/things changed since you began using our service/product? Please be as specific as possible (i.e. we increased sales by 25% in 3 months; I lost 15 pounds in 20 days; I doubled my income last year). You may also want to ask this as a before/after question, i.e. “How are things different now after hiring us than they were before you hired us?”


8. If you were to recommend me to a colleague, friend, or business associate, how would you describe the way I provided my service to you (or, the way I helped you achieve a certain result)?


9. Is there anything else you’d like to add that I haven’t yet asked about?


10. Can I share this information in our marketing materials?

If you don’t have any client testimonials on your site, it’s not to late to go out and solicit a few. Use some or all of the questions noted above to increase the trust visitors have in your services and products and increase your sales dramatically!

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This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com

Your Good Reputation and How to Market It

To make your business grow in the right way, many things have to be taken into consideration. Marketing and advertising your products and services are the most important. Without developing and implementing intelligent brand marketing and promotional strategies, it will be impossible to see an increase in you customer base.

Marketing is how you let people know about your products and services. Obviously, the quality of your products and services makes people come back over and over again. However, you need to do something to get new customers and that is where using different marketing strategies lends a helping hand.

Reputation marketing is one technique that can create an impact. According to this marketing strategy, you get more customers when others know about your reputation. This is another way of saying that reputation drives word-of-mouth marketing.

A good reputation is the single most valuable asset your company can have. Knowledge and experience are high on the list, but both of those qualities can be bought – you can always hire smart and experienced people to help you. A good reputation can take a long time to earn but can be lost in a moment.

As you gain a body of satisfied customers, your reputation will grow naturally. Internet reputation management will help you protect your good name online.

For the online portion of your business, you’ll have to market your products in a slightly different way than for a brick and mortar business. It is important for all business enterprises with an online presence to pay attention to search engine optimization. If you can’t do it yourself, you may want to hire qualified SEO service professionals to make specific changes to your website so it will be easier to access the site to purchase products or services. These optimizers are the people who can help you with Internet marketing and reputation marketing. Using a qualified, professional SEO service to establish a strong online presence is always beneficial to a website.

Article marketing is another way of promoting your website and products. This can build your reputation as well. If you write articles with quality information that people are searching for and submit them to directories, you will become a known expert. This will give you and your business the credibility to compete in your business arena. It will also let you gain trust with potential customers. If they read your articles and like them, they will be less hesitant in buying products or services from you.

Here are some tips to get more out of article marketing.

Content

Content is all-important. People go to the Internet for information; they don’t want to read a sales pitch. If your articles have valuable information, people will trust and value your opinions and maybe head to your website when they want to buy. Keep to the point in your articles – brevity is best. Consider all the ways you can approach your topics for a good variety of articles. Organize your content with bullets, numbers or headings to help get your point across and make your articles more readable. And, last but not least, make sure you have a strong title that will grab readers’ attention.

Keywords and Resource Box

Before setting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, do a little research on using keywords and phrases. See what words you would type into a search engine to find information that your target audience would want. You can use these words in your article, but don’t go overboard or your article will sound artificial.

The resource box at the end of your article is the place where you can put a link back to your website. This is where you can make your sales pitch, describe your website and link back to it.

Proofread and Publish

Proofread everything. If the content you send out to represent yourself is sloppy, with spelling and grammatical errors, it will reflect badly on you, tarnish your reputation and by association, your products or services. If you aren’t a good proofreader, find some friends and listen to their comments.

Publishing your article on your website will strengthen the content of your site and will build your credibility. You can also send out your articles to online article directories. You can even cross-link by placing links in your articles to other articles that you’ve written.

Yet another way to promote your website and gain a good reputation is by using Social Media Marketing. Visit forums and discussion boards and actively participate in the discussions. You want to try to keep up with your participation; showing up and then vanishing can hurt your reputation. Make sure you include a link to your website or email in your postings. And always observe proper etiquette.

The bottom line is that your reputation is the biggest asset you have. If you do not have good reputation, it is impossible to get any success in business. People don’t like losing their money, and that is the reason they research before choosing any particular company.

If you have enough content conveying valuable information to potential buyers, you will always be able to see an improvement in your business. So, always consider the option of reputation marketing. You can either handle the marketing on your own or you can go with a professional company for assistance. It doesn’t matter what you choose as long as you stay aware of your online reputation and use it to your advantage.

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This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com

Keys To Great Email Strategy

The foundations of strategy don’t change, but transferring it to email require a different level of thinking these days. I was teaching my daughter backgammon and talking about the strategy of the game. She very simply said, “My strategy is to win.” After laughing, I said “Winning isn’t a strategy, it’s a result.” But she had a good point; we seem to think very cause and effect in our business. We either think too narrowly in determining what winning means — or we think so long-term that we lose sight of the strategic things that really worked.

Strategy to me is an evolving thing that includes establishment of goals, objectives, tactics, and an iterative methodology that allows you to create dimensional approaches across many segments, products and channels.

To be successful in email strategy doesn’t start with a communication strategy. It starts with a framework for how you’ll make decisions. Here are some elements that should be included in this framework:

1. What are your monetary goals and objectives for your program, and how do they change by segment and/or product mix? This isn’t just a revenue view; it’s a profit view, a cost of reach, direct and indirect value of response, and the variables associated with the cost of running your program. These are all critical levers you’ll have to make decisions on “in-motion.”


2. What are the consumer actions and motivators that drive a purchase decision? Not just, why do they buy? But, what motivates them to buy, what type of information do they need in what part of the lifecycle? How does it evolve by segment? What type of support does your site, call center, or sales force play in this? What are the tasks your customer must take to complete a purchase — and how does your operations support those?


3. What competitive considerations are important to your business — and how do they impact the ways your customers make decisions? This isn’t as simple as saying, we offer a better product or our competitors offer a competitive product cheaper. You must develop a strategy that can react quickly to market conditions and competitive promotions and adjust to consumer demands. How will you gather this competitive insight, consumer response and make decisions on this information? It’s critical that you set some business rules upfront for how you will react to competitive considerations. This includes creating “and/IF” scenarios and outcomes. If you don’t create strategy around this, you will find yourself in reaction mode without well-thought-out plans, ultimately distracted from your program and strategies.


4. How you create customer segments is critical to effective strategy. You’ll quickly find that if you make it too complex, you’ll never develop a complete strategy that is doable. It’s critical that you create actionable segments that can be catered to in-program. Just because you can create dynamically driven segments and event-driven communications doesn’t mean you will have the time or resources to truly optimize all the segments. Your strategy should define the core primary and secondary segments and prioritize each. I typically put them into “high value,” “low value” and “invest” categories, allowing for variations in approaches and techniques.


5. Lastly, your framework should include simple hypothesis-driven testing. Sounds simple: You want to learn something, so you test it and get a result. But anyone who’s worked in this space long enough knows that test results are rarely “pure” and rarely tell a complete story. At best they inform direction, not tactics. Your strategic testing framework should include how often you’ll test, what hypothesis you want to solve, and what are the actions you’ll take once you’ve proven or disproven this thinking. (it may be frequency, it may be price sensitivity, types of communications that drive what actions etc..). It’s critical that you lay out this framework early in the year. If you wait till the campaign brief to form thoughts around testing, you’ll end up learning little, creating unneeded complexity and generally confused about what works.

Strategy is something that needs investment and fresh perspective. I’ve seen lots of tactics, some that worked and some that didn’t — but I’ve seen very few strategic plans that were set up properly for email marketing or eCRM. With a well-planned strategy, you’ll see fewer and fewer obstacles. “Obstacles are those fearful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals” — and goals begin with a foundational strategy.

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This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com

Increase Your Sales With Blog Marketing

A savvy and free way to increase your business sales is through blog marketing. No matter what business you’re in, you can increase your business with a focused blog marketing campaign. You may shy away from blog marketing because you feel that you might not be a good writer, or simply don’t like to write. This is understandable. But the truth is that many blog marketers nowadays don’t even write their own content. They pay someone else to do it.

In fact, you can pay someone else to write dozens of articles to keep your blog going. You can come up with ideas if you want to, but you can just as easily give your writers a broad general topic idea and have them come up with streamlined topics for blog entries. The best course of action is truly up to you, but paying writers to craft your blog entries is not expensive and may save you trouble in the long run.

Once you’ve determined how your blog will be written, the next thing you must do is focus on the keywords that your blog will include. There is a lot of information out there on keyword research and niche marketing but, in essence, what you want to do is find keywords that are searched highly and don’t have a lot of competition. Competition means that there are a lot of other pages that come up when you search under that keyword.

You want to have less than 30,000 pages of competition in the Google search results in order to determine that a keyword is viable. And you want to use a keyword tool like the one on Wordtracker to determine how many searches the term receives per day. Go for keywords that get close to or over 100,000 searches with very little competition. This way, you have a really good chance to get to the top of the search engines with your blog.

The reason blog marketing is so effective is because blog marketing allows you to provide the ultimate content that the search engine spiders are looking for when they crawl webpages. The search engine spiders are looking for pages that provide content which contains a fair number of the keywords that the Internet user is looking for, along with information that the user might find useful.

The search engines know that readers don’t just want a blatant sales pitch all the time. They want the reader to get the most accurate information for his or her needs.

Blogs provide information about products and services that customers might enjoy. Some of them contain reviews, opinions or instructions. There are no hard and fast rules for blogging.

Blogs are not ecommerce sites and are, therefore, viewed favorably by many of the search engines. You want to make sure, however, that you don’t have too much keyword-density and too little real content filling up your blog. You want to have truly useful articles that people will find interesting.

One of the wonderful things about the Internet is that it can provide people with informative content that makes an interesting read. If you can become an information resource in your field, people will be more likely to buy from you. Why? Because they will trust you. They might not buy from you right away, but they will probably patronize you at some point in time.

The audience you build with your blog can help you in a number of ways. Some people will, of course, purchase from you. Others may help build your business by telling a friend, mentioning you on their website, or promoting your products or services on their blog.

Another important step in blog marketing is determining where you want to host your blog. There are many options and some of them are free. If you like, you can also build your blog within your website, but then you won’t be taking advantage of an external link that your blog could provide to your website.

After you set up your blog, make sure your blog meta tags and titles are optimized to the best of your ability, just like your website. You may also want to add media, like videos. This can make your content more diverse and interesting to the search engines, as well.

Submit your blog to social marketing sites every day and submit unique keyword optimized articles to some of the most popular article directories every week. Eventually people will begin to read your blog and if they find the information useful, they will want to know more about your business.

Blog marketing, used in conjunction with many of the other online marketing strategies, is a valuable way to increase the public’s view of your brand, and hopefully your sales.

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This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com

Discover the Answers to the Top 10 SEO Questions

Any type of online business will strongly benefit from a few SEO techniques. However, everyone and their brother has advice on how to do it. All this 'expert' advice can make the simple task of optimizing your site incredibly confusing. Here are some straightforward answers to the most common SEO questions.

1. What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. A search engine is a tool many internet users use to find sites that are relevant to their needs. The three biggies when it comes to search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are however, hundreds of search engines available to internet users. Search engines work by sending out spiders to crawl through the World Wide Web and gather information. If you have the information they're looking for, in the places they are looking, they'll find you and place you in their results when a person is looking for your information.

The task of understanding what search engines are looking for and putting it in the right places on your website and in your content, is the essence of search engine optimization. So now you might be asking...what do search engines look for and where do they look for it? The answer is keywords and links. Keywords in your html coding, keywords on your webpage content, keywords in your content, and the number of incoming links you have to your website.

2. How Important is SEO?

Let's just put it this way. What's better, a few visitors who stumble upon your website or hundreds of visitors that go to your website with the direct intention of learning more or making a purchase?

With more and more people searching and shopping online, getting on the first page or two of the search engine results can mean the difference between keeping your day job and becoming an internet millionaire.

3. What are Text Links?

Links are just one of the tools you can use to increase your search engine optimization. The more quality links you have, the better your search engine ranking will be. Text links are links that contain only text. Wikipedia is a great place to examine internal text links. The links are contained within a sentence and when a reader clicks on them they are taken to a different page on the same website. The kind of text links you're looking for will be text links that will take readers from your article, ebook, or web copy to your website.

An excellent tool to generate incoming links is to write copy for online audiences like article directories, blogs, and ezines and insert text links in the copy. Webmasters will link to the content and thus to your site. Additionally, when you allow free reprints of your copy and provided the links are maintained, you're encouraging links to your website.

4. What are Link Farms and Link Exchanges?

Search engines don't accept just any old link. The link has to be from a relevant and quality company. This means you don't want to participate in link farming. If a search engine suspects your links to be lacking, they'll actually penalize you. Link farming or link exchanging is essentially the process of exchanging reciprocal links with Web sites in order to increase your search engine ranking. A link farm is a Web page that is nothing more than a page of links to other sites. Stay away from link farms. When you generate a link from another site, it had better be relevant and coming from a real web site.

5. What is Duplicate Content?

The definition of duplicate content is web pages that contain substantially the same content. Search engines will penalize you for this. How do you avoid duplicate content? Don't publish the same article in several locations. There are many tools available online to help you re-write your content so that it is 30%, 40%, and even 50% different. However, the best way to avoid duplicate content is to simply write new content.

6. How do I Find the Right Keywords?

There are several steps to finding the most profitable keywords. The first step is to generally do a bit of brainstorming and come up with a list of keywords you think people will use to find your products. The next step is to research supply and demand for those particular keywords. Supply means how many other websites are using those same keywords and demand is how many people are looking for those particular keywords.

The key is to find keywords with high demand and relatively low supply. There are many effective and useful keyword tools to help you find this information and to generate keyword ideas. Once you decide on a few keywords, it may be useful to do a bit of testing before you commit to them.

7. How do I Optimize My Web Pages?

Placing your keywords in the right location is a good start to optimizing your web pages. Search engines look to the headings, subheadings, domain name, and title of your website. They also look in the content on your page and primarily focus on the first paragraph.

Try to get a domain name with your primary keyword included. When you include your keyword in your URL it tells the search engine spiders immediately what your site is about.

Title Tag. Your title tag is the line of text that appears on search engine results pages that acts as a link to your site. This is a crucial element of your webpage as it describes to your visitors what your page is about.

If you view your source code, your title tag will look something like this:

Keeping your title tags brief, descriptive, up to date, and keyword rich will help to increase the relevance of your site in the eyes of the search engines, as well as giving your potential visitors a good idea of what they can expect from your site.

Meta Tags have lost their importance to the search engines, however, it is still helpful to place your keywords in your meta tags. In your source code they look something like this:

8. Do I Need to Submit My Site to The Search Engines?

The simple answer is - no. Search engine spiders are always out there doing their job and collecting information. Every time you update your website, add content, or change your keywords, the search engines capture the information and record it. However, if you want to be listed in a directory, like the DMOZ Open Directory Project, then you will need to submit to those.

9. What are Spiders?

Search engine spiders are also called web crawlers or bots. They're basically automated programs which scan websites to provide information to search engines often for the purpose of indexing or ranking them.

10. How does Content Help My SEO?

Content is one of the best tools to improve your search engine ranking. It is a great place to emphasize keywords, encourage linking to your site, and increase traffic. The key to content is to make sure you're offering quality content and you're updating your website and your content frequently. Content can be provided in many forms including:

• Blogs

• Forums and chat rooms

• Articles

• Reviews

• Case studies

• Reports

• How to guides

• Tutorials

• e-books and much more.

By Jeremy Gislason (c) 2009

Learn How to Make Money Online With no False Promises

If you want to learn how to make money online the right way, with no hype and no false promises, then you will have to make the effort to ignore all these seemingly unbelievable offers that are being made to you. If you have recently lost your job, then you are vulnerable, and prey to every shark in the internet waters – and there are lots of them.

I know what it is like because I was like you. I lost my job, and tried to make it online but found it very hard. I spent a lot of money trying to learn how to make money online: one lump sum of $6,500 to be taught what I now know was elementary stuff. I was taken for a ride, and when I eventually found out that the Corey Rudl that I paid for this was one of the most well respected internet millionaires online, I was disillusioned.

These guys have no shame. They are still at it. I have just been offered an unbelievable opportunity, only about 40 slots left, to learn how to make $300 a day that can expand to many times that. The guy selling his ideas that made him so much money is doing it because he wants to ‘give something back’. Why do I find it difficult to believe that?

Why not just carry on earning his ‘many times’ 300 bucks a day? Why go to the bother of having a website designed and everything else involved in marketing his offer when he is already earning at least $30,000 a month if we are to believe him? Personally I am sick of it all, and after a few years in this business trying to make a living have concluded that they are all in it together; there is a clique of well-known names, and I know them all; they help each other to screw the rest of us.

You won’t learn how to make money online from these guys. The way that I did it was to teach myself, and then to figure out what these guys were actually doing. Many of them were software engineers, designing software to carry out keyword research, or to enable you to check your website statistics or something else in that vein. Others were ex-sales guys who knew how to lie, and yet others would come up with a good idea, run it to death till it was no longer working, and the sell it to us showing how much money they made from it – only it couldn’t work any more because:

• Google had banned it, or


• Clickbank had banned it, or


• Technology and rules had changed and it was no longer any good.

These are the only circumstances under which these guys are going to give you their internet secrets. That’s a fact. So what is the best way to learn how to make money online? Honest truth? There is no best way. I have found that there are several ways, and they can be made to work, but they won’t earn you 300 bucks a day.

Perhaps two or three together might, and if you used each of them you could make a good living online. It’s the old saying: make $20 a day from one website and all you need do is to do the same with another 50 websites and you have a grand a day. Sure – only the guys that say that aren’t doing it. So why not if it’s so easy?

You can learn how to make money online if you are prepared to accept that you won’t do it overnight. If you are prepared to learn the groundwork, and then build up from a solid foundation, it is possible to make a good living. That’s what I found, and part of the way that I do that is what I am doing right now: writing this article. Article writing, article marketing, call it what you want. It doesn’t matter. It lets me advertise free.

That might not seem a lot to you right now, but it will, believe me. Free advertising is worth every penny you pay for it, and that’s not all that there is to online success. It’s taking every opportunity that comes, knowing what to do with it and making the most of it. You don’t have to make a fortune from every opportunity, but you should remember what I said earlier: make $20 dollars from one website. . .

Suddenly it looked possible to me, and do you know what the major factor in all this was? Education! I don’t mean college education, though I have that. I mean learning how to get things working online. How the internet works. How the World Wide Web works, and how to use what I learned about marketing and advertising and designing websites to actually sell stuff online.

Not just my writing skills that I did as an article ghostwriter, but how to use the online tools that are available free to everybody, and the genuine information available, not that trash given to us by millionaires that feel like screwing us for another million. How to use all that to make money online.

It can be done. You can learn how to make money online. I had my fill of false promises and being sold redundant software and redundant ideas. I did it and so can you. You might just survive with your online home business, but you must learn the basics – that’s where the strength of your home business will come.

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This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com

5 Tips for Saving Money on Your PPC Campaign

Do you feel like you are spending a lot of money on PPC but that you are getting little in return? For small business owners and internet entrepreneurs, spending even a couple thousand dollars on PPC can feel like an incredible amount of money. To ensure that your ads actually bring your business results and to make the most out of your PPC investment, implement some of these money-saving tips.

1. Make sure your ads are geographically targeted. If you are a dry cleaner in Brooklyn, only place ads for people in your local area. This will help to lower ad impression, raise CTR, and give you better ROI and a higher quality score.


2. Use the negative keywords match feature to your advantage. When you use the negative keywords match feature, you can filter out keywords for which you do not want your ads to show. The words “free” and “cheap” are common elements of negative keyword phrases. For example, if you sell web templates, surely you don’t want people searching for “free web templates” to click on your ad. You will have to pay for those extra clicks and all of those unwanted impressions will lower your CTR. Use the negative keywords match feature to filter out such negative keywords. However, you may find that some negative keywords would be of benefit to your campaign. Go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, choose “negative” in the drop down menu under Match Type, and determine which negative keywords may serve you.


3. Create separate ad groups, ads, and landing pages. Rather than targeting a slew of keywords with one ad and one landing page, group similar keywords in individual ad groups, create individual ads for them, and then point them to your designated landing pages. By doing so, you can improve your CTR and conversion rates because the landing pages will be more relevant to the terms that users are searching for.


4. Use ad scheduling. Ad scheduling allows you to control the day and time that your ads appear. For example, if your business offers a special Tuesday deal, you can schedule your ad campaign so that your ads promoting the Tuesday deal only show on Tuesdays. Or if you are running your ads 24 hours a day, you might find that by running them only during a certain time frame of the day instead, you get better conversions. Let’s say you have a health website. You will probably get more clicks and conversions in the morning for keywords like, “morning after pill,” “morning sickness,” “morning headache,” and “hangover.”


5. Don’t use broad match. Many people are simply unaware of the different keyword match features that are available in Adwords. By default in an Adwords campaign, your keywords are set as a “broad match.” The problem with broad match is that your ads will show up when people search for different variations of your keywords, even if they are not on your keyword list. Google is likely to consider many words as relevant when they are really not. Use the “phrase” keyword match type to ensure that your ads only show up when people search for the exact keywords on your list.

This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com