The Internet–Love it or hate it, it’s here to stay

If you hate it, get over it! Every day someone tells me

We spent a lot of money on the Internet, and never got any business from it.

I’m sorry someone ripped you off–really I am; but place the blame where it lies, with the ‘expert’ who didn’t get you any customers–not with the Internet!

If you love it, or you just got over hating it, great! Here’s how you use it to get customers:

The new yellow pages; directory, map & all-in-one research tool

Stop for a minute and think about how you use the Internet:

• If you need directions, you don’t get a paper map, you look it up online
• If your toaster breaks, you search for ‘how to fix a toaster’
• If you want to go out for dinner, you search for ‘local restaurant reviews’
• Theater times, ‘local movie times’
• Weekend weather forecast, ‘local weather forecast’

You search for information, not for a sales pitch; your customers are doing exactly the same. If you want to attract people to your website, post useful information, not an online an sales brochure!

While searching for information, users are shown paid advertisements for products and services. These ads are usually related to their search. Ads like these are sold to the highest bidder and you, the advertiser, pay-per-click. Since they go to the highest bidder they’re usually very expensive, so expensive, in fact, that it’s very difficult to run a pay-per-click campaign profitably. Several marketing consultants, myself included, refer to pay per click (ppc) as opium; you can make some useful drugs out of opium, but it’s very likely you’ll get hooked, then it’s a very expensive, hard to break habit. Never use ppc if money is tight! Use ppc only if you have a well funded campaign and need to kick-start it with lots of leads quickly and temporarily.

Being Findable

Once you’ve written useful information and posted it on your website, the search engines will do a good job of categorizing your site and presenting your site to searchers–if, and only if the information is well written and published correctly to your site. That’s a huge if! You must make sure that information can be found once it’s posted.

The Three Biggest Web Page Mistakes

1. Search engines can read text but not graphics. It’s dangerous to build a website that contains too many graphics. Graphics may improve the appearance of your website but it will rank low in search engine results. Adding alternate text to your images does help, but it cannot take the place of good old-fashioned text content on your site. Content is king!
2. Make sure that your website does not have any broken links. Test the status of all your site links to ensure they are functioning; there are tools to make this chore a snap. A website with badly maintained links will not be ranked highly by search engines.
3. Do not create a flash (or similar animated) website. Search engines do not recognize flash any more than they do graphics–less in fact. Graphics and consequently the website will not be ranked on search engine listings. Having the coolest looking site is not always best. Don’t even make an opening animated flash graphic, the search engines will not see the text page that it needs to see. Note: there are exceptions to the ‘no animation’ rule–keep reading.

Error Free (reasonably)

Search Engines are machines, and if you’ve learned anything about these computing machines you’ve heard the expression “Garbage In–Garbage Out.” You must write properly, build the web pages properly, announce the existence of your website properly and attract attention to your site properly. In short, this stuff is harder than it looks! Lots of businesses have awful web sites that attract no customers. If you want a lousy web site that doesn’t attract customers it’s easy, just type ‘free web site’ in any search engine and follow the instructions.

The first trick you’ve already learned; write useful information, not an online brochure. The second trick–well, let’s call in a step, not a trick because there’s really no trick to it. Build or pay for a reasonably attractive site. Now you can do this yourself, for very little money, or you can spend thousands for custom artwork. Notice that I said a “reasonably attractive” site. That’s because unless you are an artist, no one is going to judge the artistic quality of your site–unless it’s really ugly. If you are an artist (photographer, designer, painter, dancer, musician etc.), then yes, it’s important to have a site that reflects your style. But all the rest of us just need a functional site that’s reasonably attractive. You can use traditional web pages, or you can use a blog (web log) if you like. Combining the two is a good, popular choice.

Functionally, sites need to be reasonably error free–not perfect. Perfect is great, but not necessary. There are free web site validation services that will check your code and explain each error. Some errors on a web page is usually OK if the site looks correct on all the major browsers. 100 errors on a page is not acceptable, and there are lots of sites like that. Sites that only look correct on some browsers is also completely unacceptable.

There are some technical aspects that need to be error free as well. Every site should have a machine readable sitemap (usually sitemap.xml) that tells search engines where to find things on your site. Every site should also have a robots.txt file which tells search engines where not to go snooping around. There are meta-tags that need to be correctly formatted, these include things like site and page titles, keywords and descriptions. These absolutely must be done, and done correctly, because they are critical to helping the search engines drive customers to you.

Generate online leads

Find some information you can ‘give away’ on a mailing list, both email and real mail. Get a list of subscribers going. The more valuable your information, the more subscribers you’ll get, and these become your in-house lead list. Start promoting (politely) to these people. Don’t email daily to this list! Monthly is plenty, mail too often and they’ll all unsubscribe. There are services that will handle all the subscription stuff for you, or your webmaster may be able to do it in-house.

Submit Your Site Information

Now that all this is correct, go to each search engine and find-out how they want you to submit your site information. Each site is different, and has their own rules and preferences. Avoid sites that say they’ll submit to 50 or 500 different search engines or directories. There simply aren’t that many useful ones, in fact there are less than half a dozen search engines worth bothering with. The directory listings aren’t much help unless they are in your town or specialize in your field, but those few are worth doing.

Links

The final–but never ending part is to build relevant links to your site. There are hundreds of way to do this:

• Get reviewed by your customers
• Write news releases & articles
• Get your vendors to link to you
• Join trade associations that link
• Join social media sites
• Have all your employees make social bookmarks to your site

You name it, this list is endless–here’s where you creativity and imagination count. You need to build links to keep ahead of the competition on the search engines, not just so that potential customer will stumble upon your site. There is no such thing as “enough” links.

Getting more prospects

There are lots and lots of way to generate prospects and entire schools of thought about qualifying prospects, but we’re going to limit our discussion here to advertising. Most all companies do some form of advertising, and lots of companies do nothing but advertise for new business, so it’s a good place to start our discussion.

Getting more prospects is about one thing, tracking results. You take great care in keeping track of your accounts receivable. You pay a bookkeeper to carefully track each account. You know exactly when their payment is due. You call your customer when they’re late in paying their bill. Unfortunately, most business have no method for tracking their advertising–not even those few companies who ask “how did you hear about us?” That question is pretty useless because customers may tell you that they saw your advertising on TV or the radio or wherever, but fail to mention that it wasn’t why they chose you.

The 80/20 Rule Never Goes Away

Good tracking always has the ability to tell you exactly what route brought them into your business. Why is this so important? That’s easy, you’ve heard of the 80/20 rule; it applies to almost everything, and advertising is no exception. 20% of your advertising produces 80% of your new advertisement-related prospects. That means the other 80% of your advertising is a waste of money! Money you could use to generate explosive growth if you knew where to best invest it. Just imagine how many new customers you’d have if you simply redirected the 100% you are already spending into the 20% of your advertising methods that are actually producing results!

Tracking properly is a bit of work. Do you advertise in more that one section of the yellow pages? A car repair shop might have an ad under Auto Repair, another under Tires, and a third under Wheel Alignment. Simply learning that they found you in the yellow pages is useless, especially in a larger city with a few different competing yellow pages. Grilling your customers won’t work either, tracking must be automatic. One easy way is to stop running the same phone number all over town. Every publication can be given a separate phone number, all of which forward to your “real” phone line. This is not expensive nor complicated, we’re currently paying just $4 per month for each additional fake phone line. Each line lists the Caller ID information for each prospect. This allows us to very simply look-up which customers came-in from which advertisement. If you’re running two ads in each of two different yellow pages, that’s 4 fake phone lines. There is no other way to get so much valuable marketing insight for under 20 bucks a month! Of course you need to track all your ads, not just the yellow pages. This includes your on-line advertising, trade publications, coupon books, TV, radio, etc. Custom Internet landing pages track on-line activity just as easily as the fake phone lines track calls. The only customers that will be less accurate will be the walk-in traffic.

Now that you can easily determine exactly which ads are getting the phone to ring, it’s a simple matter of canceling the unproductive ads & pouring your full advertising budget into the ads that are actually working. Given the 80/20 rule, you could conceivably have five times your current customer volume, that’s right, 500% instantly! Granted, the growth probably won’t be that linear, but would you complain if your business only doubled or tripled?

Slash your advertising by 80% and use the savings to grow your business!

The Big Lie: “Advertising, marketing & sales are all a numbers game”

False! Most companies treat it like a numbers game, but “most companies” fail within two years. When done properly, those numbers can be analysed, refined and predicted. You should be able to look every advertising sales rep in the eye and tell her what your current return on investment is from your existing ads, and explain exactly what response you demand if they want your business–and require that level of performance for payment.

Smaller lies:

“The customers have all disappeared” False! Money is going to be tight for a lot longer than wall street thinks, but the customers are still around.

“Most businesses that fail, do so because they are under capitalised” False! If they successfully opened for business, they had enough capital. Almost all business failures are because they didn’t have enough customers.

“Service industries are immune from these leaner times” False! The same information revolution that has decimated hometown retail is currently sucking all the cash out of the service industries as well. Your customers are going on-line and learning how to fix their own appliances, cars and office equipment. The easy, high mark-up services are vanishing, leaving service professionals to make a living doing the more difficult jobs.

And the sad truth:

“It will never be the same again” True! The ways people shop has changed, not because of the economy (though the economy did speed-up and intensify the process of change), but because of the ease of doing comparison shopping these days. The days of “whatever the market will bear” has gone. From now on you’re going to have to earn whatever you get–let’s start with getting you more customers!.

It wasn’t very long ago that a local company could attract customers by taking-out an ad in the local newspaper or yellow pages. For some of us those days feel like just last week. But if you’ve been panicking over the slowing economy for the last few years, you’re not alone. Sadly you have lots of fellow business owners to commiserate with.

Many business made the wrong marketing choice at the beginning of the recession, stopping promoting their business in order to conserve cash. That was the worst mistake they could make. All you have to do is look around and see how many companies right here in town have closed recently, and you will see the results of conserving your marketing budget during the hard times. You, however, survived. Congratulations!

Since the hard-times lasted longer than most people thought, many businesses have started plowing new hand-fulls of cash into ad campaigns recently. Most are finding the results, well, confusing. The advertising isn’t getting the phone to ring as much as it used to. And the customers are different too:

• They don’t want to come into the store

• They price shop more than ever

• They’re far more likely order from out-of-state, increasingly online.

• They expect you to diagnose their service problem over the phone, or by email; and tell them how to fix it themselves.

How are you supposed to make a living like this? Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about.