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On several occasions I’ve had clients tell me that a telemarketer has called with this promise. “Pay us ($40, $100, 200, etc) per month and we’ll put your website at the top of Google. We have a special relationship with Google. ”

Is this a scam?

It’s generally not a scam in the strictest sense. They aren’t lying, but they do leave out a lot of important facts. Most of these places are using Adwords to promote your business. Adwords allows you to bid on a keyword (choose an amount are willing to pay per person who clicks through to your site) and therefore is called Pay Per Click advertising. Using this system, you can be at the top of Google (the sponsored listings show at the top and on the right), by just paying enough money.

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If you’ve read many marketing books you know the huge number of times a potential prospect needs to be exposed to a marketing message before actually purchasing the advertised product or service. I was reading one of Jay Levinson’s books recently and he said that it takes 9 impressions before someone takes action. Furthermore he says only one in three attempts at making an impression are successful. This means you need to put your message in front of your prospect 27 times.

This got me thinking. Why does it seem like some people just instantly buy? Here’s my BFO (Blinding Flash of the Obvious). The repetition has already taken place before you get there. In other words, through various sources that prospect has already heard many times how much they need what you’re offering.

The trick is tapping into an internal dialog that someone is having. Let me give you a totally self-serving example:

Fred the business owner knows he needs a website. His clients keep asking him if he has one, and everywhere he turns he sees evidence that this is a must. At the same time, he keeps having the same discussion in his head, “Yeah I know I need a website, but I can’t afford it.” Now I come along with a simple marketing message, “Basic Websites Under $500” This instantly presents a potential solution (a scratch for an itch) that he has had for a long time.

If you can craft the right marketing message, the repetition has already been done. You only need to delve into what your customers really need and want, and tap into that inner dialog.

A few months ago, I set a goal to empty my inbox. It all relates to Getting Things Done by David Allen and Inbox Zero.

To make a long story short, I had to process 10’s of thousands of emails. During this exciting work, I figured out something. When you are processing email it’s much easier if you sort by “from” instead of the default of sorting by date. This puts all of the messages from the same people together. This makes it easy to delete a block of spam all from one person (click on the first message, hold down shift, click on the last message, press delete). Additionally, it makes it much easier for reply’s because if someone has sent you multiple questions, you can read all and reply to all in one email.

To sort by from you simply click on the Column Name (in Thunderbird that’s ’sender’, but I believe in Outlook Express it’s ‘from’).

Using this method I’m often able to process a couple hundred emails within 20-30 minutes, including answering several.

I just watched a very interesting video about using videos to promote your business. It’s about an hour long and certainly worth the time. Click here to view it.

I’ve come to understand, as you may, that one of the worst set of data for me to lose would be my email. To that end, I’ve come up with a way to automatically backup all of my email.

I created a new Gmail account just for backups. I forward a copy of all of my email to this account. If I was ever to have a problem, even if I just accidently deleted an email, I can go back and search for it at that Gmail account.

Many hosting companies give you the ability to forward copies of your email to a secondary address. If you’re not sure how to do it, you’ll need to contact your hosting company.

Needless to say, if you host with me, you can ask me.

Squidoo is a very simple way for you to create a site. Since you have control of the page, you can make it about a niche subject and link it to your site. Additionally, you can create as many different pages (they call them lenses) as you want. Check out Squidoo.

Hi,

This week I’d love it if you’d send me some feedback. Have you found any online marketing tools that have really worked well for your business? Are you having trouble figuring out any of the online marketing tools? Click here to contact me and let me know.

Creating an FAQ page is a great way to build credibility into your site, make more sales, and save time.

Do’s

• Include the most common questions you’re asked
• Answer the questions directly
• Add a form where people can ask you questions
• Keep a positive tone

Do Not’s

• Use FAQ’s just for sales, while some questions like, “how are you able to offer…” are acceptable, those questions should be in the minority
• Create an FAQ page with fewer then 5 questions

All and all, an FAQ page is a great tool you can add to your website.

I’m psychic, I can tell you who your best prospects are. Yep, it doesn’t even matter who’s reading this. It’s your existing client base. The people who are already sold on your business are the easiest people to sell to again. Read the rest of this entry »

When the economy goes up, your marketing eforts should go up. Why? Two simple words, market share. If your competitors are cutting marketing dollars, that leaves the door open for you to capture market share.

“Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.” ~Warren Buffett

I can hear you now, “but I don’t have any money.” If you have no cash flow, you must not have much business, so that means you have an abundance of your greatest resource… Time. Invest some time using the free resources on this site.

One last note about marketing in a slow economy, make sure you are testing. Just because you need to market, doesn’t mean that you need to keep spending or start spending, a lot of money on marketing that doesn’t work. The simplest way to test is to ask a simple question, “how did you hear about us?”