What’s a business owner to do?

Recently there was a news item from the Orlando, Florida area regarding Yellow Pages. What makes an ubiquitous book like the Yellow Pages a news story? Exactly that! They are everywhere! Evidently, at least in the Orlando area, something is going to be done about it.

It doesn’t matter if you are a small business owner or a consumer, you have the same problem. Which book do I use? The consumer is only going to keep so many Yellow Page books and a business can only afford to advertise in a few. Of course both parties are looking for the same thing — Results! Either you want to find what you are looking for in the Yellow Pages you decide to keep - or - you want sales from the book you decided to advertise in.

The interesting part of all this is that many consumers and some very tech savvy business owners have already solved the problem. They stopped using phone directories and have opted for a faster, less expensive option.

What is it?

The Internet! If you go to your favorite search engine and type in the words “yellow pages” you will find over 450,000,000 results. Whatever you want to know about Yellow Pages from online to offline is there. Of course you will find many online Yellow Pages to help you find anything from A to Z in your area also.

If you are a business owner and you are not online with your business now, you should be looking into it immediately. The costs are dramatically lower and if you do it right the results are great. The buzzword that you have to familiarize yourself with is “local search”. What that means is if someone in you area is looking on the Internet they will type in something like “Barber, Specific City, Specific State” and you want your barbershop to come up.

Statistics are now showing that there are more people going to their computers than picking up their Yellow Page Book. Most people will do an online search for products and product reviews before they go to make their purchase locally. Just think if you could be the business that answers their questions, gives them product reviews, and the business where they go to buy what they want.

Orlando, Florida may be on to something. But do we need government in the market telling consumers and business owners how many Yellow Page books they can have? The market is already making its choice. Yellow Page advertising is getting very expensive, and putting an ad in all of the books is impossible. Consumers aren’t using Yellow Pages like they did in the past. So you can bet in the near future you will see many of the Yellow Page books going out of business as business owners go more and more online to attract customers.

The name of the game with Internet Marketing is productivity. Productivity means reaching the greatest number of targeted prospects with the least effort and expense to generate the most sales.

The key to productivity is leverage: expanding your marketing activity with resources and systems that run without your direct effort or excessive involvement.

Developing a Link Partner strategy is one recommended way to leverage your efforts and increase your productivity, although there are numerous additional ways to apply leverage to your Internet business efforts. These may include:

- Advertising in ezines, online forums, websites and other sources

- Participation as a member in online business and marketing forums

- Participation in Social Networking sites

With each of these leveraging systems, it may take some effort and time to get them set up and to begin establishing your website presence.

The advantage to any or all of these systems is that once set up, they will produce results for you with minimal effort and will continue to do so for extended periods of time.

Link Partners are website owners or webmasters with whom you exchange your website link. You will place a link to their site somewhere on your website, and they will place your link somewhere on their site.

Links can be in text ad form or banner form. Links might be included in an article, a site review or a blog post. Or they might be listed in a business services directory. The style or nature of the link exchange should be agreed upon before the links are posted to prevent any misunderstandings or disappointments.

Link Partners may be easy to find, but the real essence of an effective Link Partner strategy is exchanging links with quality websites. That is, sites with a respectable PageRank and who are already attracting the same kind of visitors that you are targeting for your online business.

There are many good web tools available that can be used to check the PageRank of a website. You can do an Internet search for page rank tools.

To find quality sites and to encourage them to want to support your Link Partner strategy, here are some recommended steps:

1) When surfing the Internet, watch for and bookmark sites that you believe are suitable for your purpose. You could also do Internet searches for your keywords, then check out the sites that rate the highest in the search engine results.

2) Once you identify a suitable Link Partner candidate, write a complimentary review for the site and post the review on your website or blog page.

3) Contact the webmaster or owner of the reviewed site, advise them of the review and give them permission to publish the review on their site along with a link pointing back to your site as the review source. As an alternative to publishing the review on their site, they can simply include a link that points to the review on your site.

You can apply this Link Partner strategy to any number of partners you choose, keeping in mind that the more link partners you have, the more effectively you will be able to leverage your efforts and expand your reach.

Productivity is the name of the game. Increased sales are the goal. An effective Link Partner strategy can be the ideal means to achieve the desired end.

Making email opt-in pages more effective is most important yet all too often overlooked and forgotten task of a company’s marketing agent whose job is to increase sales through email contacts. Design and presentation of the opt-in pages determines the quality of email lists and the rate of company growth in addition to meeting or raising subscriber’s expectations. All of these in turn lend a helping hand to the desired email performance.

The first and foremost step toward maximizing the opt-in pages is to entice and persuade recipients of the emails to complete and submit them. The second step is the task of designing the opt-in page.

Drawing visitors into the company’s website is an important goal but once there, visitors should be persuaded to sign up by going to the opt-in page. The path to that page, therefore, must attract attention to itself by being clearly and attractively visible and links to the opt-in page should appear on the Home page as well as on all the other pages on the company’s website.

The website should offer an easy and friendly environment to its visitors by displaying promotional boxes as side bars, plainly announcing the existence of its e-newsletter, links to navigation areas should be legible and apparent and the language used on the website must be known and understood by the general public and, of course, the average visitor.

Assuming that there is enough space for it, promoting the most recent e-newsletter along with its link on the company’s website Home page is a good idea. An effectively functional website contains a “Knowledge and Resource Center” where articles and back issues of e-newsletters are kept in chronological order for visitors to browse through at will. The link to the opt-in page should be included here as well.

Since the sole purpose of the opt-in page is to convert as many readers as it can into signed up subscribers, the design, structure and layout of the opt-in page should be similar to the landing page and it should radiate confidence, value and reliability. Links to sample e-newsletters should be included so that the interested readers will get an idea what they are signing up for. A small screenshot displaying the e-newsletter is not a must but it can most certainly help. A list of positive testimonials from other subscribers of the e-newsletter in a pull-down format could prove to be a beneficial selling point.

There is no such thing as a free lunch nowadays. Thus it is important to remember that when readers finally decide to subscribe and relinquish their well-guarded email addresses, they expect something of at least equal value in exchange. This is the key reason for displaying images, providing samples and reader testimonials of the e-newsletter right on the opt-in page. “Email only special deals” are nice added bonuses that will be appreciated by subscribers and goes a long way toward promoting the company and its products. Such “email only” offers can also increase the number of subscribers which in turn will increase sales.

A brief statement or disclaimer must be visibly displayed near the “Submit” or “Send” button along with a link to the company’s detailed privacy policy that will fully explain, among other important points, the e-newsletter frequency, format and content. In addition, a confirming and welcoming email must be issued as soon as an opt-in page is submitted.

In designing and structuring the opt-in page, it is crucially important that the form does not require too much personal information, yet it is equally important that it asks for as much information as is needed for the company’s present as well as future marketing and sales strategies. It is advisable to distinguish between mandatory information and optional information and mark those distinctions beside every field by using different colors, asterisk or actually spelling it out. A programmed script should be included within the opt-in page to check for syntax errors. Furthermore, to reduce possibilities of making typing errors while entering the email address, two consecutive but separate fields should be provided. The minimum required fields should include first name, last name, email address (twice) and format preference, while the optional fields could ask for secondary email addresses (also entered in two consecutive but separate fields) and various demographic details.

It doesn’t really matter what you are selling, you need to remember that it isn’t the features of your product that will persuade people to buy, but the benefits that product would bring them, such as how it will solve a problem they have or what advantage they would have if they used it. If you don’t believe that, think back on purchases you have made.

Why do you buy toothpaste? It’s not just to clean your teeth, it’s to clean them so that you don’t have bad breath when you kiss your girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/wife etc or so that you don’t create a bad impression when you go for a job interview, so that your mouth tastes fresh and not fuzzy or so that your teeth won’t rot and fall out!

Why do some people buy a BMW or a Jag? For the prestige of owning a luxury car - don’t the ads for BMW & Jag stress these points in their sales copy? They do it deliberately to arouse the desire in potential customers.

SO why do people buy? Here’s a dozen of the most common reasons:

to make more money
to save money
to save time
to be like others & have what others have
to have better than others
to reduce work or effort
to be more comfortable
to get rid of pain
to learn & satisfy curiosity
to have fun
to feel good about themselves
to get a bargain

This is a reasonably long list, but you’re sure to have no problem coming up with more reasons why people buy.

There’s always a “so that….” attached to people’s purchases. We don’t buy a time-saving device just to save time, we buy it so that we can have that time to do something more desirable or more beneficial to us in some way.

We don’t buy aspirin because we have a headache, we buy it so that we can get rid of the headache we have. Most people don’t want more money just to have the money, they want more money so that they can buy something else they would love to have!

Understand what the “so that…” for your product is. There might be different “so that’s” for different groups of people and if that’s the case, great, because you have more than one market and the opportunity to make more sales!

Once you realize that there is emotion attached to buying, you will understand that how people feel when they are considering a purchase makes a big difference to the likelihood of you making a sale. If you can tap into these feelings when you advertise your product or service, your chances of making sales will skyrocket.

So, always, always make sure that you keep your buyers in mind when you decide on your product and how you will market it. Understand your product or service and be very clear about who your target market is. Think as they would think, see as they would see, feel as they would feel. Ask yourself how your product can help these people, how they would benefit from it.

Don’t tell prospects that they need your solution to their problem, though - nobody likes being told what to do. Instead, write the copy using an example of something that has happened to you, a friend or family member that they can identify with. If you can get them to think, “yes, that’s exactly how it is for me, too”, you’ll certainly hold their interest and they will read on or sign up to find out what worked for you to get out of your fix, or undesirable situation.

For example, you could say “I used to hate my job and dreaded Monday mornings when the grind started all over again, but I had no idea of how I could ever get out of it because I had a young family to provide for and a mortgage to pay to keep the home we’d struggled so hard for.” (By now plenty of people will be nodding in agreement) Then you continue with “When I saw this opportunity advertised…. I didn’t believe I could ever do that, but then I saw that …..had quit his job and as making big $$$$….”

At this stage, you start to list all the benefits of the product, some testimonials from other people who have used it successfully if you have any and then list all the features of the product so that there’s no doubt about what the product is, what it does or can do. Always be truthful. Never lie to get a sale, but don’t leave out any of the benefits either as they might just be the thing that could help someone.

Remember, you are selling a solution so you need to understand what the problem is and how it affects people!