Your Business Website’s 2 Goals

You may have already spent a lot of time creating your website going through one iteration after another with changes to text placement, graphics, font size and spacing… but if you haven’t focused on at least one of these two goals – and hopefully both of them, you aren’t finished yet!

Two goals for your business website?

1. Sell visitors something.
2. Collect lead information so you can add them with your email campaign.

If you don’t do one of these two things your not doing enough with visitors to your website. It’s difficult to get 25% sign ups to your newsletter / email program, but some sites are doing it. Could you imagine converting 25% of your visitors to leads you have permission to email? Even 5% is a good amount to aim for. If you convert 5 people per day that’s over 1,800 per year – a very decent sized list.

Selling something to your visitors is difficult on a first visit, or second or third. But, you should be trying. Make clear calls to action so visitors know what you want them to do on each page. Building trust takes a couple of visits and a couple of articles before someone will be on-board and trust you enough to buy from you.

Once a visitor signs up for your business newsletter you have permission to email them until they unsubscribe. Give free information and bonuses before you ask for a sale through email. Spontaneous buys will happen occasionally, but studies show that most sales are made after the 5th, 6th email. If you’re not already an email expert use Aweber.com to set up your leads lists and count on them to get your email messages delivered. They have en exceptional delivery rate – where other companies fail miserably in this area.

If you’re interested in becoming expert in these topics we’ll have ebusiness training in both lead generation, email campaigns, and ecommerce sales optimization tips for your site in the near future. Join our email newsletter today so you can be notified when we have free and deeply discounted training courses for you to try.

Instant, Focused Traffic for Your Business Site?

Is it possible to have, within a few minutes instant traffic to your business website that is focused and consists of people ready to buy your products?

Yes, it’s very possible. Now, it’s not as easy as pie – but, with 20 minutes of effort you can be getting sales of your products at your business site.

I’m talking about Pay Per Click programs. Google Adwords is the most often used pay per click service available and it’s easy to setup and gives you the most traffic for your efforts.

While it’s easy to get up and running with PPC programs it isn’t that easy to optimize the campaigns so you’re not paying so much money that you’re not making a good profit.

Pay per click works like this:

1. You choose keywords & keyword phrases you’d like to appear in Google search results for. Let’s say you’re selling pink shoes. Some keywords you’d add to your campaign would be “pink shoes, pink boots, pink runners, pink running shoes, pink boots” and so on.

2. You bid on each keyword – or as a group if you want to pay the same fr all keywords. When you bid you’re telling how much you will pay Google when a search engine user finds your ad on Google and clicks it – arriving at the page you specify on your site. You’re bidding against everyone else that wants to be found in Google search results for those exact keywords. You might bid 8 cents. You might bid 45 cents or $4.45 in order to be shown in the results. The competition is tight for highly sought-after keywords!

3. You create your text or graphics ads and upload to Google so they can place them on their search results pages.

4. You choose demographics, times you want your ads to run – and a hundred other criteria that define your campaign. You can choose by country – state – city, and so much more. It’s becoming quite specific – which is good for everyone.

5. Choose a page you want visitors to land on after clicking your ad. The page should sell your product – pink shoes, probably by showing all the kinds of pink shoes you have – and asking them to click to see more detailed information about each pink shoe pair.

6. You control how long the campaign runs and how much you spend each day – maximum. It’s quite easy to control and you’re billed after the fact.

Pay per click is one area you should really look into as you try to find the best ways to bring targeted traffic to your site. It’s virtually instant. Sometimes it works immediately and sometimes you’ll need to optimize your landing pages (sales pages) and your targeting variables before you’re able to make money with it. There are companies making thousands of dollars with just PPC – can you make it work for your business?

We’ll offer Pay Per Click training here. Join our email newsletter to be notified of new ebusiness courses as they’re released. Some will be free and some will be deeply discounted for members of our email newsletter.

Ways to Increase Sales

Every business wants to increase sales in a big way. One of the best ways to increase sales is with those that are already your customers. Present customers are the source of most sales for you and everyone else.

Your current customers already know you, trust you and have gotten over the obstacle of buying from you – so to buy from you again is not a big hurdle for you to help them over.

What are some ways you can sell more to your current business customers?

1. Sales incentives. Incentivize your sales team to sell every way you can. Give them innovative programs to sell and reward them for their efforts. Make goals attainable and fun to attempt. Reward with positive feedback, cash, and whatever you can think of.

2. Up-sell! One of the most effective techniques for selling is to sell something additional to someone that is already buying something from you. They are in the middle of buying something from you ideally, and you offer them an upsell – either an upgrade or another special offer on a product they don’t have yet. This is a very powerful technique because once someone is buying – the hurdle is already clear… they are buying… to buy something additional seems to make more sense at that point. To buy something additional for a great price makes a lot of sense and is hard to pass up

3. Treat current customers like gold. It’s a good idea to treat your current customers a little better than others that haven’t become your customers yet. Why? People will tell their friends how they get treated and that they’re part of a special group. Give current customers access to special information about sales before they happen. Give them incentives through your email newsletter than they can redeem for special prices. Your current customers ARE gold. Make sure you treat them that way!

5. Customer rewards. A free lunch on your birthday is something that people remember. Offer current customers rewards like this to make your business memorable. You might award points for the number of purchases they make – like the Subway sandwich shop that punches cards. You might give discounts after they spend $500 in one calendar year. There are many ways you can offer customer rewards – implement some!

6. Free samples.

Your current customers are just a hair away from buying again from you. Why not offer for free what non-customers have to buy outright? Offer some freebies to current customers and they’ll gush with glee. We all love to get something free… make it a standard practice to give current customers the royal treatment and see what happens to sales over the long-term.

Finding new customers for your business is a great idea, however, the real gold is right there in your current crop of customers because sales are made easier to them than to new customers. Finding new customers takes time and effort you don’t have to go through to sell to current customers.

Customer loyalty is an amazing thing… ask Mercedes what they think.