Archive for the ‘Refine Your Marketing’ Category

This video may be funny and amusing but cold calls, door-to-door selling and other “tree shaking methods” are no fun and those aren’t very amusing. This video has a lot to offer.

jf

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Jean-Guy (JG) Francoeur
Author, Answers You’re Aching To Know
VP, Business Development
http://rapidresultsworkshop.com/

Technorati Tags: 10 mistakes, advertising, how to better convert leads, how to build a database, how to capture leads, how to generate leads, how to marketing, how to nurture leads, how to qualify leads, lead generation, lead nurturing, lead qualification, marketing 101, marketing consultant, marketing ideas, marketing solutions, marketing tips, online marketing expert, sales training, small business marketing, Toronto Marketing Consultant

Author’s Note: Joe Manna is an acquaintance of mine. He’s a rockstar that works for Infusionsoft. Not only do I recommend Infusionsoft to just about everyone I speak to, every client I work with gets an infusionsoft account (I make it a requirement)!

The Concept of Narrowband Marketing

By JOE MANNA on SEPTEMBER 9, 2010

I’m going to share an interesting and useful concept for you known as narrowband marketing. It very much covers how marketers today need to act in order to maintain relevance to their customers and prospects. This concept is something that I believe every small business needs to adopt in order to be successful at marketing without being evil. The best part is, some of you are already doing it.

Narrowband marketing is the concept of tailoring a marketing campaign specific to a recipient’s interest. More explicitly, it results in longer-term relationships, better conversions, minimal complaints and increased loyalty. No, it doesn’t relate to whether you dial-up or use cable for your Internet service … (who dials up anymore?!)

As opposed to broadband marketing, narrowband is about being narrow, select, exclusive and relevant. Broadband marketing is appropriate in certain situations, but don’t expect to earn any loyalty or respect from your recipients.  Broadband limits how select and intimate you can be with your subscribers.

Editor’s Note: This blog post was discovered and brought to you by Jeff McLeod of the Black Card Marketing Group.  The author of the original post is Derek Gehl.  He is Entrepreneur.com”s “E-Business” columnist and the CEO of the Internet Marketing Center , an internet marketing firm that has helped thousands of people learn to start and run their own online businesses. IMC hosts a new Search Marketing Lab Forum , where members have their strategy questions answered by search marketing specialists.

2005 was a busy year for the internet. Last year more than a billion people went online, more than 250 billion searches were done, and total online sales accounted for over $170 billion (Forrester). More people than ever are turning to the internet to find–and buy–the products they need.

This year, resolve to get your business off to a great start and make more money in 2006. To do that, here are the top three sure-fire strategies you need to boost your profits this year!

Strategy #1: Know How to Beat the Search Engines and Drive Free Traffic to Your Site
The key to getting your business name to pop up in search engines is to use sound online marketing principles, rather than trying to manipulate the search engines with tons of keywords and inflated link popularity. That means you should:

• Provide useful information, valuable content and links that are related to your business.
• Make your domain names and page titles relevant to your business and keywords.

by Gerry Robert

It’s a certain fact…business is more competitive than it’s ever been!

To stay alive in these uncertain times, you can’t just offer a quality product at a fair price…you have to know how to market effectively. You should demand that you get the best results from every dime you drop into marketing! Unfortunately, most businesses have no idea of how to get the most out of every marketing "dollar" that they spend.

SURE-FIRE METHOD #1: Focus on your prospect’s needs and not on yourself.

Does this seem too obvious? Look through your yellow pages. Answer this question: Are they focused on the seller or buyer?

Ninety-five percent of the ads are likely totally focused on the business and not on what the business can do for YOU, the prospect!

Take a look at the ads in the newspapers, on the TV, listen to the radio or pull up virtually any website. It’s the same type of drivel.

Your selfishness is what kills most of your marketing. From brochures to flyers, and sales letters to advertisements, your marketing message should let your prospects know that you are concerned ONLY WITH WHAT THEY WANT!

Anything about you should always come last.

Until your marketing efforts focus on the prospects’ wants, your marketing is handicapped.

SURE-FIRE METHOD #2: FIGURE OUT THE NEEDS AND WANTS OF YOUR PROSPECTS

With a title like that I’ve really put the pressure on myself to make this one good!  But I’m not scared, because I have a system. A system for writing great blog posts!

Follow these guidelines and soon you'll be using this pic on the front page of YOUR blog!

If you’ve been following this blog in chronological order (you learned how to install wordpress, then how to optimize wordpress, and finally followed the steps of how to style wordpress) you might be thinking, “Great Jeff, I have an optimized, stylized, bloggified, googlized, amped-up, plugged-in, slamma, bamma, jamma, in-yo-face, momma-betta-be-in-her- place blog! But I’ve got nothing in it. Now I have to fill it up with great posts.  How in the world wide web do I do that!?!?”

Well have no fear, follow my 2.5 Ways to Write a GUARANTEED Killer Blog Post and you’ll be well on your way to a happy following!

**Author’s note**: There are more than 2.5 ways to crush it with your blog posts.  These are just a few good ones. I’ve asked people to comment below with their own secrets to killer blog posts.

#1 – Write your posts using numbered lists

What do I mean by this? Offer “5 ways”, “7 tips”, “28 to do’s” for your readers on whatever topic strikes your fancy. People react to these much better (we’ve tested this many times) than just about any other types of headlines. They are easy (both to read and to write), they are fun, and they often read like a check list. People like check lists.

I got called out.  By my buddy, and colleague Jean-Guy Francoeur.  He did a great post about how a big bank in Canada, ING Direct, just did an online campaign using classic Internet Marketing Techniques (eg, launch sequencing, squeeze page, social media, etc). And he asked me to do a little commentary on it, so here goes…

** Author’s note**: After publishing this post on Sept 8th, I decided to seek some feedback from ING’s head office. Actually, I went straight to the top: President Peter Aceto, the man featured in their video. I found two accounts for him on Facebook and one on LinkedIn.  I messaged all three. About 36 hours later, he sent me this message:

I am very impressed with your very thorough coverage and analysis of our work on the marketing of our new THRiVE Chequing account. You do hit a few nails right on the head and I do agree that there are areas that need improvement which we plan to discuss for next time. This is why I love SM as it allows us to get this type of feedback from so many people. Thank your for taking the time to share your thoughts and all in all quite a complimentary review of the work we are doing.
Peter.

Now back to the original post:

by Gerry Robert

L.I.S.T.E.N. Or else!

A positive chap this Mr. Chan!  I’m good friends with his former boss the legendary Colonel Izaidin.  He said that he wanted to teach his salespeople to listen.  “I here you teach salespeople about listening?”  “I sure do!”  I responded, “I wrote a book on that one subject.  How important do you think it is for the success of salespeople?”  He said without even a second’s hesitation, “It’s everything!”  He was right about that fact.  I was delighted  when he told me his company, Berjaya Prudential started a  company-wide campaign based on this one crucial topic.

What made me so happy was that here was an already successful company looking to develop more effectively its salespeople in this important skill.  So many companies want to teach  their salespeople to manipulate customers with the latest “Motivational psycho-babble” out of California.  Too bad!

Sure some of those tricks work but you can forget about long-term relationships, trust, referrals and re-orders if you  start using those silly so-called “persuasion” gimmicks.  Don’t you hate it when others try to use them on you?

I often ask people “How would you describe a salesperson.”  You might not like what they tell me.  “Salespeople are so pushy.”  Or, “They are slick talkers.”  They tell me that what they dislike the most about salespeople is that they never shut up.  This brings me back to Mr. Chan.

How to Style WordPress

Using Plug-ins and Widgets

Jeff McLeod

Jeff@JeffMcLeod.ca

Powerpoint accompanying this article

Get a .doc copy of this post

Copy of WordPress with all my favorite plugins already included

In this article I’m talking about:

1. Setting up the Look and Feel
2. Setting up Social Media/Social Networking

This is my little list of things I think you should download and how I think you should configure them. To understand my thinking watch the video at http://jeffmcleod.ca showing you how and why I choose all of this. Also you can download all of these plug-ins in one file from the website.

1. Set-up the Look and Feel
   1. Delete the example comment and post

1. Go to Appearance->Themes->Add New: Upload (or you can see what WP has to offer). Activate the theme

1. i.     Go into the FTP and change the logo to the client’s logo (wp-content/themes/themename/images/client-logo.png)

1. Note: this is only if you are using the templates that I provide at http://jeffmcleod.ca
2. ii.     Go to Appearance->Editor: Header and ctrl-f for ‘client-logo.png’.
3. iii.     Make the file path the same as the path of the logo you just uploaded
4. iv.     Save changes
5. Go to Plug-ins->Add New, search for “Excerpts Deluxe”. Install and activate.
   1. i.     Set “Cutoff after:” to 200 words
   2. Set-up Social Media/Bookmarking
      1. Go to Plug-ins->Add New and search for “Share This”, install and activate

How to Optimize WordPress

Using Plug-ins

Jeff McLeod

Jeff@JeffMcLeod.ca

In this article I’m talking about:

1. Setting up Anti-spamming
2. Setting up Search Engine Optimization
3. Setting up Mobile Functionality

Powerpoint accompanying this article

Get a .doc copy of this post

Copy of WordPress with all my favorite plugins already included

This is my little list of things I think you should download and how I think you should configure them. To understand my thinking watch the video at http://jeffmcleod.ca showing you how and why I choose all of this. Also you can download all of these plug-ins in one file from the website.

1. Set-up Anti-spamming
   1. Go to settings->general->membership: uncheck “anyone can register”
   2. Go to settings->discussions->other comment settings: uncheck “Users must be logged in and registered to comment”
   3. Go to settings->discussions->before a comment appears: uncheck “Admin must always approve comment” and uncheck “Comment author must have a previously approved comment”
      1. i.     Save changes
2. Go to Plug-ins and activate Akismet (if the plug-in isn’t installed search for it under Plug-ins->add new).
   1. i.     Once installed, activate the plug-in. It will tell you that a key needed.  Follow the link to get a Key.
   2. ii.     Choose personal use if you want to use it for free.  Otherwise pay for it.  Retrieve the key from your email and input it into wordpress.
   3. Set-up SEO
      1. Go to Settings->permalinks and select custom.  Set it to “/%postname%

In this article I’m talking about:

1. Downloading WordPress
2. Uploading it to your site
3. Setting up the database
4. Configuring your wordpress installation
5. Logging into wordpress

Powerpoint accompanying this article

Get a .doc copy of this post

Copy of WordPress with all my favorite plugins already included

This is my little list of things I think you should download and how I think you should configure them. To understand my thinking watch the video at http://jeffmcleod.ca showing you how and why I choose all of this. Also you can download all of these plug-ins in one file from the website.

1. Download WordPress
   1. Google “download wordpress”
   2. It’s free
   3. I am sticking to 2.9.2 for now (you can download this from me at http://jeffmcleod.ca )
   4. Upload WordPress to your site
      1. Log in to FTP site
      2. I like to use FileZilla, but do as you please
      3. Copy entire folder contents onto FTP
      4. I recommend the root folder
      5. If you use a deeper folder it will be in all of your URLs (ie www.yourdomain.com/downloads/stuff/wordpress/…, not cool)
         1. i.     Also, you won’t be able to post any pages to the homepage)
2. Rename folder to whatever you want (ie blog, membership)
3. Set-up Database
   1. Log in to cPanel
   2. Go to mySQL Databases
   3. Create new database
   4. I use the folder name, you can use whatever you want
   5. Create new user
   6. At this stage I always use admin