Sales & Marketing Consultant, Bestselling Author & Sales Conference Speaker

Among the best marketing tools for business these days is the establishment of a blog. The advantages are many: you can tell your customers how to use your products, offer how-to industry advice, establish yourself as an expert in your field, and so on.

There are a number of ways to do this—last week, I wrote to you about using Tumblr—but one way to establish a blog on your own website is to use WordPress. There are other blogging programs out there, such as Drupal, and I encourage you to take a look at the pros and cons in detail to see which one will be better suited to your business’ needs. In short, Drupal has some additional functionality and features that enable you to customise your blog with widgets, but it lacks the extensive array of themes that WordPress has. Also, for the novice, Drupal has a much higher learning curve.

If all you’re looking for is an attractive blogging program with a set of useful functions and features, it’s hard to go wrong with WordPress. With that in mind, here are some guidelines to keep in mind. (Note: In my Internet marketing blog today, I’ll be providing an extensive list of resources that every WordPress blog should, at the very least, know about, so do pop over there and have a look. The link to it is here.)

Provide Quality Content

Before you launch your blog, try to have a healthy batch of posts online—five at minimum, but 10 to 15 is better. And your posts should have substance. This means that they’re more than just photos of your product with a blurb about how to use it or a video posting. (Believe me, this happens all too often.) And your content should be original, not stuff you’ve pilfered from other sites. While it’s okay to use outside information to do your research, you content must by in your own words. No exceptions!

Use Google Analytics

If you’re not already using it for your website, you should be. Google Analytics is a free traffic reporting service for your website. It’s very easy to set up an account, and you’ll need to install a bit of code into your site, but it’s not an overwhelming process. And you’ll be glad you did it, because it will enable you to track the number of visitors to your site. More importantly, however, you’ll be able to discern the keywords people are using to find you and the specific content that they are reading.

Google Sitemaps Plugin

WordPress has an endless supply of plugins, and this one is very helpful in that it enables Google to index your blog, which helps in search engine rankings. You can find the sitemap generator plugin here.

Establish Permalinks

Consider installing the SEO slugs plugin, which you can find here. What this does is take a URL, such as companydomain.com/blog?id=97531 and turns it into companydomain.com/blog/greatest-blog-ever. Now, isn’t that much better?

Make your images SEO friendly

Millions of searchers turn to Google every day looking for great pictures, so making you’re SEO friendly with the plugin you’ll find here may very well pay off in loads of new visitors. There’s a free version that covers the basics and a paid version that’s more robust.

As I stated above, I’ll be providing much more details in my Internet Marketing Academy blog for those of you interested in learning more about the ins and outs of WordPress blogging. If you have comments to share, I encourage you to leave them below.

Happy Marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

http://www.seanmcpheat.com

(Image by Photostock)

As sales people, we love to talk. I know a lot of us, me included have had the tendency to talk ourselves out of the occasional sale. Partly out of curiously and partly out of professional courtesy ( If I am not too busy or if the sales person is not terrible awful) I am inclined to let a sales person, especially young ones, get their pitch out. It is good for their confidence and I have been in their shoes myself, it is nice when someone listens to you and lets you give it your best shot.

A couple of months back, I was at a trade show that I had really enjoyed.  I was thinking about exhibiting so I approached a young member of their sales staff after the event. He was very enthusiastic about the fact that I wanted to exhibit and gave me his spiel. He gave me more and more of it! He was pretty young and inexperienced but he missed all the signals, he was in an easy sales situation, willing buyer, who just needed some information and he talked himself right out of it. I may still exhibit with them, as long as I don’t have to speak with that guy again, I just don’t have the time!

When it comes to websites, this type of behaviour is even more common, we tend to get hung up on what we want to tell people, rather than on what they need to know. The tragedy is that our audience online is even more transient. Unlike the effort it may have taken someone to get to a big sofa warehouse of out of town car dealership, it is no effort at all for a web user to move to another website. Give a lot of thought to what content you put on the pages of your website, you don’t want to be the guy who talks himself out of deals!

Here’s what you should focus on…

If your website is there to fulfil a marketing function, how are customers finding you? If you are doing any search marketing, there are a few things you need to bear in mind that will have an effect on your conversion rates.

The search traffic your website attracts is very important; each of them is the same as a visitor to a high street shop or showroom. The home page is the generic entry route for people of all interests. As a direct result of that, it is often not the best destination for all visitors. Traffic that you have won by investing in search marketing is very high value and you have the power to make sure that they get exactly what they need in order to make the decision to contact or buy from you.

When running a search campaign, create a new landing page for each group of search terms. These will a) reduce your costs of PPC advertising and b) improve your ability to deliver the right content.

When creating landing pages, bear in mind that you have less than a second to make an impression on a visitor. Design is very important. Think about what your customer wants to see. They want to get information – they are on a website though, they probably don’t want to read pages of text. This is an opportunity to think about content delivery. Use graphics to tell your story, or video – don’t rely on voice too much as many may be visiting your website from a place or device where they do not wish to be heard.

Make it easy for them to get in touch. An unobtrusive live chat tool is great; one that pops up and asks to help is more annoying online than in a store, don’t be a pest. If people are spending a long time on your website, it is a good thing.

Don’t focus too much on data capture. Marketing teams love data capture, it helps them prove the effectiveness of their work. The truth is that using a form to grab details is not always the best way to help people get in touch. Tell marketing not to be lazy and get their data by running promotions and competitions. From a sales point of view, the customer needs to be able to choose to act in the way that best suits them. Make the appropriate telephone number or email clearly visible on the landing page.

Be responsive! So many people complain that their website enquiries are never followed up. I myself have experienced that a number of times. Make sure that procedures are in place so that each enquiry gets dealt with immediately. Many of them will come in overnight when people are online; this increases the importance of responding quickly as they may already have started to cool and may have contacted competitors too!

If you are making use of HTML emails as a marketing tool, there are other usability issues to keep in mind. 30% of UK B2B marketing emails are opened on a mobile device.

There is not much you can do to make a website snap on an older phone but it’s likely that many of your customers would be using a modern iOS, Android, Blackberry or Windows Mobile device. In that case, have your template tested for compatibility with those platforms to ensure that the email is visible and works correctly. The website that the email links to must also be mobile optimised to ensure that a person visiting on the back of a marketing email is able to have an optimal experience and importantly engage with you from their mobile. Remember that if you don’t do this, you are throwing away 30% of your responses and that’s just silly.

Closing is very important online. If you have an e-commerce presence, make sure that you communicate with customers after they have handed over their credit card details. Be sure to follow each purchase up with a confirmation email that makes your customer feel welcomed. Consider including the ability to share information about their purchase to their friends on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest. This type of interaction can go a long way and it builds trust, a lack of which is still a leading obstacle in the path of online vendors.

There are many more tips that I could give you here but I think just implementing these will make a difference. Decisions about websites are often made by marketing teams, if your company has a significant separation of sales and marketing functions make sure that the sales team are represented at meeting about the website. Their knowledge and experience in buyer profiles and psychology is invaluable.

(Image by FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

A Guest Blog By Matthew Jensen, Business Development Manager at Fast Fwd Multimedia

Link up with Matthew: http://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewjensenuk

Follow Matthew on Twitter: https://twitter.com/@MatthewGJensen

Fast Fwd Multimedia Ltd. is a full service digital agency that specialises in creating hosted business solutions for companies of all sizes. Fast Fwd are committed to delivering digital services of the highest quality, at competitive prices. We consistently over deliver and delight our clients.

It’s hard to believe, but 2012 will be upon us within 3 days. This is a perfect opportunity look at the direction of your business, where you’ve been in 2011, and where you want to be in 2012.

The best way to do this is with an end-of-year marketing analysis and report. Don’t worry, you’re not giving the report to anyone other than yourself!

Identify Three Successes

It’s always easier to take criticism when you start with the positives. To this end, identify 3 things that’s you’ve done successfully with your marketing this year. And I don’t just mean that you should say “I worked harder this year.” Look for:

• Measurable improvements over 2010 (click-through rates, ROI on campaigns, etc.).
• Successful new campaigns implemented.
• Higher sales volume, new clients won, or costs lowered.

Look for the things that you did best in 2011. Now, the key is to identify what you did to achieve your greatest successes in 2011, and then try to repeat them for 2012.

Identify Three Failures

This can be a lot more difficult than identifying the three successes. Look for things that you did, which didn’t work out as well as you had hoped, or actions that you didn’t take, which would have been good in hindsight. Consider:

• Moves that you didn’t make, or delayed on (making your site mobile-friendly, kick-starting your social media campaign).
• Clients that you lost, or more importantly, existing client relationships that you let stagnate.
• Unsuccessful marketing moves (failed campaigns, ill-advised advertisements).

It’s always said that a mistake is an opportunity to learn. So don’t just dwell on your mistakes from the past year. The purpose of identifying them is so that you can make sure you don’t repeat them.

Identify Where you Want to Be Next Year

This is the most important part of the analysis. Taking your successes and your failures from the past year, identify where you want to be at this time next year. Put these in concrete terms, and make a plan for how you’re going to get there.

So rather than telling yourself that you want to have a considerable social media presence, tell yourself that by this time next year you’ll have 500 fans on your Facebook page, 5,000 followers on Twitter, and at least 5 highly-rated videos on YouTube.

Happy New Year, and make sure that 2012 is your most productive year ever!

Happy marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

http://www.seanmcpheat.com

November is going to be a very busy month for me, as after many successful experiences keynoting at other people’s events I have decided to host my own Sales Summit for you all.

My 2011 Sales Summit is being held on Thursday 17^th November at the Radisson Edwardian Hotel, Heathrow – and what a jam packed day we have for our guests!

We have 3 fantastic speakers presenting four must-see sessions throughout the day. I, of course, will be presenting two sessions to kick off and wrap up the Sales Summit – well, it is my event after all!

My first session is The Ultimate Sales Audit, in which I hope to entertain and enlighten my audience by presenting them with an unusual take on the selling process where I will rip their sales approach to pieces. This will allow my guests to thoroughly analyse their techniques and understand the dynamics at play.

I will be showing guests how to analyse their figures in the right way and reduce their “Sales Velocity”. I will also show my guests how to make the most of their sales interactions and how to pre-sell their products.

I will be wrapping up the event by hosting my ever-popular session on eselling®. As many of you will know I have developed an alternative sales approach which can help businesses of all shapes and sizes to prospect and sell online. The approach is called eselling® and when the book was launched in July 2011 it immediately became a #1 Amazon bestseller in the Sales and Marketing category due to its eagerly anticipated release.

During this session I will show my guests how they can use the internet to network with key decision makers, listen for leads, position themselves as an industry expert and improve the quality of their content. They will also learn how to use the internet to prospect, research their market and competitors, and boost their personal branding.

One of the main features of the eselling® session is to teach my guests how to use social media within their business… but in the right way. Many businesses already use social media sites to enhance their online visibility, but many go about this in completely the wrong way and end up wasting their time so this is an issue I will be addressing during the final session of the day.

Presenting alongside myself I have two fantastic speakers which I’d like to introduce you to. The second session at the Sales Summit will be held by international public speaker Simon Hazeldine, who is also a bestselling author and holds a Masters Degree in Performance Psychology.

Simon will be presenting a session on Bare Knuckle Negotiating, where Simon will take guests on a journey through the negotiation process; exposing the strategies, tricks and tactics they need to survive and thrive.

Simon will be teaching my guests about the 5 stages of negotiation, the essential LIM model for getting what they want and the common negotiation mistakes to avoid. Guests will also find out how to deal with power ploys, how to become a powerful negotiator and how to guard themselves against dirty negotiating tactics.

But that is not all…I have a third and final speaker presenting on the day. He is none other than my number one Sales Trainer Mark Williams. Mark specialises in the design and delivery of sales training courses and on-going sales development programmes. As a sales improvement specialist, Mark is always in great demand and he has managed programmes across the UK, Europe, Japan, China and the Middle East.

Mark will be presenting a session on The New RIO, in which he will be showing guests how to get return on influence. In this very engaging and practical session Mark will don his “Derren Brown” powers to take guests into a world of magical influence and advanced mastery!

Mark will be showing my guests how to better understand their clients, how to get clients on their side and how to influence people on a subconscious level.

As well as all gaining access to all of these brilliant sessions guests will also enjoy a sit down networking lunch, free refreshments throughout the day, free parking, pre-arranged networking opportunities with the people who they want to meet, pre-programme objectives where they can specifically tell us their issues or needs and we will factor that into our sessions, the satisfaction of contributing to a charity and some surprises that I know they’ll just love!

But I should warn you, the clock is ticking and its last orders! So if you want to be part of this unique event then please visit www.salessummit2011.com and reserve your seat before Friday 4th November as that is deadline day.

I’m really looking forward to meeting you all at the event as I know my Sales Summit will be one event you won’t forget in a hurry!

Happy marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

http://www.seanmcpheat.com