Stats usage

Learning and development is increasingly important in this time of recession to ensure that businesses continue to get the most out of their workforce. On the 27th and 28th of January London’s Olympia Two venue will host the annual Learning & Development Show, the premium event for learning and development practitioners and for businesses who want to find out how to make this vital area work for them.

This will be the eleventh year of the event that has become Read the rest of this entry »

The very essence of business is to get your products sold. But the inevitable question is how to crack the nut and hit the bull’s eye for higher sale? You have the best of products, a great looking store and an award winning merchandising logo, but your products are not getting sold. It has been found that merchandising holds the key to success for small businesses.

What is merchandising? It is the technique and the manner in which products are Read the rest of this entry »

If you ever wanted to know get through an attack by reanimated corpses then this post is for you! ‘The Very Fast Guide to Survive (The Beginning of) a Zombie Apocalypse’ gives you some very valuable advice. It covers everything from the best methods of defending yourself to the correct ways of escaping from your house.

Alternatively, it may be worth reading this post even if you are perfectly safe from the ranks of the undead but you have Read the rest of this entry »

I couldn’t believe how old the internet actually was when I first read this post. In fact, I didn’t believe it; I went onto Wikipedia to double check that it was accurate. And guess what? It really is that old. Think about what was going on the world then!

I wonder how many people who use the internet on a regular basis realise that it has being on the go for so long? It is amazing that an experiment Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who has a business knows the importance of marketing it to build it. A business will not grow if nobody knows it exists. Learning effective marketing strategies is important to the success of your business. Below are just a few ways to market your business:

1. Email Marketing - Gather current and new customers email addresses so that you can keep them updated on new products, services, etc.

2. Blogging - Create a blog focusing around your business and Read the rest of this entry »

Many people think that it takes hard work to get a promotion in the workplace. Well, although working hard does contribute to a promotion, it generally is not the reason one gets one. Believe it or not, it is your personality that helps you climb that corporate ladder.

People who show strength, confidence and ambition get noticed. People who are not afraid to add suggestions, ideas and opinions on how to better the workplace. A person can work 10 Read the rest of this entry »

When picking search terms for your webiste, people generally go for the high volume terms. But data recently showed that adding the word “buy” as a prefix whilst draws a lower number of people to the webiste, those people that do come have a much higher conversion rate!

So here is a case where less is really more! Better than this, the longer a serach term, the cheaper it is to optimise for it and thus the return on investment is even greater.

I have started, built up and sold a number of businesses over the last thirty years across a multitude of different unconnected industrial and commercial sectors including: Home Improvements, Financial Services, Property, Web Development, and primarily… delivering energy management solutions through various distribution channels including the Enigin Partner development program. However the fundamental principles, the critical success factors, the blueprints, the foundations stones, call them what you like… that have proven so many times to consistently work are in fact constant!
…Therefore… they can be easily replicated… Read the rest of this entry »

Getting an email address from a visitor to your site isn’t as easy as it used to be.  These days people are already inundated with hundreds of daily spam messages and most of them are aware that each time they add their name to someone’s subscriber base, they risk another deluge of spam arriving in their in-box offering them everything from liposuction to medication like viagra.  The best way to circumnavigate reluctance to share their personal information is to offer them something that they want in return for the information.

The first thing you need to do is consider what visitors would consider a value exchange.  Would it be a report on something related to the subject area of your site?  Would it be an e-book or workbook on a similar theme?  How about a list of resources that people interested in your site subject area would find useful?  Maybe an audio podcast they can download and listen to that will either educate or entertain them and be based on the subject area of your site? Or perhaps you could send them some cosmetic surgery or marks and spensers vouchers? Whatever you choose, it should be a quality product and easy to transfer automatically so that the visitor can be enticed with a “download immediately upon subscribing to our site” comment.

Creating these products doesn’t have to be expensive.  You can either produce them yourself, or outsource via a number of sites such as rentacoder.Com or elance.Com.  Make sure that you are very clear about what the product should be before you post the project however, and be very clear that you want original material and all rights to the product once it’s complete.  What you pay for the product will depend on your budget (which in turn is dependent upon what the conversion from visitor to subscriber is worth to you), and the kind of quality you can expect.   Extremely low budgets can expect products that require additional “fixing” to improve the standard of the product before it’s used as a conversion incentive.

Once you have your product, take the time to create a welcome page that promotes what the product will do for the visitor if they download it.  What can they expect to learn from it?  Educate them on how much they will get out of the product. How much they will save using their vouchers, how much more beautiful they'll look after the face lift, how much they will enjoy listening to the free music tracks.  Use language that enforces this and gets them to act now (chances are if they decide to do it later, they’ll forget)  so that they can immediately access the download of this product. 

Conversion incentive products are a great way of bringing new people onto your subscriber base but make sure that your product is of high quality, and that you are able to market it effectively.  If you don’t see an upsurge in your conversion rates once you offer the product, it’s probably the page that markets the product that’s at fault, so you need to consider if the page is saying what the visitor needs to read in order to get excited enough about the product to sign up as a subscriber.

Most of us passively surf the Internet.  We click on links from emails and websites that we routinely visit and find new websites that we’re also interested in, but often we just scan the text and then click on to the next site on our web journey.  Also, all too often we never return to those sites because we don’t remember their names and after a day or so don’t even remember the visit!   If you have a site that wants to convert those surfers into visitors who come back then you need to get them to take an additional step before they move on to the next site so that you have them “tagged” and can get them back again!

The way to do this is by using active headlines – some kind of “call to action” so that the visitor is interested or intrigued enough to be knocked temporarily out of his passive surfing zone.  Have the words free laser hair removal with a live link like this nice and big. Or perhaps if you sell corporate events london, have a flash sequence with images of the event in order to catch peoples attanetion. You don’t want to hold him up, just slow him down long enough to provide you with an email address - so make sure there is 'join our mailing list' box linked in to some kind of email marketing software package that processes it for you automatically. Once you have this, then that part of the conversion process is complete – your accidental surfer is now a subscriber and the next part of your conversion system will pick him up.

So what kind of headlines will call this surfer to action?  Well you could offer a free report – something directly related to your subject area (it’s the subject area that will have brought the surfer there initially).  Perhaps it could be a headline “Click here to receive your FREE report on the Best 10 Tips on Catching the Biggest Trout this Season” or “Subscribe here and receive a free guide on choosing the best tent for your next adventure vacation” – depending on what your subject area is.  The reports don’t have to be long – they could be anything from a report of 2-3 pages (which should also give more information about your site and giving teasers about what they will find there), to an ebook of 50-200 pages.  You could produce these yourself, employ someone else to do them for you at a relatively low cost, or see if there is some kind of PLR content available (often a very low fee) that allows you to put your own information on the content and use it as a conversion tool.

Remember, although the report or ebook you’re offering should give good quality information, the main thing is to get the visitor to be interested enough to hand over their email information so bullet point what they will learn from the item you’re going to send them, make the process of signing up simple, and use active language that will move them to action. 

Happy Converting!