Category Archives: eMarketing

How Can I Market My “How To Start Your Maid Service” Guide?

eMarketing, Products

We currently own a non franchised Maid Service and trying to create a how to manual. How to market, price and keep customers as well as having a web site for exclusive content and know how we’ve learned. I understand it’s a relatively easy business to start and operate. However, we are finding that a lot of information in many of the how to "start" a cleaning business are very general. We are in a vacation area and a lot of our business is servicing rental homes, condos, etc. We believe we have a niche if we could tell other aspiring and existing cleaning companies how to market and go after these clients. How do I do market research to see if it’s a viable idea.

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Jay’s Answer: To find out if people are looking for this information see how many people are searching for:

  • cleaning business
  • commercial cleaning business
  • house cleaning business
  • carpet cleaning business
  • start a cleaning business
  • starting a cleaning business
  • how to start a cleaning business
  • office cleaning business
  • window cleaning business
  • cleaning service
  • cleaning services
  • house cleaning service
  • home cleaning business
  • house cleaning services

You’ll find that there’s mid-low search interest, and high advertising competition.

Before you spend any money on advertising the solution, make sure you can prove ROI on your business (using these tips) and also that the information is transferable (others have followed the tips and they worked for them as well). Then, you have the "case studies" to sell the system – whether it be a book, video, seminar, franchise, etc.

How Can We Estimate Website Conversion Rates?

eMarketing

We have recently acquired a small Japanese education agency for study in Australia. www.goshu-ryugaku.com – and we are trying to do some simple modelling of the likely sales once we can get the SEO sorted out.

What is the likely conversion rate of unique visitors to enquiries? And how can we maximize that?

What is the likely conversion rate of enquiries to sales (we will be using dedicated sales people with email / messenger and telephone for dialogue).

Do you think my guestimate of 10% conversion of hits to contacts and 5% of contacts to sales is realistic?

We believe we can generate a good number of hits…but how many do we need to get the number of sales we want?

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Jay’s Answer: It all focuses on your website copy. Your home and landing pages need to be focused on your goal of generating enquiries, and well crafted to help people understand what you do, for whom, why they should contact you, and why your business is much better than the others.

If your copy is great, then you should be able to generate a fair bit of enquiries.

As far as converting enquiries to sales, this now depends upon your sales staff – how good they are at listening to the prospect’s needs and addressing them. Of course, price is important, but value for that price is even more so.

Generating traffic to your website is easy – it’s generating the right type of traffic – people that really need your services.

As far as conversion rates for websites, they generally are at 1% (on average).

Boost Your Store’s Foot Traffic For Free

Creative Business Ideas, eMarketing, Publicity

Store Queue
Photo by tata_aka_T

To get more customers into your store, make it easier for people to find your business online. Use Google’s Local Business Center to get your business listed in Google Maps, include a photo of your store, a description of your services, and even downloadable coupons for free. The entire process takes less than 15 minutes and you can easily change your store listing at any time.

  1. If you don’t already have a Google account, get one here . A Google account is also a necessity for using Google Analytics, Google Pages, etc.
  2. Create your Local Business Center Account
  3. Enter your business name, street address, phone number, website, and description. While you don’t need a website, Google requires a valid street address and phone number.
  4. Categorize your business (major categories include: retail stores, organizations, business to business, entertainment, transportation, travel, education, services, health & medical, restaurants, government offices, and real estate)
  5. (Optionally) Specify your hours and payment options.
  6. (Optionally) Upload pictures of your storefront or goods.
  7. (Optionally) Add details such as keywords, price ranges, and/or areas served.
  8. Confirm your listing (either by phone or postcard).

Many Good Ideas Google Maps Listing

The more information you provide, the easier it will be for people to find you: by location, by type of your business, by the hours of your business, and even what your store looks like. Think of Local Business Center as a free online Yellow Pages listing. Make sure you highlight the key benefits of your store to attract online attention.

Of course, adding a listing alone isn’t going to make your business an overnight success. It will make your business easier to find, and is a great addition to an old-fashioned brick-and-mortar store that doesn’t have a website but does want an online presence.

This tip will help increase awareness of your store online. Getting customers to tell their friends and return back to the store is vital strategy for creating an ongoing stream of clientele.

In addition to Google, many other search engines also allow you to submit your store (in many cases for free) to their business lists: Yahoo , Super Pages , Yellow Pages , MSN , Insider Pages , Local , and City Search .

How Can I Learn More About Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

eMarketing

I am in the process of constructing my website and have realised I know very little about SEO. I am seeking your thoughts and advice on the following:

1) Are there any easy-to-read-and-understand books or websites on the subject you could recommend?

2) Is there any simple, common sense advice you can give me, from your own experience?

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Jay’s Answer: Search optimization is an art based on shifting sands. Everyone is trying to optimize their site based on algorithms for search engines that are constantly being tweaked to prevent "gaming".

First, a simple book to read: Search Engine Optimization for Dummies (Peter Kent).

What’s changing in the SEO scene is the area of social search marketing. Before, if you wanted to find something, you went to the big search engines and did an "impartial" search. What’s hot now is asking your "community" for recommendations, in the same way you’d find a local plumber. The social search scene is very young, and SEO experts are trying to figure out how to "game" it as well.

My suggestions is to focus on your site first. Make sure it has top-quality information, so that when you do get traffic, people immediately "get" what you’re selling, see your expertise, and convert into customers. Once you’ve got your site "good enough" (don’t get into the paralysis of trying to make it perfect from the get-go), then open the traffic doors. Yes, do the keyword optimization. Yes, understand how people who want your products/services would try to find you, and make sure you’re listed "there". And finally, your website is an island unless you build bridges from other websites (backlinks). Find other sites that you can "partner" with. Contribute articles on your expertise to article banks.

How Do I Know Why Someone Did Not Buy My Product?

eMarketing, Services

We are selling an Enterprise software product and during the course of last year I had many contacts to many companies that evaluated the product, some of which ended up as clients, others did not. Usually I called the prospects asking why they choose not to buy our product if they decided against it.

I would now like to have a more structured approach to get some understanding what we do right or wrong with our offering – is it the product, is it the service, is it the price or anything else (what should I ask?). My goal is to convert more prospects into clients.

My initial idea is to conduct on online survey and send an invitation to all the people I had contact with last year. Do you think this is a good approach? If so, which questions do I need to ask? (I am assuming there is a typical set of questions to ask). I would like to keep the set of questions as small as possible in order to make answering the survey more attractive.

Or should I take another approach? I am also glad about any additional pointers.

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Jay’s Answer: I don’t know how many people you need to contact (and the lifetime value of the prospect), but if it’s under a couple of hundred people, I would call them. An online survey request is all to easy to ignore. What you really want is a dialog.

Before contacting any of them, create a script that could use either for a survey (should you wish) or a phone call. The script would be very similar to the one you would use when you initially contacting them: 1) confirming that they are a decision maker for this service/product, 2) finding out their current solution to the product/service, 3) confirming that they would be interested in a better solution, 4) determining a budget for it, etc.

When you contact them the first time, you needed to learn about their organization’s needs first, then you could sell them your solution. If after testing, your solution was rejected, I would go over the answers that they initially provided to see where their answers and your solutions didn’t "match up".

How Can I Grow My Opt-In List For Our Webinars?

eMarketing

We are a small B2B that specializes in creating tradeshow exhibits and other marketing displays. We would like to develop an opt-in database for e-marketing our free educational webinars. Subject matter is highly relevant and helps position us as expert resources in the field. There is little sales pitch involved and so far we have had a good response. The problem is we have a small contact list and want to grow this quickly. We can buy good strategic lists and use them for e-marketing for a limited period of time, but need to know the best tools and steps to capture an interested audience, build up a good clean database, and move forward positioning ourselves in this market with prospective clients. We’re late adopters to all of the new media, so please keep your responses in lay-terms.

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Jay’s Answer: The best way to build is a list is to give the reader a compelling reason to sign up. That means you need to target your list and identify their pain (and position yourself as having the solution). To sign up with you, you need to give them something of value that they need (for example, price the webinars at $39.95, but provide 2 free webinars for those subscribing, etc.) Also, the more information you request for sign up, the fewer the sign ups you’ll actually get.

Optimize Your Website For Search In 3 Steps

Creative Business Ideas, eMarketing,

Search Engine Logos Since the purpose of having a website is for people to find you online, I wanted to go over some basic strategies for ensuring that people searching for your types of services/products find your small business’s website.

The goal of optimization is to have your website listed before your competitors ("ranked highly") (ideally on the first page of search results, which most people don’t look beyond).

Most search engines report the result of searches in two groups: sponsored ads and normal ("organic ") searches. Sponsored ads appear because the company has agreed to pay the search engine (via a pay-per-click [PPC] ad campaign) money whenever people click on their ad for specific keywords. PPC is a great way to generate traffic quickly, but it’s often not cost effective long-term. Long-term you want your website to appear organically highly ranked.

When a person does a search, the goal of the search engine is to show the most relevant websites that likely match the person’s search terms . The goal of optimizing is to make your site highly relevant for specific search terms.

  1. Identify the search terms you want to rank highly for . As in all forms of marketing, you need to think like the person who’s looking, not as the business who’s selling. That means you need to know what keywords people use to search for businesses like yours. This information is easy to find from pay-per-click programs, such as Google Ad Words Keyword Tool . Don’t forget to also spot trends (using a tool such as Google Trends ) in keyword searches, since you want to catch "up-and-coming" searches that might be ranked low now.
  2. Use the keywords in relevant pages in your website . Keywords are seen in: the main body of the web page, meta tags (less important, but still worth having), and the alt-text in your images. Use keywords naturally – remember the point is to have more customers. If your website isn’t human-readable, then all your work will be for naught. Also, make sure that if you want to target customers in a region, you use your region in your keyword phrases.
  3. Get links to your website. Search engines rank websites by their "authority ". One way they measure authority is how many (and which) other websites link to them ("backlinks "). One backlink from an top-class website is worth hundreds of poor-quality links. You can get backlinks from a wide variety of sites: organizations that you’re a member of, blogs, and directories. One tool I recommend is Directory Submitter , a free tool to get backlinks. Be warned: Google is in the process of penalizing websites with paid backlinks. Also: submit your websites to the search engines (if you have not already) so they can explicitly add your site to their directories: Google , Yahoo , and MSN .

There is a lot more to search engine optimation (SEO) that these tips. Don’t forget there are professionals that can help you with your search engine optimization (I’d be happy to recommend some).

What’s the Best Way To Market My Web Design Agency?

eMarketing, Services

I am operating a web design agency that is focused on corporate web designs. Our target market is Real Estate companies, corporates and middle sized companies. We are using Google Adwords and Adbrite.com. Now we plan to place print ads. In which Business Magazine we should place ads?

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Jay’s Answer: Focus on one niche at a time. I would start with real estate companies, creating a landing page that targets them instead of your generic (“we do logo, web, and branding design”) message. Sell the solution – a great logo, website, branding helps attract customers short- and long-term, etc.

Corporate and middle-sized companies most likely do this work in-house, so you’ll be less likely to find opportunities there. However, if you focus on a niched middle-sized or corporate company, and know that you have a special service that it’s unlikely they have in-house, then by all means fill the need.

As for print magazines – don’t place ads in general business magazines. Place them in magazines that your niche reads. What do they read? Ask them.

Also, make sure you get your keywords in alignment for your niche’s search. You want to be easy to find.

What Are Best Practices For Optimizing Website Meta Tags?

eMarketing

I’ve been researching meta tags and it’s a little frustrating. There seems to be a lot of conflicting advice out there. What is your take on what you want your meta tags to reflect in order to optimize your search engine results?

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Jay’s Answer: Meta tags can matter, but remember what you really want are the right people finding your website easily (and then converting them to customers).

Focus on value on the copy of the website itself. The home page should be focused around the problem the “right” people are searching on by analyzing web search volume in the past few months. Spend your time crafting the page so it immediately speaks to the needs of the prospect. Yes, make sure that the keywords that people search are are sprinkled throughout the page naturally, but don’t sacrifice human-readability.

Once the site is ready for traffic, then get your site registered with the search engines and get links to your website organically (i.e, without paying for them)(Website placement is based on authority, and one of the metrics of authority is link quality/quantity). You don’t want traffic until you have a site that’s effective.

SEO is an art, hence the wide differing opinions on the techniques.

What’s a Good Tagline For An Online Marketing Company?

eMarketing, Names + Taglines

I run an online marketing and web solutions company called “Whirlwind”. We are into web strategy, online campaign management, SEO/SEM, etc. and also offer customized web solutions including site/blog development. As of now, we do not have any tagline for the company, and I would like to ask the members here is they can help us come up with something good.

I am ideally looking at a three-beat advertising slogan, which can add a lot of punch. We figured that this would be needed because the name of our firm doesn’t directly imply what kind of services we offer. So a persuasive/intelligent tagline or slogan would help.

A coupla examples of a three-beat advertising slogan:
1.The few, the proud, the Marines
2. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

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Jay’s Answer:

  • Business Problems? We Strategize. Web Results.
  • Your Business, Online, Everywhere.

The tagline should mention a key benefit of working with you. Web strategy (etc.) are services, not benefits. Here’s my tagline thinking:

Your Business, Online, Everywhere =
your business – makes the tagline personal to the reader. Removing “your” may work, but it strips the tagline of a “voice”
online – your specialty
everywhere – where the client’s company will be seen.

Note: online/everywhere may appear to be redundant, however many businesses are online, but aren’t visible. What Whirlwind focuses on is the online marketing.

Along the same lines:

  • Be Online. Be Seen. Be Successful.