Tag Archives: website

What Are A Call Center’s Compelling Home Page Headlines?

I read this on a marketing website “If you want people to read what you have to say on your website, you must start each webpage with a compelling headline and use sub headlines to keep your visitors reading your text”

I am developing a web site and need to headlines for the front page. We are a call center for outsourcing telemarketing inbound and outbound services. We are nationwide and have the top technology in the industry. Our service is superb and we have a state of the art facility.

Any suggestions for headlines to the front page introduction to us headline, then a secondary headline with what content would be most important? If you were going to outsource to a call center what would you be looking for?

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Is Your Business Overwhelmed With Phone Calls?
Tired Of Answering The Phone?
Tired Of Cold-Calling?
Rather Be Working Than Calling?
Wasting Too Much Time On The Phone?
We Love To Find You New Customers
Because Calling Isn’t Everyone’s Cup of Tea
Leave Phone Calling To the Pros
Do What You Do. We’ll Answer The Phone.
Stop Phone Interruptions.

Who Can Help Create A Personal Direct Mail Campaign?

The other day I received a postcard in the mail that was clever. The postcard was personalized with my name front and back. It pointed me to a URL which also included my name: myname.company.net. When I followed the URL the landing page greeted me with my name as well. This was I imagine done with a single technology that generates the postcard and the web site address and populated the page with my name.

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The personalized postcard was produced using variable data printing (VDP). A number of companies also package VDP with direct marketing (as you saw). Here are some leads:

http://www.vdpcomplete.com
http://www.easypurl.com
http://variabledataprinting.printpelican.com/

What Is A Sub-Domain?

My hosting company offers up to 6 websites hosted for the one low price. I created a website which is ranking very well and have now created a second site (unrelated in topic) to the first site on the same hosting plan. I now realize this second website is considered a sub-domain of the first website according to my CPanel, although they have completely different domain names. Will this 2nd site be considered of lesser importance by the search engines or is this whole sub-domain thing just visible to me in my CPanel? Should I move the 2nd site to a separate new hosting plan

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You might be confusing subdomain with the folder structure of your website.

A subdomain is a name that comes before your domain name. In the case of www.google.com there’s also images.google.com, maps.google.com, etc. Each of these are websites in their own right, but their names share the domain name. Search engines see these as their own website. Subdomains are a handy way to organize a logical “entity” of a website.

The folder structure is how the websites are organized on your web hosting server. If your package provides 6 websites, then it’s probable that each domain’s files & folders are kept in a single domain folder (which in turn, is kept in a folder for you, the hosting user). At the “top level” of your web hosting folder, you’d have a different folder for each domain.

The cpanel allows you to map a folder to a (sub)domain.

You DO want your different (unrelated) websites to have different domain names as a start of your “branding”.

How To Disaster-Proof Your Business

ambulanceHow much pain would your business feel if suddenly you couldn’t email your clients? What if you lost your correspondence file or your phone lost its dial tone? We tend to avoid thinking about a business catastrophe until it hits close to home. And when problems hit, we need them fixed yesterday and are willing to pay a lot to make them go away.

Anticipate Common Problems

How you solve them will depend upon your business model, budget, and risk tolerance.

Fire/Earthquake/Hurricane. Imagine that everything in your office is destroyed. What are the steps you’d take to get things up-and-running?

Theft. Your important information is gone, and in the hands of who-knows? Have you safeguarded your passwords, financial, and contact information (especially of your clients)?

No Internet connection. How could you get/send emails?

No dial tone. How could you call (and get calls from) your clients?

Web host offline. How can people find you online?

Emails bounce/blocked. Recently I found that my domain has been “spoofed” (someone sent a bunch of spam to people, making it look like I emailed it). The result is that I couldn’t send emails to some of my existing clients. My work-around was to create a (free) gmail account (which isn’t blocked) to send outgoing messages to these clients.

Crashed hard disk/virus. Your files aren’t accessible. Now what?

Deleted/Lost/Trashed file(s). One (or more) of the files on your computer (or website) suddenly is unusable. How can you get it back?

Illness/Death/Leave. What if you or your employees, couldn’t do your job?

Wrong contact information. An important advertisement (including Yellow Pages or 411 information listing) has the wrong contact information (worst case: your competitor’s contact information).

Money. What if you bounced a check to one of your suppliers? What if your credit cards are denied? What if your merchant account stops processing your client’s payments?

Don’t Forget To Test

Too often people find that their computer backups are incomplete or unusable. Restore your backup to another computer. Use that computer for a day.

It’s not a matter of IF you’ll have a problem, it’s just WHEN.

Spending time (and money) to avoid a problem may feel like it’s a distraction from growing (or doing) your business. But it’s the key for making clients feel like you’re there when they need you.

What Are The Latest Internet Usage Statistics?

Please point me to your favorite, reliable, and up-to-date source for Internet usage metrics such as:

  • How long does the average person (in the U.S.) spend online each day?
  • What’s an updated stat on high-speed Internet penetration?
  • How is this time being spent online? Personal? Work? Surfing? Searching?
  • Who and how many are using IE6, IE7, Firefox, Safari?
  • What’s the most common screen resolution for these Internet users?

We want to make sure our personalized micro sites can be enjoyed by all, but if we can’t do that we’d like to figure out what an acceptable level might look like going forward.

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Here are the relevant links:

How Can I Promote A New Film?

I’m trying to promote a new film for this ad agency I’m interning for…. how should I go about it? Any good ideas ??

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If you’re looking to get web traffic to your film’s site, create teasers/trailers of the film and post on free video sites such as YouTube, Google Video, etc.

Cross-promote it with a relevant partner. If your film is about babies, consider: baby products, new moms’ website/blogs, parenting magazines, etc.

What Canned Responses Should My Online Store Generate?

I was trying to find a website that offers free canned responses that I can send out to our customers after they have made a purchase at our online shop (order confirmation-thank you for your order…etc.) also a canned response that is responding to a customer inquiry.

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If you do want to “borrow” some canned responses, I’d suggest modeling them on Amazon. They’ve got the email response language down.

See also: commentary on the canned responses

How Can I Generate Traffic To My Website?

I am looking for an online service/website that will generate quality traffic to my site so my sales will increase.

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You actually have 2 questions: “How to increase traffic” and “How to increase sales”. The second question is actually more important. Just because you get more visitors doesn’t mean you’ll get more sales. You need to be selling the right thing to the right people at the right time. That means your site should clearly identify who your audience is, what problem you solve of theirs, and how you solve it.

Once you’ve crafted this compelling benefit statement, only then it makes sense to find sites that drive traffic to you. And what type of traffic? You only want to attract that matches your audience. If you’re selling a product for men, and you only get women visiting your site, while it’s possible some women will buy the product for a man in her life, you would get many more conversions if you started by getting men to visit your site.

 

See also: Marketing 101

How Can I Have A Successful Website Launch?

I am looking for a clear, concise ‘how to” on the steps necessary to successfully launch a new web site. What are the things I need to think about in terms of my audience (bankers), the press, trade shows, email blasts, direct mail, and other marketing tactics.

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A website is a business. Make sure you have a clear strategic plan for what you’re trying to accomplish, who you’re trying to sell to, how you differentiate yourself, etc. Here’s an article to get you started.

If you’ve already done your planning “homework”, then after your site is up, your next step is traffic. This is a function of targeting your website’s solution to your market’s problem. Each campaign is different, because each market is different and you want your site to standout from the others. In general online solutions can include: emails to existing clients, co-marketing with other sites, back-links from other sites, press releases, white papers, SEO, PPC, videos, eBooks, and articles.

How Can I Increase My Website Rank?

What the first thing I should do on the Internet? I want to have a PR rank website 4 at least, should I have a blog, forum, if yes, where, and where is should I tell about my posting, site, etc..?

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Site optimization is a long-term process. First, you need to identify what keywords you want top position for, and determine what page rank (a number from 0 to 10) the top sites have. You’re looking for keywords that have traffic (there are people interested in the topic) as well as relatively low page ranks for the top sites.

Once you identify your keywords, you need to populate at least your home page with the words “naturally”. Don’t forget to include the keywords in the title of the page itself and in the keywords tag (which isn’t as important as it once was).

Next, you need backlinks, links from other sites to your site. The better the site that gives you backlinks, the better your pagerank.

It takes time for your site to go up in rank. Newer sites naturally get a lower ranking than newer sites.