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I recently listened to a presentation by Colette Mason, a professional website useability expert. As you would expect with her track record of high profile clients in both the public and private sector it was time well spent.
Among the gems she provided was her list of outsourcing contractors. Having taken a look at them myself they have already gone into my toolbox and I've added them to the Members Resources page.
If you are looking for writers, document formatting, editing, proof-reading and similar services to produce really professional looking documents then go take a look now under the Outsourcing heading on the Members Resources page.
You might also find these articles useful for outsourcing information
- Benefits of Small Business Outsourcing (brighthub.com)
- Whiteboard Friday – Outsourcing Content Creation (mt-soft.com.ar)
- Finding a good outsourcer for website changes/design/marketing? (ask.metafilter.com)
Filed under Blog, Outsourcing by 
Just to let you know that all 3 of the presentations from the last meeting are now available in the members area.
Traffic
The presentation on Traffic also has a working Excel spreadsheet illustrating the importance of having upsell offers in place in your sales funnel as well as the impact of improving your optin and conversion rates.
Download it now and adapt it to represent your own business to see just what you could make – or how much money you are leaving on the table!
Click here to go to the Traffic presentation.
Got a real world business dealing in physical products?
Then you need to see the presentation on Google Places. Get to the top of page #1 with no website – and displace all the SEO optimised sites – for free!
A pdf of the mindmap with relevant links is also included in the post.
Social Bookmarking
Then there's Social Bookmarking, rather forgotten in the current wave of Twitter/Facebook enthusiasm but still a powerful tool – invaluable information and some recommendations of the most effective tools.
And finally, don't forget the bright shiny new forum is awaiting your questions and answers.
Click here to vist the Forum
Looking forward to seeing you all again next month. Book it in your diary for 21 August.
Subscription members just email me to confirm and non-members please RSVP by clicking on the red Smart Marketing Warriors badge in the right sidebar
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I recently used what I'm going to share with you now to boost the conversion rate from prospect to customer by 400%. A fair hike up, I'm sure you'll agree.
Given that one of my websites is Sian Murphy Copywriter, you might be expecting me to divulge that after an extensive and costly review of the copy, I tweeked one dull word and hey presto, the magic turn of phrase emerged which had people flocking to buy. But I didn't.
Let me tell you the story…
One of my regular business coaching clients asked me to revamp the copy and marketing for one of their sales processes, which was just dead in the water. Now, this is a business in the real world with warehouses, big noisy machines and foremen with toetectors, hard hats and high visibility tabards.
The sales staff were cold calling, all with fancy scripts, to get contact details (the list) and subsequently convert them into paying customers – something to do with printers and inks and stuff. But the conversions weren't happening, product wasn't moving and all of this lack of profit being delivered by a the resource intensive practice of cold calling.
What they expected was a rewrite of their copy and cold calling scripts, followed by an intensive training programme, all of which takes yonks and so doesn't come cheap. I suppose you've worked out that didn't happen. Instead, I spent a couple of hours and yep, we got a 400% boost in conversion. Here's what I did.
I put in a system. Using a piece of paper, a pencil to scribble a flow chart. A simple scheme for contacting prospects was enough to secure the conversions. Consitency and continuity for staff and customers is the key.
I'm not going to publish the system here, you wouldn't believe how simple it is, and I'm not sure it would help much, because every sales process is individual, but there is a fine lesson here. When something isn't performing as you want, I suggest you follow these guidelines…
- Don't decide what needs fixing before you've looked at what's broken. Don't make assumptions about why something isn't working.
- Decide what the problem is before you go about mending it. Write it down so you have it very clear.
- Review the whole process, no matter how pointless you think that is. Even better, get someone who doesn't know the system to pull it apart for you.
- Start with the cheapest solution and work your way up. Don't just fling time and money at a problem and hope it will go away, because it won't.
I don't know what the copy and marketing was like for the process I looked at. Could still be crap. But I do know this, my client could have spent loads and loads getting it rewritten and it still wouldn't have worked because there wasn't a system to the sales process.
And there are two stages to implementing a system. The first is to develop the system and the second is the decision to automate. Well planned automation, using appropriate tools, will save you time and money – as long as you use the right package.
We once had an autoresponder which used to drop out, without preamble or explantion, every now and then – so losing us leads unless we checked it was still working every hour or so. An expensive pain in the bum.
All of the tools we use and recommend on this site are reviewed here so you don't have to waste your time and money sucking and seeing.
Filed under Blog, Business Management, Copywriting, Sales Funnel, Web Writing and Presentation by
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Each month at the Smart Marketing Warriors meeting, one of our members gets treated to a 'Hot Seat'. This is where we review a member's website then recommend improvements to the website design.
And I'm not your Mother, so it's not called the Hot Seat for nothing.
However, let me set this straight, this isn't about slagging off what someone's doing for 30 minutes, you can go anywhere and get numerous people to do that for free. No, it's about looking at where the project owner wants to be, what they want to achieve and what needs to happen to make that come true?
But here's the thing, there are patterns emerging, themes if you will, which crop up repeatedly. It's not that we're getting bored saying the same thing over to new members as they take the hot seat – but why wait? When you have this information then you can get going on this right now.
Just for this post, I've picked out the one improvement which is recommended almost every time we review a website, and here it is.
Get the interesting stuff above the fold – the bit which people see when they first land on your web page, or site, and if it fails to entice then you won't' get them scrolling down to find any of the nuggets of contents below the fold. The 'fold' terminology relates the big newspapers where the leading headlines tell readers why they need to continue reading.
I have my own theory why this recurrs…
1. The above the fold area is filled with information about the web site owner, logo's and headers, which say little about what's in it for the reader. The reader doesn't care about you. They care about what you have that interests them, and that is a very subtle difference which is difficult to achieve without the experienced and non-biased eye.
2. Newbie web developers (and I know this is what happened to me) are so thrilled at being able to create something, anything, that they fill the space up with incidentals, which are easy to put in, and add colour and words, but nothing else. A good example is the calendar. Wordpress cleverly lets you pick and point, and zip, a calender pops into the sidebar. But unless you are running an events programme which your visitor wants to know about, why would they want to look at a calender? They don't.
YOU can't do your own hot seat, but you can run a simulation by asking someone who doesn't know what you're doing (and who is not well known for their tendency to flattery) to visit your site and tell you what it's all about, and their understanding of what's on offer.
Or, for less than the cost of a daily cup of tea you can become a Smart Marketing Warriors member and book up your very own hot seat to rack up your website design. And that way you also get to find out about the other important elements for improvement which you can implement right now.
You can join right now in time for the next meeting right here
Filed under Building Websites by
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It's true that this site is normally focused towards online and business web marketing, but hotel conference rooms don't hold the monopoly on public speaking.
I'm not going to bore you with the statistic about how many millions of people are more scared by public speaking than of dying…but isn't that a bit extreme? However, it could be the reason why many people switch off from public speaking and convince themselves its unecessary because their marketing efforts will be online.
It's also a bit of a shame, because public speaking is about the meanest marketing tool there is. Public speaking can win you new clients on the day, and set you up for the future by positioning you as an expert in your field.
Let me explain what I mean by public speaking…because I'm not talking about your transformation into a faux Bill Clinton. You don't have to stand up and expound world issues. Unless you are serioulsy worth listening to (i.e. a world leader) then, at first, people don't want your opinion, they're looking for knowledge and information to help them improve a special area of their life or business.
Is this starting to sound like marketing yet?
Public speaking in this context could be any one of the following…
- Running a workshop or seminar on your subject
- A presentation to a group of staff or a board
- Being a visiting speaker at someone else's event so you can get them out of their room, and into your room
- Party Plan (remember tupperware – not such a silly idea)
- Speaking at clubs – the women's institute members all have problems, dreams, desires and money
- Webinars – online events where attendees register and get to see and hear what's happening, but all delivered online
- Conference calls – a very cheap way of getting lots of people together to listen to what you have to say – but the limitation here is the lack of visual information and that matters to some people
- Interview, or be interviewed, on the radio, or blog talk radio.
There is loads of information around on public speaking and far too much to tack onto the end of an article like this. However, there are two core elements which you must account for if you are to have any success.
Number one is that whatever you decide to talk about, in whichever environment, for goodness sake keep your eye on the end game. Yes, content is king and you must, must, must deliver value ( even if your event is free, participants have spent time and money getting to you) but what is the grander purpose here? It's to sell more of your product or service. If you don't set up 'the close', no-one will buy. You can be the most engaging speaker ever, but if your sales message isn't clear then you will not get the sales. Bottom line.
At the very least, you can point people to a table with your brochure on it. And that is the very least.
Here's a tip while you work on getting comfortable selling yourself and public speaking – take someone along to do the selling bit, third party, after the event. This leaves you free to mingle with the crowd and all you have to do is point prospects to the sales area where someone else does the dirty money thing.
Number two is to keep your topic tight. If you provide an advertising service to anyone who knocks on the door, great, but you need to target your event… so how about…
"How To Create Advertising That Works For Plumbers"
"How To Create Advertising That Works For Hairdressers"
When you target a niche for your public speaking, you give the heads up to your potential audience; make advertising so much easier by opening up advertising opporunities in specialist trade journals and industry events and you can finely tune your sales message to oil the wheels towards your sales table.
Public speaking is so important that at Smart Marketing Warriors are now considering introducing a very special training element for our business web marketing group – to help them cut their teeth.
To find out more then head over the information page
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If we believe google, each month around the globe, 368,000 people tap 'How To Make A Website' into google.
What's a bit scary however, is that 3,370,000 sites turn up in the results. A potential 3,370,000 answers! I wonder if some of them are different. Perhaps they even contradict each other. Yep.
4 years ago or so, that was me, typing 'How To Make A Website' into google and getting over 3 millions answers to wade through. Seriously, how do you pick your way through that lot?
Today I can get a web site published in a few minutes, or a few days, depending on how fancy you want, and have loads of my own sites ranging from quite comprehensive to basic single landing page sites as in After The Army. I also build websites for clients. Why am I dishing this out like a CV? Well the point is that I don't know everything, but I know enough to get websites out there that do the job.
So here is my basic guide on How To Make A Website…
1. There are websites you build using HTML. You can jump start the process with a template; you can use an HTML editor like Dreamweaver or Frontpage, or you can hand code your HTML in a text editor like notepad.
If you want to do something quickly, or cheaply, then this may not be the option for you. There is the language of HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets – which is how you style your pages) to learn and the accredited course on using Dreamweaver that we booked cost over £800 and lasted over 6 months. With homework and all that sort of thing. Or you can pay a developer to build one for you.
When you've built your site, you publish it to the internet using an FTP (file transfer protocol programme) which acts as a go between from your computer to your host. Each time you want to change the site you need to download the damn thing, fiddle around, and load it back up. You can have the site coded so that basic changes to the wording of pages can be made without all of this carry on – but you need someone who knows what they're doing to set that up.
When you publish your website, no one will find it unless you tell them the exact URL (the http:/www.thingy.com), or you put keywords into the site, and into the copy, which match what people are searching for. The keywords go into the coding in the site and once again if you want to change them, then you need to do the whole downloady, uploady thing.
And keywords aren't static, they need to change because seachers may be using something different to find you or your business; your potential customers and your competition is changing. You can pay a developer over 300 quid to change a few keywords. Yikes, think on.
That said we do have a lead generation website built like this and you can pop over and have a quick look so you know what I'm talking about. Here it is
So why do people bother with this? Well you have total control over where all the various elements go. You can put pictures, text, adverts and pages wherever you want. And then move them 2 mm to the left. So you need to decide why that would be important to your online marketing campaign. If you are an artist, then the overall look of your site could be vital. If you are a web designer who specialises in building sites for artists, then, yes, this precision design can count. But if you're a raw food specialist, does it really matter that much? I don't think so. It should look clean and visitors need to be able to find what they were hunting for in the first place in double quick time. I'm a great one for getting carried away with colour and design and it does me good to remember what Tim Berners-Lee (accredited with inventing the world wide web) said about web users – "Web users ultimately want to get data quickly and easily. They don't much care about attractive sites and pretty design".
If this sort of detail does matter to you then you must decide if you're going to pay someone to develop it for you, remembering that you will need to pay them again if you want to change something and that you have the costs of driving traffic on top of that. If you're happy with the slower train then you can learn how to build it yourself.
You could decide to use a site builder. This is where you pick and point at various elements of your website and build them up into a site. And that's all I'm going to say about that clunky sort of thing.
Or, You Can Use Wordpress
Wordpress is usually thought of as a blogging platform, which means it is often dismissed as a serious web design tool. But that's what it is. A blog, or weblog, is only a website that is updated like a diary. Or that's how it started out and today there are wordpress sites around which are doing the job of the previous corporate brochure type of site. Plus, they also have the relationship building blog element which google and your customers like so very much. You can fix the front page if you like so, much the same as with an HTML site, your visitor always gets the same information when they land.
You can't easily muck about with the content to the same degree. Pictures and adverts are placed in widgets which are already in a fixed position. But why should that worry you when the information is delivered and the pretty pictures are still displayed? The SEO (search engine optimisation) stuff is so much easier because you can type your keywords in and the meta titles are picked up from the titles of the posts. This means you can be on top of your market and change your keywords, or add new ones, in about 2 minutes.
If you're really keen to get going and you don't yet have a URL or a host of your own, then you can even get your blog started for free through Wordpress.com, with a word of caution, you can put in loads of work and wordpress will have ultimate control over the site and the traffic. Also your URL will be something like http:/www.sianmurphycopywriter.com/wordpress. In the longrun, you should consider buying your URL, getting it hosted and then loading wordpress up onto your site. And this is very simple once you know how. When you click on the right buttons (and they'res not many) your new wordpress site is sort of sucked up and planted on the internet for all to see. After that you can just start typing. You can even fancy it up using different skins and themes. This site uses the Thesis Theme. Leaving the armed forces uses the awesome Thesis Theme (you have to say awesome) with a Times Skin, and Smart Marketing Warriors uses the Semiologic theme.
If you want to take money, announce your posts to the world, add pictures and videos in a trice, link up to twitter, run a forum or a membership site, and just about anything you can imagine wanting a website to do, then there are 1,000's of plugins (many of which are free) which you can also add a the click of the 'install button'.
I like, no I love Wordpress. And so does google.
There are other blogging platforms, such as Blogger.com, and all sorts of site templates and site builders which you can get through paid programmes and certain hosts, but they can be clunky so watch out.
If you want a website which is quick, professional, updateable and loved by google, then wordpress has got to be it.
Let's tie this together a bit. You've got the 'I'm going to do it all myself (or I'm going to pay someone else a lot of money, and then carry on paying them a lot of money everytime I want to change the site), conventional html type site. With knowledge and time, or cash, then you can have exactly what you want.
In the middle is the site builder sort of thing. Don't waste your time or money here.
Finally, there's the wordpress option. You can pick your layout and you can change colours and design within boundaries. And you can publish a website in 10 minutes and have your first post out there in the next 2 minutes for all to see. Not perfect. But out there.
And remember, whilst it's in the designers laptop, no-one's seeing any damn thing.
If want a step-by-step blueprint for building websites using wordpress then click through here to get help.
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I don't know about you, but it took me a while to get a grip on Twitter. I joined because everyone else did. I did a few lonely tweets, and I got a few followers. I learnt that if you go and follow people, they follow you back and hey presto, you have the makings of a list.
But crikey doesn't it take a long time to do this following thing manually? It's such a pain in the bum, that I half managed to convince myself it wasn't that important.
And then I caught myself looking at how many followers other people had.
Even worse, I found myself drawing conclusions about their business and marketing acumen based on their numbers of followers. The depths of my brain had, without my encouragement, developed this arbitrary cut off number of what was ok – anyone with more than 2,500 followers was clearly doing alright. I had 349.
Time to stop buggering around, but sometimes it's not that easy to squeeze one more activity into the daily routine when you have clients expecting you to do something.
Obviously, I knew there were loads of twitter tools out there, and I'd even visited a few, but there was so much to learn before you got started. Shelved it again for a while, but wasted several hours dipping in and out.
It just goes to show you the power of information when it comes from a source you trust. One of our members wasn't very into Twitter, and was at the cusp of getting her first blog published. An academic rather than a web mogul. Well, when she told me she'd started using a product called Buzzom and it was working for her, growing her list and helping her tweet, I just decided to hook up and get going without too much research. Thank goodness. My list is now growing at about 30 people a day and Buzzom also helps me to schedule my tweets and manage my other (yes I now have 2!) twitter account.
Social media can be a bit of a beast to get your head around and there are hundreds of social sites. You can't join them all in one day, so which ones are worth focusing on? There are techie and protocol issues to grasp, which means that plugging into the social network sites can suck the time and the will to live from the sturdiest online marketer.
For guidance about which social media sites you really must focus on, and, how to get the best out of your time when using them, then you may find this information useful.
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The focus of this website, and the associated training programme, is business web marketing, so, what did we learn at the Saturday meeting about personal branding for the small business? And how does that relate to marketing on the internet?
You may think that if you're a one man band, you can forget about your personal branding. Sure you can neglect it for a while, but leave it for too long, and you're going to be throwing good business down the pan. And 'Good Business' are the key words here. How would you like to work with who you want? The platinum clients who pay premium rates. And pay on time.
Personal branding gives you that choice.
Last Saturday we arranged for the Personal Branding UK expert Jorgen Sundberg to talk to our members. Jorgen pointed out something so stunningly simple, that many of us there seemed to have forgotten about it. Really, no matter who you are, if you offer a service, just loads of your potential clients are going to go online to find out who you are, before they decide to do business with you. They will type your name into the all seeing google, and see what's churned out!
Why don't you try that for yourself? Did you like what you saw? Did you see anything at all? Moving on very quickly.
And it's not about your logo. They really don't care about the hue and size and of your logo. They'll be learning about what you get up to on Facebook and reviewing your Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin profiles. EEK! Jorgan urged us to aim for consistency across the 4 megathons of social media – that's the three above and Google Profiles. This means that your linkedin profile is the same as your facebook one. Yadda yadda. I'm sure you get the idea.
Social media is a bit of an oddball beastie – I've sort of lumped the whole lot together as I couldn't find a collective noun. How about a Chatter? Latching onto the different social media accounts is a bit like evolving as a teenager – everything's changing really quickly. When I went back to my linked in profile – which I set up yonks ago and forgot about, the dodgy sounding email address associated with it was an old hotmail account which I used at college, and which now spends its retirement spamming everyone on my contact list. Not the professional image I was hoping for.
All sorted now. Profile written using the linkedin template and transferred to each account with emails and websites all consistent.
Phew.
However, what is your personal branding? It's certainly more than a list of qualifications, experience and contact details. That's your CV. What Jorgan explained was that your branding is how you demonstrate the value you deliver. It's your integrity out on the washing line for the neighbours to nose at. And who wants to see your old grey undies with the wrinkly elastic. Best thong forwards.
You can see the full presentation and get your Personal Branding Toolkit with the 5 Key Elements you need to get started right here
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Last Saturday's meeting went well with two presentations oriented towards beginners and a guest speaker in the form of Jorgen Sundberg who spoke on his speciality of Personal Branding.
As an offshoot of the general Social Media whirl it was interesting to see how he approached the use of social media for those who are working on building their personal brand and the structured approach of assembling a consistent toolkit of information was really useful.
Remembering what it was like for complete beginners starting out to launch either a hobby or a full time business in online marketing, Bruce's presentation on 'What the Web Really Looks Like' set out with the intention of de-mystifying the web and putting some concrete into 'the cloud' in order to make it more understandable. Definitely heading for the 'Getting Started' section of the membership site.
Sian's presentation on Finding and Using Keywords for your business did exactly what it says in the title. From her background as a copywriter, Sian's view of keywords was invaluable.
This time around we split the Hot Seat session between two members to provide some objective observations on progress by members. Find out how Brian got on with www.overcoming-low-self-esteem.com where he is offering life coaching services and Dawn who's objective was to break out of 'website under construction' syndrome!
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Personal branding is a neglected part of my business, mainly because I get tied up generating immediate cash.
Perhaps personal branding should fall in alongside training and personal development – it can be neglected for a while, but leave it for too long and stasis sets in and suddenly it's the business doldrums.
So, I'm rather pleased that our guest speaker at the London meeting of the Smart Marketing Warriors this Saturday is Jorgen Sundberg, the personal branding consultant who helps entrepreneurs to create, build and promote their brands.
Jorgen tells us 'your name is your greatest asset and will stay with you for the rest of your life. Transforming it into a personal brand that others will recognize and appreciate is your best strategy for long-term success in business.'
The following Top 5 Reasons For Personal Branding, all hit where it matters – in the wallet (or purse in my case)
- Grow Your Network = more customers
- Attract Opportunities = more customers
- Establish Credibility = more customers
- Increase Your Online Clout = more customers
- Securing Work = there's a trend forming here!
Everyone at the meeting will get to find out about Personal Branding: The 5 Most Important Actions for Marketers and Small Business Owners
As long as you're at the meeting then you can go home and start applying the information immediately. Jorgen will also be around for the open session in the afternoon, so you'll get a chance to chat with him as well.
Please secure your place using the RSVP button on the right hand column – just under the video of Laurie being over enthusiastic.
Best wishes and we look forward to seeing you on Saturday
Sian, Bruce and Laurie
PS Also on the agenda this Saturday are:
Finding And Using Keywords For Your Business, and
What The Web Looks Like – Bruce Birds demystifying the internet.
We've also introduced a new section for the afternoon – Cool Tools – and you can find out more about that on the day.
PPS If you need help or detailed knowledge about marketing your business online, then the Smart Marketing Warriors might be for you. It keeps you moving forward by answering your specific queries alongside giving you expert strategies and techniques. Check it out now and get your introductory publication here
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