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First published in 1936, How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie, a prolific American writer and lecturer, is one of the first best-selling self-help books. Although the principles are over 70 years old, many of his ideas in still applicable today.
Communication is key when building relationships with people. No one wants to be friends with someone who only talks about themselves and never listens to others. All relationships are two-way streets, and it is imperative to listen as much as (if not more than) you talk.
Forget about the details of setting up an AdWords, Search Marketing or adCenter campaign. — You aren’t going to find those instructions here. At least not today anyway. If you’re looking for that kind of information, each vendor has a pretty extensive step-by-step process they’ll walk you through. (Although tips on those instructions are always good - that is another post.)
What you will find here is a basic question that you need to ask yourself. Before even considering how to compose your ad text or create the keyword list, what is the FIRST question that needs asked? Is it about the budget? No. How about the CPC bids? No, that’s not the first either.
Sites that are designed to sell products and/or services must go the extra mile to enhance the visitor’s engagement with the website. Shopping cart abandonment (shoppers abandoning their carts before deciding to pay for the “items” they’ve added to their cart) can result in a significant loss in potential sales. But much of that can be reduced when the shopping process is streamlined and geared for shopper satisfaction.
There is a new book out by Seth Godin that gets to the why of New Marketing and explains the 14 trends that go with it. He encourages you to wisely dive in and embrace it. What are you waiting for?
Seth Godin who has written 11 books to date including Purple Cow as well as being an entrepreneur and highly respected speaker has another great book for us to read, Meatball Sundae. I truly enjoyed yet again his getting to the point writing merged with real-life business examples. Godin doesn’t focus on the negative instead he illustrates through words what a company did and what they could have done better and on the flip side what they did and what he thought was amazing about it. He also includes many websites that should be looked over as examples or used in your new marketing strategy. Godin gets into old marketing and new marketing how they differ and why old marketing is not the future or the present. He touches on, The Long Tail theory coined by Chris Anderson which is also one of SEOmoz’s must read books. Godin explains why direct communication with your customers is more important then ever and how one person can effect your business by using direct communication. It’s up to you to make it a positive comment or a negative one.
Buying software is so 1999. I mean seriously, who wants to buck up and spend upwards of $500 on an office suite when you have bills to pay and lattes to drink. Plus, with everyone’s exciting New Year’s resolutions in full swing, saving money may be even more appealing. Enter the world of free web-based software and open source software. This list is obviously not comprehensive, nor authoritative, however, these ten programs are the ones I found most useful during 2007.
Stoney has a relatively hands-off policy regarding what the team blogs about on (EMP). Occasionally he’ll give us some general direction or guidance (Titles, people! It’s all about titles!!!) and he tell us to always keep it relevant to business and marketing, but other than that we pretty much have free reign. And while he doesn’t like to write negative posts about other small businesses, he’s never specifically said we can’t, so I’m going to vent a little and, well, if a particular local web hosting company gets in the way, that’ll be their problem, not mine.
Some of you may have noticed that our CodeMonitor tool has not been working properly for several weeks (actually it’s been over a few months now!). A while back we started having some issues with our web host. At the time, it was on the same account (1and1 Hosting) as our client reporting suite, task management system and this blog. Our site’s started going down periodically and the customer support we received was less than stellar.
Would you buy your service/product from you based on your website? Does your site have a good first impression? Look it over and see what needs to be improved to fulfill the point of your site. Ask people who you know and know will give you a straight answer the same two questions I just asked you. Just like anything else in business itâs extremely beneficial to get a different perspective. If you do find that your website can use a little buffing up and donât know where to start you can try the following quirky trick to gain web focus.
First of all think of your homepage as a person, I know itâs a little weird but go with it for a moment. Get out a pen and paper draw your ideal representative, (you donât have to be artist of the year). What would your ideal rep. wear to work? Are they the suit and tie type, laid back and relaxed, new age, small town church wear, stay at home mom, etc? Give them a short background like where they are from, their work experience, what their main job focus with you is, etc. Name your ideal employee with a name that fits all the characteristics. Are they a Carol, Steve, Bob, Peggy-Sue? This is a great thing to do with your employees/co-workers to get their perception of what you represent.
Next step is to write the voice that matches your star employee. Try to stay around the 8th to 9th grade level of intellect. Even if you have rocket scientists reading your site this makes it easier to skim through and get your point across quickly. Leave the extremely technical talk for your inner webpages that deal with those particular subjects. Use your content in a sales savvy way. Influence them in your direction. Give your web visitor the information they need to make the decision and feel comfortable to follow through.
This is the last of my book reviews for the year. I had a pile of completed books that I hadn’t had a chance to write up my reviews of them until this week. Hence the all-review-all-the-time thing we got going on here at EMP this week. Next week I’ll be publishing a complete list of all the books and documents (not counting blogs) that I’ve read in 2007. That’ll be a treat for all you readers out there.
Anyway, on with the show. I got a chance to read SEOmoz’s Viral Marketing and Linkbait on the Web document. Yes, you need a subscription to read it. The document does a great job of explaining the broad strokes of link bait, starting with the audience. They outline who they are, where they are, and how you reach them, and why you want to do this in the first place.
There’s a great discussion started by Michael Dorausch regarding Matt Cutts’ three steps process to build a site and get a ton of traffic. Michael transcribed and organized Matt Cutts’ evening presentation at PubCon this past week. Cutts made many great suggestions that any webmaster old or new ought to consider.
Step 1 - Make a Compelling Service
“If youâre trying to sell junk you’re going to have a much harder time. So spend the time, and the thing is you can start up a website really for a lot less money than you could even five or six years ago.
A website is much like a home. In order for it to function as intended it has to be built to be structurally sound top to bottom. On the web you can think of search engine spiders as the building inspector who come by from time to time making sure that all areas of your site can be properly access. This isn’t a perfect analogy of course because the search engines don’t issue citations if your site has blocked access to a bedroom. That, and they are also taking stock of your valuables, something that we probably wouldn’t appreciate any home inspector to do!
Hire Stoney deGeyter or the rest of the Pole Position Marketing team for your in-house training, conference or other search marketing events. Contact us for more information.
First published in 1936, How to Win Friends & Influence People
Sites that are designed to sell products and/or services must go the extra mile to enhance the visitor’s engagement with the website. Shopping cart abandonment (shoppers abandoning their carts before deciding to pay for the “items” they’ve added to their cart) can result in a significant loss in potential sales. But much of that can be reduced when the shopping process is streamlined and geared for shopper satisfaction.
Stoney has a relatively hands-off policy regarding what the team blogs about on (EMP). Occasionally he’ll give us some general direction or guidance (Titles, people! It’s all about titles!!!) and he tell us to always keep it relevant to business and marketing, but other than that we pretty much have free reign. And while he doesn’t like to write negative posts about other small businesses, he’s never specifically said we can’t, so I’m going to vent a little and, well, if a particular local web hosting company gets in the way, that’ll be their problem, not mine.
