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Video by, Brent Virkus of Find the Capital This video shows you how one of Find the Capital’s clients used their website to generated over 5,000 visitors and produce over 200 deals in just the past six months 100% through LinkedIn.
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Article by, Lisa Virkus – Founder and CEO of Find the Capital So many Sales and Marketing Consultants focus their energy on Marketing advice. Rarely do any of them focus on the Sales side of the business. Why is this? If I was to speculate, it’s because these “Consultants” have never actually sold anything themselves. It’s easy to market. Selling is another thing… Find the Capital has an advisory practice that helps companies looking to grow their business implement our proven system for generating new customers known as the FTC Ultimate Marketing System. In this article, I’m going to do something other Consultants rarely do….teach you our proven system of how to identify Leads and then Convert them from Lead to Prospects to Paying Customers…The FTC Ultimate Marketing System way. For the purposes of this article, I’m going to use our industry as the example (i.e. Sales and Marketing Consulting). Let’s say your in our business and using an email “Drip Campaign” as your main prospecting activity. Under this prospecting method, you send out a weekly email to your database of contacts. The emails you send are providing your contacts with important articles on how they can grow their business. The emails are put together in a formate that allows your reader to click through on a topic, which redirects them to your website for the full article. Why is this important to have them “click through”? It’s simple. Most email campaign companies like Constant Contact or Campaigner allow you to see who clicked through to read the rest of the article. Point being is if a person has taken the time to click through, this may be a good indication they are looking for your services. So in this example, let’s assume your sent the following email out: Dear Contact, We all know LinkedIn is the number one social network for business people. Then why is it you are not generating any business out of it? In this weeks Growing Your Empire article we are going to focus on 5 Simple Steps to Marketing Your Business on LinkedIn. LinkedIn can play a significant role in the effective marketing of your business. LinkedIn’s value as a marketing tool gets...
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Article by, Dave Lavinsky Regardless of how good your current website it, I’m confident it can be better. In fact, on my website, I’m constantly testing new ideas to improve it. I test different colors, different headlines, different pictures, and so on. And each time, I learn ways to improve. Below I summarize the 10 key aspects of your website that you should review and improve over time. 1. Look and Feel The look and feel of your website is much more important than you might realize. Because when visitors go to your site, it’s critical that their first impression is positive. Think for a minute about who your customers are and what they are seeking. Then cater to them. For example, the look and feel of Porsche’s website is extremely cool and elegant. Conversely, the look and feel of the Ben & Jerry’s website is much more animated and fun (right now it’s showing cows drinking on the beach). Both websites do a great job of conveying the image in which they want customers to view them. Make sure that the look and feel of your website does the same. 2. Copywriting I’m sure following situation happens to you (since it happens to me all the time): I go to a company’s website, I read the homepage, and I still don’t know what the company does. So, I end up going to the “About Us” page to read more and to try to decipher what it is that the company does. Importantly, I’m the exception. Few other visitors will invest the time to figure out what your company does. Rather, if they don’t immediately “get it” and you don’t immediately show them how you will benefit them, they’ll leave and be gone forever. A quick tip here is to use compelling headlines. For example, if your website sold tires, a great headline would be: “See Our Selection Of Over 500 Brands of Tires at the Guaranteed Lowest Prices.” This is pretty much what all customers are looking for (selection and best price), so this headline lets visitors quickly know what the company does and that they are in the right place. 3. Navigation I’m sure your website has...
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“As Search Engines evolve and continue to look for legitimate ways to determine rankings, social media continues to become a more important factor. “Social Media will have two main benefits for companies,” says Benjamin Ard, Director of Social Media for Utah-based internet marketing firm Leadgenix. “First is the obvious interaction that comes when companies are in direct contact with their customers. Benefit number two is the Social SEO aspect where social media links and interaction will count for a lot in SEO rankings.” Social SEO (a relatively new concept) encompasses the idea that social media links and interaction play a huge part in a website’s search rankings. Search engines consistently give more rankings weight to SEO-type activities that are harder to create. (For example, creating and distributing an infographic that gets shared 30,000 times = good! vs. spending 30 seconds on a social bookmark = not so good.) Because legitimate interaction between business and customer is so hard to fake online, social media authority online holds an increasing amount of weight for search engines. What does that mean for businesses? It means that even if a company doesn’t gain any perceived benefit from Facebook posts, Twitter re-tweets, orYouTube subscribers, there is immense benefit from having active social media accounts. How can businesses leverage the emerging advantages of Social SEO? Here are 10 (and ½!) Social SEO ideas every business can implement: 1. Using Brand Name In Posts Occasionally using your brand name in posts will help Google GOOG +0.06% associate your brand with your keyword posts. Branded posts will also allow for you to be more likely to rank your social profiles for your own company name, which helps companies with any reputation management problems they may run into. 2. Linking Your Social Accounts From Your Homepage Google, while crawling your website, will notice any social links and immediately associate those social profiles with your company. Posts coming from those linked accounts will help you rank for specific keywords showing up frequently in posts. Google Plus also has its own process for validating a site with a business account. 3. Don’t Go All In If your hand isn’t right for the pot, don’t go all in. There are hundreds of social media sites to support different communities with varying interests. (Wikipedia lists more than 200.) If your company doesn’t...
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Article by, Brendan Brandt from Young Entrepreneur As if making the transition from student life to the working world wasn’t hard enough. In March, the unemployment rate among 18- to 29-year-olds was 11.7 percent, more than four percentage points higher than the national average of 7.6 percent, according to the millennial-advocacy group Generation Opportunity. But here’s an interesting twist: Nearly half of the college students surveyed in a new report on millennials out today aren’t using the professional-networking site, LinkedIn. That survey called “The Student Employment Study,” which was produced in by Gen-Y research firm Millennial Branding and AfterCollege, an online career network for college students and recent grads, found that 46 percent of students don’t use LinkedIn. That’s hardly a recipe for professional success. While using the professional-networking site is a no-brainer for career seekers, it can also be a valuable resource for intrepid young entrepreneurs. By utilizing three key features, budding entrepreneurs can maximize their potential and even grow their businesses. Here’s a rundown of those features and how young founders can use them most effectively: 1. Build instant credibility. LinkedIn “Endorsements” provide a forum for the network’s users to endorse and commend colleagues, praise counterparts and ask for feedback. While this discussion board promotes referrals and substantiates rapport for the average professional, it can be a massively effective networking tool for young entrepreneurs. When recommendations are posted, business owners are instantaneously deemed more relevant. That enhanced status can cause entrepreneurs’ credibility to skyrocket and possibly help them establish themselves as active leaders within their respective fields. With consistent usage, both actively soliciting recommendations from relevant business partners and returning praise, users can rapidly garner attention from both potential customers and other professionals within the industry. At the same time, by reaching out to those who demonstrate high level knowledge and come highly recommended, young entrepreneurs can learn from that contact’s expertise, as well as amass a strong network. 2. Gain intel on competitors and toot your own horn too. Unlike Facebook’s pages or corporate-run Twitter feeds, LinkedIn’s “Company Pages” can often illuminate, say, a competitor’s moves or industry trends, as well as provide industry specific knowledge. Plus, you can use it to help fulfill your company’s goals too....
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Article by, Don Peppers With all the serious talk about listening and responding to customers, monitoring social media, innovating, cutting costs, recovering from mistakes, etc. etc., the very idea of being customer centric can begin to sound like really hard work! But maybe it doesn’t always have to be. Maybe you should occasionally just have some fun with your customers. Make them laugh. My brother Jeff is an Army chaplain. An ex-Ranger, he has no hair on his head (I mean ZERO hair, nada), and he looks like the kind of body builder you wouldn’t want to tangle with.Apparently one of his dietary secrets is the zero-calorie noodles he orders online from Miracle Noodle. The other day, after placing an order with them online, he received this email notification: Dear Mr. Peppers: Your noodles (order 221579) have been gently taken from our highly secured warehouse with cotton gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. Our team of employees inspected your Miracle Noodles and polished the labels to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing. Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your Miracle Noodles into the finest box that money can buy. We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Chatsworth waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private Miracle Noodle jet on this day, (5/6/2013 2:43:00 PM). I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at Miracle Noodle. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year”. We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to Miracle Noodle. Shipped Via Carrier Priority Mail, Medium Flat Rate Box Shipping Tracking Number 9405510200986079715532 Warm Regards, The Miracle Noodle Team I’m sorry, but I found this send-up of the standard customer-service message that “your product has shipped” absolutely hilarious! At the end of its email, Miracle Noodle included an acknowledgment that the idea was “inspired by Derek Sivers.” Sivers was the founder of CD Baby, an online music store launched in 1997 (before iTunes) that specialized in music by independent artists. Sivers also...
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