Can You Achieve Double Digit Sales Conversion?

It's very difficult in business to continuous achieve a better than 10% conversion ratio for you sales. In simple language that's one in every 10 potential customers actually putting their hands into their wallets and paying you for your goods and services.

One of my mentors James Schramko is consistently achieving double digit success with his online sales techniques. He is a recognised leader in the internet business community in this area.

In March 2010 James is running one of his limited seminars for you and a partner (not necessarily your spouse) here in Sydney. If you are interstate or overseas, it's well worth the visit. If you can't make it then one alternative is to join his online forum, where I am also a member and have been for sometime, and engage with the community there.

If you want to know how to achieve significant success online this is the right place to start.

The thing that sold me on James in the first place is that's he's genuine. Not trying to sell you something all the time. He gives and gives and gives and then gives some more. The workshop is a great environment for people who currently aren't familiar with internet marketing techniques through to more experience marketers looking for a boost. I'll let James talk to you more about this. Just click on the picture above and he can tell you in his own words.

Twitter Traffic – Is It Important?

How can I use Twitter for my business? What makes it special? There's so much written about the use of twitter already but "what does it all mean?".

Twitter offers a completely different method of communication.  It mixes social networking with instant messaging.  Posts are a very brief 140 characters each allowing you to answer that burning question, “What are you up to right now?”  

In order to answer this question you must make every word count.  You need to grab your readers’ attention quickly with each “tweet” (how a post is referred to on Twitter).  Twitter allows you to sign up and send messages to your subscribers and friends.  You can update your audience as frequently as you wish and they can respond to you quickly and easily.  

The way it works is that people follow your “tweets”, so the more followers you have the more you are likely to get as their friends see your details on the profile pages on others and choose to follow you too.  Each time you post an updated tweet, it will be transmitted to your group of followers immediately to their computers and cell phones if they have chosen that way of communication.  

If you send out regular tweets you will start to gather a faithful group of followers.  Make each tweet count and add value.  If you write reviews on computer games or create accessories for Avatars, then you can tell your followers when you have been working on something new or have something new to tell them.  

It is possible to grow a fanatical following who are so interested in what you are doing and offering that they look out for every new tweet from you.  For information marketers such intensity can quickly develop into a faithful band of buyers who react to any new offerings you put their way. 

Friends that want to arrange a meeting can tweet everyone to let them know the time and location of the meeting.  You can also send tweets that give notice of a latest update to your blog or lens update.  Remember to work your tweet carefully so you have enough room to include the link to your site. 

This is essential if you want to create interest in your website and branding yourself successfully.  Even a very brief post can give you an identity in such a way that followers are attracted to your particular niche.  Some people love Twitter and others just do not understand it.  

To understand how it works you really need to use Twitter every day.  Look at what other Twitterers are up to and how they use tweets to market their brand, build an identity, display their expertise and generate website traffic.  

Twitter is addictive and this is mainly down to instant gratification.  It is easy to use and allows you to get your message across to lots of people quickly.  Once you have chosen to use Twitter for your niche, hobby, profession, business, or sport, you will start to see how it is a great way of dispensing huge amounts of information quickly, one tweet at a time. 

It's more than just this though, you can use some of the social bookmarking tools mentioned in a previous post, that will make the tweet for you automatically, for example when you update your blog, or publish a new article. From a business perspective you can send information instantly and also get it back just as quickly. Remember though it's instant gratification and so you need to act fast if a customer contacts you. It's great for support issues, combine Twitter with your support desk and you can have a very effective result for your customers problem resolution and they will be thinking great customer service.

Why Does My Business Need Social Bookmarking?

Firstly, what is social bookmarking?

To be successful on the internet, people, customers, prospects, have to be able to find you. To find you they often use a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing to look for the "thing" they are interested in. To be found on the first page of a search engine is vitally important as most people, actually more than 95% of people never look at more than the first 3 pages of results. Some of the popular social bookmarking sites are Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Facebook and Twitter. 

How is this relevant to social bookmarking?

Well, in short if you have provided items of value, like an article, a book, a video and put it on the internet then the more references there are to that piece of content the better. The social book marking sites, and there's more than 150 of them, create a link back to your article. The search engines love to see this link, they give you credit for having all these links to your content, and presto you climb up the list of results in the search engines. We want our business to be as high up on this list of results as possible, preferably the first page. This isn't an article about search engines or SEO but it is very relevant.

Lets look at this in a bit more detail.

Social bookmarking is a way of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs online.  You might have the best product in the world, but if you can’t generate the traffic you’ve just got a nice website on your hands with no customers.  Even if you have a loyal mailing list you will still need to constantly update this by attracting new online visitors.  

There are many options for making connections on social bookmarking sites.  To find the best you need to take your time and surf around.  Once you have researched the best start to set up some social bookmarking accounts that you can use regularly.  

StumbleUpon is one of the most popular of the social bookmarking sites which is both powerful and easy to use. First you need to create an account and then create a toolbar interface.  All that’s left to do is click on the Thumbs Up icon (which is found on your browser after you install the StumbleUpon tool) in order to recommend a website.  This can be done for any websites you own and you can also ask your friends to give you the Thumbs Up.  In addition to these ratings you can also add comments about your website.  

Can you Digg it?  Sounds like a line from a 70s song, but it is actually a very popular social bookmarking site. Digg works very much like StumbleUpon in that users are allowed to push up the ratings for a particular site so that it reaches the front page.  If you can make it to the front page you will be presenting yourself to thousands of potential visitors and more and more people will start hitting your site to see what you are all about.  

To assist you in publishing your information out onto the web there are a number of services available to you. There are both free and paid services and those listed here are the free services. They require a bit of effort from your business to maintain but the effort pays off over time. You will need to register yourself or your business to each of the social sites you want to be profiled on. This can take a little time at the beginning, though once done you don't have to worry about again.

• Clipmarks markets itself as “scissors for web pages.”  This site lets you submit items that are transmitted to the Internet – including to an iPhone and to Facebook.  It provides a one stop shop and can save a lot of time.
• You can sign up with services like OnlyWire to get similiar capability to Clipmarks. OnlyWire has a free and a paid option. 
• Another option is to use a site called Socialmarker. Using your social site accounts it steps your through the creation process of entries in each of these sites. You would repeat this process for each new piece of information that you want to promote out onto the internet.  
• Alternatively you can use ping.fm to connect to all your social media accounts. 

Some of these services provide a small application for your browser. Just install one or more of these plugins for your browser. These "plugins" allow you to carry out a multitude of functions such as clicking once to submit your item to many sites in one go.  In order for this to work, you will need to join any social bookmarking sites you want to use.  

You will need to ensure that visitors to your site know how they can rate your site.  It is not possible to bribe or reward them for bookmarking your site.  This is the social bookmarking equivalent to stuffing the ballot box.  

You can publish links to bookmarking sites as a gentle and polite reminder to your visitors.  Don’t be coy about submitting any updated information to these networks yourself.  You will just need to ensure that you do it in such a way that it doesn’t appear as spam.  If you tell people what you have got and where they can find it there is a good chance they will pass this information on to others.

In the spirit of this article there's a button just below that says "Share / Save". Go on, click and and social bookmark this article and see how it works.