News from the Coop (B’Gok!)

The “This is Spam” button popping up on many service providers’ email services can be empowering for a user or potential spam victim. But it can also be the kiss of death for a legitimate business that, with a click of that button, gets falsely (or perhaps legitimately) labeled as a spammer. This article on Dark Readings gives you seven tips to avoiding this fate.

Remember, spammers are as spammers do. If you are not following these guidelines and start ending up in the spam folder, it’s because you probably ARE spamming.

read the article

Your website has the potential to be the most reliable salesperson in your business. It never takes coffee breaks, gets sick or goes home early. It always responds to your customer’s inquiries instantly. In fact, using a few simple strategies, you can build a website that has a continuous and predictable positive effect on your business.

Let’s say that you sell newspaper subscriptions. You use telemarketing as the primary way to contact your potential customers. Would you ever start a call with “Hi. My name is Joe. I want to sell you a newspaper subscription”?

I guarantee that you would have to make a lot of calls to sell a handful of subscriptions if this were your approach.

Instead, wouldn’t it be better to try to get them to agree to listen to you before you try to close the sale? You might have better luck with, “Hi. My name is Joe. I’m calling to tell you how you can save hundreds of dollars every week by subscribing to the newspaper. You like to save money, don’t you?” If their answer is yes, they have agreed to listen to what you have to say.

This approach would certainly sell more newspapers.

The copy on your website needs to be set up the same way. The first thing your website should do is get your prospective customer to agree to read the first paragraph of your sales copy. In the first paragraph, they should be convinced to continue reading the next few paragraphs…

…where you talk about the benefits of your product or service. Notice that I said benefits, not features. With few exceptions, most buying decisions are made based on perceived benefits, not a fact-filled feature list.

After they’ve read about the benefits, you might want to consider adding a few testimonials. If you have a yoga studio, get some of your long time customers to talk about the health benefits they’ve received from your classes. If you are an auto repair shop, have them talk to you about how you gave them honest service at a fair price.

Whatever your business is, you have customers that are happy that they did business with you. Talk to them. Ask them permission to use a quote and a picture of them on your website. If most of your customers are other businesses, offer to place a link back to their website after the testimonial.

Finally, always remember to ask for the customer to take the next step. If you sell directly from your website, ask for the order. Give them the opportunity to sign up for your newsletter. Ask them to call you to set up an demonstration. Whatever the next step in your sales process is, always ask your prospective customers to take that step.

——-

Modern Webspace provides services and coaching to local small- and medium-sized businesses that want to energize their Internet marketing efforts. We focus on finding solutions that are both sensible and affordable to your business. Call or e-mail for a FREE, no obligation consultation.

Earlier this week, I bought a book about webspace marketing called Google Best Practices by Jerry West of Web Marketing Now. In it, he discusses how to best position your webspace to take advantage of the tremendous power of Google. He discusses how to select search terms that you should target and what you need to do to get your webspace listed high on Google’s search results page.

One of the things Jerry said is that in order to get and maintain a good ranking, you need to constantly create new content and update old content. He suggests that you should write 200-550 words per day. That’s definitely a lot of writing, but certainly doable.

Another key concept is that you need to make your webspace easy for Google’s robots to scan. You need to make sure that your webspace follows all of the construction guidelines that Google asks for. These include using valid HTML, not doing things designed to trick your users, only having one title, not copying large blocks of text that can be found elsewhere on the web, and several other common sense guidelines. It also helps if you tell Google how your webspace is structured. It isn’t always obvious to Google’s robots where all of the pages in your webspace are located, so you may need to tell it where to go. Another benefit of doing this is that your webspace will be added to Google faster.

Another important point that Jerry makes is that even when you get your webspace to the top of Google’s list, you still need to get the user to click on your link. The key to doing this is writing a good title for your page. When Google lists search results, your page title is the most prominent text that is displayed. It makes sense that you spend a little extra time writing a title that appeals to your potential customers.

There really is no black magic to getting a good position in Google’s search results. Many of the SEO companies tell you that it’s voodoo, but it really boils down to a handful of common sense practices and a dedication to getting it done. Build a site that is easy for Google to read, write quality content and write titles that attract users and Google will treat you well. In a nutshell, if you build webspace that people want to go to, Google will realize it and reward you.

For more information on Jerry’s fabulous guide, visit his website at http://www.webmarketingnow.com.

Yep…I got hitched. On September 30, my lovely fiance agreed to become my wife. Our wedding was attended by about 60 guests, all of them dear friends and family. We held the wedding on beautiful Orcas Island, one of the San Juan islands in Washington State. If you haven’t already, check out our wedding web site. It will be updated soon with pictures from the wedding.

After the wedding, we spent a week on the Kona side of Big Island of Hawaii. Besides the usual honeymoon stuff (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), we went horseback riding, went to the top of Mauna Kea (almost 14,000 feet up), snorkeled, had several romantic dinners out and watch the entire first season of Lost. Yes, Lost. I know that watching 25 hours of Lost over the course of a week doesn’t sound very romantic, but we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

I also started a business! I will be assisting small- and medium- sized ventures design and manage their webspace. I’m not going to be a webhost or a web designer or even a web programmer, although, I will offer all three of those services. Rather, I’m going to offer a service where I act as a webmaster for my customers. But rather than be a ‘consultant’, I’m working to make my service highly productized. For a fairly low monthly cost, I will manage all aspects of a company’s web presence, making sure that everything is working correctly, their content stays fresh and their webspace is getting the kind of exposure appropriate for their company. I’m still ramping things up, but I should have my webspace ready for publishing by the end of the week.

Finally, I’m ready to bottle my first batch of homebrewed beer. It is a porter that is a touch on the sweet side. It will be ready to drink around the beginning of next year. I plan to call it Sexy Kenny’s Birthday Brew, since it will be ready to drink around my birthday. I’m planning to make a batch of Sexy Kenny’s Sweet Wheat and Sexy Kenny’s Loco Lemon next.