Compete Marketing Group Show: Internet Marketing S

If someone goes to your contact page, they probably want to reach you, right? If they get confused or leave, that could mean a lost lead or sale for you. In this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show, we talk about tips you can use to create an effective contact page.   * Note that this blog post is derived from the transcript of the audio discussion. Please excuse any typos or odd wording. There are a number of things that you can do on the contact page of your website to increase the chances that people will actually contact you.  In this post, we share with you some specific mistakes that many businesses make, so you can make sure you are not making those mistakes on your contact page. Don’t Ask For Too Much Information A common mistake that many businesses make is asking for too much information on the contact page. If you ask for a lot of contact information, it can intimidate visitors that would otherwise want to contact you. Below are some statistics that demonstrate how serious this mistake can be: If you have three fields on your contact page, you can usually expect an average of 25% conversion. That means 25% of the people that actually visit the page, contact you. If you have six or more fields, which is not that uncommon, the conversion rate can drop to 15%. This is a 40% drop compared to only having three fields of information on your contact page. In short, make sure that your contact page only requests the information you absolutely need. Remember, you can gather additional information from prospects after they are in contact with you. Don’t Use “Submit” in Your Buttons Many websites use the word “submit” on their contact page. It is very common to see a contact form that requests different pieces of information and then has a submit button at the bottom. While this is common, there are other words that you can use that statistically perform better than the word “submit.” Here is a few examples: Using “click here” instead of submit gets more clicks. Using the word “register” performs quite negatively even compared to the word “submit.” While it’s sometimes difficult to prove exactly why this occurs, there have been multiple industry studies contacted by third parties that repeatedly show this trend. We have also seen this on the hundreds of websites that we have worked with. Look at your contact page and if you use the word “submit,” change it to “contact us” or something else that is more active sounding. Make Your Contact Page More Effective These are just few of the things that we have found working with hundreds of websites. Each time we review a website, there are low hanging opportunities to improve the performance of the website. If you want to review your website with us, contact us today at competeonweb.com.      

There is a science to getting your website ranked on Google. In this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show, we share a process you can use to understand what it takes in your industry to get your website ranked on Google. * Note that this blog post is derived from the transcript of the audio discussion. Please excuse any typos or odd wording. Identify Your Google Competitors While you will have competitors in your industry, these are not necessarily the same competitors you will have on Google. Before developing your Google ranking strategy, identify competitors that currently get exposure on Google. Perform searches on Google that your prospects are likely to perform. Identify established websites that you recognize that seem to get exposure in these rankings. Use tools such as alexa.com to compare the popularity of one site against another. Use tools such as semrush.com to identify which websites get exposure for certain keywords and how much additional Google exposure websites receive, etc. Once you have identified websites that get exposure on Google, you can analyze their specific website from Google’s perspective. Compare Your Website To Competing Websites Once you have a list of websites that are getting exposure on Google, you can analyze specific metrics related to that website and compare those metrics to your website. In short, you are trying to see what Google sees when Google looks at their website compared to your website. What keywords are they targeting?- Look at the page title in the upper left-hand side of your internet browser as well as the content on their page. Are there specific keywords that they seem to be targeting within this content? Compare those to keywords that you’re targeting in your content. How authoritative is the website? – Google determines the authority of your website and uses that to determine where you should show up in Google rankings. Authority is based on a number of metrics including The number of links you have from other websites, The authority of the linking websites, The content in the links, and A number of other metrics related to the links. We work with clients to conduct a Link Footprint Analysis to identify specific metrics for competitor’s websites and gaps in your own websites metrics. This helps us know exactly what metrics we need to work on in order to get more exposure on Google. Develop Your SEO Strategy And Execute Once you have identified specific metrics that you need to influence in order to get more exposure on Google, you can implement a number of tactics to accomplish that goal. You can create additional content targeting specific topics that competitors have content for. You can increase the exposure your blog posts receive online so that Google sees that you are an authority on that topic. Measure your results over time and tweak the strategy. Improve Your Website’s Google Ranking Getting ranked on Google sounds complicated and is if you’re not familiar with how Google works. We can help you analyze your specific website compared to competitors ranking in your market to identify specific actions you can take to increase your exposure on Google. Contact us today.

If you’re spending time creating content, you should do what you can to make sure people are engaging with that content. In this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show, we share tips you can use to build the readership, comments, shares, and other forms of engagement for your content. * Note that this blog post is derived from the transcript of the audio discussion. Please excuse any typos or odd wording. Quality Matters More Than Quantity Many business owners think they need to publish content every day, or every week in order to get benefit from their content. However, we have found that the quality of the content always trumps the quantity of the content. For example, If every piece of content that you create is based on very pressing topics in your industry, then that content is going to be engaging to your audience even if it is published infrequently. With that said, you do need to do content promotion to build the readership for your content, but the quality of the content you put out is still going to be more important than the quantity. Mention Industry Influencers If you’re writing about a topic that is popular in your industry, consider mentioning others that have written about the topic. Specifically; If you mentioned influential contacts and companies in your industry that are active online, and fit within the content you’re creating, then, The likelihood that they will share that content with their audience is high. By consistently writing about important topics in your industry, and engaging with industry influencers, you can gradually grow the exposure your content receives, as well as the engagement of the content. Have A Debate Important topics are always viewed differently by different people in your industry. If you have a different view than others in your market, consider using your content to spark a debate on the topic. A constructive debate with passionate readers can be a great way to spark high levels of engagement with your content. Build And Nurture Your Email List In addition to publishing content, you need to build an email list of your readers over time. This email list becomes a powerful asset for your company as you can share new content with the email subscribers, and also use the email list to sell products and services. Each piece of content you create should have some sort of connection to getting readers onto your email list. It’s important to remember that real people receive the emails you send. If you feel you are being too promotional, then you probably are. Each time you prepare an email for your list, ask yourself if they would truly appreciate receiving what you are about to send. If you take the time to build your email list, and nurture it, it can become a powerful asset you can use to build engagement with your content. Participate Yourself Once your readership has grown, and your audience is engaging with your content, you will see the direct value in engaging with them as they reply to your content. However, as you are starting your content marketing, and engagement is low, it’s even more important for you to participate. Each time you receive a blog comment, a share, or another form of engagement from your readership, make sure to reply quickly. Even with a small audience, your direct engagement shows that you care, and will spark other audience members to engage as well. Summary And Next Actions We can help you with content marketing. Content marketing can be a powerful way to build a relationship with prospects and customers. If you want guidance and support on creating and managing your content marketing strategy, contact us.

Creating your own content can take a lot of time, but sharing other people’s content that your audience will appreciate can help position you as a helpful authority in your industry. In this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show, we discuss a number of tools that you can use to identify great content to share in only 10 minutes per day. * Note that this blog post is derived from the transcript of the audio discussion. Please excuse any typos or odd wording. — These simple tools can help you provide value to your audience without taking too much of your time in creating content. How Sharing 3rd Party Content Works People want to learn and they will learn from valuable resources that you share even if it’s not content that you actually create yourself. They’ll appreciate that referral to great resources and you’ll be established as an authority and a valuable resource in your industry because you provided it to them, and referred them to that content. This is how sharing works and you therefore, don’t need to create all the content yourself. 3 Tools You Can Use To Share Content Online There are a number of systems that you can use to share content online. Below are the 3 we recommend; Google alert – Google alert enables you to essentially tell Google that you want to be notified anytime a new piece of content is published online and that meets your specified topic criteria. Social Networks Lists – Twitter and Facebook enable you to see social media updates from a select group of people that you think share valuable content. You can even look at Twitter and Facebook to identify additional ideas for content based on what others are sharing. Reader App – This application enables you to look at all of the blogs in one place. By using a single app for your iPad, your phone or your computer, you can look through multiple industry blogs and multiple industry web publications. That app can group all of that content into a single location, and enable you to review all of it very quickly. You can review an entire industry’s worth of content within minutes rather than spending hours in going to different publications. Set-up A Daily Workflow To Share Content Once you have a system like this in place, setup a daily workflow for sharing content. Make sure you spend some time – as little as 10 minutes per day using this system we discussed in above heads. You would essentially spend that 10 minutes reviewing all the different content that you’re seeing within your system in Google alerts, in your social network list, and in your reader app, and Then you would add interesting content that you want to share into your sharing queue. Over time, the sharing queue is going to gradually share that content, so if you say you want to do two or three social media updates a day, then it’s going to pull two or three social media updates from your queue and it’s going to share those. Summary And Next Actions If you’re interested in using this type of system in your business feel free to contact us. We can help you develop an overall strategy of how this fits into your business. We can also help you build the entire system and manage it throughout the month. We have a range of packages that we use with businesses like yours to help them get benefits from content marketing strategies like this.

If you’re using blogging to market your business, you need to ensure that it’s getting the most exposure possible. In this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show, we share results from a marketing study that you can apply right away to get more exposure for your content and make it produce more results for your business. * Note that this blog post is derived from the transcript of the audio discussion. Please excuse any typos or odd wording. — Blogging is one way to market your business and in this post, we share results form a marketing study of Hubspot.com that you can use to get more exposure for your blog. Publish Your Content On Best Days In The Week If you publish your content that’s meant especially for a business audience, Tuesday and Wednesday are the best days to do that. This is based on the results of the study. On Mondays, people are not necessarily in content mode. They are coming back to work and they’re getting all of their tasks started On Thursdays and Fridays they’re moving into the weekend mode. And so, Tuesday and Wednesday are usually going to be your best bet to publish content. Create An Effective Title When creating content, pay special attention to the title of the blog post. Make sure the titles are short and to the point, and It is more effective to have the titles posed as a question. The study found that; 60 characters or less in blog post title received the most social shares, and Titles that included a question mark had double the shares on social media. Choose Social Media Channels That Give More Exposure The social media channels that can give more exposure to your content as compared to other platforms are Facebook and Twitter. It was observed that 38% of the shares received on blog post content were on Twitter, and Facebook accounted for 33% of the total shares. It is therefore critical for you to consider where your content is going to be shared and craft that into your content, so that’s it’s easily share-able. You should also consider adding an effective “call to action” so as to encourage people to further share your content within Twitter and Facebook. Quick Summary And Next Actions If you’re considering using content to market your business, we would love to speak with you. We have a lot of experience working with clients to develop high-end content that showcases their expertise, and we work with them to actually manage the entire process of: Creating content Publishing the content on certain days during the week, Promoting it on social media channels, and Getting maximum exposure for that content. If you’re interested in how we can help you with that, please reach out to us. We’d be happy to share how we do this, and specifically how it might help your business.    

There are so many ways to grow your business, but what should you focus on? In this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show, we discuss what to focus on when marketing if you want to grow your business quickly and effectively. * Note that this blog post is derived from the transcript of the audio discussion. Please excuse any typos or odd wording. — The process that we went through recently with a client below is going to help you decide what to focus on in marketing your business Quantify Where You’re Starting From The first thing that you need to do is identify where you are now. It’s important to understand where you’re starting from before you figure out how you’re going to get to the specific goals that you want to reach. Look at your numbers – The first thing to do is look at your data. Try to get an understanding of what data you have and use that data to make decisions. For example, look at your website traffic, look at the number of customers that you have, look at the number of customers that haven’t purchased recently, Look at your data to start and be able to use that data to make decisions on how to move forward. Focus only on numbers you can impact – The overall sales of the business is nice to know but that’s not something that you can directly address within a short time period with specific next actions. Instead of focusing on a broad number such as total revenue, Focus on something such as website traffic that directly comes to your blog or Website traffic that directly comes from an all night advertising campaign or maybe even The amount of revenue generated from a specific advertising channel that you’re running. The key to understanding here is to focus on addressable numbers only. Set a benchmark number – Once you have a benchmark number for each of these data points that you’re reviewing,  you can start to focus on how you’re going to improve that number to reach your goals Leverage Assets That Can Add Value To Your Business The second part of this process is identifying what you can use to actually reach your goals. A lot of times in a business you’re going to have some specific assets that you can use and use better than you’re using right now to actually move forward and reach your goals. Here’s some examples. Website Traffic – If you already have website traffic coming to your site even if it’s small and you’re not fully maximizing that, then that’s an asset that you already have right in front of you that if you focus on improving and getting more results from, then you can reach your goals using that asset. Customer List- Look at the total number of customers that you have in your business. Also, consider the number of recent customers within the last three to six months depending on the type of business you’re in. Finally, look at customers that you had that haven’t purchased recently. Look at all the information you have available about your customers and see if you’re maximizing that fully. In most cases you’re not going to be maximizing this, so that’s another asset that you can leverage. Partnerships and Relationships –  If you have relationships in the industry that you could do cooperative marketing efforts with, such as posting content to each others websites or doing a joint online event like a online workshop, then that’s something that you want to look at. Create a 90-Day Action Plan Once you know where you’re at now and you know what you have that you can leverage to grow, you want to set up a 90-day plan. Put a 90-day plan in place to improve your benchmark numbers. Set specific goals within a 90-day window that you can do to improve the benchmark numbers and reach your goal. You want to do it within small increments of 90 days because that’s long enough to get results, but also short enough that you can easily see what needs to be done within that 90 days. Your goal in that 90 days should not be to double the revenue of your business. Instead what it should be is to double the conversion rate, the amount of leads and customers you get from a very specific marketing channel, or possibly set up your email marketing system to actually be usable to get more customers. But the main thing that you want to do at this particular step is to setup a 90-day plan and work that plan over 90 days. At the end of that 90 days: Evaluate the results of what you did, Evaluate what assets you now have and what your numbers now are, and Then plan the next 90 days. Do things in short 90-day windows to help you move forward effectively. Summary and Next Actions To use this in your business: Figure out where you’re at right now using your data so you can benchmark your numbers. Then figure out what assets you have now that you can leverage to actually meet your goals. Work in 90-day windows with very specific goals and ree-valuate and re-plan after those 90 days. If you need help setting these goals in your business, we can definitely help you. Feel free to contact us to set up a road map consultation so that we can better understand your business and help you decide how to move forward.

Metrics help you know what’s working in your business. In this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show, we discuss about how to create a simple dashboard that you can use to make monitoring your business metrics easier. Full Transcript of Audio Below We’ve transcribed the audio into text and formatted it for easy reading below. Please excuse any typos or odd wording, as this transcript is taken directly from the spoken word within the audio above. — We’ve talked in other episodes about why it’s important to actually track numbers in your business. Why Tracking Numbers Is Important In Your Business The main reason really comes down to knowing what is happening in your business. By tracking your metrics You’re able to know for sure, what’s happening in your business which makes it easier to make decisions. It’s easier to actually run and operate your business, since you can take some of the emotions out of it. ×Tracking metrics effectively is just a piece of the puzzle to market your business successfully. To get a list of specific opportunities to grow your business, click here. 3 Things That Make For A Great Dashboard But what we want to talk about today is how to make a dashboard to actually monitor your business metrics. So let’s start with the question about what makes for a great dashboard. You only want to have what’s actually relevant to your business You want to keep your dashboard very simple so you only have a few key metrics for each part of your business so you’re not overwhelmed with different data. And that’s going to enable you to meet the second thing that makes a great dashboard. You actually need to use it You need to use it and be able to take action based on those metrics, and so By using the dashboard you’re going to be able to improve the business, and It’s going to be a lot easier to use the actual dashboard if you keep it simple and relevant. So don’t let too much data make it onto your dashboard. Have it  automatically updated Make sure that you don’t need to do any data entry to actually have the reports be usable and that doesn’t necessarily mean that the program is going to automatically update the data and have it just appear there. You want to have a tool that can make as much of it as automated as possible and the rest that can’t be physically automated will be automated with a very low cost data entry team, one to two dollars an hour. We’ll talk about that in a moment. But those are the three things that are most important for a dashboard: First, only have what’s relevant on the actual dashboard so that you can keep it simple. Second, you need to make sure to actually use it and that you can use it to take action, so you’re able to improve the business based on this data. Third, you want to make sure that the dashboard automatically updates so that you don’t have to do data entry time, to actually have it be useful for you. Dashboard Tool That We Recommend So, with that said, let’s talk about the tool and the process that we recommend for having a dashboard in your business. The tool that we recommend is called Geckoboard. It’s Geckoboard.com and what Geckoboard enables you to do is create your own dashboard using a number of different systems. So if you wanted to show your website traffic, or the number of deals that are in your CRM system, the odds are that if you use a relatively industry standard system for your CRM system, or for your website tracking, then you’re going to be able to pull that data automatically into Geckoboard. Geckoboard is a tool that we recommend for actually building the dashboard. Automating Manually Gathered Data If it’s not possible to actually have that data appear automatically within Geckoboard, then what we recommend is creating a Google spreadsheet which is an online spreadsheet. Having the data be stored there, which would be entered by a data entry team, which we will talk about in a moment, and Then Geckoboard can pull data and present data from a Google spreadsheet So if it’s not possible to automatically pull it into Geckoboard, then you want to keep it in a Google spreadsheet and then connect Geckoboard to the Google spreadsheet. Working with a Data Entry Team or Assistant Now, I’ve mentioned having a data entry team or an assistant of some sort actually enter the data. The reason why I think this is really important is that, If you as a business owner are actually doing data entry to produce these reports, eventually you’re not going to have time to do the data entry because it’s a relatively low value task based on other things you could be doing in the business, and Therefore you’re not going to be able to actually use the reports because they’re going to be missing data. So I think it’s very important to take out the data entry part from your particular responsibilities. One way to do that is to just have somebody else in your office manage that part of the process, and I think that for most listeners that’s going to be the best bet  is: Just have an assistant do it, Have an intern, Have somebody else on the team to take that 15 minutes per day and enter that data. Otherwise, if you have a lot of data or a more complicated dashboard; You could hire a virtual assistant outside of your office for a very low cost – one, two, three dollars an hour, just to repetitively, everyday log into your systems and gather that data into the spreadsheet. Summary and Next Actions An action item out of today is to consider what you would be able to do by having actionable business data in front of you every single day. We use this to run our businesses, and it’s been a huge huge improvement over some of the old ways we used to run the business. We have the data at our fingertips, and tools like Geckoboard, and some of the processes we’ve talked about today have enabled us to do that. Contact us to discuss how to best define metrics for your business, and if you need some guidance on how to actually set up Geckoboard, we’d be happy to point you in the right direction. You can visit us at competeonweb.com ×Tracking metrics effectively is just a piece of the puzzle to market your business successfully. To get a list of specific opportunities to grow your business, click here.

If you were able to know for certain how much money was going to be generated by a marketing campaign you were running, would that be helpful? In this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show, we share a competitive business strategy that we use to know exactly what results will be produced by a campaign and how we use that data to dominate industries we’re in. Full Transcript of Audio Below We’ve transcribed the audio into text and formatted it for easy reading below. Please excuse any typos or odd wording, as this transcript is taken directly from the spoken word within the audio above. — Today, we’re going to share advanced tactics that we use, to know exactly what results will be produced by a campaign. And then how we use that data, to dominate certain markets that we have businesses in. Tracking Your Website Numbers Is Powerful For Your Business One of the most powerful things that you can do if you’re running a website is to track your numbers carefully. And this might sound basic but: Of course, you need to know your numbers. Track the number of people that are coming to your website. Questions You Need To Ask Yourself Maybe you think you already track that information, and you already know your numbers. But ask yourself these questions: Do you know exactly how much it costs you to generate a lead or to produce a sale on your website? Do you know how that number changes for social media visitors versus visitors that come from a specific online advertising campaign? Another question that you should ask yourself is, do you know exactly how long it takes to turn someone from a brand new website visitor, that has never been on your website before, to an actual lead or a close sale? And again, do you know how that number changes between different channels of website traffic that you receive, such as social media visits or maybe a direct mail campaign? The last question that you can ask yourself is, would you write a check for $10, $20, $30,000 based on those numbers? Are you that confident in the numbers that you know right now? How To Know Your Numbers What we want to talk about today is how to know your numbers, at an extremely granular level. You want to be able to measure everything that happens on your website: Know about; The number of visits that come from different channels The number of leads and sales that come from different channels The profitability of sales from different channels You need to be able to segment all of this data, so that you know exactly what the numbers are,  for all the different ways that people can find your website. Whether that’s people coming from Google Online advertising campaigns, or Other ways that people find your website Powerful Website Tracking Tools Now, Google Analytics or rather simple website tracking tools are sometimes not enough to have this level of granular data. You need a tool that automatically tracks everything. Two of the specific tools that we’ve had good experiences with is: Kiss Metrics, and Mixpanel They’re definitely great options, but they’re also quite expensive. But these are tools that can help you dominate different markets; If you’re in a position where you’re trying to scale up your business or wanting to double the business to really grow things quickly now that you have a solid foundation in place. How We Use These Tools In Some Of Our Businesses One of the things we’ve talked about in other episodes, that applies directly to what we’re talking about in today’s episode, is how we use these tools in some of the businesses that we actually run. In addition to managing client businesses and doing client work, we also own and operate a number of our own businesses. And so; We use these tools, and these principles, to know exactly what works in a particular market We track all of these numbers, and We know exactly what produces results in that particular business Then we put money behind that, to actually scale up those particular campaigns, as long as the metrics remain healthy. So for example; If we go into a market, and we see that a certain type of online advertising campaign performs extremely well, and Even if it’s incredibly expensive to run that campaign, we know that it’s profitable, Because we’re able to track data at a very, very granular level. Then we’re able to use that information, to scale up that campaign, while other competitors, that might not be tracking the data as closely, might be weary of putting that much financial resource behind a campaign that they don’t know for sure that it works. Using this type of information, We’ve been able to go into a number of relatively, what we call “unsexy industries,” where, competitors are not that advanced. And the marketing campaigns, and the tracking that’s being done by the other competitors in the market, are not that advanced. We’ve been able to go into those industries and do very well. And so we wanted to share some of these details with you today. A Quick Recap And Next Actions If you’re already running a website, and tracking your website visitors, that’s definitely a good first step. These advanced tools are for businesses that are looking to grow into scale, once they have their foundation in place. If you’re interested in learning more about how you can use these types of systems, feel free to contact us. We’d be happy to do an initial consultation, to Review what data you have in your business right now, and How you can use some of these more advanced tools, To really know, for certain, exactly what results will be produced, for different campaigns in your business, and How to use that information to dominate your industry.

Are you specifically trying to get people to visit your website using various tactics such as direct mail or other promotions? In this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show, you’re going to learn how to know exactly how many people visit your website from each of these activities and also how to know what results each activity has produced for your business. Full Transcript of Audio Below We’ve transcribed the audio into text and formatted it for easy reading below. Please excuse any typos or odd wording, as this transcript is taken directly from the spoken word within the audio above. — Are you specifically trying to get people to visit your website using various tactics such as direct mail or other promotions? Today you’re going to learn how to know exactly how many people visit your website from each of these activities and also how to know what results each activity has produced for your business. Benefits of Tracking Actual Activity Produced From A Campaign When you’re trying to get people to visit your website either through a direct mail campaign or some other promotion, you’re going to get a lot of benefits if you take the time to track the actual activity produced from that campaign. For example, if you’re running a newspaper ad, you can know exactly how many website visitors come to your website from that particular ad compared to another magazine ad that you may be running. In addition, You can track exactly what each of those visitors does on your website, such as How long they spend on the site, What pages they visit and also How many purchases are generated from a particular campaign. So, you may be able to find out that the newspaper ad that you’re running in the local business journal performs much better than a magazine ad that you’re running in the national publication. Know The Exact Cost Of A Website Visit From Different Campaigns So, you can know exactly how many visits are arriving and also what those people are actually doing on your website. But one of the more powerful things that you can do to really help compare different campaigns is you can know exactly how much an actual visit costs you from each different campaign. So for example, If you are paying a $100 for a magazine ad that produces 10 visits, Then each of those visits is actually costing you $10, and so You’re able to break down the cost based on $10 per visit how many of those actually produce sales. Using all of this data, you’re able to really calculate; Exactly how much revenue was produced by a campaign and Whether that campaign was profitable. So, to take a step back, there are a lot of benefits that you can get by tracking campaigns very carefully. You’re going to know how many visits are coming in from a specific campaign. You’re going to know what those visits do on your website, and lastly, You’re going to be able to know exactly what the profitability is of each campaign that you’re running. Use Google Analytics to Track Activity of Website Visitors Google Analytics is a free website tracking software provided by Google that enables you to track the activity that goes on your website. We have a lot of other content on the website and resources you can use to learn more about Google Analytics. So, if you’re not using Google Analytics be sure to check those resources or reach out to us. With Google Analytics one of the things that you can do is use something called a tagged URL, Basically what this means is when you create a campaign such as a magazine ad, for example, rather than sending people directly to your home page, you can send people to a tagged version of that home page, Basically what that will do is people will still see the home page and they’ll still arrive exactly at the page that you wanted them to arrive at, but Google Analytics will look at the tags in that address and will track that that person came from the magazine ad rather than just some other website channel that you’re promoting. So, one of the things you want to be sure to use is what’s called a tagged URL with Google Analytics. How We Use Tagged URLs in Google Analytics to Track Website Visitors In the show notes you will find the resource of how you can actually create one of those tagged URLs but feel free to reach out to us as well if you’re wanting additional guidance on how to use Google Analytics and how to actually create this tagged URL. But basically what you want to do is create the tagged URL and then use that URL in your campaign. Usually what we do is we create a tagged URL, but then we also make what we call a clean URL. An example of that would be, If you’re sending people to your home page, your website address might be, you know, website.com. The tagged URL is going to be website.com/ a lot of different information. There is going to be a lot of different tags in there that Google Analytics is going to use. So, it’s a pretty complicated looking address. What we do is; We create the tagged URL that has all the complicated information but then, We also create a very simple URL that redirects to the tagged URL For example, you might send people to website.com/newspaper or website.com/sdbj, San Diego Business Journal for example, and If somebody visits that address it’s going to take them to the home page but it’s going to be the tagged URL. It’s a little bit complicated to explain but hopefully what we wanted to get across today is that you can track exactly how many visits are coming from each of your campaigns using this feature called a Google Analytics tagged URL. Summary And Next Action As a next action out of today: We recommend trying to change one or two of your current campaigns that you’re running to use tracked URLs. Create a tracked URL and use that in one or two of your existing campaigns to see the results in Google Analytics If you want an overview of how to use Google Analytics or how to apply this in your business, feel free to contact us at competeonweb.com for a short consultation of how you can use this in your business.

When you create and publish content online, you want to make sure it’s as effective as possible, right? In this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show, we discuss a blog post template that you can use to make sure that your content gets the message across and is effective in your business. Full Transcript of Audio Below We’ve transcribed the audio into text and formatted it for easy reading below. Please excuse any typos or odd wording, as this transcript is taken directly from the spoken word within the audio above. — When you spend your time creating content and publishing it online, you really want to be sure that your time is being well spent and the content is as effective as possible. Today we’re going to talk about a template that you can use to make sure that your content gets the message across and is effective in your business. ×Effective blogging is just a small piece of the puzzle to market your business successfully. To get a list of specific opportunities to grow your business, click here. Target Three Types of Readers When you’re creating content for your website you want to target three types of readers; First, people reading only the headlines. The second type of reader is people reading headlines and bullet points. The third group is people reading the entire article. People Reading Only the Headlines Some people, when they visit a blog post are only going to; Scan through it to try and understand the topic that you’re talking about and get value out of that content. They’re only going to read the actual headlines and subheadings and the content that really jumps out at them which are the headings throughout the actual post. You therefore want to make sure that the actual topic that you’re communicating about and the main points that you’re trying to get across are actually in those headlines. For example, if you’re reading this particular post on our website, you’ll notice that we’ve done this on this particular post. The first heading is Target Three Types of Readers. That’s what we’re going into and then the next headline is People Reading Only the Headlines. It makes it very clear that that’s the first type of reader. So you want to be certain that when you write an actual blog post, the headlines throughout the entire article are very clear and communicate the structure of the actual content and provide enough value for somebody that just reads the headlines. People Reading Headlines and Bullet Points The second type of reader is people reading headlines and bullet points. These are very similar to people that only read the headlines, But they’re also going to read the bullet points and other content that jumps out at them. For example though, read the headlines such as People Reading Headlines and Bullet Points. That’s the headline that you probably just read if you’re reading this on our site and Then they’ll read the actual bullet points within that section. Now I’m not exactly sure what bullet points are going to be within the section that you’re listening to right now, but; The bottom line is you want to make sure that the headlines connect well with the bullet points. Think of somebody that’s going to be basically scanning through the article reading just the headlines and the bullet points. You need to make sure that that particular person is able to get the main concept out of the article that you’re writing and get some value out of it as well. People Reading The Entire Article The third group is people reading the entire article. Now we’re not going to go into too much detail on these particular people because it’s pretty self-explanatory. People that read the entire article are going to read the headlines, the bullet points, the content, and other types of content that are in the actual post. Make Your Blog Post Cater to All 3 Types of Readers When you’re creating an actual article for your website, Create the content, Craft the headlines, Craft the bullet points, Make sure everything looks good and then, Read through the article according to each of these groups. Start by reading the article and only read the headlines to yourself. Does the actual content make sense and communicate the overall structure of the actual post if you only read the headlines? Then do the same thing and just read the headlines and the bullet points. Does it make sense again? I want to be clear that, obviously, you’re not going to get as much detail out of the content if you’re only reading the headlines, but you do want to make sure that everything makes sense as you’re actually reading through. Summary And Next Actions So to summarize, when you’re writing a blog post or an article for your website, think of the three types of readers we discussed today; People reading only the headlines, People reading headlines and bullet points, and People reading the entire article. For more information or for examples of blog posts that we’ve written that use this structure, comment on this particular blog post and we’ll share some specific examples with people that comment so that you can see exact examples of this in action. ×Effective blogging is just a small piece of the puzzle to market your business successfully. To get a list of specific opportunities to grow your business, click here.

Cold calling can produce leads if done effectively. But if you already had warm leads that expressed interest in your products and services, wouldn’t you rather call them first? In this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show, we explain how to find interested prospects who are already familiar with your business that would be happy to speak with you if you cold called them.   Full Transcript of Audio Below We’ve transcribed the audio into text and formatted it for easy reading below. Please excuse any typos or odd wording, as this transcript is taken directly from the spoken word within the audio above. — If you’re spending time creating blog posts each week but not sure if it’s actually generating sales, this episode’s going to help you. We’re going to talk about a simple process that you can use to generate sales and warm leads from the blog posts that you put out. Here’s how it works. Have an Email List of Prospects Creating content on your blog takes a lot of time. If you don’t have processes in place to generate sales directly from that content, you’re definitely missing out on an opportunity. When you create new content on your blog, send an email update to your prospect list about that new content. Now, for the sake of today’s episode let’s assume that you do have an email list. If you do not, feel free to review our other episodes or contact us and we can refer you to an episode specifically about how to create and manage an email list, but for today let’s assume that you do have an email list. Share New Content With Your Email List When you create content you’re going to send a notice to your subscribers on your email list about that content. For example; Send them a quick summary or what the action items are from those particular posts that you’ve put out. A few days after sending that email you can; Log into the email system and Check to see who opened that email and Check to see who clicked on the actual email to visit the blog post. What you’re looking for here is specific people that are on your email list that actually engaged with the content that you put out. Identify Hot Prospects Based on Their Activity Now, what you want to do with that particular list is you want to look through that list of people that opened the email and people that actually clicked on the email to visit the blog posts and try to pick out some warm prospects that you know you can help. This works really well; If you are a low volume, high dollar business. For example, professional service based businesses that are not necessarily trying to close five or ten deals every single day. Maybe you just need to close five to ten deals per month to rapidly grow your business. So, this is the ideal situation. When you have a relatively small list and you’re going for quality rather than quantity with the sales that you’re generating. So, what you want to do is look through your email data to see who opened the list or who opened the email, who clicked on the email and find ideal prospects that you know that you can help that are on that list. Contact Prospects When They’re Most Interested Then what you can do is pretty simple. Just make a quick call to those particular prospects checking in. Consider mentioning that you saw that they read the blog post. This can be a good introduction and good timing to reach out to them and start a conversation with them about the particular topic of the blog post. You can share a few ideas you have about how to integrate that particular topic into their business but basically what you’re doing is you’re manufacturing serendipity. You’re basically; Using the data in your email system to know that they actually read the blog post and then Reaching out to them to connect with them about the blog post. Now, while this may sound simple, the simple things done systematically are what grows a business and so this is definitely something that you can implement. A Quick Recap Again to summarize; When you create content send an email out to your list. A few days after that, look into your email system to see who opened the email and who clicked on the email. Pick out a few prospects on that list that you know you can help, and then Make a quick follow-up call to those prospects to discuss how you can implement those particular action items from the blog posts in their business. We Are Happy to Help If you have any questions on how to implement this or additional advanced strategies, feel free to reach out to us. We would be more than happy to help you implement this and other marketing tactics in your business.

If you download free images from Google, you can be sued for thousands of dollars. In this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show, you’ll learn why Google’ing for website images can be dangerous and what’s a more effective and a safe way to get images for your website.  Full Transcript of Audio Below We’ve transcribed the audio into text and formatted it for easy reading below. Please excuse any typos or odd wording, as this transcript is taken directly from the spoken word within the audio above. — Today, we’re going to talk about why you should not be using Google to find images for your website. Free Images on Google are Often Copyrighted When you’re building a website or publishing content online, you need to have high quality images and one of the first places you’re probably going to look when you need to find a perfect image for your new blog post or images for a new website you’re building is Google. You’re going to go to Google and type in some sort of search that is going to find perfect images for your websites. You can definitely find high quality images on Google, but the issue with these images is that the majority of the time these are copyrighted images. Basically what that means is if you take that image from the Google search result and publish it on your website, you’re technically breaking copyright law and can be pursued with legal action and sued for using that image. You Will Be Caught Using Copyrighted Images One of the things that I wanted to make sure you’re aware of is what goes on with the image copyright holders and how easily you can be found and pursued for using that copyrighted image. What these websites do is; They sell images and For the images that they sell, They want to find people that are using those images without actually paying for them. The way that they do that is; They have internet scanning software that is programmed to go out and find every single use of their images on the internet. They upload their database of images to this software and that software then goes out and looks around on the internet for any use of those actual images. That might sound complicated, but it’s actually not that difficult to do from a technical perspective and this software’s been around for years. ×Being careful about using Google images is just one piece of the puzzle to market your business successfully. To get a list of specific opportunities to grow your business, click here. Legal Implications of  Using Copyrighted Images So, what I wanted to make sure you’re aware of is how easy it is for you to get caught using those actual images. Typically what will happen is; You’ll receive a letter of some sort of possibly just an email through your website and they’ll be asking you for licensing information for the specific image in question and You’re going to tell them you don’t have that or you’re going to say, “I found it on Google”. Then they’re going to send you a settlement agreement to usually pay them thousands of dollars in exchange for not pursuing legal action against you and They are completely in the right for doing that. It’s totally legal for them to be able to pursue copyright violations, but what I wanted to make sure that you’re aware of is that if you go to Google and you actually copy an image, you’re technically breaking the copyright laws and it’s very, very easy for you to get caught doing that. Where You Can Find Free High Quality Images So, a solution that you can use is fairly simple. There are stock photography sites that you can go to where you can find images to use within your content and you can download those and get fully licensed versions of those actual images. Example- iStockPhoto.com In some cases you’re going to pay a couple of dollars for those images while in other cases you can find free ones, but what we found is that typically you can find high, high quality images that meet your search criteria for about $1 to $2 each. So, you are going to pay a little bit of money, but you’re not going to be breaking copyright law and you’re not going to have to deal with a lawsuit or paying thousands of dollars for breaking the copyright law for a particular image. We Are Happy to Help If you’re interested in additional resources that you can use to find stock photography, please visit the episode notes on CompeteOnWeb.com. We’d be happy to help you out in finding free high quality images to add to your website without getting into any kind of legal trouble.

People don’t become leads or buy from you the first time they come into contact with you, right? If you knew exactly when they were ready to buy, would you followup with them at that time? In this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show, you’ll learn about a 4 part followup system that “automatically” follows up with your prospects starting at initial interest all the way through to when they’re ready to buy.  Full Transcript of Audio Below We’ve transcribed the audio into text and formatted it for easy reading below. Please excuse any typos or odd wording, as this transcript is taken directly from the spoken word within the audio above. — Today we’re going to talk about a few specific things you can do to generate more leads and revenue from the existing website traffic that you have. Why Should You Followup With Prospects? Following up with people that are interested in buying your products and services is really important and the main reason why that’s important is sales don’t happen immediately. Very rarely is somebody going to visit your website and purchase right on the first time they visit your website. Instead, what usually needs to happen is They need to build trust by going through your website content. They need to further research your services so that they know that it’s a good match, and then Once they’re ready, they need to contact you through the site. That’s why following up with them throughout that entire process and at the different stages of the buying cycle is important. Different Followup Stages Now what I want to show you today is how you can systematize a lot of those different follow up pieces so that you know you’re doing it and you’re doing it at the right times. If follow up is baked into your processes and how you do business, then you’re going to be a lot more effective at generating leads from the traffic that’s coming to your website. So here are a few specific tools that you can use at different parts of that buying process. Basically what I’ve done is I’ve broken down all the way from; A website visit, Somebody leaving the website, Somebody opting into your CRM system or your prospect list, Calling them at the right time when they’re ready to buy. Use Live Chat for Website Visitors Let’s start with when somebody visits your website. Somebody’s on your website, they’re reviewing your content, maybe they’re looking at some of your service pages. One of the things that you can do with them to follow up at that particular moment is use something called a website chat. Basically it’s a chat box that opens up and enables you to have a conversation directly with that website visitor. Now it’s really important when you’re using a website chat system that you don’t just immediately try and start selling the person. Instead what we’ve found works really well for our own business is basically asking; If they need help, If there’s anything else that you can provide them related to the topic for the pages that they’re looking at. Adopt a very consultative approach and the end result of that ideally should be to get their email address to add them to your prospect list. Really what you’re trying to do at this point is follow up with them while they’re on the website to see if you can be of any further help to them. That’s one particular touch point where you can follow up with people. Use a live chat system when they’re on your website. Get People Who Leave Back to Your Website Let’s assume that this person leaves the website, and let’s say that they did not actually engage with you on the website chat, or maybe you’re not using your website chat. One of the things that you can do to get them back to your website and continue that interaction with that particular prospect is to use something called re-marketing. Basically what re-marketing is; When somebody comes to your website and then leaves, they will then see your ad across the internet on different websites because they visited your website. You can track the fact that they visited your site in the past and then they left, and you can configure your ads to show specifically to people that left your website. That’s a good way to follow up with people and get them back on to your website so that you can continue that discussion with them. Then maybe once they’re on your website, you can actually get them to engage in a live chat or do what I’m going to explain next which is opt-in to your actual prospect list. But if they leave your website, you should be using re-marketing to follow up and get them back. Followup With Email Prospects So let’s take it one step deeper. If somebody’s on your website, maybe they came back to your website from a re-marketing campaign and they’re interested in your services and some information, but they’re just not yet ready to buy. One of the things that you can do is somehow get them on to your prospect list; Either with the website chat feature that we talked about before, or Maybe by providing some sort of white paper download or free course, or Something along those lines to basically get their email address. What you’re going to be able to do once you have their email address is; Follow up with them periodically with content that’s going to be of interest to them. You can send the same content to all of the prospects that are on your list, but You should most likely be segmenting your list by the interest of the prospect. If somebody specifically looks at a certain service and a certain offering of yours, then you should only follow up with them with content that’s relevant to that particular service. Once they’re on your prospect list, you can keep that relationship going by periodically following up with them with additional helpful information. Track Activity Related To Purchase Interest The next thing is really the most important part. Once somebody has been on your prospect list and you’ve been keeping in touch with them; you want to be able to follow up with them at the moment that they’re ready to buy. One of the things that you can do that’s a little more advanced is that You can track what people do on your website Then you can trigger something to happen once they do something that shows interest in buying. Here’s an example. Let’s say that somebody’s on your prospect list and they visit your website periodically, and then One day they come back and they start looking at the services page, They start looking the case studies pages, They start looking at the pricing or consultation pages or something along those lines. Your system can be configured to track when somebody’s doing that and immediately flag somebody on your team to call that person or to follow up with that person because they’re showing really specific interest in being ready to buy your services. That’s really the last stage – tracking what they’re doing on the website and following up when they start doing things that show that they’re really ready to buy. Summary And Next Actions So to summarize what we’ve talked about is having follow up mechanisms in place throughout the entire buying cycle. The first step is when someone’s on your website. Use a website chat system to keep in touch and to follow up with them and see if you can help them at all. If somebody leaves the website, use re-marketing to show them ads to get them back to your website. Once you have somebody on your email list, you want to keep in contact with them and provide content that they would find helpful, and then Finally, once somebody’s on your email list and they do something that shows that they’re ready to buy, you need to have your system in place so that you can, A: be aware of that, and B: follow up with them at the right time. We Are Happy to Help Hopefully this has been helpful. If you want more information about how to use this effectively in your business, feel free to reach out to us. We’d be happy to review what you have in place in place right now and how you can integrate some of these systems to get more leads from the existing website traffic that you have.

You can boost the sales and leads you get on your website by 30% without getting more website traffic. In this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show, we share one of the many email marketing best practices we use that can add revenue to your bottom line.    Full Transcript of Audio Below We’ve transcribed the audio into text and formatted it for easy reading below. Please excuse any typos or odd wording, as this transcript is taken directly from the spoken word within the audio above. — Today you’re going to learn how to generate upwards of 30 percent more leads, or revenue on your website without getting more website traffic. What If Someone Starts a Purchase, But Then Stops? When somebody comes to your website, and starts the process to either purchase a product, or fill out a form to become a lead for your business, they might end up stopping halfway through. This can happen because they get distracted, maybe a phone call comes in at their office, or maybe they’re confused by the process and need to do more research. But the bottom line is that person is; Interested in purchasing your product, or becoming a lead for your business, but They didn’t complete the actual process, and So now, you’re not aware of that person. “Automatically” Followup with Them One of the things that you can do to greatly increase the leads, and sales you get from your website is to have a follow up process in place to follow up with people that started the purchase process, but did not complete it. This is called an abandoned cart sequence, or a follow up sequence, and basically what you’re doing is; You’re keeping track of the people that start the actual purchase process, or Start the process of filling out a form on your website to become a lead, BUT they do not actually reach the completion of that process. How the Followup Process Works Now we don’t want to go into too much technical detail of exactly how to do this, because it really depends on what system you’re on. But this is something you should definitely have in place if you’re generating leads, or you’re trying to sell products on your website. If you run an E-commerce store that actually sells products, this is pretty simple to do depending on what platform you’re on. Basically what it does is; It tracks as somebody is going through the checkout process to purchase a product if they actually reach the confirmation page at the end. Even if they didn’t reach that page, you will already have some of their contact information, and You can then generate a follow up email to that particular person. If you have a lead  generation website, you can have a multiple step process to actually generate a lead. For example; You can start by asking for the person’s email address, Then on the next page, you ask for a little bit of detail about their particular question, or about what product they’re interested in, and Then you have the confirmation page. Even if that person doesn’t actually fill out the information on the product page, but they’ve already entered their email on the first screen, you can also generate a follow up to that person. The bottom line of what you’re doing is tracking if somebody starts the purchase process, or the lead process, and doesn’t actually finish, you’re basically able to follow up with that person automatically. We Are Happy To Help If you’re interested on how to accomplish this depending on what platform you’re using for your website, feel free to reach out to us at competeonweb.com. We’d be happy to take a look, and make a recommendation on how you can integrate this in your business. But if you’re selling products, or generating leads on your website this is a great way to grow the amount of sales, and leads that come from your website without having to get more website traffic then you’re getting.

You probably have a phone number on your website. But do you know exactly how many phone calls are generated by each of your marketing efforts? If not, this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show about how to use call tracking effectively is for you.   Full Transcript of Audio Below We’ve transcribed the audio into text and formatted it for easy reading below. Please excuse any typos or odd wording, as this transcript is taken directly from the spoken word within the audio above. — Today, we’re going to talk about how to know exactly how many phone calls each of your marketing campaigns is producing. What Marketing Campaign is Causing a Phone Call? Tracking the results of your marketing campaigns is important. After all, marketing costs money so you want to make sure that the effort that you’re putting in and the money you’re putting in is producing profitable results. It is very simple to track when somebody sees an advertisement for your business and comes to your website and then purchases a product directly on the site. You can figure out exactly where that person came from and then track the fact that they actually purchased on the website. The challenge comes in when somebody actually calls you after visiting your website. They get on the phone and they call you. The reason why this can be a challenge is if you’re not using different phone numbers on your website, you’re not necessarily going to know what that person called (i.e. which campaign they came from). Now, of course you could ask them what advertisement they saw and how they got to your website, but you lose a lot of the data in that type of situation where you’re just asking people how they found you. Tracking Data Using Different Phone Numbers So, here’s a much better solution that you can use. There are services and tools you can use to basically show different phone numbers to people depending on how they found your website. Here’s an example. If somebody came to your website from Facebook, maybe they saw a Facebook share that you put out there or maybe you’re running an advertising campaign on Facebook, they would see one specific phone number. If somebody came from a Google search, they would see a different phone number on your website. Easy to Implement with Your Current Phone System Now, both of these phone numbers are going to lead to your office or to your call center support team. You can decide where the phone actually rings and nothing needs to change in your existing phone system. But the bottom line is: The website visitor is going to receive a different phone number depending on where they came from and that Enables you to track data based on how many calls are coming in from each different phone number. This is accomplished through a small line of code setup on your website that dynamically changes the phone number based on where the website visitor came from. We won’t go into the technical detail of this in today’s post, but if you’re interested in how this works from a technical perspective let us know in the comments below. Quick Recap And Next Actions You can definitely find more details by contacting us at competeonweb.com, but I wanted to share what was possible in this post. If you have the same phone number on your website showing to everyone regardless of where they actually came from and how they found your website, you’re missing out on some potential data sources. You can contact us today to book a roadmap session and we’ll help you identify what’s working in your marketing and how to do more of what is producing a profit.

You may think that social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) doesn’t produce revenue. You’re right – it usually doesn’t directly produce revenue. But it does indirectly produce leads and revenue. In this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show, we share a social media measurement process that will give you insight into how much revenue is being produced by your social media efforts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Plus, and more. Full Transcript of Audio Below We’ve transcribed the audio into text and formatted it for easy reading below. Please excuse any typos or odd wording, as this transcript is taken directly from the spoken word within the audio above. — What we’re going to talk about today is how to know exactly how much revenue is being produced by your social media activity. How You’re Probably Measuring Your Marketing When you measure your online marketing, usually what you’re measuring is the last thing that somebody does before they become a lead or purchase a product on your website. Let me give you an example. If somebody goes on Google, Searches for a product or service that you offer, and Then comes to your website and Purchases that product, You’re going to attribute that revenue or that sale to the Google search. You’re going to say that because that person searched on Google and then found your product and then purchased the product. So your revenue should be attributed to Google and the marketing efforts that you’re doing on Google. You’re Missing Important Data But a more complicated situation is when; Somebody visits your website and then leaves Then visits your website again in the future and leaves again, and Then visits your website a third time at some point in the future, and then purchases. In that scenario you need to measure each time somebody interacts with your website and then attribute the revenue appropriately. Let me give you an example for that also: Let’s say that you’re producing content and you’re putting it out on social media channels, such as LinkedIn and Facebook. If somebody finds your content on LinkedIn, clicks on the actual content and visits your website, that may be the first time they interact with your company. If that person leaves and then at some point in the future sees an advertisement related to your company or sees maybe an online banner related to your company and then comes back and makes the purchase. In such a situation, you want to make sure that that first time they interacted with your company on LinkedIn gets some of the credit for the revenue that’s produced. And the way that you do that is with a more advanced analytics tracking system that basically tracks the entire interaction flow with your website. How to Measure Revenue Produced by Social Media You need to measure every single time somebody comes to the website, so you can see when somebody actually purchases the product. What you’d be able to do in that particular case is you would be able to work backwards from the purchase. You’d be able to see when somebody actually purchases a product and then you can work backwards and see each of the touch points that they’ve had with your company. A direct advantage that you can have by using this type of tactic or this type of strategy is to know exactly how much your social media efforts are producing.  It may not necessarily mean the exact sales that are being generated directly from some content that you put out on LinkedIn, but it will help you know over the average of all of your sales. With all of your leads that are coming in, you’ll be able to know how much revenue is being produced from that initial LinkedIn share or from that initial tweet that you sent out on Twitter. Basically what you can start to do once you’re gathering all this data is you can track roughly how much revenue is being produced by the social media channels you’re active in. A Quick Summary And Next Actions As a direct result out of this video, I just wanted to make sure that you’re aware that this is possible. There are systems you can use to be able to track multi-touch attribution which basically means; Tracking everything that somebody does on your website, every single time they come to your website, so that you can attribute the revenue to the appropriate marketing channels. If you’re interested in discussing this further, feel free to reach out to us at competeonweb.com. We’d be happy to review your social media efforts: book a road map session.

If you’re there to answer a website visitor’s question, the odds of generating a sale or lead from that visitor grow significantly. In this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show, we share a simple tool you can use to allow your website visitors to ask a question in real time on your website. We’ve used this in our own businesses and the results have been great! Full Transcript of Audio Below We’ve transcribed the audio into text and formatted it for easy reading below. Please excuse any typos or odd wording, as this transcript is taken directly from the spoken word within the audio above. — In business, it’s important for you to answer the questions of your prospects to increase the likelihood that they’re going to buy.  Today we’re going to talk about a simple tool that you can use on your website to answer the questions of your prospects so that they buy through your site. Your Website Visitors Have Questions Imagine that you run a retail store.  If somebody comes into the retail store, there’s going to be questions that they have.  And if you can be available to answer those questions as they’re getting closer to the purchase, the odds of them actually purchasing are going to go up. On your website, it’s not as easy to be available to answer those questions as it might be with an offline retail store: If you’re having thousands of website visitors a day come to your website, it’s very challenging for you to actually be able to address each of them, one on one, right when they come to the website. But what you can do is use a tool such as a live chat tool, that enables the website visitor to basically click a button and start chatting with an instant message text discussion on the website with a member of your team. How Live Chat Works to Answer Questions Here’s how it works. Somebody comes to the website – Let’s say that you offer high end consulting or financial planning services.  Somebody’s on the website, they’re looking through your content, and maybe they’re looking at your services page. They have some sort of question that they want answered – They probably wouldn’t take the time to actually call you directly, but they do see a little button on the bottom of your website, very subtle, that says, ‘Chat with us now,’ or, ‘Ask a question,’ or something along those lines.  They can click that button, a little chat box will pop up, they can type their question, and a member of your team will be connected with them right away to be able to answer that question. Your team member is going to be able to address their question and address anything else they’d like to discuss, and send them on their way so that they can continue through the website and hopefully purchase the product. Live Chat Works Well for Us – Try It These tools are very effective, but they’re not new.  They’ve been around for many years, but It’s something that you should look into integrating on your website, especially if you have a higher touch sales process. If you’re selling something that is higher dollar, higher price, and something that’s a little bit complicated and may need to be considered a little more in depth by the actual buyer. Look into using a live chat tool on your website. We Are Happy To Help If you have questions, leave a comment below or contact us directly at competeonweb.com. We can provide you with a recommendation of the tool to use as well as how to integrate it into your marketing process.

If someone mentions your brand online, either positively or negatively, you need to be aware of it. This enables you to be aware of how people are talking about your brand online, and gives you the ability to get involved if needed. In this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show, we talk about brand tracking and how to get notified automatically anytime someone talks about your company online. http://competemarketinggroup.wistia.com/medias/tffor6a1oq?embedType=iframe&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=600 Full Transcript of Audio Below We’ve transcribed the audio into text and formatted it for easy reading below. Please excuse any typos or odd wording, as this transcript is taken directly from the spoken word within the audio above. — Today we’re going to talk about a tool that you can use to get notified anytime somebody mentions your company or your product and services online. Why You Need to Track Your Company Online If somebody mentions your products and services whether it’s in a positive light or a negative light, it’s important that you get notified of this. It’s really important for you to keep a strong hold on your brand and be aware of how people are talking about you online. ×Tracking mentions of your company online is a small piece of the puzzle to market your business successfully. To get a list of specific opportunities to grow your business, click here. Here’s an example. If somebody mentions your product or your company in a positive light, you want to be notified about that. One of the things that you can do is You could reach out to that person either privately or publicly and thank them and Maybe offer additional information that they might find helpful. Doing that shows that person and also the rest of the people who see this positive review online that You are a real person and that You care about the experiences of your customers So, knowing about something positive that somebody says about you online and reacting to that can be a huge advantage in your market. On the flip side, if somebody publishes something negative about you: Maybe they didn’t have a good experience with your product or service or or they’re purposely disparaging your company online Either way, you want to be sure to know about this so you can react accordingly. Free Tool to Get Notified Instantly Monitoring your brand and monitoring all the content on the internet day by day, hour by hour is certainly not realistic for you to do manually. So, one of the tools that we recommend setting up is called the Google Alerts. Google Alerts enables you to do is to tell Google anytime somebody mentions this particular keyword or this particular phrase online, you want to get notified about it via email. What’s great about the tool is that you can set up a Google Alert for; Your company name, Your product name, Your own name or even Members of your team It will enable you to get notified via email anytime somebody mentions that particular keyword online. So go setup a Google Alert for your company today. How We Can Help If you’re interested in additional ways that you can monitor your brand online and have systems in place to market and manage your business more effectively, contact us or join our email list on this page to get email-subscriber resources we send out periodically. We publish a lot of content that will help you manage and market your business more effectively and if you’re ready to speak with us about your particular business, book a road map session. ×Tracking mentions of your company online is a small piece of the puzzle to market your business successfully. To get a list of specific opportunities to grow your business, click here.

It’s possible to buy Google traffic and pay for each website visitor that Google sends you. This is called “per pay click” marketing, or “pay per visit” marketing. In this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show, we share how this works and how you can use it to grow your business. http://competemarketinggroup.wistia.com/medias/m5c1c65gec?embedType=iframe&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=760 Full Transcript of Audio Below We’ve transcribed the audio into text and formatted it for easy reading below. Please excuse any typos or odd wording, as this transcript is taken directly from the spoken word within the audio above. — Increasing your rankings on Google is not the only way to get more website visitors from Google. We’re going to talk about another tactic that you should be considering today. Pay Per Click Marketing – How It Works? It’s possible to pay Google to send people to your website. Here’s how it works. You can configure an ad to show up on Google when somebody types in a specific keyword or a phrase. For example, you can tell Google that anytime somebody searches for a specific phrase that is related to a product or service that you offer, Google will show your ad to those people. Now, Google will show the ad to people that search for that particular keyword and then if that person clicks on the ad and then actually visits your website, you will pay Google a small amount of money for that particular website visitor. So, basically what’s happening is you tell Google that you want your website to show up in front of people that search for a specific phrase and you will only pay Google if that person visits your website. The term is called Pay Per Click marketing and it can be a really effective way to grow your business and to grow your website traffic. ×Buying traffic from Google is powerful, but it's just a small piece of the puzzle to market your business successfully. To get a list of specific opportunities to grow your business, click here. How is “Price” Determined in Pay Per Click Marketing A few important things to understand about Pay Per Click marketing is first of all the price. The price is set by the market. So, it’s not a flat fee that you pay to Google for every website visitor in any industry. In every industry the price that you pay Google is going to be different. In some industries, it can be 10 cents per click, 20 cents per click. In other industries, it can literally be $35, $40, $50 per click, so it all depends on what industry you’re in. The bottom line is that the cost is set by the market and so your competitors are not going to pay $50 per click if they’re not able to turn a profit somehow from that customer. That doesn’t mean that they earn more than $50 for every website visitor that comes in right away, but; They might get people into their business, Get people onto their customer list and eventually Over the lifetime of that customer earn more than $50. The main thing I wanted to clarify is that the price is set by the market depending on how many other competitors are bidding on that particular keyword or that phrase. What Google Cares About in Pay Per Click Marketing Relevant Website Content – The next thing I wanted to clarify is that it’s not all built on the price. You cannot just outbid your competitors and expect to show up at the top of the ads. Just because you’re willing to pay more for the website visitor than your competitor doesn’t not mean that you actually show up at the top. Google wants to make sure that your website is relevant to the actual key word being advertised. So if you want to show up for a particular keyword, Google is not only going to look at the price that you’re willing to pay. Google’s also going to look at how relevant your website is for that particular keyword. So They (Google) are going to visit your website, Their system is going to review your website, Compare it to the keyword you’re targeting to make sure that you actually have content on the page that is related to that keyword. This way they make sure you’re relevant. Analyze Visitors Behavior – The second thing that they’re going to look at is they’re going to track what people do when they actually get to your site through the ad. So, if somebody searches on Google, sees your ad, clicks on it and then leaves your website right away, Google is going to know that and over time if a lot of people do that they will stop showing your ad or show it significantly less. They’ll lower where your ad actually shows up online, and They can start to charge you more for the actual clicks to basically price you out of the market since your website is apparently not relevant for that phrase. So, when it comes to Pay Per Click marketing, you should remember that price is not the only factor and how much it costs for a click in your particular market. A Quick Recap / Next Steps To summarize, you can buy visits from Google and other search engines and it’s definitely something that you should look into doing. ×Buying traffic from Google is powerful, but it's just a small piece of the puzzle to market your business successfully. To get a list of specific opportunities to grow your business, click here. It can be an extremely scalable and profitable way to grow your business, Get more website traffic and Have more leads and sales coming in. Contact us and we’d be happy to review specific opportunities in your market: review competitors and see how much money they are spending on their particular Google ads. We can show specifically what keywords your competitors are targeting and we can see what types of numbers would be relevant to your particular campaign. How much would you need to spend for each click? How much would you need to spend per month on Google, and How  many leads and sales do you think would be coming from the actual campaign? We can even run some numbers on a road map session with you to figure out if this is something that you should be doing in your business. Book a RoadMap Session If you’re ready to move forward with the roadmap session, please contact us to book one. Otherwise, feel free to review other resources from The Compete Marketing Group Show and subscribe to our email list for email-subscriber resources by clicking the button on this page..

In this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show, we explain how to review your website design and marketing systems to ensure your business is organized clearly so you can hire someone to run the business or even sell the company profitably. Full Transcript of Audio Below We’ve transcribed the audio into text and formatted it for easy reading below. Please excuse any typos or odd wording, as this transcript is taken directly from the spoken word within the audio above. — In any business, there comes a point where you may want to exit the business. Either you sell the company, or you bring somebody to manage the day-to-day operations that you were responsible for. Today, we’re going to talk about how to make sure that you don’t lose money as a part of that process or even lose the entire business. Businesses NEED Organized Systems and Processes It’s important to have systems and processes in your business. That makes it so that there’s a way of doing things, and you can hire people to come in and actually run your business. Also, if somebody’s buying your business, they want to have an understanding of how you do things and how you’ve become successful so that they can keep the business at that level and take it to the next level. That’s why they would be buying your company. Your Website and Marketing Needs to Be Organized We encounter a lot of situations where businesses come to us and their online website and some of their online marketing systems are extremely unorganized. And we recently encountered a situation where a company was trying to sell their business and that actually blew the entire sale. Their systems were so unorganized that the entire sale fell through. And this was not a small company. This was a company that was doing tens of millions of dollars in revenue and would have a pretty high business valuation that they could sell the company for if their systems were in place. To give you an idea of the level of the problem, let’s say; The value of the company would be a hundred million dollars if they were actually able to sell their company and have their systems in place. But since their systems were so unorganized, they needed to be untangled by the acquiring company and for that reason the deal actually fell through. If the deal would have happened, it probably would’ve taken a good 20 or 25 million dollars off of the purchase price. So we’re talking about a serious problem here that I want to make sure you’re aware of so that you can avoid it in the future. Tip – Use a Standard Platform for Your Website Now, we’re going to focus specifically on marketing systems and website systems. First, you want to make sure that your website is built on an industry standard platform. The reason why you want to be on an industry standard website platform is because that way anyone can be hired to actually take over the role of managing that website. Or if a company is purchasing your company, then they’ll understand why you chose that platform. And it’s a platform that they can hire somebody to actually manage. If you have a fully customized platform in something that you’ve kind of strung together through the years; something you built it in the late 90s or many years ago before some of the industry standard platforms really developed and gained popularity, then that can be a problem when you’re trying to sell the actual business or even if you’re trying to bring somebody in to manage the business. So that’s the first thing you want to do – make sure you’re on an industry standard platform. Recommended Website Platforms WordPress is a great example of an industry standard platform. If you have a more complicated website, you can use something like Drupal. That’s a very common platform that huge companies use. You can do essentially anything on that platform. If you’re running an Ecommerce business, there’s a range of other platforms to consider. Anything from Bigcommerce or Shopify all the way up to a system like Magento which is extremely powerful, but also very complicated as well. The bottom line is you want to be on an industry standard platform for your website. Make Sure You’re Tracking Your Website and Marketing The second thing that you want to make sure of is that you have website tracking in place. When people come to your website, you want to know what they’re doing on your website. And to give you some context here, that company we talked about earlier that was in the process of trying to be acquired, didn’t have proper website tracking in place. Even though they were successful, they were doing 10s of millions of dollars in revenue, they weren’t able to show where that revenue was coming from. They were doing marketing efforts, but they weren’t able to show which ones were working and which ones were not working. So the acquiring company was going in sort of blind, not knowing what they should continue and what they should cut. And that brings the overall value of the company down. You therefore need to have website tracking in place so that you know what’s happening on your website, where your leads and sales are coming from, and how your marketing efforts are doing. Google Analytics Is a Free Website Tracking Tool Google Analytics is the simplest system for you to use. It’s a free tool provided by Google – it’s called Google Analytics. You just put a line of code on each page of your website. It’s very easy to install, and It will track everything that goes on, on you website. It will track what people do when they get there, Where they came from, How long they stay on the website, and You can also configure it to track sales Where those sales came from and What percentage of revenue comes from which marketing channel. The bottom line again  is that you want to have your website tracking in place. What To Do Now? So the first thing that you should do today is at least be conscious of where your business is at now. Are you on a industry standard website platform, or do you have everything strung together through the year? That’s something we can definitely help you identify and be aware of what your options are for moving forward. The second thing you want to make sure of is that you have your website tracking in place. Make sure you have at least Google Analytics installed and configured so it’s tracking your website traffic. I know that this is the type of situation you can easily procrastinate on and just worry about it later when you’re ready to sell the business. But when you’re trying to exit a business, whether you’re bringing somebody in to manage the day-to-day operations or possibly selling the company, there are so many other details to worry about that fixing your systems at that time is almost entirely impossible to do. So it’s something you want to be conscious of. We Are Happy to Help Hopefully, this has helped you identify some situations in your business. Feel free to contact us. We’d be happy to review your site and your marketing to at least show you specifically what you need to be aware of.