Get More Leads and Sales Online

Recession, depression, or even in the very best of times, business owners, authors and speakers have challenges big and small when it comes to increasing leads and sales on the Internet. And, they want better results, fast, and for the best price. It’s a simple concept really and yet so difficult to achieve sometimes.

If you have a product, book, or service that really does offer a means for someone to overcome a problem, we believe it is your obligation to get the word out that you have a remedy available.

One of the most challenging parts of owning a business and increasing sales is to realize you really do have a solution to someone’s problem. You have to be so confident in your process or product that you actually feel bad if someone decides to take another route because you were not able to convince them you had the best solution. And, that’s the first step to increasing your leads and sales using the Internet—having that total confidence that what you offer will truly help someone.

Now let’s look closer at the actual process for increasing those leads and sales. It seems so complex of a topic, but it’s actually very simple. You can only increase your leads and sales from the Internet in 3 ways:

1. Increase your conversion rates (the percentage of your visitors you “convert” to leads or customers)
2. Increase the number of visitors to your Web site
3. Change your price*

*Notice we said “change” of price and not necessarily “lower” price. You may in fact find through testing that you are charging too little and sales actually increase when your price is higher.

When it comes to increasing your leads and sales using the Internet, you first need to know what your conversion rates are and the number of actual visitors you are getting to your Web site (minus search engine spider traffic, for example). This research you can surely do on your own.

Then, you either need to learn how to increase your conversion rates or pay someone to identify the problem areas of your Web site through a Web site evaluation.

Most business owners, authors or speakers come to HereNextYear with a Web site that’s not working and they need help turning things around. So, we’re used to the process of evaluating a Web site and then making an action plan.

Not to say that first-timers don’t hire us too, but it seems that people wanting their first Web site have a preconceived idea of what their budget should be for Web site design and content development and are more concerned with how little they can spend to get “something” on the Web. That’s fine. If you’re new to the Web, go to Craigslist or Elance and see what you can get for a few hundred bucks.

In more than 13 years helping people with their Internet strategies, one of our greatest joys is to watch people evolve from sometimes very non-technical backgrounds into Internet marketing success machines! What is it that makes that turning point a reality? “Realization!” Here are a few things that today’s successful netrepreneurs had to realize before their Web sites could go to the next level:

A Web Site is Only One Piece – A Web site is only 5% of what’s available on the Internet to grow your business. Seach engines? Sure…add on another 5 or 10%. There is so much more to the Internet marketing spectrum than “the Web site.”

Internet Marketing is Constant – Gone are the days when you just add new Web site to the Internet and you forget about it and just watch the dollars roll in. That model simply does not exist today and it never did. Only after months of continuous effort and testing should you settle back to more of a maintenance mode on your Web site, unless of course you start a new project to launch another Web site. But, that’s a different discussion.

More Web Sites are FAR Better than One – Most business owners have 3, 5, 10 Web sites to fuel leads and sales for their business. Stop thinking you have to only have one Web site for yours. Start with one but then build out additional sites to complement your primary Web site.

You MUST Be Able to Maintain Content - Today, there is no excuse. The stakes are too high. You must be able to maintain and change your own Web site content instead of sending every small change request to your designer and waiting for a week to have your content added. You need to be able to add photos and even potentially audio and video. You need to be able to test headlines on a sales page or add a special offer for an upcoming holiday. Hiding behind a shield of “I’m not technical enough” is out the window. With online tools like our Ultimate Blog Setup Package, maintaining your own content is as easy as using Microsoft Word.

Someone Has to DO the Work – You can go to as many Internet marketing seminars as you want and learn all the tricks from the experts. But, eventually, you have to put things into a sequence and accomplish tasks one step at a time.

There is a Sequence to Everything – Why would you want to get 100,000 visitors a month to your Web site if your Web site isn’t converting any visitors to customers now at 1,000 visitors a month? 100,000 X $0 is still $0. First focus on design, copywriting and a strong sales process for your Web pages and then go for the big traffic.

The Secret is in Testing – At least every month, preferably every week, or even maybe every day if you get enough visitation to generate good numbers, you should change one or two items on your sales pages to test results…and document those results. Business owners like you (and me) are evolving their skills to watch visitation statistics frequently and make changes to their Web sites based on those statistics. At HereNextYear Internet marketing workshops in Denver Colorado and surrounding areas, we routinely ask the audiences to raise their hands if they can tell us how many visitors they had to their Web sites the week before. Only 10 per cent raise their hands. Can you see the opportunity?

Nothing is Cast in Stone Online – Try to avoid spending hours of up-front work to come up with the perfect wording for any page of your Web site. Nothing is cast in stone on the Web. Any page you write off-line is going to look different to you when you add it online to your Web site. And, that’s okay because you will always be able to change what appears on the Web.

You Can’t Do it All – With more than 50 categories of Internet marketing available to you as the business owner, you can’t possibly do it all yourself. To keep your sanity, you will need to begin finding helpers and be willing to pay them.

You Must Form a Team – Whether your team is you and your spouse and a few students to help with programming tasks or a team of 25 at one of the most prestigious advertising agencies, or even HereNextYear’s team of 7, everyone with a successful Web site has a team they can rely on. Start creating yours now and stop thinking you have to do it all on your own.

You Have to Learn Before You Delegate - Before you know what to pay people for and how to instruct them what you want them to do, you really need to experience how those strategies work first-hand. For example, if you want to find someone in the Philippines and pay them $2 per article for a 20-article campaign, would you know how to make sure they didn’t just scrape articles from the Internet to provide you with what they claim is original content? Or, what if you found what you thought was a “great deal” for search engine optimization for only $90 a month? Would you know how to evaluate the service if you didn’t know how to optimize pages of your Web site? Make a list of all the Internet marketing categories you know how to do and those you don’t. Create a sequenced plan for learning them all so that you can delegate tasks more effectively later.

No One Knows Your Customer Better – As much as you can potentially farm out to companies, you are the key component to your business. No one will ever have more enthusiasm for promoting your business than you and no one will know your target market better. Have confidence in your own involvement.

It’s a Business, Not a Hobby – This is one of the biggest requirements of all. You must make the commitment to yourself that your business, book, or speaking career really is a business. And, you have to treat it like one with planning, a budget to spend, and taking marketing seriously.

In Summary…

We’d like to invite you to put these realizations to use for your own Internet marketing campaign to increase leads and sales using the Internet. There are 3 ways to have us help you right now.

1. Sign-up to receive the Tuesday Triplet where HereNextYear president, Marty Dickinson, sends just three timely and topical tips every Tuesday for you to begin using immediately in your Internet marketing practice. It’s free and you can cancel at any time.
2. Claim your free membership in our Level 1 Members Area where you will have access to some important tools we use on a daily basis including a traffic calculator and a free headline generator.
3. Call us at HereNextYear (303) 743-0832 for a free consult to see how we might be able to help.And always remember that the key to the increase of leads and sales using the Internet is to be continuous in your effort.