Website and visitors: generates hardly any number of leads

You have company website in order to inform potential customers. Spending money for marketing purposes is OK and every company has a website.

SEO: You have applied the best SEO you could do or pay for and got high ranking on Google, Yahoo and MSN Live! Spending more money. After inserting a free web statistics solution, you knew the site got traffic, but not enough visitors.

ADVERTISING: So you bought Adwords or Text Link Adds or whatever. Spending even more money. This resulted in more visitors.

BOOKMARKING: Tried sneaky bookmarking on Digg, Reddit, Technorati, etc. This resulted in more search engine links, but no real increase in visitors, as your products or services are not HOT. No problem as this bookmarking didn’t cost you any money. Still, less than 3 percent of all the website visitors submit their contact details.

WHITE PAPER: Thus you wrote a White Paper, and made it downloadable from your website after visitors submit their name and email. This increased the level of contact details to 4% - an increase of 1%. It might be the subject; it might be the products or the type of services, who knows. The fact is and remains: only 96% or more of all of your visitors come, read your website and leave without a trail or trace. The 4% is only what remains as a start for lead generation, as each one needs to be contacted to see if they really are interested.

Email marketing:

The next idea was to use email marketing: sending out tagged emails to potential buyers. These could be retrieved and traced when the receiver clicked n the link inside the email. Great idea, but you didn’t have enough email addresses to send out. Thus you had to buy email opt-in lists. This sounds like getting into spamming, not? Pushing people into your website is almost like luring them to visit your website. Moreover you had to build a special ‘Landing page’ to ultimately keep their interest further.

Have you already questioned yourself?

What is the likelihood of sending an email to someone with an appropriate message at the appropriate time?

This is multiplying probabilities:

For instance:

* Probability of addressee related to your proposition: 40%

* Probability of appropriate message (is he interested): 15%

* Probability of timing (now or next year or later): 9%

* This becomes: 0.40 times 0.15 times 0.09 = 0.0054 or 0.5%

Meaning in order to get one interested person, you have to send out 185 emails. Thus if you want 10 possible Leads, you need to send out 1850 emails. WOW!

These Leads still need to be qualified, thus your return on emails will be much lower.

(Note: these numbers are just an example and differ from industry to industry and product or service proposed.)

Conclusion: you will be needing massive amounts of email addresses. These you only can obtain by buying them. Spending more money.

Build on the natural inflow of visitors:

Still you have visitors coming to your website by their own means. Not being pushed or lured by an email campaign. They are pulled in by your content and the interest in your solutions, products or services. Thus what you need is a solution able to reveal the identity of the visitor by company name. Their location, language, website,… Just like any web analytic solution, the search terms used and the pages visited can be captured and listed. This allows for identifying their interests and needs.

Not web analytic: website visitor identification solution:

At first you might think you just need a web analytic application or service, however there is a important difference: web analytic aggregate data about the website, whereas website visitor identification solutions aggregate data by visiting company. For each visiting company a record has to be inserted in the company data base. Once a system stores companies in a data base, a CRM is not far off. Just add the possibility of entering contacts, events/actions and agenda for having a basic CRM.

The CRM becomes more sophisticated by the integration from the website visitors and their visits with the capabilities of the CRM. This will enhance the CRM functionalities into a different kind, as the data from the website flows into the CRM, keeping the CRM a lively information source. Of course in order to use a visitor identification solution, you will be spending money. However this is spending money to leverage the investments and expenses made for your website.

Website visitor identification integrated in CRM:

In order to inform further about the visitor identification combined with CRM, please visit LEADSExplorer

Business benefits:

* Identify your business opportunities with Leads, Customers, Ex-Customers, and Missed Customers

* Nurture and convert interested parties into Leads, into Prospects, into Sales using the integrated CRM

* Internet Data Mining for Company info and finding Contacts.

* Get Sales reasons to: call, email, send letter, leaflet, visit: using the appropriate, timely message

* Re-contact the indicated returning known visitors

* Get more lead opportunities

* Reduce significantly the acquisition cost for: Leads, Prospects and getting Appointments

* Reduce significantly the Customer Retention costs

LEADSExplorer http://www.leadsexplorer.com/en/le/t/BusinessProposition.html

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Colin_Herridge

They create new content daily
Although they may have the post timestamped and may have not actually created it at that second they always have new content coming out. Sometimes these guys are way to busy and have “Guest Bloggers” do the posting for them that week. Either way they get the fresh content out there and everyone loves reading it. It is suggest to post at least once a day and most bloggers cannot even find the time to do it once a week. Imagine the surge in traffic and rss subscribers if you posted on a day to day basis. Give it a try, it is the best way to gain exposure.

Promotion is in their blood
They can promote a product without some people even realizing it. Sometimes they may be a bit deceptive and hide the affiliate links but they still get signups which is more money in their pocket. Then they use this money to further promote the blog until word of mouth takes over. They are also amazing at hyping contests, Darren of Problogger offered over $54,000 worth of Prizes in the ProBlogger Birthday Bash Competitions! The great part is that almost all the prizes were donated so it was almost free exposure to his already massively popular blog.

They know what they are talking about
Always do research before making a post, it will give you even more ideas and will make you look like a professional in that area. Even though you may already know a great deal about the topic, the readers may not, posting a tip or trick is a great way to build a loyal reader-base. Surprisingly even the basics of Google Adsense such as adding code to a webpage is difficult for beginners, and if you have that they will be sure to bookmark the site and return in the future.

They build a list of contacts
Every top blogger has a Blogroll or list of other webmasters blogs that they enjoy reading. This is a great way to find other interesting blogs and spread the word about your own. Find the best blogs in your topic and ask them to do a blogroll exchange with you. Some may be nice enough to do it even if you are a new blog, others may other do it with close friends. It’s worth a shot though! This also helps build powerful backlinks that are sitewide most of the time which means a bunch of pages will get indexed, search engine rankings will improve, and you will get that small pagerank boost.

They love what they do
These guys are working as bloggers fulltime and love it. They attend conversions and seminars for the topic and just cannot get enough of it. This allows them to share insider news and tips that other bloggers cannot. They are great at promoting their name and always conduct themselves professionally. Without this type of passion their blog would have never made it. Keep this in mind as a bit of motivation when writing your blog.

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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Derek_Baker

Three hundred million. That’s how many people live in the United States alone, and at least half of them - if not more - have some kind of access to the Internet. Getting five people to agree on something is difficult. Getting 150 million people to agree on something is, to put it mildly, impossible.

The point is: if you’re going to spend any time in social media marketing, with blogs, forums and other online communities, it’s not a question of if you’ll run into any controversy. It’s merely a question of when, and how bad it will be.

By the nature of community alone, a topic or blog post will surface that bitterly divides people on which side is in the right. Some people will only add more fuel to the fire, while others will try futilely to put out the flames.

If you want to remain a part of the social media community, you have to learn to weather the good times and the bad. Here are a few tips for handling controversy gracefully.

1) Don’t panic.

Douglas Adams wasn’t lying with that piece of advice. The upside of controversy is that it will get a lot of people talking, and they’ll all be talking about you. You’ll find the mantra “There’s no such thing as bad press” to be surprisingly true in this case.

People who would have otherwise never heard of you or your site will be showing up to see what the big deal is, which means you’ve just exponentially expanded your audience.

However, that’s not to say there aren’t downsides. If you don’t handle a controversy with professionalism and grace, online social media will eat you alive. While you’ll gain some respect if you handle yourself well, if you botch it too badly, the bad word will spread faster than wildfire in a forest that hasn’t seen rain in 20 years.

2) Don’t respond immediately.

It’s not a difficult scenario to imagine: you’ve made a blog post about something, and you knew when you made it that some people wouldn’t agree with what you have to say. What you didn’t expect was how viciously they would disagree. Not only are they attacking your argument, but they’re attacking you and your business.

You think what they’re saying is wrong, or you know how to disprove it, so you should jump on immediately and do so, right?

Well, probably not. The technology on the Internet makes it extremely easy to post responses in the heat of the moment, which can result in you saying something that you’ll regret later.

As much as it may pain you to do so, wait until you’ve cooled off and had a chance to get the feel of the other side’s point before you make an attempt to post. This lets you see what the other people are saying and consider it logically, not emotionally.

3) Attack the argument, not the person.

Argumentum ad hominem means “argument against the man,” and unfortunately it shows up in these situations more than it should. If somebody makes a comment you disagree with and you say something like, “Well, if you believe that, then you’re an idiot,” you’re attacking them personally, not what they’re saying.

That’s the quickest way to not only anger people, but drive the controversial discussion off-topic. Plus, you’ll come across as petty and inept at defending your own statements.

If you disagree with something somebody said, keep your comments restricted to just attacking what they said. For example: “You said X. I disagree with X because of Y and Z.” By not attacking them, you’ll gain a little more respect in how you’re handling the controversy.

4) Keep your responses simple and professional.

That’s not to say keep them so devoid of emotion that they read like corporate blather. People really hate corporate blather, and they’ll hate it even more if they’re looking for a straight answer in a controversy. But neither should you drive a point into the ground. Find the arguments to which you want to respond, quote exactly what that person said, and nicely point out what is right and what is incorrect.

When you’re pointing out something that’s incorrect, make sure that you’re only fixing facts, not opinions. For example, say somebody paraphrased something you put in your blog post, and paraphrased it wrongly. Quote their paraphrase and say why they’ve misunderstood you. Back it up with the exact quote from your original post, along with clarification of what you meant. Consider an apology if the original wording was unclear.

Remember: everything you say online, be it in a blog post or forum comment, will reflect on you and your business. Keeping your responses professional and to-the-point will let people know that even in the most controversial storm, you know better than to resort to emotional and petty attacks.

If you want to read a good article on dealing with social media controversy, check out this article at Search Engine Guide: Recovering from a Social Media Disaster.

Controversy is just part of the nature of the social media community. And when a controversial storm hits, it can feel like an unstoppable force is swarming over you, and you’re just fighting to keep your head above water.

But as long as you don’t panic and keep your responses professional without trying to spin people, you’ll still be able to hold your head high once the storm subsides. And you may find yourself with a new league of loyal customers and readers once all is said and done.

Jessica Cox and Michelle Pierce are graduates of the University of Oklahoma’s College of Journalism with a background in Internet marketing and writing for the Web. They currently provide PR services at Xeal Precision Marketing. Sign up to get crucial Internet marketing tips at Xeal’s free Thursday webinar.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jessica_F._Cox