7. Make Sure Your Web Site Copy is Clear and Persuasive Perhaps the most overlooked element of web site development these days is copy - that is, the words been all those pretty pictures, flash animations, and whizzy functions. A great deal of web site copy on the internet today is utter rubbish, and many online shops feature hardly any at all! You get a welcome message, product titles, pictures, maybe a few specifications, and great big "Buy Now" buttons. Once again, it seems that people jump onto the Internet bandwagon and forget that there's a real human being on the other side of the computer screen and he/she wants information and wants to be treated with some respect. Basic business rules still apply, and with some modification, your approach to your web site should be similar in many respects to traditional mail order or direct/distance selling. And the golden rule of mail order and direct selling? The more you tell, the more you sell! Professional copywriters throughout the marketing ages have known this all along. The theory has been tested to the ends of the universe and the result is always the same. Long copy outsells short copy every time. But there are some rules and some adaptation of this basic fact when thinking about the web:

General rules:

• Your copy should be clear and concise in its construction
• Every sentence needs to be short and snappy, with short words
• Where possible, one sentence per paragraph (if it's sales copy, editorial is different)
• Use headlines, sub heads and bullet points
• Every single statement should contain a fact, benefit or persuasive argument. Don't waste a word!
• Spend MOST of your time creating headlines, they are the single most important factor in dir
  Who Hires More Illegal Aliens; Car Washes VS Construction?
  Have you considered which industries in United States of America hire the most illegal aliens? Some say it is the construction industry and they would be right, as they do hire a tremendous number of illegal immigrants and illegal aliens.Others might say that the landscaping industry hires the most illegal aliens and they too would be right as you would be hard pressed to find a crew of landscapers in any major U.S. city, which did not have some illegal aliens or illegal immigrants on it. But have ever considered car washes and how many illegal aliens and illegal immigrants they hire that come from Mexico and will work for lower wages?Well let me tell you the car was association has considered this and they are worried that some of their members and many of the 49,000 car washes and United States of America will become targets of public outrage and it will very severely hurt the industry, as far as I'm concerned that is their problem may be the choice to hire the illegal aliens the first place. They decided they wanted to make more profits, skip payroll taxes and exploit Mexican illegal immigrants by hiring them in pain them very low wages.If all the sounds rotten in Denmark to you you're correct and a few are outraged and want to do something about it I suggest you call your local border patrol office and get them to raid your local carwash to send a message to these industries that this is unacceptable and you will not tolerate illegal it immigrants in our country any longer. If you are a true American you will do this and if you are not you won't. Consider this and 2006.
  What makes one e-commerce web site a raging success, while another similar one barely gets a visitor much less sells anything? Ask any small business owner and you're likely to get a range of answers from "Cool technology" to "A really sexy web site", and more likely than not: "Being Number One on the Search Engines".

  Important some of these things may be, they're not actually the core elements for success! And it's for this reason that most people go wrong when they go online. In fact, the main factors, or decisions, that make a web site successful or not, take place long before a line of code is written, or a graphic designed or anyone puts finger to keyboard to write any copy. We list below, in order of importance, the ten things you should concentrate on if you want your e-commerce web site to be a rip-roaring success:

  1. Do Your Research The first thing that you must remember (and this is the bit that everyone seemed to forget in Internet "Gold Rush" of 1999) is that the same business principles apply to your internet business as any other. You must: a) Have a product/service with a solid perceived need; b) you must be able to sell it at a price that is profitable and provides good value to the purchaser and; c) you must be able to reach a sufficient number of potential purchasers (and convince them to buy) to generate enough revenue to make your business viable. And to find out that, you need to research your market. Thoroughly.

  The first and most obvious thing you need to find out is the "need" factor. Note I said "perceived" need, perhaps better described as a "want". We buy lots of things we don't need, because mainly we think we need them. So, will people benefit from your product or service? Do you genuinely believe you can convince people they need it? To find that out, you have to ask them! But we're not there yet: it's one thing having a product that people do actually need, but if there are already lots of people supplying it, then you might have a problem with part b. You are only going to be able to sell your product/service at a profit AND and a price people think represents good value if 1) Not many other people provide it or 2) yours is better (and/or cheaper - but for reasons explained later, this is not usually a good route to take). Again, you must do your research and find out before you do anything else. And finally, can you reach this market cost-efficiently and find enough people to buy from you? This is the one great strength of the Internet and e-commerce: it's much cheaper, it's faster and has a much wider reach that any other communications channel so far invented! But it still costs time and money, and you have to be realistic, so you need to research your market and work out if you have the time and money to reach it.

  2. Work on your Strategy OK, so now you know, hopefully, that there is a need for your product or service, that not many people offer it at the price/profit/value level that you can, and you know that thousands of people who use the internet a lot and who you know from your research can and do buy online, will want to buy it from you. So now you work on your strategy. This is key. You cannot simply say "Hey, we've got a great product and a big market, let's slap up a web site and we'll get rich!" You need to sit down and carefully work on how you're going to do all of this. You need to know what your goals are. If your goal is to "sell lots" you'll sell nothing! I Guarantee it. You need to work out where your want to be in 1, 3 and 5 years time at a minimum and then work back from there. If you start with that and work back, then a lot of the pieces will fall into place. Your strategy should apply to all your business, and your web site or Internet bits will only be a part of it (a big part, perhaps...). For example, if you have a product with a big ticket price, and you only sell 5 a year, then you don't want to start planning in a shopping basket system and credit card payments! Selling on that scale will need lots of relationship building and face-to-face interaction, so you need to work out how your Internet/e-commerce strategy will enhance and benefit that. A good web site to that will impress people who pay ?50,000 for your product? A newsletter system to help keep in touch during the long sales cycle? It's a completely different approach to selling ?20 watches....

  3. Concentrate on Existing Customers If your business is already up-and-running and you're simply adding an Internet presence or improving on it, then your existing customers should be treated like Gold. They can actually help you bring your business online. Test the waters with them, ask them what they think at each stage, build the system around them and their needs and you'll end up with a template that will help you expand online in the sure knowledge that it will attract and help keep new customers. And, of course, if you do it right, you can start making extra money online right away, without a single new customer, by using your web presence to save money and improve relationships with your existing customers so they buy more from you.

  4. Make Service a Priority While the Internet can help you cut costs and make your business run more slickly, you've got to remember that it can also be very impersonal. One of the most valuable things I've ever learnt is that people buy from people they like. And they don't like to be let down. The media is littered with stories of people who managed to click and pay for something online only to wait weeks for it never to turn up. Emails don't get replied to, phones don't get answered (if the web site even publishes the number!), and they get constantly fobbed off. Yet the Internet is an ideal tool for delivering better customer communication! But many businesses use a flash web site to hide behind... That's another quirk of the Internet - it's possible to gain customers more quickly than traditional methods, but you can lose them like lightening if you provide a poor service. News travels fast on the internet - even faster if it's bad news...

  5. Work out your Communication and and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) policies and procedures As I mentioned before, the Internet provides excellent tools and opportunities to build relationships with customers and clients. By this stage of your planning, you're chomping at the bit to "get something up and start selling" but winning a customer is a bit like wooing a woman (please forgive the sexist nature of this analogy!). You don't run up to a woman you like a scream in her face "I want to have babies with you, NOW!" So why do people do this online? You need to build into your plan ways and means of starting and growing relationships with your customers and clients. You need work out ways of opening a dialogue, finding out about them, and helping them find out about you. Did you know that research shows that people generally visit a web site seven times before they feel confortable enough to buy anything? So what are you going to do that makes your web site interesting enough for people to visit seven times just to look at it? And when they do, what then? Is it like a one night stand? Or do you send them emails asking if they are happy with the product/service? Can you send them a regular newsletter that they find interesting? And do you have a system in place to manage all of this - for example, can you track how many times a customer has been contacted, by what method, and what was said? You can and should build up a valuable database of detailed customer information, their buying habits, what they like/don't like and a system for contacting them on a regular basis.

  6. Offline/ Online Marketing, Search Engines & Pay Per Click Ah, search engines. The magic bullet of marketing... or so the Search Engine promotions "experts" would have you think. The holy grail for many is "being number one on the search engines", and great though that is, your success or failure actually hangs on what happens when all that traffic gets to your web site - it's got nothing at all to do with being No1. In fact you can actually bankrupt your business by being No1. A sudden flood of traffic can burst your bandwidth budget, have you running to Dell or HP or whoever for more servers, bring your web site to it's knees, and, if all those visitors turn up and don't find what they're looking for, you make virtual enemies of thousands - even millions - of potential customers. Once again, before you even think about Search Engines, you must go back to your research and your strategy and start again from there. Ask yourself: What is my ideal customer? What search engines do they use? What key words do they use to find services/products like mine? What's my USP? What magazines do they read? Are there cheaper/better ways of reaching them than via search engines? There are, of course, certain low-cost/no-cost golden rules that everyone should follow. Your web address and email address should be printed on all your stationery. If you send out catalogues, promote your web site in it. Add a promotional message (including a link to your web site) at the bottom of all your emails (this is sometimes called a signature file or sig file). The key is to think about your promotion from your customer's perspective. If you do that, then, at least as far as Search Engines are concerned, you can focus on relevance. Make sure that people who find your site via search engines are actually looking for what you have to offer and are ready to buy. You are relevant to them and they are relevant to you. If my sales target in my strategy is to sell 100 units a week, then all I really need is 100 buying customers from Search Engines. If I use all the tricks in the book and haul a million visitors in who aren't even vaguely interested in my widgets, I'm wasting their time and my money. To sum up, you should:

  • Aim for a number one Search Engine listing ONLY for well-researched, highly targeted key words and phrases
  • Use Pay Per Click facilities such as Overture to get quick results and control your budgets
  • Make sure you don't waste offline opportunities. Publish your web address/email on all company literature and include it in all your adverts.
  • Use Sig files on ALL emails
  • Sign up affiliates and pay them a commission
  • Use a Viral Marketing email campaign
  • Publish email newsletters and information to build an email list
  • Research your market carefully to find out what methods people use to find and buy your product/service and concentrate all your efforts on those channels.

  7. Make Sure Your Web Site Copy is Clear and Persuasive Perhaps the most overlooked element of web site development these days is copy - that is, the words been all those pretty pictures, flash animations, and whizzy functions. A great deal of web site copy on the internet today is utter rubbish, and many online shops feature hardly any at all! You get a welcome message, product titles, pictures, maybe a few specifications, and great big "Buy Now" buttons. Once again, it seems that people jump onto the Internet bandwagon and forget that there's a real human being on the other side of the computer screen and he/she wants information and wants to be treated with some respect. Basic business rules still apply, and with some modification, your approach to your web site should be similar in many respects to traditional mail order or direct/distance selling. And the golden rule of mail order and direct selling? The more you tell, the more you sell! Professional copywriters throughout the marketing ages have known this all along. The theory has been tested to the ends of the universe and the result is always the same. Long copy outsells short copy every time. But there are some rules and some adaptation of this basic fact when thinking about the web:

  General rules:

  • Your copy should be clear and concise in its construction
  • Every sentence needs to be short and snappy, with short words
  • Where possible, one sentence per paragraph (if it's sales copy, editorial is different)
  • Use headlines, sub heads and bullet points
  • Every single statement should contain a fact, benefit or persuasive argument. Don't waste a word!
  • Spend MOST of your time creating headlines, they are the single most important factor in dire
    Freelance Writing Jobs
    Freelance writing offers the opportunity to make money from home and gives a writer a chance to work on an almost endless variety of projects. A writer can either focus on an area of expertise, or write a greater variety of general knowledge articles. With the internet, there are many more freelance opportunities today than ever before, and the field is expanding daily.Where to find Freelance Writing Jobs:While magazines and newspapers are the more traditional route for freelance writers, the internet has provided a whole new arena for writers. There are internet magazines (sometimes called e-zines) and blogs (short for weblogs) on almost any topic available. While many do not pay writers, some are beginning to. Content sites are another source of writing jobs.There are also freelance websites specifically designed to help bring together clients and writers. The writers can bid on jobs, and then the client will chose the writer who best suits their needs, both in talent and price. Some of the jobs will be creating new content, while others want people to rewrite existing articles, to make them fresh. Most of these bidding sites do charge fees of some sort. Some of the charge the client to post the job, while others charge the writers either to join, or a percentage of the total payment agreed upon for the job. The benefit of going through one of the sites where you bid on jobs, is that the money is held in escrow, so that writer is guaranteed payment upon successful completion of the project. The writer has to balance the convenience of someone helping find them work versus the expense of promoting themselves to potential clients.Skills you need:In addition to basic typing skills, you should have a creative streak that allows you to present information in a new, informative and entertaining way. You should have good grammar and spelling skills, as most of the freelance jobs require the product to be delivered with minimal errors. While experience is good, it is fairly easy to begin a freelance writing career by building gradually, possibly even writing a few articles for free to build a body of work to show potential clients as writing samples.Tools you need:As with most jobs that require typing, a reliable computer and internet connection is a must. You should have a word processing program that allows you to save to a variety of formats, as clients have different needs.How much money can you make?
    the Internet and e-commerce: it's much cheaper, it's faster and has a much wider reach that any other communications channel so far invented! But it still costs time and money, and you have to be realistic, so you need to research your market and work out if you have the time and money to reach it.

    2. Work on your Strategy OK, so now you know, hopefully, that there is a need for your product or service, that not many people offer it at the price/profit/value level that you can, and you know that thousands of people who use the internet a lot and who you know from your research can and do buy online, will want to buy it from you. So now you work on your strategy. This is key. You cannot simply say "Hey, we've got a great product and a big market, let's slap up a web site and we'll get rich!" You need to sit down and carefully work on how you're going to do all of this. You need to know what your goals are. If your goal is to "sell lots" you'll sell nothing! I Guarantee it. You need to work out where your want to be in 1, 3 and 5 years time at a minimum and then work back from there. If you start with that and work back, then a lot of the pieces will fall into place. Your strategy should apply to all your business, and your web site or Internet bits will only be a part of it (a big part, perhaps...). For example, if you have a product with a big ticket price, and you only sell 5 a year, then you don't want to start planning in a shopping basket system and credit card payments! Selling on that scale will need lots of relationship building and face-to-face interaction, so you need to work out how your Internet/e-commerce strategy will enhance and benefit that. A good web site to that will impress people who pay ?50,000 for your product? A newsletter system to help keep in touch during the long sales cycle? It's a completely different approach to selling ?20 watches....

    3. Concentrate on Existing Customers If your business is already up-and-running and you're simply adding an Internet presence or improving on it, then your existing customers should be treated like Gold. They can actually help you bring your business online. Test the waters with them, ask them what they think at each stage, build the system around them and their needs and you'll end up with a template that will help you expand online in the sure knowledge that it will attract and help keep new customers. And, of course, if you do it right, you can start making extra money online right away, without a single new customer, by using your web presence to save money and improve relationships with your existing customers so they buy more from you.

    4. Make Service a Priority While the Internet can help you cut costs and make your business run more slickly, you've got to remember that it can also be very impersonal. One of the most valuable things I've ever learnt is that people buy from people they like. And they don't like to be let down. The media is littered with stories of people who managed to click and pay for something online only to wait weeks for it never to turn up. Emails don't get replied to, phones don't get answered (if the web site even publishes the number!), and they get constantly fobbed off. Yet the Internet is an ideal tool for delivering better customer communication! But many businesses use a flash web site to hide behind... That's another quirk of the Internet - it's possible to gain customers more quickly than traditional methods, but you can lose them like lightening if you provide a poor service. News travels fast on the internet - even faster if it's bad news...

    5. Work out your Communication and and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) policies and procedures As I mentioned before, the Internet provides excellent tools and opportunities to build relationships with customers and clients. By this stage of your planning, you're chomping at the bit to "get something up and start selling" but winning a customer is a bit like wooing a woman (please forgive the sexist nature of this analogy!). You don't run up to a woman you like a scream in her face "I want to have babies with you, NOW!" So why do people do this online? You need to build into your plan ways and means of starting and growing relationships with your customers and clients. You need work out ways of opening a dialogue, finding out about them, and helping them find out about you. Did you know that research shows that people generally visit a web site seven times before they feel confortable enough to buy anything? So what are you going to do that makes your web site interesting enough for people to visit seven times just to look at it? And when they do, what then? Is it like a one night stand? Or do you send them emails asking if they are happy with the product/service? Can you send them a regular newsletter that they find interesting? And do you have a system in place to manage all of this - for example, can you track how many times a customer has been contacted, by what method, and what was said? You can and should build up a valuable database of detailed customer information, their buying habits, what they like/don't like and a system for contacting them on a regular basis.

    6. Offline/ Online Marketing, Search Engines & Pay Per Click Ah, search engines. The magic bullet of marketing... or so the Search Engine promotions "experts" would have you think. The holy grail for many is "being number one on the search engines", and great though that is, your success or failure actually hangs on what happens when all that traffic gets to your web site - it's got nothing at all to do with being No1. In fact you can actually bankrupt your business by being No1. A sudden flood of traffic can burst your bandwidth budget, have you running to Dell or HP or whoever for more servers, bring your web site to it's knees, and, if all those visitors turn up and don't find what they're looking for, you make virtual enemies of thousands - even millions - of potential customers. Once again, before you even think about Search Engines, you must go back to your research and your strategy and start again from there. Ask yourself: What is my ideal customer? What search engines do they use? What key words do they use to find services/products like mine? What's my USP? What magazines do they read? Are there cheaper/better ways of reaching them than via search engines? There are, of course, certain low-cost/no-cost golden rules that everyone should follow. Your web address and email address should be printed on all your stationery. If you send out catalogues, promote your web site in it. Add a promotional message (including a link to your web site) at the bottom of all your emails (this is sometimes called a signature file or sig file). The key is to think about your promotion from your customer's perspective. If you do that, then, at least as far as Search Engines are concerned, you can focus on relevance. Make sure that people who find your site via search engines are actually looking for what you have to offer and are ready to buy. You are relevant to them and they are relevant to you. If my sales target in my strategy is to sell 100 units a week, then all I really need is 100 buying customers from Search Engines. If I use all the tricks in the book and haul a million visitors in who aren't even vaguely interested in my widgets, I'm wasting their time and my money. To sum up, you should:

    • Aim for a number one Search Engine listing ONLY for well-researched, highly targeted key words and phrases
    • Use Pay Per Click facilities such as Overture to get quick results and control your budgets
    • Make sure you don't waste offline opportunities. Publish your web address/email on all company literature and include it in all your adverts.
    • Use Sig files on ALL emails
    • Sign up affiliates and pay them a commission
    • Use a Viral Marketing email campaign
    • Publish email newsletters and information to build an email list
    • Research your market carefully to find out what methods people use to find and buy your product/service and concentrate all your efforts on those channels.

    7. Make Sure Your Web Site Copy is Clear and Persuasive Perhaps the most overlooked element of web site development these days is copy - that is, the words been all those pretty pictures, flash animations, and whizzy functions. A great deal of web site copy on the internet today is utter rubbish, and many online shops feature hardly any at all! You get a welcome message, product titles, pictures, maybe a few specifications, and great big "Buy Now" buttons. Once again, it seems that people jump onto the Internet bandwagon and forget that there's a real human being on the other side of the computer screen and he/she wants information and wants to be treated with some respect. Basic business rules still apply, and with some modification, your approach to your web site should be similar in many respects to traditional mail order or direct/distance selling. And the golden rule of mail order and direct selling? The more you tell, the more you sell! Professional copywriters throughout the marketing ages have known this all along. The theory has been tested to the ends of the universe and the result is always the same. Long copy outsells short copy every time. But there are some rules and some adaptation of this basic fact when thinking about the web:

    General rules:

    • Your copy should be clear and concise in its construction
    • Every sentence needs to be short and snappy, with short words
    • Where possible, one sentence per paragraph (if it's sales copy, editorial is different)
    • Use headlines, sub heads and bullet points
    • Every single statement should contain a fact, benefit or persuasive argument. Don't waste a word!
    • Spend MOST of your time creating headlines, they are the single most important factor in dir
      How Much Is A Solid Appointment With A Decision Maker Worth?
      Jim, my now-retired State Farm Insurance agent, was the luckiest guy in the world.I don’t say this because he had a great wife. Actually, I never met her.But I did meet his office manager, Shirley, and she is what made Jim the luckiest guy in the world.She was rock-solid, dependable, and she was a very, very effective communicator. She was especially good over the phone.Jim gave her complete control of the agency’s day-to-day operations, while he labored away on every golf course he could find.One of Shirley’s best abilities was in the area of appointment setting. She had no problem getting decision makers on the line, and her earnest and honest tones simply made prospects roll over.I never asked Jim how much he paid Shirley, but she was worth her weight in platinum.I can estimate that the average client Jim put on the books could be expected to deliver about $10,000 to him in commissions, over time. He closed about a third of the appointments she set for him, so my guess is that if each appointment cost him about $30 to set, he was getting back about 100 times his investment.Not bad, right?The other evening at a dinner at the UCLA faculty center, I was speaking to two colleagues, who double as consultants, about the value of a qualified appointment with a decision maker.“How much would you willingly pay for one?” I asked.The more junior of the two blurted out, “$100.”Shaking his head in disapproval, the second said, “No, no, I’d pay $500—that’s what it’s worth.”All I know is the average appointment setter in Los Angeles is paid twelve to fifteen dollars per hour. Sometimes, they receive bonuses, based on appointments set, or deals that are closed.That’s far too little money, if they’re good.Wouldn’t you agree?
      hout a single new customer, by using your web presence to save money and improve relationships with your existing customers so they buy more from you.

      4. Make Service a Priority While the Internet can help you cut costs and make your business run more slickly, you've got to remember that it can also be very impersonal. One of the most valuable things I've ever learnt is that people buy from people they like. And they don't like to be let down. The media is littered with stories of people who managed to click and pay for something online only to wait weeks for it never to turn up. Emails don't get replied to, phones don't get answered (if the web site even publishes the number!), and they get constantly fobbed off. Yet the Internet is an ideal tool for delivering better customer communication! But many businesses use a flash web site to hide behind... That's another quirk of the Internet - it's possible to gain customers more quickly than traditional methods, but you can lose them like lightening if you provide a poor service. News travels fast on the internet - even faster if it's bad news...

      5. Work out your Communication and and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) policies and procedures As I mentioned before, the Internet provides excellent tools and opportunities to build relationships with customers and clients. By this stage of your planning, you're chomping at the bit to "get something up and start selling" but winning a customer is a bit like wooing a woman (please forgive the sexist nature of this analogy!). You don't run up to a woman you like a scream in her face "I want to have babies with you, NOW!" So why do people do this online? You need to build into your plan ways and means of starting and growing relationships with your customers and clients. You need work out ways of opening a dialogue, finding out about them, and helping them find out about you. Did you know that research shows that people generally visit a web site seven times before they feel confortable enough to buy anything? So what are you going to do that makes your web site interesting enough for people to visit seven times just to look at it? And when they do, what then? Is it like a one night stand? Or do you send them emails asking if they are happy with the product/service? Can you send them a regular newsletter that they find interesting? And do you have a system in place to manage all of this - for example, can you track how many times a customer has been contacted, by what method, and what was said? You can and should build up a valuable database of detailed customer information, their buying habits, what they like/don't like and a system for contacting them on a regular basis.

      6. Offline/ Online Marketing, Search Engines & Pay Per Click Ah, search engines. The magic bullet of marketing... or so the Search Engine promotions "experts" would have you think. The holy grail for many is "being number one on the search engines", and great though that is, your success or failure actually hangs on what happens when all that traffic gets to your web site - it's got nothing at all to do with being No1. In fact you can actually bankrupt your business by being No1. A sudden flood of traffic can burst your bandwidth budget, have you running to Dell or HP or whoever for more servers, bring your web site to it's knees, and, if all those visitors turn up and don't find what they're looking for, you make virtual enemies of thousands - even millions - of potential customers. Once again, before you even think about Search Engines, you must go back to your research and your strategy and start again from there. Ask yourself: What is my ideal customer? What search engines do they use? What key words do they use to find services/products like mine? What's my USP? What magazines do they read? Are there cheaper/better ways of reaching them than via search engines? There are, of course, certain low-cost/no-cost golden rules that everyone should follow. Your web address and email address should be printed on all your stationery. If you send out catalogues, promote your web site in it. Add a promotional message (including a link to your web site) at the bottom of all your emails (this is sometimes called a signature file or sig file). The key is to think about your promotion from your customer's perspective. If you do that, then, at least as far as Search Engines are concerned, you can focus on relevance. Make sure that people who find your site via search engines are actually looking for what you have to offer and are ready to buy. You are relevant to them and they are relevant to you. If my sales target in my strategy is to sell 100 units a week, then all I really need is 100 buying customers from Search Engines. If I use all the tricks in the book and haul a million visitors in who aren't even vaguely interested in my widgets, I'm wasting their time and my money. To sum up, you should:

      • Aim for a number one Search Engine listing ONLY for well-researched, highly targeted key words and phrases
      • Use Pay Per Click facilities such as Overture to get quick results and control your budgets
      • Make sure you don't waste offline opportunities. Publish your web address/email on all company literature and include it in all your adverts.
      • Use Sig files on ALL emails
      • Sign up affiliates and pay them a commission
      • Use a Viral Marketing email campaign
      • Publish email newsletters and information to build an email list
      • Research your market carefully to find out what methods people use to find and buy your product/service and concentrate all your efforts on those channels.

      7. Make Sure Your Web Site Copy is Clear and Persuasive Perhaps the most overlooked element of web site development these days is copy - that is, the words been all those pretty pictures, flash animations, and whizzy functions. A great deal of web site copy on the internet today is utter rubbish, and many online shops feature hardly any at all! You get a welcome message, product titles, pictures, maybe a few specifications, and great big "Buy Now" buttons. Once again, it seems that people jump onto the Internet bandwagon and forget that there's a real human being on the other side of the computer screen and he/she wants information and wants to be treated with some respect. Basic business rules still apply, and with some modification, your approach to your web site should be similar in many respects to traditional mail order or direct/distance selling. And the golden rule of mail order and direct selling? The more you tell, the more you sell! Professional copywriters throughout the marketing ages have known this all along. The theory has been tested to the ends of the universe and the result is always the same. Long copy outsells short copy every time. But there are some rules and some adaptation of this basic fact when thinking about the web:

      General rules:

      • Your copy should be clear and concise in its construction
      • Every sentence needs to be short and snappy, with short words
      • Where possible, one sentence per paragraph (if it's sales copy, editorial is different)
      • Use headlines, sub heads and bullet points
      • Every single statement should contain a fact, benefit or persuasive argument. Don't waste a word!
      • Spend MOST of your time creating headlines, they are the single most important factor in dir
        You're The New Boss - What Now?
        You're the boss. What do you do now?Tim is nervous. He's about to start a new job as the boss of people he doesn't know. He's not coming as a savior. The team is performing up to standard, even though it could do better.Tim has the same question most new bosses have. What should I do?Start by learning about your people and the situation. This team isn't in trouble. You don't have to take drastic action, so take the time to get to know them and to let them get to know you. Start by getting everyone together.Getting to Know MeYou want to meet with the team and with every member individually. Start with the team meeting so everyone hears the same basic information at the same time.The people on your team want to know about you. They want to know who you are and where you came from and why you wound up as their boss. Most of all they want to know what your coming means for them.Tell them how you got there. If you tell it as a short story (less than 5 minutes) you'll find it easier for you and comfortable for them.Tell them what you're going to do next. Tell them that you'll be talking to each one of them. They need to know that you'll be gathering information and impressions before you make any changes.Let them know your expectations.Sharpe's SpeechBernard Cornwell is a great historical novelist. One of his series is about Richard Sharpe who starts out as a private in the British Army and rises from the ranks, finally fighting with Wellington at Waterloo. It's a great read if you like military history and historical novels.The novel Sharpe's Rifles is set just after Sharpe has been promoted from the ranks to Lieutenant. He's trying to learn what it's like to lead as an officer. He gets a lesson from a Spanish officer and nobleman, Blas Vivar.Vivar tells Sharpe that he should tell his soldiers what he expects from them. The message should be short and clear. Here are Vivar's three rules"They must not steal unless they will die for not stealing, they must look after their horses before themselves, and they must fight like heroes."Richard Sharpe modified Vivar's rules to suit his own situation, but he kept the number to three and he kept them simple. You need something similar to share. People want to know what's expected of them. On the first day, Tim might say something like this.I expect you to do your work as well as you can.I
        y what method, and what was said? You can and should build up a valuable database of detailed customer information, their buying habits, what they like/don't like and a system for contacting them on a regular basis.

        6. Offline/ Online Marketing, Search Engines & Pay Per Click Ah, search engines. The magic bullet of marketing... or so the Search Engine promotions "experts" would have you think. The holy grail for many is "being number one on the search engines", and great though that is, your success or failure actually hangs on what happens when all that traffic gets to your web site - it's got nothing at all to do with being No1. In fact you can actually bankrupt your business by being No1. A sudden flood of traffic can burst your bandwidth budget, have you running to Dell or HP or whoever for more servers, bring your web site to it's knees, and, if all those visitors turn up and don't find what they're looking for, you make virtual enemies of thousands - even millions - of potential customers. Once again, before you even think about Search Engines, you must go back to your research and your strategy and start again from there. Ask yourself: What is my ideal customer? What search engines do they use? What key words do they use to find services/products like mine? What's my USP? What magazines do they read? Are there cheaper/better ways of reaching them than via search engines? There are, of course, certain low-cost/no-cost golden rules that everyone should follow. Your web address and email address should be printed on all your stationery. If you send out catalogues, promote your web site in it. Add a promotional message (including a link to your web site) at the bottom of all your emails (this is sometimes called a signature file or sig file). The key is to think about your promotion from your customer's perspective. If you do that, then, at least as far as Search Engines are concerned, you can focus on relevance. Make sure that people who find your site via search engines are actually looking for what you have to offer and are ready to buy. You are relevant to them and they are relevant to you. If my sales target in my strategy is to sell 100 units a week, then all I really need is 100 buying customers from Search Engines. If I use all the tricks in the book and haul a million visitors in who aren't even vaguely interested in my widgets, I'm wasting their time and my money. To sum up, you should:

        • Aim for a number one Search Engine listing ONLY for well-researched, highly targeted key words and phrases
        • Use Pay Per Click facilities such as Overture to get quick results and control your budgets
        • Make sure you don't waste offline opportunities. Publish your web address/email on all company literature and include it in all your adverts.
        • Use Sig files on ALL emails
        • Sign up affiliates and pay them a commission
        • Use a Viral Marketing email campaign
        • Publish email newsletters and information to build an email list
        • Research your market carefully to find out what methods people use to find and buy your product/service and concentrate all your efforts on those channels.

        7. Make Sure Your Web Site Copy is Clear and Persuasive Perhaps the most overlooked element of web site development these days is copy - that is, the words been all those pretty pictures, flash animations, and whizzy functions. A great deal of web site copy on the internet today is utter rubbish, and many online shops feature hardly any at all! You get a welcome message, product titles, pictures, maybe a few specifications, and great big "Buy Now" buttons. Once again, it seems that people jump onto the Internet bandwagon and forget that there's a real human being on the other side of the computer screen and he/she wants information and wants to be treated with some respect. Basic business rules still apply, and with some modification, your approach to your web site should be similar in many respects to traditional mail order or direct/distance selling. And the golden rule of mail order and direct selling? The more you tell, the more you sell! Professional copywriters throughout the marketing ages have known this all along. The theory has been tested to the ends of the universe and the result is always the same. Long copy outsells short copy every time. But there are some rules and some adaptation of this basic fact when thinking about the web:

        General rules:

        • Your copy should be clear and concise in its construction
        • Every sentence needs to be short and snappy, with short words
        • Where possible, one sentence per paragraph (if it's sales copy, editorial is different)
        • Use headlines, sub heads and bullet points
        • Every single statement should contain a fact, benefit or persuasive argument. Don't waste a word!
        • Spend MOST of your time creating headlines, they are the single most important factor in dir
          Productivity: So Many Small Things
          We rarely see stories or articles about productivity in the newspaper or on TV. When we do, it’s usually just another story on the economy that defies understanding.Which is too bad. Our prosperous standard of living arrived, in large part, because of the ability of companies and organizations everywhere, and for the past several hundred years, to increase productivity.Productivity simply refers to how much labor or money it takes to create a product or service. If a carpenter can build one house in one month, then the carpenter’s productivity is one house per month. If the carpenter gets new tools or new ideas and does the job more quickly, his productivity goes up.Every time productivity goes up, the carpenter’s standard of living goes up, too (generally speaking). Here’s another example of how productivity works:Suppose a British company discovers how to make steel products just a tiny, tiny bit harder. Then a company in the U.S.A. uses this process to make ball bearings that last an average of 423 days rather than 420 days, when they're used in truck axles.A trucking company that hauls washing machines from Mexico City to Montreal, Canada buys trucks with these better bearings. That means it can haul a load for a few dollars less. In turn, this means the cost of each washer goes down by a few cents.But, what's a few cents less when you're paying hundreds of dollars for a new washer? What's more, you'd probably observe that you only need a new washing machine once every fifteen or twenty years.That’s true, but this productivity improvement is just one of the many millions of small improvements we’ve seen since the Industrial Revolution (and some improvements even predate that period).We also need to remember a couple of other points. First, productivity improvements have a cumulative effect, which is to say they build on each other to multiply the gains. Second, productivity has increased at an unprecedented rate for the past half century.The most obvious example sits on your desk: a personal computer. Not too many years ago, we prepared letters on a typewriter, one letter at a time. Now, using a computer and word processor, we can select a stock letter from a collection that covers most common issues, add a name and address using mail merge, send the document to the printer, and in seconds a completed letter lands on our desk.The personal computer, though, is simply the tip of an icebe
          ll-researched, highly targeted key words and phrases
        • Use Pay Per Click facilities such as Overture to get quick results and control your budgets
        • Make sure you don't waste offline opportunities. Publish your web address/email on all company literature and include it in all your adverts.
        • Use Sig files on ALL emails
        • Sign up affiliates and pay them a commission
        • Use a Viral Marketing email campaign
        • Publish email newsletters and information to build an email list
        • Research your market carefully to find out what methods people use to find and buy your product/service and concentrate all your efforts on those channels.

        7. Make Sure Your Web Site Copy is Clear and Persuasive Perhaps the most overlooked element of web site development these days is copy - that is, the words been all those pretty pictures, flash animations, and whizzy functions. A great deal of web site copy on the internet today is utter rubbish, and many online shops feature hardly any at all! You get a welcome message, product titles, pictures, maybe a few specifications, and great big "Buy Now" buttons. Once again, it seems that people jump onto the Internet bandwagon and forget that there's a real human being on the other side of the computer screen and he/she wants information and wants to be treated with some respect. Basic business rules still apply, and with some modification, your approach to your web site should be similar in many respects to traditional mail order or direct/distance selling. And the golden rule of mail order and direct selling? The more you tell, the more you sell! Professional copywriters throughout the marketing ages have known this all along. The theory has been tested to the ends of the universe and the result is always the same. Long copy outsells short copy every time. But there are some rules and some adaptation of this basic fact when thinking about the web:

        General rules:

        • Your copy should be clear and concise in its construction
        • Every sentence needs to be short and snappy, with short words
        • Where possible, one sentence per paragraph (if it's sales copy, editorial is different)
        • Use headlines, sub heads and bullet points
        • Every single statement should contain a fact, benefit or persuasive argument. Don't waste a word!
        • Spend MOST of your time creating headlines, they are the single most important factor in direct mail sales success and the same goes for the web.

        Special Web Rules:

        • Break up copy that's more than about 500-700 words long into seperate pages
        • Always try to close the prospect at the end of each page as well as having a "more" link to the next page
        • Try to include a close or buy link above the "waterline" (ie before they have to scroll to read the next paragraph or sentence)
        • Try to inject as much "personality" into your copy as possible. A web page can be a particularly "cold" place - so add as much human warmth as possible. Remember, people buy from people they like.

        8. Make Sure your Navigation is Easy, and that your Web Site Design and Backend Technology are all focused on a Great Customer Experience Only now should you be thinking about the build of your web site and its technology. It's at this point, you can finally consider your web site's design and how it will look. Remember, web design (any design) is subjective. No matter how much time or money you spend on it, or how proud you are of it, a certain proportion of your visitors will still think it's crap. But guess what? They don't care, and if you get everything right it has almost no bearing at all on sales. But there are three important elements to web site design:

        1. Ease of navigation comes FIRST. Make sure your fancy page design doesn't confuse and frustrate your customers. Keep it simple. And bearing in mind that no matter how good the site looks, lots of people will hate it, so make sure the design is not overbearing. Make sure that, whether your customer likes your site or not , it's not an issue!

        2. Get it done professionally. Good, professional design inspires confidence in your customers, and on the web that's a precious commodity. They may not always like it, but they'll appreciate that it's been done professionally, and that therefore infers that your are a professional company.

        3. Make sure that the site is clean and uncluttered, and avoid too many flashy animations, whizzy bits, and Flash downloads that will slow your site down and annoy your customers, no matter how "cool" you think they are. And whatever you do avoid "front Door", "click here to enter our site" intro-type pages AT ALL COSTS! Especially Flash ones. They are utterly pointless and delay your customer from getting to what they're after, which is information about your company/products/services.

        And finally, the technology - especially the "Shopping cart". So long as it works properly, doesn't mix up customers' baskets, can cope with demand, and deliver orders reliably, then your choice of "cart" technology will have no bearing whatsoever on sales success. Other than that, your technology and the complexity of your system will be dictated by what it is you actually need to achieve. We've mentioned newsletters, CRM, customer support & service and so on - all your technology choices MUST be made to make these things easy for you to manage and to enhance them. And most of all, your technology must ALWAYS be geared towards a great customer experience.

        9. Get Pricing in Perspective and Think about your Market Positioning and your Value Proposition There's one final myth about the internet (and business in general) that I'd like to explode and it's this: People buy on price. The myth that you must be cheap, even cheapest, on the internet has grown exponentially, especially with the advent of shopping price comparison engines. Combine this with the widely held (and largely correct) belief that using the Internet to sell reduces cost, most people think that price is the only issue, and that you must be cheaper than everyone else to succeed. Nothing could be further from the truth!

        A buying decision is a bit like an iceberg, of which the price element is the highly visible tip. The bulk of the decision reasoning takes place hidden away from view, and many in business ignore it at their peril. When a customer says to you that you're too expensive, they are not actually saying that your price is too high. What they're really saying is that they are not convinced that the benefit your are offering exceeds the investment they have to make. They don't like your Value Proposition. The problem is usually that you haven't convinced them enough about the benefits, not that you're charging too much. On the internet, this brings us back, actually, to point/step seven where I explained the massive importance of your sales copy. If your web site is simply a catalogue of products and prices and a shopping cart, what else has any site visitor to go on when making a judgment other than price? So you've cornered yourself immediately. You have no option other than to go cheaper than your competition to make the sale. If, however, you make a big deal in your web copy about the benefits of buying from you (like prompt delivery, great service, reliability, money-back guarantee, free insurance or whatever you can think of) then suddenly, price is not an issue. People will pay your higher price for peace-of-mind, great service and extra benefits than taking a risk with the cheap, nasty web site that might let them down. And when you feel under pressure to drop your price, say for a special offer, why not try adding a free extra benefit instead? It's much more effective and more profitable! Instead of knocking 10% off, offer 10% more!

        Another issue that you need to look carefully at, especially on the Internet where credibility is hard to achieve, is your Market Positioning. Your prices say a lot more about your company than you think. Although people like to say they love a bargain, every single one will make the assumption that cheap = nasty. If your prices are too low, people will assume there's a catch or you're cutting corners. If you want to position your business as the best in its class, then people will only feel good about you if your prices are at the top end of the range. Too low, and suddenly they lose faith in you because "something doesn't ring true". If your prices are "unbelievable!", then so are you!

        10 Tackle Fraud & Security Internet fraud is a big, big issue and you can't ignore it. Most online customer will admit to being extremely wary of handing out credit card details online, especially to new web sites that they have never come across before. So, you need to have security and fraud policies in place and (here we go again about copy!) make sure you tell your customers that you have these and you will take great care of their personal information.

        At the very minimum you need:

        • A secure server and SSL certificate for your order pages
        • A privacy policy that clearly informs your customers that you pass their details onto nobody and that you keep them safe.
        One of the best solutions is to use a Payment Service Provider (PSP) to process your credit cards for you. The better known and respected ones such as WorldPay are best, because the general public are aware of them and know that they have strong security measures in place. And from your own perspective, you gain some protection against law suits and some relief from the risk and responsibility of looking after customers' valuable credit card information.