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SiteProNews Blogs

• Darren Dunner
• Jerry Bader
• Kalena Jordan
• Matt Jackson
• Mel Strocen
• Titus Hoskins

10 Ideas to Increase Your eBay Response

By Clint Herman in Featured

So now you have a potential eBay buyer checking out your auction. They’re obviously interested in the item you are selling, or they wouldn’t be checking out your auction. Let’s say they’re on the fence about whether to buy or not. So how can you nudge them and get them to bid or buy? Well, check out the tips below.

Increase your picture quality: It’s been said over and over - a picture is worth a thousand words. If your picture is not good quality then it probably won’t matter what you wrote in your description Maybe you missed something important that a good quality picture would convey. If you have bad lighting or a background that drowns out your item then it will be worth little to nothing to those checking out your auction. Make sure people can see what you’re selling and consider using multiple pictures to show different angles and aspects of your item.

Creating A Successful Online Sales Strategy

By Jerry Bader in Featured

You have a website, and perhaps you’re even a professional salesperson, and as such you know that the best way to sell someone something is face-to-face, but have you seen the price of gas lately?

So whether your customers are local, national, or international, the cost of getting to them is just too darn high to make any money. You could call them on the phone or email them, but with voice mail, spam filters, and all manner of gatekeepers, it is literally impossible to get to people, even when they’re waiting for your call.

It’s never been easy to sell, but in today’s jaded, cynical, frustrated business climate, the job is even harder.

Order-takers are next to useless in the field, so don’t expect the tactic to work any better on your website: you know what I mean by order-takers, the guys and gals that service fully developed territories with clients that already use your wares, and who order what they need no matter whether anybody calls on them or not.

No, what you need is a real sales presentation, one aimed at the customers you don’t have, the ones looking for new ideas and products.

Here’s seven website sales tactics to remember:

1. Use The Web’s Video and Audio Capability

Make better use out of your company’s website by adding some face-to-face ingredient through the use of audio and video. Give your audience someone they can relate to, someone who will connect on an emotional and psychological level.

2. Don’t Fall Into The SEO Trap

Unfortunately, many business owners have fallen into the SEO trap of designing their online presentations for search engine spiders not people. Sure it’s great to drive traffic to a website, but if they leave within seconds of arriving without getting your marketing message, what exactly have you achieved?

3. Technology Is Not The Solution To A People Problem

And of course, you’ve got those websites that are nothing more than a shopping cart and ordering system; a technological solution to a human problem that turns whatever is being sold into a commodity, and we all know commodity sales go to the lowest seller.

4. Be Aware of The Paradox of Choice

Some entrepreneurs think by offering everything but the kitchen sink is how to get customers; but they obviously haven’t heard of the Paradox of Choice, a term coined by psychologist Barry Schwartz, whose book by the same name postulates that the more choice you offer, the less likely people will make any decision at all.

5. What Is Required Is A Performer

The Web with its remote, dislocated nature requires very specific performance criteria that few people, even professional salespeople possess. You may be practiced at making presentations, maybe even immensely effective in front of a live audience or in a boardroom, but selling in person is far more forgiving than selling remotely online.

What is required is a performer, someone who looks, sounds, and acts the apart; someone who also knows how to use verbal and nonverbal techniques to deliver a message. Don’t let your ego get in the way of building your online clientele.

6. The Web Is No Place For Overheads Or Flipcharts

Selling on the Web is about building relationships the same as traditional beat-the-pavement sales, but the arsenal of techniques required is far more challenging from a psychological and performance point-of-view. An online presentation that is nothing more than a series of overhead slides, graphs, and royalty-free photos delivered with a tentative delivery will not be taken seriously from an audience that is one click away from accessing your competitors.

7. Treat Your Website Visitors Like An Audience

So what then are the criteria for creating an online presentation that sells? There are four things your online presentation must be: informative, engaging, entertaining, and memorable.

Why you ask? The thing you have to keep in mind when you want to use your website to connect to people and build a business relationship is that you can’t treat them like customers, you have to treat them like an audience, and once you make that leap of faith, you are on your way to a successful online sales presentation strategy.

Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads, http://www.136words.com, and http://www.sonicpersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.

About MRPwebmedia

People ask, “What do you do?” You could say we inform, enlighten, innovate, and create; you could also say we deliver our clients’ marketing messages in memorable ways using video, audio, webmedia campaigns and websites; all created in-house from concept to implementation, from graphic and motion design to Web-design, from script writing to video-production to post-production, from music composition to signature sound design.

What do we do? We motivate action by speaking to your audience’s real needs. We tell your story so your brand, your message, embeds in the minds of your clients. We are corporate storytellers.

Wikipedia’s Secret to Google Domination!

By Michael Small in Featured

Latent Semantic Indexing, or LSI is the hottest trend in Google today and the secret behind Wikipedia’s runaway success as the top raking site for just about anything you can imagine on Google.

In short, LSI considers the words around your main keyword as “hot topics” that add to the credibility of the page. If I target the term “SEO” I have a much better chance of high ranking if I use the right words around it.

Of course, finding these words would be near impossible without a service like Quintura. But with this magic bullet, it’s easier than ever to get on top of Google and stay there! Here’s how…

1. Visit http://www.Quintura.com
2. Enter your keyword and click the search button. A “cloud” shows up on the page with the words you need.
3. Review all the other words in the cloud but focus on those bolded. These are good, but it gets better.
4. Hover your mouse over your original keyword and focus on the updated words that show up. These will get you over the top!

Let’s revisit that “SEO” example I just talked about…

My first cloud shows the bolded words “marketing, services, expert, optimization, and “company.” These are good, but they get better.

When hover the mouse hover “SEO” I get “optimization, search engine, expert, services and company.” Even better!

Want a little more punch with a second mention of your keywords? Try combining a couple into a keyword cluster if they fit… For my example it might be “search engine optimization expert” added somewhere near the end of the page text. That’s three keywords in one cluster. Just don’t go too crazy.

The goal is to use these words on your page if they fit naturally. And if you really want to steal a page right out of Wikipedia’s secret playbook, consider creating a separate page for each of the “hot topic” words and linking to and from them within the text of each page. That’s how Wikipedia takes it one step further and wins the top spots on Google almost every time.

Finally, keep inbound linking in mind. This is huge. Without quality inbound links, you can have the best site in the world and Google will ignore it. Continue to build up your inbound links and be sure to check your ranking at least weekly. If you decide to go with a product to do the linking and rank checking for you, I recommend a product called SEO Elite (http://www.SEOeliteWeb.com). It’s $167 and saves most SEO professionals and do it yourselfers at least forty hours up front and twenty hours per month, per site. It’s also good at locating those hard to find “authority sites” so loved by Google.

Well that’s LSI, short and sweet. And the time to start using it could not be better. With Google constantly working more LSI strategies into their algorithms, the time to get on board is definitely now. Good luck.

Navigating the Social Media Landscape

By Leslie Russell in Featured

You know what Facebook and MySpace are. You’ve heard of people twittering. You read a couple of blogs now and then, and you must admit, you already know that your company’s firewall prevents you from watching YouTube videos at the office. What you don’t know is how these social sites might connect to your marketing plan.

Exploring social media - such as blogs, social networking sites, image hosting sites and social bookmarking sites - is becoming increasingly essential for businesses. Social media marketing (SMM) allows you to build your company’s reputation as an authority in your field while engaging your consumers in an open dialogue. Most importantly, it helps you drive up site traffic, meet conversion goals and bolster search engine marketing results via links and quality content - all while supporting your traditional marketing efforts.