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How to Build Repeat Business with Neglected Clients

By Karl Walinskas in Featured

Have you been having a good year selling? Maybe you’ve had a good couple of years, landing new accounts faster than your office buddies can parrot, “Whazzzzuppppp!” Great. How healthy is your repeat sales pipeline? You know, the sales where existing clients come to you for more of your stuff (goods or services), where the cost of the sale is much lower because rapport and trust were already established, the easy sales. You’re hesitating. Do you mean to tell me that your repeat sales pipeline isn’t full? How embarrassing for you.

Don’t feel so bad. Sometimes we all get so busy prospecting and closing new deals that we neglect current accounts or even lose once solid business because we haven’t paid that customer a visit in a while. This business need not be lost forever. Here are a few quick tips to get your foot back in the door of lost accounts and open the floodgates to your repeat sales pipeline.

Research
Get familiar with what’s going on currently at the company that you haven’t seen in a while. Maybe they’ve doubled in size or just received a substantial contract. Maybe they have cut their workforce. Research their order history with your company or you to see what they have previously purchased and when they purchased it. This information arms you with a degree of intelligence that this prostomer (midway between a prospect and a customer, in this case, a customer who has regressed into a qualified prospect) will appreciate.

Even more important, find out if the people who were your main contacts in this company way back when are still around, and are they in good standing. The last thing you want is to throw Mr. Hammerstein’s name around as your primary advocate, receive a polite but nervous “He no longer is employed with ABC Company,” and find out later that Hammerstein was let go for dropping his trousers at the company picnic and cuckooing like a dime store clock—or worse. No wonder you couldn’t get past the gatekeeper on the telephone. If your main contact isn’t there any longer, use a secondary contact (you do have secondary contacts at your client businesses, don’t you?).

Ask for a Face to Face
Once you’re assured that you have the right information (including the right contact), call the company to arrange an appointment, getting past the gatekeeper by referencing the gobs of business that you have done with the client and how you added value to the company. When you get your quarry on the phone, make it clear that you have no intention of closing on any sales unless she asks you to. I use a phrase like this:

“Ms. Prostomer, I realize that you haven’t seen or heard much from our company in recent months. Day to day business has left me neglecting you as a valued customer, and I apologize for that. It’s my intention to continue to partner with you well into the future, but I’m afraid that my knowledge of your company situation isn’t current. I need to get about thirty minutes (or less) of your time to bring me up to speed so that I can serve you better. Does next Tuesday at 3pm fit into your schedule?”

You have about a 90% chance of getting the appointment using that approach, even if you don’t agree on next Tuesday. You may receive some verbal hits about how lax your firm has been with client service. Don’t take it personal, shut up, and take the shots. It’s their way of venting and simultaneously testing your attitude. If Ms. Prostemer slams the receiver in your ear, move on to pick some lower lying fruit with other companies in your database.

Confirm and Impress
Here’s one that many successful salespeople do before new appointments, and that’s how you should consider a re-appointment with a long lost customer. Call the contact the day before to confirm your appointment for the following day, saying how much you look forward to visiting with her. It’s OK to leave a voicemail message—you’re just reminding them not to cancel.

Here comes the impress part. I got this one from listening to one of Jeffrey Gitomer’s on-hold recordings years ago. Reference in your message that you’re sending the contact something of value, either by FAX, email, or snail mail, timed so she gets it right before your appointment. Make sure whatever you send is pertinent to that company and doesn’t include a pitch or coupons for your stuff. It could be an industry article of interest to her, some late-breaking news, or even a message of congratulations on the company achieving a recent milestone (yes, making someone feel important does add value). By the way, making the newly re-contacted customer laugh with good-natured and professional humor is a big plus.

Rapport Re-Build
Use your professional judgment as to how much rapport you’ve lost over time. If this contact is brand new to you, start over on rapport building. The best way I know of to do this is to get the person talking about herself, how she came to her current level of success, how the company is doing, that sort of thing. Asking for a facility tour is a terrific way to show an interest in partnering with that prostemer. Most of the time you’ll get it and your appointment will go way beyond the originally scheduled time without complaint from the prostemer (plan on this and don’t schedule another appointment too closely following this one, because then you won’t ask for the tour and you’ll miss the opportunity). Find common interests on a personal level if you feel (after the tour) that the contact is receptive. You’re building relationships, remember?

Diagnose
Once you get through appropriate rapport re-build, be considerate of the prostemer’s time. You may already be running late. Do your Selling Solutions questioning to diagnose this real and perceived pain. For those of you reading who don’t know what Selling Solutions questions are, email me at sales@smartcompanygrowth.com with “Sales Questions” in the subject line and I’ll send you back a fact sheet or post to this article. Find out all the facts and feelings. Don’t be too quick to offer solutions yet. Figure out where your products or services will have the biggest impact and offer at a later date to meet again to offer a solution to those problems using your well written and thought out profit improvement proposal.

Set the Stage
After this one appointment, you should be back in the good graces of the once and future client. Take the initiative and schedule a follow-up to get into specifics about how you can help the company and present your profit improvement proposal. This should be easier to get than the initial meeting if you’ve been effective. When you go back the second time, pick up the ball and run with it using your personal selling style for your industry that has proven effective.

Sometimes you have to eat a little crow to get back in the good graces of a client who has left or you have neglected. Once you’ve done what it takes to get back in the door, the sales come easier as the relationship grows stronger. Proceed as normal with the Selling Solutions techniques that you know and love, and you’ll find that your repeat sales pipeline is flowing freely, as it should be.

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Is your repeat business 75% or higher? Learn more about Selling Solutions skills to kick-start repeat business. More small business strategies for growth can be found at the Smart Blog. Smart Company Growth is a small business growth strategies firm founded by Karl Walinskas that helps companies grow sales and contain costs.

Starting A Blog? Here Are Some Quick Tips For Success

By Stefan Dyke in Featured

Having a blog is one of the easiest ways to get started making money online and one of the best things about them is that they are extremely easy to setup and create. Not only can you maintain your blog at your own pace, modern technology means that you can even blog while you are on vacation or on the move – just imagine knowing that your blog is making you money while you enjoy a holiday somewhere nice!

Of course the first step to making any money with a blog is to get one set up. The good news is that it’s possible to do this completely free of charge and that’s what we are going to take a look at in this article.

First, you need to get yourself set up with a blog. There are a couple of options – host a blog using your own domain name or get a free one hosted elsewhere. Let’s concentrate on the free blog options initially and in this instance there are really only two decent options:

http://www.blogger.com or http://www.wordpress.com.

Blogger is actually owned by Google, so it will generally be indexed by Google faster whereas WordPress is a free blog engine that is robust and infinitely expandable. WordPress is better in the sense that it has more advanced features such as Trackbacks and Categories and you can also manage your sidebar links more efficiently (more about this later).

A quick word of warning. If you are thinking of using a WordPress hosted blog, WordPress tends to frown upon blogs that are too commercial and hosted on their service platform. If you want to make money from your blog or make it commercial, you may want to use a self-hosted WordPress blog which you can get from WordPress.org or Blogger.

Once you’ve gotten yourself a free blog from either Blogger or WordPress you should post some test posts and get yourself familiar with the many options that are available to you (in particular with WordPress) so that you can be sure to understand how they work and what the benefits are.

Here are some key features that you should get to know in order to make the most of your blog:

Permalink - Permalink stands for permanent link, which is a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) that leads to an individual post that you make in your blog.

Trackback - When you post about someone else’s blog post elsewhere, your post will automatically show up in their
“trackback” section. This feature is only available with WordPress, and not Blogger blogs.

Pinging – Pinging is the action where a certain aggregator is notified whenever your blog is updated, so that the aggregator may show the newest post of your blog on their website. This is a useful way to gain traffic and get easy links to your blog, which can increase your search engine ranking.

Now that you know a little bit more about the language of blogging, let’s think about the type of content you should consider blogging about in order to maximize your chance of having a profitable blog.

One key thing to understand is that the nature of the internet and people in general means that there is no limit to the type of content that your blog could have. The main difference between a blog that does well and makes money for it’s creator and one that doesn’t is going to be down to the way that you write, not what you write about. Think about the type of articles you like to read. They are usually light weight and easy to skim in order to get the gist of the content, so you want to make sure that your blog contains quality content that is easy to absorb.

Adding a personal touch to your blog posts will attract more readers and have them coming back for more by making the site feel more friendly and engaging. Avoid writing like you are preaching to the masses. Instead, concentrate on writing as if you are simply talking with a close friend, someone that is eager to learn what you have to share, someone who you can relate to. And besides, it’s also very useful to establish your own personality through your words. We are all very curious creatures, so naturally your visitors will want to know as much about you as the information you’re offering them.

Having a distinctive personality in your blog will make a world of difference between your blog about gadgets and all the other blogs about gadgets out there. This is a lot like creating your own brand name where people immediately remember your blog’s name when they need information about gadgets, just like how people immediately think of McDonald’s for fastfood or Nike for sportswear.

One thing to remember – it can be hard to change from one blog platform to another without a large amount of work so if you are truly looking to make money with your blog, start with either a Blogger site or a WordPress blog installed on your own server (I’d personally suggest the latter).

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Stefan is a UK based Internet Marketer who believes that blogging is a tool that should be in every internet marketers arsenal and as such has created an how-to guide designed to get anyone up and running a new blog as quickly as possible. Find out more about the guide at
http://cashbloggingtactics.com and more about Stefan at http://summit-marketing.com.

Social Networking – More Connected Than Ever – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Billygean in Featured

If you pick up any woman’s magazine at the moment you’ll find nervous articles about how we’re so busy with the Internet and social networking that we are becoming disconnected from reality. Apparently, we are not ever “in the moment” and are constantly task-switching on our various social networking sites.

What I’ve found, particularly with the invention of the smartphone, is that I find waiting for trains, buses and appointments a lot less boring. I pull out my phone and I check Twitter and Facebook or read mindless celebrity gossip. I’m sure I’m not alone in that. However what I don’t actually do is ignore my friends or text through my dinner in a restaurant. I don’t do push notifications and I don’t answer emails while I’m on dates, nor do I know anyone who does. Social networking kills time sometimes, but it doesn’t replace the things we really want to do. I take my phone in the bath (don’t worry, I’m insured), and I read Twitter. I used to read magazines. I don’t feel any less “in the moment” of my bath, and in fact it’s something I really enjoy; I like looking at what the world’s been up to while I’ve been at work.

Another thing these articles tend to talk about is that we’re a nation that is disconnected: the sense of community is gone and because we communicate in a virtual way, we are ceasing to engage in personal contact and are becoming lonelier than ever.

I can’t be the only person these views are beginning to grate on. In many ways I feel we are more connected than ever. I have a cousin who moved to Barcelona. I have a lot of cousins, so I can’t phone them all regularly. He’s on Facebook and Twitter now and a few times a week we exchange messages and banter. I feel more connected to him than I ever have.

Hundreds of people wish me happy birthday on Facebook. I’m sure I’m not the only one. They don’t have to. Just because the message is typed doesn’t make it any less meaningful that someone took a couple of minutes out of their day to wish me happy birthday, even if the message comes from somebody I knew at school and haven’t seen for a decade.

My neighbor is on Facebook. She has young children and so I never know when is convenient to pop over. It’s so much easier to message her on the internet or send her a text. Sometimes we chat on Facebook messenger late at night in our pajamas. It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to go round to her house (and I’m sure her husband wouldn’t want to hear our girly ramblings). Here, Facebook hasn’t replaced an in-person communication; it’s simply added to it. We still talk over the fence in the garden, but we also talk on Facebook sometimes.

A lot of people seem to think there is a difference between talking to somebody on Twitter and looking into their eyes. There is a difference, of course there is: I wouldn’t be happy to conduct my relationship over Twitter, for example. But how important is this difference? Sometimes, I like to see my friends in person. And sometimes, I want to not get dressed up and do other things while I talk to them. Because of that latter option, I don’t think we meet up any less. We’ve always met up every few weeks. Now, we meet up every few weeks but catch up on the internet in the meantime.

Every day, I see photographs of my friends appear on Facebook. These aren’t events I would have been at were it not for social networking: these are just pictures of my friends I wouldn’t otherwise have seen. We write on each others’ walls with funny messages that five years ago would probably have been text messages and ten years ago wouldn’t have existed at all. Do we talk less because of social networking? No, I think we talk more.

The community hasn’t disbanded because of social networking. For that, we can probably blame Tesco. No – the community is as alive as ever: it just contains almost everybody you’ve ever spoken to.

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Billygean is a 26 year old trainee lawyer, writer and blogger. She wrote her first novel while recovering from ME/CFS. She enjoys eating nutella straight out of the jar, Shakespeare and Twitter. http://www.billygean.co.uk/

How to Generate Massive Traffic by Marketing With YouTube

By Ruth Morgan in Featured

Marketing with YouTube is becoming a very popular way of promoting websites or small businesses. Many people associate YouTube with silly videos of cute pets, fighting siblings, or awkward family moments. In fact, YouTube is one of the most popular search engines in the world! It is not exactly a traditional search engine, but it does provide people with the information they are looking for at any given time.

If you think marketing with YouTube will be a good addition to your current strategy, then follow the steps below to get started.

Signing Up and Creating Your YouTube Channel

The first thing you need to do when you sign into YouTube for the first time is to set up a ‘channel’. This will allow visitors to subscribe to your videos and they will then be notified whenever you post something new. It will also serve as your own real estate on the internet and you can upload as many videos as you like. Your YouTube channel is a great place to refer people who are interested in your business.

You will have a short profile next to your videos. You will place your website’s URL here. Believe it or not, this generates a lot of traffic. You will receive a lot of visitors to your site, regardless of your business. Your channel is just like having your very own personalized television station that only promotes your business! All you need to do is keep the attention of your visitor.

Your First YouTube Video

Once you’ve created your account and your channel, it is time for you to make and upload the videos that will bring traffic to your site. Fun videos that get people’s attention never hurt, but remember that you are marketing with YouTube and you don’t want to seem unprofessional. You should aim to let people know about your business in your first video, so keep the gimmicks to a minimum.

Keeping things on the lighter side and talking about your personal experiences can be a good approach. Avoid sounding too sales oriented as this can be off-putting, especially when a visitor views your channel for the first time. Most people would prefer to deal with a person they can identify with rather than a corporate sales person.

Moving Forward With YouTube

Once you have finished your first introduction video, you can start to upload more videos that are based on quality content and pitch your message quietly. Aim to keep your videos short, less than three minutes in length is a good rule of thumb. It is acceptable to have a few longer videos, but avoid making that the norm. If it is impossible to get your message across in a few minutes, try to create a video series where you can spread the message over a few videos.

Tagging, Tagging, Tagging

Probably the most important part of marketing with YouTube is your keyword tags and video annotations. The annotations are shown on the screen during the video. Try inserting some funny thoughts on the video or simply write your website URL.

Tags are just like keywords in Google. Users search for these when they find your video or website. Try to include as many content specific keywords in your tags as possible. This will allow you to improve your rank and it increases the possibility of your potential clients finding your
video.

YouTube is a great way to boost your marketing strategy. It doesn’t cost any money and it is great fun. So give your best effort for success and start making videos today!

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Would you like to find out more on how to promote your online business? Then get your free copy of Ruth Morgan’s 90 page report ‘Internet Marketing Revealed’. You’ll also get a 5 step guide to setting up your own online business. To claim your free report and 5 step guide go to
http://HowToBuildYourInternetBusiness.com today.

How to Choose the Right Copywriter for YOU

By Ken Hoffman in Featured

What Type of Copywriting Are You Looking For?

What kind of copy are you looking for? There are many different kinds. First, there is copywriting by niche specialty. For example: copywriters who only write for alternative health, or financial, or self-help markets. Second, there are copywriters who specialize in the type of copy: landing pages, white papers, video scripts, etc. There is advertising copy. There’s corporate copy such as marketing collateral, newsletters, and product literature. There’s slick ad agency copy. There’s branding, direct response, and B2B. There’s web SEO content and web sales copy.

For the sake of this report I will divide copy into two primary types: copy designed to sell and copy designed for other reasons. Now there is some copy that is supposedly designed to sell, but has no way of measurement. The most powerful type of copy and the hardest one to find is the one that sells. If you just want content, you can find that cheap anywhere.

Think Marketing Strategy First, Copywriting Second

What will your marketing strategy be? Unless you yourself know and understand marketing strategy it’s important to get some feedback on this. Copy is one part of three things: Your message (the copy), your list (or target market), and your marketing strategy (the process of getting the prospect to your copy, through your copy and to your order page).

MRPwebmedia Wins SIA Video Microsite Award

By Jerry Bader in Featured

MRPwebmedia is pleased to announce that we have been awarded a SIA Summit International Award for the Video Microsite we created for one of our clients. The site can be seen at http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads/CallLimiter/.

Jerry Bader
MRPwebmedia
(905) 764-1246

Visit Our Sites

http://www.mrpwebmedia.com

http://www.136words.com

http://www.sonicpersonality.com

http://www.cacheclosed.com

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; we turn advertising into content, and content into a memorable experience.

Common SEO Questions – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Nick Stamoulis in Featured

Even though SEO has been around for a long time, there are still plenty of site owners, web developers and marketers who don’t have much experience with SEO. This is through no fault of their own, as SEO has only recently been taken out of its silo and incorporated into overall Internet marketing strategies. A few years ago, SEO was looked at as more of a technical practice, something that was handled behind the scenes. Now, SEO has taken a much more active, marketing-driven role. There is no denying that SEO is important if you want your brand to succeed online, but many people still do not fully understand that SEO is a not magic bullet. It will not solve all your online marketing problems overnight, nor will it supplement your offline marketing questions. Too many site owners are caught off-guard by black hat SEO spammers and con-men, looking to take advantage of “SEO newbies.”

Here are a few of the most common SEO questions and the white hat responses:

Q: How long will it take me to rank in Google?

A: There is no guarantee as to how fast your site will rank in Google, Bing, Yahoo or any of the other search engines. There are a lot of factors that your SEO is fighting against to help your site perform. If your site launched in a small niche with few competitors (grasshopper breeding), it might rank well faster because there was little opposition. If you launched your site in a highly competitive market (dog breeding), it could take much longer for your site to rank for your chosen keywords. There is no set time frame since each site and industry is different.

Creating Art on the Web through Website Design

By Kevin Germain in Featured

The web is a wild place. It is an art gallery without the admission fee. Web designers are artist of a different medium. Like artists not all of the website designs that they create are going to work. Some websites are truly annoying. Take for instance a painter that really likes the color blue. If it is used in every piece of art the painter makes it will visually not stimulate our eyes and we will become bored or annoyed with the artists art. The same is true for web design. As a website developer you need to make sure that your “art” is different for each client and you need to avoid common mistakes that draw attention away from the client’s product or service. There are several things to steer clear of when designing websites to ensure a perfect site for your client.

Top Five Most Annoying Website Design Techniques

1) Colors that assault the eye – If your clients insisting on using every color of the rainbow in their site design it is your job as the website designer to talk them out of it. Even though they think it adds just the right touch of pizzazz to their site you know better. Colors that are too bright or morbidly dark will not be suitable to promote your clients work. Even if you are promoting a circus keep the main site colors down to a maximum of two or three. Do not give in to the more is better philosophy with color.

2) Background sounds – Nothing is worse that a site that replays the same sound bit throughout the entire site. Or worse yet a slogan that plays each and every time you click on a new page within a site. Full songs are also an absolute annoyance. It is best that the site visually provides the entertainment leave the background noise out of future web designs.

3) Spelling Errors – You are using a computer with a spell check button make sure you use it. Nothing is worse than bad grammar, incorrect punctuation or pour spelling. Before you go live with any site make sure multiple eyes have looked over all text. Even if the client has provided the text for their site do not trust that it is correct. Always double and triple check for errors or inconsistent tenses. They will thank you for catching the error before the site has become viewable to their clients.

4) Font Size – If you use all capital letters in your design people will feel like the site is shouting at them. Using all small letters will make people feel like you are whispering. It is best to stay consistent with normal text and punctuation. This way it will make the website feel as if it speaking to the viewer in a normal voice which will make it more pleasing to read.

5) Blinking links and popup windows – These items are to the web what junk mail is to our mail boxes. Useless information that gets in the way of important information. Stop using popup windows and blinking lights to attract attention to your art because the reality is that they are just annoying.

Remember in web design it is all about how your website design is perceived by the people viewing it. Make sure the art you present does not detour anyone from visiting the websites your clients have had you design.

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If you have enjoyed this article from Kevin Germain at CPS please visit http://www.cpsmi.com today. You will find useful information on website development.

5 Quick and Easy Ways to Create High Profit Sales Minisites

By Ian Greenwood in Featured

Building your own sales minisites can be a bit of a chore – no doubt! After creating a product you need a website to sell it from, but for some this step has a steep learning curve. The process of creating a sales minisite is one area that sometimes stops potential internet marketers from profiting on the web.

But, this step is essential if you want to make any money online. You also need a sales site to attract affiliates, get involved in joint ventures or to give your internet marketing business any credibility. It’s obvious though why this step causes many internet marketing novices to stop in their tracks. But there are several ways around this sticking point.

Here are 5 top ways you can immediately use to speed up the process of creating a simple sales site for your next internet marketing project.

1. Use Video

A video sales page usually just has a video, a few bullet points, and a buying link. Once you have shot your sales video then creating the page is the easy part. By using video you immediately do away with most of the problems of web graphics, formatting text, crafting a sales letter, and lots of HTML coding.

The big benefit of including video as your sales message, is that you can also demonstrate your product right there on the screen. This is powerful marketing.

2. Use Outsourcing

If you decide to outsource your minisite creation you will of course need a budget to pay your freelancer. The good news is that there are thousands of highly talented and creative web developers out there who can help you out. Freelance sites like elance.com or peopleperhour.com have lists of those who can create your minisite.

On many of these freelance sites you don’t need to pay anything until you are satisfied with the result. Also, those interested in taking your project will indicate how much they are willing to take to complete it, so they try to “out bid” each other. These two factors will tend to keep the costs down and get you a great job for a great price.

3. Use Someone Else’s Site

If you don’t have a product yet you can use someone else’s site and sell their product as an affiliate. Although this doesn’t get your site up and running it does give you a chance to earn money, gain experience, and to build a list of your own buyers. This also helps you gain a bit of breathing space while you get your own products up and running.

The another big advantage of this technique is that you can see the type of websites that are converting visitors to buyers, and making money. This can give you big pointers to what you need to include in your own minisite project.

4. Use Templates

Templates are webpage blanks. They have all the features of the completed page like headlines, subheads, testimonial boxes, bullet lists and buying links, but none of the detailed content. This leaves you free to plug in your own information and transform the template into your own sales page.

The big advantage here is that your sales page will be your own. Even although you started off with a common template, your own information will turn it into a sales minisite that no one else has. You can even include your own graphics, video, etc to transform it into something unique.

5. Use PLR Products

Private label rights products (or PLR for short) often come with their own sales sites. You can of course usually edit both the PLR product, and the sales site, and so produce not only a unique product, but also a unique sales minisite. You don’t have to do this of course. At the very least all you have to do is insert your own buying link into the sales page to make the site your own.

Any of these strategies can short circuit the process of creating your own high profit sales minisite. You need to remember that the process of creating web pages is central to internet marketing, but to get up and running you don’t need to spend hours and hours slaving over a hot keyboard.

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There is a free training video to accompany this article. Ian Greenwood reveals just how powerful these techniques are. You can watch live as he creates a fully functional webpage in under 5 minutes. Click through now to http://www.EasyWebpageBuilding.com to claim your free training video. Please note that you will be taken straight through to the training video. You do not need to opt in to receive it. Go now to www.EasyWebpageBuilding.com.

SEO vs. Sales: The Battle Of Content

By John V in Featured

The topic of SEO vs. Sales is a rather fascinating one.

This topic is really the battle of what is good for SEO in terms of content and website structure versus what is good concerning the direct marketing appeal.

SEO is about having good content, page authority and plenty of pages. From the sales perspective you want people to fill out a form, give you a call and purchase your products. It can be quite challenging to find that middle ground consisting of the power of SEO without having to sacrifice the direct response effectiveness on the sales side. A good looking web page filled with great content is ideal as far as SEO goes but it is not very conducive to prompting a visitor to take an action such as filling out a form or buying a product. And, having a webpage with a very clear call-to-action is great for getting people to take action but it is not so great in terms of SEO due to the fact that there is not a lot of text on the page.

One of the easiest ways to bridge the gap between SEO and sales is to implement a blog on your website. A blog can add a great deal of content and authority to your site. You should keep your blog fresh by creating a new blog post each day and be sure to include relevant keywords in the title of your blog posts. Each post should ideally consist of at least 300 words. Another tool you can use is what is called an expandable text box. When you click on an expandable text box, it opens into a page containing a lot of content. Google loves expandable text boxes because they are relevant, they contain a lot of information and they tell the search engines what your page is all about.

You also can make your site much more SEO friendly by adding three elements: Resources, FAQs and a Glossary section. With the FAQs, divide them across many pages with one FAQ listed per page. You also should consider making use of user-generated content on your site. This could be a forum or a set of photos that people can post comments on.

This way your site visitors will be creating fresh content for you and they will even do some linking back to their sites which is all good in the eyes of the search engines.

Another thing to do is to create autonomous landing pages for paid advertising. These pages will still be a part of your site but they will be to some degree, mirror images of pages within your main site that will prevent your visitors from becoming distracted. These landing pages will encourage the average visitor to take a desired action such as buy a product or service from you. The key here is to keep the autonomous pages consistent with the design of your website and to think of these pages as microsites as opposed to single pages.

If you are able to find the balance between good SEO and sales, you will be killing two birds with one stone. The search engines will like your site and your visitors will be more likely to do what you want them to do, which is to buy something from you.

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The delicate balance between SEO and sales can be a tricky one to maintain. To learn more, watch this YouTube video on the topic – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwL36vJ8-Lc

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