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SiteProNews Blogs

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

New Video Micro Campaign Site Summer Promotion

By Jerry Bader

Summer Special

New Video Micro Campaign Site Special designed to promote a particular product, service, or special promotional campaign, includes a basic five page Micro Video Campaign Website with four 30-60 second video presentations using one onscreen actor filmed in studio on a white, black, or green screen background, plus custom signature music all done in MRPwebmedia’s innovative branding-delivery style.

Specifics can be discussed and modified for each client depending on their particular requirements and needs.

Additional videos, video lengths, Web pages, actors, props, and sets are available at additional costs.

If you are interested you can contact us for details, pricing, and an actual client example.

Jerry Bader
MRPwebmedia
(905) 764-1246

Visit Our Sites
http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads
http://www.136words.com
http://www.sonicpersonality.com
http://www.cacheclosed.com

More Google Killers on the Horizon

By admin

In the past few weeks speculation has run rampant on the future of search and whether Google might be supplanted by Twitter real-time social search  or by Wolfram Alpha, the still to be launched search engine that is billed as a true computational knowledge engine.

Wolfram Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com/) is scheduled to launch in May and could very well be a major advance in search technology. In brief, ask Wolfram Alpha a question and it supposedly will deliver a specific and accurate response as opposed to a list of related results.  Stephen Wolfram outlines  Wolfram Alpha’s technological foundation in his blog post at: http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/03/05/wolframalpha-is-coming/ .

Will Wolfram Alpha supplant Google? Not in the short term. Google has become a synonym for search, like Xerox became for copying. But Wolfram Alpha and the search technologies that follow could very well begin to undermine Google’s dominance. Wolfram appears to be a largely scientific endeavor, but with the proper funding, promotion and innovation, it could rapidly find an audience. Search has always been about finding answers.  A hundred million search results to a query are impressive, but one specific, accurate and correct result is really all that’s needed for many queries. It might be simpler for Wolfram Alpha to backfill their accurate answer results with related search results than for Google to duplicate Wolfram’s “millions of lines of algorithms”. Then again, success in the marketplace is not always about what’s “best”. Assuming Wolfram does what it claims it can and takes a competitive stance,  the search industry could dramatically change in 5 years.

Then, there’s Twitter. Does anyone seriously believe that Twitter search could be a Google killer? Indexing the micro-blogging sphere is not exactly a major technological feat for a search giant like Google. If Google search results can be supplemented with Twitter results using a GreaseMonkey script, how difficult would it be for Google to supplement their own search results with real-time social search results. Then there’s the question of exactly how useful Twitter results are. Mini blog posts are interesting but hardly a resevoir of accuracy and reliability. Tweets have their place - good for rapid communication, breaking news, marketing blurbs, networking, tips, etc. - but they are unlikely to ever be the basis for search results that put Google out of business.  

The Web Emperor Has No Clothes

By Jerry Bader

If you’re in business, you’re in sales; that’s just the way it is. We are all salesmen; we all have something to sell, a product, a service, an idea, a cause, or maybe just an opinion. And if you’re in business you have a website intended to communicate the value of that which you sell.

So if you’re in the business of selling something, and your website is the vehicle you choose to communicate your sales pitch, then shouldn’t your main concern be how effectively you are communicating that message?

Communication or Analytics

Instead of concentrating on effective communication, many businesses put the emphasis on search engine statistics: how high they rank on Google, MSN, and Yahoo, with the assumption that the higher they rank, the more traffic they’ll generate, and the more traffic they generate, the more sales they’ll get. At least, that’s what we are led to believe.

Here’s the problem: almost all the rank-generating strategies are aimed at search engine spiders, not people, so you have to ask yourself, who exactly is my website communicating to, robots or human beings?

The Secret Formula Doesn’t Exist

Why are today’s business owners and executives so mesmerized by this whole search engine thing? It reminds me of the story of an infamous Hollywood movie mogul and studio head who was caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Instead of firing the guy immediately, he was retained for some time for the simple reason his movies made money; and the dirty little secret in Hollywood is that nobody really knows why some movies are hits and others are bombs. So you keep paying the guy you think is making you money, no matter what he does, because maybe he knows something you don’t.

What we have today is a new generation of business leaders who came of age with the Internet. These Internet technology geeks and boffins are the new Web-wizards and wunderkinds: the guys with the secret formula. But like the movie industry, nobody really has a foolproof search engine recipe for success, but since most of the technical stuff is ever-changing, and over most entrepreneurs and business executives heads, they buy into it; that is until somebody tells them the emperor has no clothes.

What’s A Web Entrepreneur To do?

You heard the old expression, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” well it has never been so true as it applies to website marketing. The simple truth about websites is that success is based on a site’s ability to communicate a marketing message that makes sense, and is understood in an easy to digest format.

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.

Creating A Successful Online Sales Strategy

By Jerry Bader

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.

SEO - It’s All About the Cache!

By Jeffrey Smith

With SEO it’s all about the cache. Crawl frequency determines how changes impact your site. Without an updated cache, there are no significant changes or rankings to report to search engines.

Do you see why getting the attention of spiders is important? They are the gatekeepers between your content and the world. RSS is one method to toggle spidering, social bookmarking is another, but the fastest way to increase your cache rate for content is to (1) increase posting through using consistent time periods to introduce new posts or pages and (2) build inbound links to internal pages to create spike in network activity necessary to attract the spiders (otherwise known as a ping). Pings from your site are a digital invitation to search engines update changes.