The issue every small business faces is this: How to get Google's attention. in order to drive website traffic and ultimately sales (nearly all very small businesses need a hand up from Google). There is so much advice and 95% of it is either flat out wrong or impractical. The #1 impediment to getting your business off the ground is website traffic. The #1 impediment to increasing your website traffic is your site's Domain/Site Authority rank. The degree of your website

I’m sure you’ve wondered why your Contact Us page is getting so much traffic (it’s usually #2 in volume just behind the homepage) and so few people are filling out the form. Actually, people go to Contact pages for a lot of reasons aside from filling out the form. Here are a few: 1. They just want a phone number (and an immediate response). Research shows that buyers would much rather reach out to you and get an immediate response rather than wait for someone to respond to

While there are similarities between personal and business relationships, they are significantly different in a number of important aspects. Many people have found this out the hard way and ruined, what otherwise would have been, a wonderful long-term relationship with a client. Following are 2 ways that business relationships are similar to personal relationships and 6 ways they are different. Similarities Time: They both require time to develop. Just as you can’t expect t

The Harvard Business Review ran an excellent article by marketing researchers Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna about, what they believe is the #1 impediment to closing sales—and it’s not getting past the prospect’s status quo—which is what most sales people tend to think. Rather it’s the prospect’s indecision. In the article, they make a strong case, which goes something like this: · Research by the authors and others shows that indecision has a more powerful grip on the

While this is true for low-ticket items, it’s surprisingly true for high ticket items as well---especially if those items are complex. Badgered on all sides to make a purchase decision on complicated technology and having few resources to verify claims, risk-averse decisions makers will go with the well branded products and services every time. The lesson for businesses with unbranded or poorly branded products and services is that when you make claims, provide hard proof of

From the buyer’s perspective, the brand is both a shortcut and an insurance policy. It assures them that they can expect certain qualities from a product or service and it frees them from doing much (or any) investigation themselves. This is why people in a hurry are more likely to choose brands they know. While this is true for low-ticket items, it’s surprisingly true for high ticket items as well---especially if those items are complex. Badgered on all sides to make a purc

From the buyer’s perspective, the brand is both a shortcut and an insurance policy. It assures that they can expect certain qualities from a product or service and it frees them from doing much (or any) investigation themselves. This is why people in a hurry are more likely to choose brands they know. While this is true for low-ticket items, it’s surprisingly true for high ticket items as well---especially if those items are complex. Badgered on all sides to make a purchase

Not all channel partners are created equal. It’s best to focus on those partners where your sales are historically strong. Then work on fostering market development fund (MDF) relationships with 2-3. The goal is to submit MDF requests to the same partners every quarter. This simplifies things for a process that can be mind-numbingly complex. Create a separate spreadsheet for each partner that includes fields such as project #, approve date, start date, end date,

From the buyer’s perspective, the brand is both a shortcut and an insurance policy. It assures that they can expect certain qualities from a product or service and it frees them from doing much (or any) investigation themselves. This is why people in a hurry are more likely to choose brands they know. While this is true for low-ticket items, it’s surprisingly true for high ticket items as well---especially if those items are complex. Badgered on all sides to make a purchase