Sunday, February 27, 2005

How to Get Customers Quening up to Buy

I attended a networking lunch recently and the speaker, a well respected and very influential figure in the Yorkshire business community, talked a lot about overseas competition and the threat it posed. Most of the women business owners I spoke to were not worried. Many of them are already buying stock from China and India anyway. What they wanted to know was how to get more customers. And that’s what this Blog is all about.

I have recently published an eBook entitled How to Get Customers Queuing up to Buy, worth $27, but I am giving a copy free to all new subscribers to my Speaking and Marketing Tips Newsletter. Just click on the title to go to the web site. In this Blog and the newsletter I will be expanding on the book and providing a wealth of further low cost/no cost ideas for getting more customers. However before I talk about getting more customers I am aware of the possibility, especially if you have come here following an invitation from me, that you have absolutely no idea what a blog is.

A few months ago I was in the same happy state of blissful ignorance, however since spending a day in the company if one of the world’s most successful internet millionaires I have realised that, in this instance, ignorance is how to lose customers. BLOG is short for WebLog, and it is essentially an online diary. There are literally millions of people now using them, mostly as a means of keeping in touch with friends and family, and the entry of Google into the market with this blogger.com service I am using, has started to make blogs the "latest big thing" on the internet.

But why are Blogs important to you as a Small Business Marketing Strategy. Well because this site is owned by Google, they index it in their search engine very quickly. So if you create a blog and post interesting content related to the needs of your customers, you are going to get listed in Google very quickly. In addition if you post links to your web site here the search engines prefer to find links than have them submitted.

However here is a very important tip on linking to your web site. The domain name is not very useful in search engine placement unless it contains important keywords, and most don't. My Speaking and Marketing Tips web site contains lots of further tips, but I am listing it here to demonstrate how to list links, and this applies wherever you list your web site. My site domain name is www.SpeakingandMarketingTips.com so you can see that it does contain keywords, but not easy to read. The site is all about Small Business Marketing Strategies.

Now in both instances in that previous paragraph I have listed a descriptive phrase, and turned it into a hypertext link. You can do this easily when you make a post by selecting the text you want to link, clicking on the Hypertext symbol (a chain link + globe symbol) and adding the web address. Why is this important? Well now when the search engine checks out this entry in my blog it will find a link to a web site and a "keyword phrase" to index it under. I happen to know that "Small Business Marketing Strategies" is a quite popular phrase people use to search the internet, but that not many web sites use it, so my chances of getting a good listing on Google and therefore of having customers visiting my web site are greatly enhanced.

I know it's possible that this Blog may have prompted more questions than it provides answers to. Don't worry - that’s why you should visit regularly. I will be providing a regular flow of ideas to demystify speaking and marketing and help you to get more customers without spending a fortune on advertising. I strongly recommend that you register with this blog now - please feel free to post any comments - I will respond and if your comment is appropriate make the answer a feature in a future blog. And take a little time to check out the help pages for more information on blogging.

And finally a reminder that if you register for my free Speaking and Marketing Tips Newsletter, I'll give you a copy of my new eBook, How to Get Customers Queuing up to Buy worth $27 absolutely free. Simply click on the link above and sign up to access the download page.

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