How to Improve Your Marketing and Create Hot New Products That Your Customers Already Want

How can you improve your marketing and create new products - products that your customers already want? Simple. Ask for feedback from your customers and see what the common themes are. What do your customers like most about your product? How can you focus on that more in your marketing? What do they believe that your product/service currently lacks? Think about how you can use their feedback to create a new/improved service and offer that to your customers.

For example, perhaps you have a business that creates websites and the common feedback that your customers give is that they wish you also helped rank their site on search engines. You could create an additional service, where for a monthly fee you help rank their website. If you don’t know how to do this yourself, you could always outsource this part, but white label it as your own service - you still make a profit on the service, but don’t need to do any of the work. You can offer this to your current customers, saying that due to their feedback and the demand, you’ve created this service to help them with what they want most.

Ask for feedback from your customers, specifically on what they like most and what they dislike most/wish you offered. Use the feedback, on what they like most, and highlight it in your marketing. With what they like least/wish you did, create an additional or improved service/product and offer it to your customers.

For more great marketing ideas to improve your business check out this book 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!

Five Super Important Things to Rank Your Site

What is a Ranking in SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is meant for the betterment of web pages to help search engines rank them accordingly. In SEO, ranking indicates the position of a website’s page on what's called the search engine results pages (SERPs).
According to Google, the ranking of a website is vital because it helps in showing the relevant search results. It is also essential for the organization of largescale data present on the web and making the information reachable and valuable to people all around the world.

The ranking also makes it easier for Google to catalog the pages based on the optimization and quality of the pages.
The five most important factors in ranking of a website are:

1. Secure Website

The right URL is secure and easily accessible. A secure and accessible URL is probably the most important ranking factor of any website. Google’s bots should be able to access and crawl URLs for the information they need.
In other words, websites that have URLs that Google can visit and review easily, are more likely to rank higher on the SERPs.

To improve the ranking of your website by making it secure, you need to consider the following:
• A well-developed website through a standard website builder.
• Robots.txt file that is used by Google to determine where it can and cannot view the website information.
• A thorough sitemap which gives the details of all of your pages.

2. Page Speed

Page speed is one of the primary SEO ranking factors for many years. Websites that have rapid-loading webpages give an excellent experience to the users. Faster websites are highly preferred by search engines in any ranking system.
Since 2018, Google has taken into account the page speed on mobile devices as well as PCs. Therefore, website developers should consider smart devices and their loading speeds as well.

3. Mobile Responsiveness

Smartphones and other smart devices have become ubiquitous in the last decade. The majority of users on the web use mobile devices to browse websites. Hence, the mobile-friendliness of a website is a major ranking factor today. It has impacted the SERPs a lot because now, only mobile responsive websites are ranked on the first few pages of Google and other search engines.

Google implements a mobile-first index, which means that the results of the searched keywords are drawn from the mobile-optimized pages. Your website must be mobile responsive if you have a desire to see it ranked high on Google.

Some important factors included in website friendliness are:
• A responsive site that can fit and resize according to the device.
• Fonts are large enough to be readable on small screens.
• Different menus and pages can be accessed and navigated easily.
• Ads are placed appropriately and do not hide the content.

4. Content-Length

Some SEO experts do not consider the content length to be an important factor in the ranking of pages. However, it can be observed from the general ranking on Google that websites that have unique, engaging, relevant, and an appropriate word count are ranked higher than the others.

There is no hard and fast rule on the content length. A long piece of writing is appreciated in SEO ranking because it takes time and energy to create a unique and engaging long content.

However, there must be a balance in length. An excessively long and uninteresting piece of writing content will not attract many people to your website, which will adversely impact rankings.

Recent trends in Google rankings have shown that content length should never be ignored, and long-form content is performing better at the top of the SERPs. As a general rule, 1,000 words or more is optimal for most general content.

5. Domain Age and Authority

Data about the top-ranked websites on Google suggests that the old websites are ranked higher than the new websites. The main reason for this is that the old site is usually optimized over a period of a few years. In some cases, the domain name also accounts for the ranking of a website.

Some researches show that domains that match to each other and that are relevant, useful, and highly-optimized enjoy a significant ranking boost. However, your URL must reflect the nature of your business.

Authority is also another factor in SEO ranking. It consists of SEO signals like inbound links, social media impressions, and page authority. All of this requires a great deal of research, time, and experience, but the process can be made simple by automating it all through advanced programs. Highly ranked websites and SERPs are possible and you no longer have to be a digital marketing expert to make it all work. Web Fire is a great way to make this process fast and simple.

Make It Easy For Customers To Buy: How Offering Free Trials/Demonstrations Can Boost Your Sales

Sometimes it’s hard to see the benefit of something we haven’t seen in action or tried first. Offering a free trial period, or a demonstration of your product, can be a great way to alleviate a potential customer’s fears and make them confident the product will work for them. Also, once someone has tried something free they often feel obliged to reciprocate by purchasing from you - it’s the principle of reciprocity in action.

For example, if you have a software product, offer a free 30 day trial, so customers can see how it works, use it and see the results they get from it. You’ll get customers who may have sat on the fence or not purchased previously all of a sudden be ready to buy because they can get a chance to experience how great the product can actually be for them.

There’s one tip we’ve learned over the years that can greatly increase your retention rate here (or essentially how many stay on past the trial period), and that’s to offer a free trial, but require them to enter their credit card or payment details. Instead of charging them, which can decrease the conversion rates even more, just authorize their credit cards for $1 or so (this is typically where their card temporarily sees a charge for like $1 that never officially goes through – similar to what many gas stations do when you pay at the pump). If you use Paypal, you don’t even have to worry as much about this and can just do a straight trial for X days that automatically charges once the trial ends (Paypal is typically very good at getting money from customers, whereas for credit cards you often have to authorize them to make sure that they’re legit to start with).

You can also use trials as “special offers” whenever you want to run a sale. For instance, if you regularly sell a software tool for $997 / year, you can have a special offer where you do a free trial for 14 or 30 days. This can get a ton of people who’ve been on the fence to jump on this offer, as they know that the only other way for them to try out the software would be to pay $997 upfront.

So make it easy for customers to see the value in your product and purchase from you by offering a free trial or demonstration of your product. You’ll get a chance to make them feel comfortable with your product and see how great it is for them, before having to lay down their hard-earned cash. This in turn leads to more sales, especially from people who may have been skeptical about your product without the chance to try it first.

For more tips on sales and converting leads, check out this book 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!.

How To Make Money Using Social Media

It takes a while to understand that social media sites are developed for more than just entertainment and de-escalation of boredom. You can make money through social media without selling anything. These platforms are, believe it or not, perfectly designed to be used as money-making machines. It may take you a little time and a lot of effort to get recognized by other social media users. You'll need to build an image and audience on social media. You'll need to build an audience and engage in an effective social media content strategy. Over time, as your audience grows and you accumulate more and followers a number of new income opportunities may open up to you, and you'll never have to create a store or start your own business if you don't want to. Once you have a substantial audience, here are some ways you can make money with your popular social media account:

1: Brand Promotion:

Some of the most effective marketing is done through ads and promotions online, but not all of it is pay per click advertising. Many companies will turn to famous and popular celebrities to promote or endorse their products. If you become a social media influencer companies may reach out to you for brand promotion deals. Companies know this is a great way, especially to reach a targeted audience.

Example: Look at Tecno Mobile who launched a Tik Tok campaign to reach out to teen users, which comprise about 90% of the website's audience.

2: Shout-outs:

Shout-outs, especially among young people and millennials, are becoming one of the most common social media promotion tactics. You find someone who is a highly influential social media personality with an audience that fits your target market and you get them to give a shout-out to their audience about your page or business. Not only can you gain new customers this way, but also followers and viewers for your other pages online. If you become influential enough on social media, other influencers and companies may reach out to you for a paid shout-out.

3: Selling Arts And Crafts On Social Media:

Millions, maybe even billions of social media users all over the world have a love for the arts. Who doesn't love seeing the creativity of another person in action through arts, crafts, and other special talents. Showing your creativity and talents in action and putting them on display is a great way to build a solid social media following if you do it right. In addition to getting the influence though, it also opens up the door to money-making opportunities. Many artists are already selling on Instagram, and Facebook is starting to break into E-Commerce as well. If you have talents and hobbies you're good at and passionate about, you may be able to turn it into a social media business.

Keeping Followers Engaged With Content

Building a following and keeping a following on social media follow somewhat similar strategies, in they evolve the constant creation of content. You need content that is original, unique, and will keep relevant users engaged, and it has to be constant. Keeping up with all the content you need to keep your following strong can be demanding, but it's very much worth it, and made easier by user-friendly software like News Poster to help get you started with relevant content rolling on your page.

How to Increase Your Prices and Boost Your Business’s Profits

People often overlook this very simple, very easy way to increase their business’s profits: increase your prices. Most people tend to undercharge for their services, so try increasing your prices, as a test, and see what happens. Funnily enough, most people perceive something that is higher priced as being of higher quality, which can encourage people to buy your product or service. As you increase your prices, you’re also receiving more per sale, increasing your profit margin. Take this strategy a step further and target higher value clients.

For example, if you run a business coaching company, and you currently charge $200 an hour for your time, increase your rates to $1000. With the perceived higher quality and value in your coaching, target businesses that make a lot of money vs. those that are barely getting by. In this example, one client would be worth 5 of your clients in the past. Not only have you raised your hourly rate, but you’ve decreased the amount of work you need to do to earn the same amount of money.

An interesting example we’ve had before is when we’ve sold courses or software for $7 vs. $497 vs. $997+. Although the $7 price gets the most conversions, the $997 price would almost always make tons more money. You just have to make sure you do a good job of showing the value!

So test out this simple tip and try increasing your prices and targeting customers who have more money to spend on your product/service.

For more easy ways to grow your profits and increase your sales check out this book: 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!.

What Should Be In A Good Blog Post And Why

It would not be wrong to say that people’s interest in blogging has hit the highest point in recent years. Some people believe that blogs are dying, but more accurate they're evolving. Make no mistake, blogs are here to stay, but they're more competitive than ever. With social media, freelancing, and SEO becoming widely used around the world, the trend of blogging has dramatically increased in recent times. Millions of blogs are being written on a daily basis, but there are some basic tips and techniques which should be implemented in every excellent and engaging blog post you write.

Captivating Title and Headline

Many writers tend to ignore the fact that a good blog post is always about just one idea. There is no need to add numerous ideas and topics in a single blog post because the primary purpose of a post is to discuss and elaborate on one idea. A good title is the one that captures the readers’ attention at the very first glance and briefly describes the content of the post. It should be based on the pattern of an engaging magazine headline or a newsflash that attracts the user and forces them to click the link.

You should take time in crafting a fantastic headline for your post because it will be the first item that any readers see, and if it is not catchy enough for the user, you may lose a potential reader.

An Engaging Opening Paragraph

The importance of the first impression of a user cannot be understated. A large amount of data is available on the web that will support this. With all the content out there, it has become much more challenging to hold readers' attention. No one's going to read for an extended period of time, unless the content is unique and engaging.

An opening paragraph of a blog post is crucial to keep your reader interested in your writing. Blog posts should always start with something interesting like an amazing quote, a thought-provoking question, or a bold statement.

Targeted Audience

A good blog post is the one which targets a specific audience, depending on the topic and relevance of the post. In order to write a good post, you should know who your audience is and what they are searching for. Targeting an audience is vital to make sure your content reaches the right kind of readers who are interested in the category on which the post is written. A post that's targeted is more effective in attracting more traffic to your blog as well as keeping the readers glued.

Many blogs become successful by smartly guessing the demands and interest of their audience; however, it should be done in a professional way. Consider using different tools available on the internet to determine the requests your readers might make. Some of these tools might include Twitter Advanced Search, Keyword Tools. SEMrush, and many others.

Unique and Interesting Content

Excellent blog posts not only manage to capture the reader's attention through engaging headlines and opening sentences but also maintain interest throughout the post. The content of any blog post should be exciting and unique. Make sure the reader isn't bored and reads the the entirety of your content. Any point or opinion discussed in the post should be supported by some evidence or logic to present your thoughts clearly to the readers. High authority, trustworthy links are great when possible. Clear, comprehensive, and unambiguous writing always attracts the readers and keeps them involved.

Using Subheadings And Smaller Paragraphs

A well-presentable blog post is essential to make it easily readable for the users. Majority of the people skim through a blog post before deciding to read it, so it is important to format the blog posts properly. It can be done by dividing a post into several headings and subheadings with small paragraphs to clearly indicate the topic of each section.

Using bullet points and numbering can be done to make it easy on the reader’s eyes and keep them engaged throughout the article. Design, style, and format of the blog should be selected appropriately according to the type of blog.

Some the tips in using bullet points are:

• Treat the bullets as small headings to write concise and clear points.
• The bullets should be symmetrically formatted.
• Avoid excessive bullet points

Images

Visual content is the tried and tested method of immediately capturing the user’s attention. Captivating pictures can boost the traffic of your blog quickly and easily. You should take or design your own unique images for the blog. If you can't find or design original images yourself, there are numerous online free resources available to get the photos for your content. Consider programs like Canva, websites like Pexels, Morguefile, and Pixabay for open-sourced, copyright free photos.

SEO Optimization

SEO is an essential part of any kind of online content, including blogs. Organic searches are a huge part of the traffic blogs will see. Your content must follow the SEO best practices and the media used in your website is SEO optimized for higher ranking on the search engine result pages.

Some of the tips of optimizing a blog post are:

• Write an appropriate meta title
• The meta description should be added to clearly describe the post
• Focus keywords should be used
• Images and video should be optimized.
• Using internal links for optimization.

If you need any help in setting up a blog and writing good and captivating blog posts, you should considered Robot Author for further help with streamlining the process of creating great online content for your blog.

How Taking Action Can Get You Leads

Instead of waiting for leads to come to you, go to them! Many people just build an opt-in page or a squeeze page and wait for leads to sign-up or reach out to them - so instead of waiting for people to find your store and buy from you - actively go out and find prospects.

Look for questions that are being asked, which are relevant to what your business provides, on forums, Q&A sites (like Yahoo Answers or Quora) and social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Now take a couple of minutes to answer those questions, making sure you provide value first and foremost. This will help you gain extra exposure for your business, help build you up as an authority in your niche, start to build trust between you and possible customers and potentially land you some sales.

For example, if you have an SEO service, look for questions on the best ways to optimize websites. Then you could leave an answer such as, “Here are 3 tips I find work well…(insert your tips here). If you’re after more information, I help people with their SEO, through information and doing it all for them, and here’s a link to an article I wrote listing 17 tested ways to improve your search engine optimization.” You’ve already given great information and value in your answer, making people more likely to click through to your site.

Another example would be if you were a chiropractor, you can find people complaining about back pain and offer a couple tips that you think might help them, followed by an offer to stop by your clinic for a free initial adjustment or consultation.

Or if you were in the weight loss niche, you could find people asking questions on the best ways to lose weight, give them a few tips, and then link to a longer video or blog post of yours mentioning even more tips perhaps with an offer to sign-up for a free newsletter, which can be used to try to drive them into your main offer.

One last example, of an awesome way to go to leads instead of waiting for them to come to you, was when I first started out online, I decided to just be an affiliate for some diamond sites (where I’d earn 5% to 15% per sale through my link). I would search the internet for leads of people asking questions on diamonds, trying to see if they found a good deal, etc., and then offer to do a free analysis for them. I would often times end up finding better deals through one of the sites I was an affiliate for (sometimes I’d even have a coupon or discount through the site), pass on my affiliate link to the specific diamond, and make a nice commission when they bought it. All this was done while coming off as being a super nice guy helping them out (even if I mentioned that it was an affiliate link).

Don’t underestimate the power of going to leads instead of waiting for them to come to you! In fact, it’s important to note that this doesn’t just have to be done with consumer leads. You can apply the same methods to finding other businesses to partner with, for instance, and proactively reaching out to them to try to land a deal. Or even proactively going out to leads in the media to see if they’d want to run an article or story on something that you’re an expert in related to your niche. Even taking just an hour or two a week doing this can have huge benefits for your business.

Although you can manually search for leads out on the internet, if you get serious enough about this technique, there are tools out there like WebFire.com that can help you do this and more.

Go looking for leads, instead of waiting for them to come to you. Look on forums, Q&A sites (like Yahoo Answers) and social media (such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to find questions being asked that are relevant to your offer. Answer those questions, providing good value, to increase your exposure and potentially make sales.

For help with finding leads after what you offer, you can check out a demo of WebFire's tools here and grab a special deal!  Web Fire

How to Go From Having Customers Balking at Your Price to Being Ready to Buy – the Power of the Word “Only”

How items are described and the words we use to frame situations can have a big impact on how we then think about a scenario. Just as saying, “I cut my finger, but there’s only a little blood” versus, “I cut my finger and there’s blood everywhere,” paint two very different pictures, the words you use to describe your pricing can make a big difference to your sales. Something as small as just putting the word “only” before your pricing can increase your sales.

For example, if your price point is $97, instead write "Only $97." Psychologically, by putting “only” in front of the price, you are making little of the price, implying that it isn’t that big, and is a good deal.

While it may seem small, little tweaks can have a big impact on conversions. How we “frame-up” and train our customers to think about our pricing can influence their buying decision. By using the word “only” before your price (eg, “Only $97” vs. “$97”) it psychologically implies the value you are getting is greater than the small amount you are paying.

For more tips and tricks on increasing sales, marketing strategies and ways to make more money in your business, check out this book 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!.

How To Unban Your Banned Facebook Advertising Account

There is nothing more frustrating than going to run a Facebook ad and seeing it disapproved or banned completely. Even worse is when Facebook deactivates your ads account as a whole. People experience this with their business and personal accounts all the time. It can be devastating, especially if you can't get back online. Still, if your account has been banned from running ads, it may not be the end of the world.

New or Reinstated

The First step you will need to take is to figure out what's going on and with which account. If your Facebook business account has been disabled, you may simply be able to create a new one and try to be careful in the future. If your personal Facebook account has been disabled, however, there may be something going that is much more serious. Creating a new personal Facebook account for ads will probably not be possible since Facebook is usually very meticulous about tracing duplicates.

First Things First, Visit The Ads Manager

Before you do anything, you will want to visit your main marketing control center on Facebook, the Facebook Ads manager for business. Once you're in the Facebook Ads Manager, you should see a yellow bar at the top that indicates your account is no longer active. This box should contain a link that you can click. Once you click, it should guide you through a series of instructions and questions that you guide you through the process of reinstating your account.

Alternatively, you can also go all the way up to the support center, which may be hard to spot at first. It should appear in the top-right corner at a "?" logo. A scroll-down menu will pop out. Navigate to the bottom of the screen where it says you need "more help" and contact customer support.

Check Your Email

If for some reason you're not seeing this yellow bar and the Facebook ads manager isn't working for you, check your email. Check both your spam and your inbox folders to see if Facebook contacted you there. This email, too, should contain a link guiding you through the process.

Go Directly To The Source

If neither of the above options are working for you, you can still appeal directly to Facebook, depending on the nature of your concern. If your Facebook ads account was simply restricted, for example, because it was flagged for suspicious activity, you can visit this linkand follow the steps there to contact Facebook directly. Meanwhile, if your account was disabled completely, you can contact them here.

There is a real possibility that Facebook may have been wrong, or we simply made a simple mistake that Facebook may understand. Simply explain your situation politely and diplomatically, and with as much information and detail as possible. If you word your appeal right, you may get your ads account back in business.

Prevention is The Best Medicine

Having your Facebook ads account disabled for any reason can be disastrous, and a downright business nightmare. It may not be the end of the world, but if you can avoid this ordeal, do so at all costs. Prevention is usually key, and you should consider the following points to stay in business and on top of your Facebook ads game:

-Familiarize yourself with all of Facebook's guidelines and Ad policies, any violations could get you cut off the platform completely, and you don't want that!
-Have a legal expert draft your privacy policy, refund policy, terms & conditions, and custom disclaimers. They are required, well-written ones are a plus
-Landing pages, in most cases should include your business name and contact information
-Optimize user experiences. Don't advertise sites full of pop-ups, broken links, or poorly structured text that provides them with a poor experience
-Don't publish ads that are spammy, clickbaitish, or even borderline offensive
-Always make sure all info is 100% accurate and true in all your content
-Once your account is reinstated (if disabled), try to use a different payment method from the old one in order to avoid an accidental penalty from Facebook, and having to go through this again.

Since you're already doing advertising on Facebook, you should definitely check out this free trial of Automated Ads where you can automate your Facebook advertising as though you have a pro ad manager but without the need of paying a fortune!

How Outsourcing An Offer That You Sell Can Make More Money For Your Business

There’s only so much time in the day, and although it can be a great idea to add extra services that you sell and fulfill yourself, it’s not always practical. This is why it can be a great idea to look for other services or offers that you can sell yourself but easily outsource to others to do with little to no work on your part.

For instance, you might be a web designer that often gets requests to create and add videos to your clients’ sites, but it might either be very time consuming or nearly impossible for you to create nice looking videos to sell as a service even if you could get hundreds to thousands of dollars per sale for them.

Instead of just passing on that easy money, why not look for others online who already offer those services, reach out to them, markup their prices (or make them more “done for you” to increase the value and prices you can charge) and get permission to use their testimonials, social proof, examples, sales pages, etc. as your own (or that you can modify) to sell to your own clients. This can be a great way of making extra money at huge margins.

For instance, there’s often places online like Fiverr.com, Craigslist.com, Freelancer.com, etc., that have tons of workers for almost anything you can think of. In some cases, you can find workers who can make nice looking videos for $25 to $50 (less in some cases) and you could turn around and sell that service for hundreds to even thousands of dollars.

We’ve done that with a variety of services ranging from social media management to video creation, and it’s easy money without any work or extra hassles on our part. And it’s a win-win, because our prospects really wanted those offers and would’ve likely bought something similar at some point, so why not have them buy from us?

Adding a couple of these services of your own can be super easy, add almost no work to your plate, but make you a fortune almost completely hands free!

So be on the lookout for other services or offers that you can sell that you’re able to outsource to others for pennies on the dollar. This can add some easy money to your sales funnels without adding extra work for you to do.

For more great marketing and sales tips to increase your business, check out this book 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!.

How to Use a Sense of Urgency to Increase Your Sales: Offering a Limited Time Deal

A sense of urgency can be a great motivator, both in encouraging a sale and in life. To use urgency in business, look at offering limited time deals, especially ones that don't last more than a few days tops.  And if you have an e-mail list, mail them a lot more on the final day with reminders to the deadline.  You'll often get most of your sales on the final day! Countdown timers can be another great way to emphasize this.  The idea is similar to furniture stores that seem to always have sales that end on the weekend... even though we all know they'll probably have another sale in a week or two, we're more likely to buy now if we think there's a sale on it now vs. later.  People like to procrastinate, so limited time deals can get them off their butt to take action.

For example, if you run a gym, you may run a sale on gym membership, where if they sign up over the next 3 days they receive a discount on the total price, or X amount of personal training sessions as a bonus. The time limit creates a sense of urgency, encouraging people to buy that may have sat on the fence or procrastinated otherwise.

One huge marketing tip that we’ve perfected over the years, which has made us a lot of money, is a limited time deal method that we call the 3 Day Money Maker or the 1, 2, 3 Limited Time Offer. It can especially work well if you have an e-mail list and can e-mail them about the special offer.

Here’s how it works. You setup a special offer (ideally either a big discount like 50% or a big bonus to include with it) that only lasts for three days. We typically either start this on a Thursday or Friday and have it end over the weekend on midnight (either Saturday or Sunday night). On the first day, you only e-mail your list once to announce the special deal, provide them with a link to the sales page to buy it, etc.. You then tell them that the deal ends on midnight on X Day (three days from then). You typically will get some initial sales then, but not necessarily a ton. Then on the second day, you send them one e-mail in the morning and one e-mail later in the afternoon or evening. You likely will get few if any sales then, but that’s okay. The third day is where the real magic happens. On the third day, which is the final day of the sale, you e-mail them once in the morning, once in the mid to late afternoon, and once in the late evening. Your subject lines should increase the sense of urgency with lines like “Final Chance – 50% Off Deal Ends Today” and “Only Hours Left to Save 50%” or “Final Warning – Deal Ends in a Couple Hours” (they don’t have to be exactly that, but you get the general idea of making it seem urgent).

The final day, especially the final hour or two, will get A LOT of sales typically, especially in the final minutes of the special offer. In fact, we’ve found that if you leave the offer up until the morning, you can get several sales in the wee hours of the morning that think they gamed you by getting the deal just after it technically was meant to close. Using this method properly exactly as we laid out can make some businesses more money over a few days than they might make in several weeks or more!

Think about how you can create a time sensitive deal where people only have a limited time to take you up on it. The sense of urgency encourages people to buy. If you have an email list, constantly remind people of the deadline, as often the most sales will happen in the last day near the end.

For other cool strategies and tricks to increase your business, check out this book full of marketing and sales tips 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!.

How Going For The "Big Fish" Deals Can Increase Your Business

Too often business owners try to fight over the scraps. They try to make deals or land sales with anyone and everyone that they can find, regardless of if those deals are barely worth any money to them.

It’s amazing what can happen when you try to go for the bigger clients or choose bigger businesses to partner with. Just a single deal can often make for a very good month (or even year!).

There’s two main ways of doing this. First, you can target more high-end prospects with higher end offerings. By raising your prices and offering more “done for you” services and products, you can try to target the elite buyers instead of focusing on being the low-priced leader barely scraping by. The second way is to try to focus on big “competitors,” or on other business owners who are far bigger than you in a similar market, but not necessarily competing, and then trying to strike a deal with them to sell or promote your offers (for a big cut). If you make this hands-free, super easy, and very profitable for them, you’d be surprised how many are willing to do deals with you.

One way of doing the second suggestion here is by offering to white label your product or service. This is where you allow someone to sell your offer as their own while you do all the work to fulfill it. This can be a win-win for both, as they can get a good cut of the sale for doing virtually nothing except making easy sales for you, while you fulfill the sales, do the support, and make lots of extra sales without having to spend money on advertising or do any marketing yourself. A single big fish deal like this can make an entire business.

One thing that still amazes us to this day is that it’s often just as hard to make a huge sale or business deal as it is to make a tiny sale or business deal, yet the vast majority of people tend to focus on the little fish because they don’t think they’re able to land a bigger deal! This can be applied to almost any aspect of business – whether it be finding big players to partner with, selling high end products / services, or even just being an affiliate for more expensive products! Quite often times it’s just as hard to sell a $5,000 product as it is to sell a $50 product, as long as you’re targeting the right kind of prospects. One just results in you making a lot more.

Try going for the big fish now and then, whether by going after more elite prospects, at higher prices with better offers, or by seeking out big partnerships to do white label deals, where they sell your offers for you for a cut.

For more great marketing and sales tips to increase your business, check out this book 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!.

How Focusing on the Benefits of Your Offer Can Help Convert Sales

So how can focusing on the benefits of your offer increase your sales? It’s a marketing technique that encourages customers to focus on the end result that your product will give them, which is a powerful motivator to encourage customers to buy.

Your offer will have features (specifications) and benefits (the end result). In your marketing focus on the benefits of your service/product, instead of the features. It’s the benefits that sell your product, not the features. For example, does a person buying an anti-aging cream want to know that it contains the ingredient Q10 or that it visibly reduces wrinkles and makes them look younger? Think about how you can use the benefits your product provides in your marketing - you can still list the features, but link them to the benefit that the feature will give your customer.

For example, if you have a business selling a course teaching guitar lessons, you might have three main features that you could translate into benefits for your students:
Feature 1: Over 50 pages of guitar lessons
Benefit 1: Learn to play the guitar in under 3 hours!
Feature 2: Get training on how songs are made.
Benefit 2: You’ll be able to create your very own songs!
Feature 3: Practice on over a dozen songs with step by step instructions.
Benefit 3: You’ll be able to play over a dozen top songs in no time!
Each time, the emphasis is on what the student is actually getting out of the feature by explaining the end result that they’ll receive from that feature.

It’s amazing the difference changing your sales pitch from focusing on features to focusing on benefits instead can do. We’ve seen pitches go from poor conversions to great conversions just by changing that up.

One big trick that we’ve learned over the years is that you can even start your own side businesses mostly hands free by utilizing this concept! To do this fairly easy trick, all you have to do is look for other offers that seem to have lots of happy customers (testimonials, reviews, case studies, etc.) but don’t do a good job on the sales page of talking about the benefits. Many service providers on places like Fiverr.com and other “services for sale” type sites often do a poor job at this, but you can either create your own service (can also work with products) where you use them to fulfill the work for you but with a better sales page, or you can just reach out to them and ask if you can use their testimonials, case studies, etc. as long as you use them to provide the service that you’ll be selling to your prospects. Many are happy to agree to such a thing, and this allows you to literally be selling something within a day without having to do much of any ongoing work yourself. All you do is make a better pitch and sell it yourself!

So, in your marketing, look at how you can emphasize the benefits that customers receive from your service, as opposed to focusing on the features. You can still list the features, as they are important, especially with certain products, but link them to what the customers will get out of that feature. Why should the customer care about that feature - what end result does it deliver to them?

To find out how other simple tweaks can drastically improve your sales, check out this survey tool that helps analyze your business for areas of improvement BizFire's Free Business Analyzer and Growth Tool.

How to market to B2B Lead

One of the most important things to understand is that leads are far more than just random people who might be interested in your business. A lead is someone who needs what your business has to offer. The only thing you should have to do is capture their attention and easily be able to convince them that your products and services supply that need.

The generation of high quality leads is the most important part of business-to-business(B2B) marketing. Solid leads ensure steady growth and income. Some of the most important straategies you can consider are:

Creating and Publishing High-Quality Content Regular

All the techniques and strategies to promote your business and generate more leads boil down to the one thing that is most important in any online presence, the content. It's true to say that content is the king in any regard. You must make sure that the material published on your webpage is high-quality, reliable, and engaging to your users.

High-quality content enhances the reliability and credibility of your business and further plays a huge role in expanding your customer base via better ranking on search engines. Make sure that your website is providing some insightful information to your visitors and is not dull in tone and writing style.

Regular and consistent content publication is also key in keeping customers engaged with your business and any of the latest updates associated with it. An informative, engaging, and entertaining piece of content will grab eyeballs and establish loyalty among customers.

Develop Referral Programs

Research has shown that B2B companies with good referrals programs have a 70% higher conversion rates and good sales as well. A satisfied customer will market your business to others via word of mouth. Referral programs are essential in the success of any business.

There are many ways of creating a good program. You can create referral codes that are easily customized and provide discounts to potential customers. It facilitates the marketing team of a company to determine the source of the majority of your leads and to learn how many of them are converting into loyal customers for your products or services.

Create an Optimized and Engaging Landing Page

The landing page of your business website must be able to captivate the users' attention via proper design and be stylish. You have to set it apart from competitors, so consider viewing their landing pages first.
The page should be optimized according to the SEO standards. Moreover, it's unnecessary to add all of your most generous offers and discounts on the landing page because research suggests that a grand, single offer is far more enticing to potential customers rather than aoverwhelming them numerous offers placed on the same page.

The goal of the business should be made crystal clear on the landing page. Your message about your products, services, and unique selling proposition should be unambiguous. The primary goal of an optimized landing page is to convert the users into leads, rather than conversions. Make the content exciting and engaging for the users and convince them of the importance and quality of your business.

Landing Page Forms

The forms used on a landing page should be clear, concise, and engaging, which makes it easier for potential leads to enter their information. In this way, you can create B2B leads and market your business successfully.

Marketing via Social Media for B2B Lead Generation

Social media has become an essential part of peoples' lives around the world. Such heavy use of social media means your business has a good chance of attracting people from social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Company pages on LinkedIn are also perfect for lead generation with professionals and entrepreneurs. Linkedin is an ideal B2B marketing platform. Such professionals often search LinkedIn for products and services as well as employees. Your business standing out on LinkedIn, could be a major key to success.

Marketing through social media is also crucial because businesses can interact with potential customers directly and answer their queries instantly. As a result, users are more likely to take interest in your business, following any new updates about it through social media accounts.

Social media advertising doesn't just work for consumer marketing models. Various platforms on social media, including Facebook, are becoming popular marketing tools for B2B leads.

Ads on these websites reach hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes more. They can be specifically targeted to a group of users based on their gender, age, and interests. As a result, many highly relevent leads can be generated this way.

Pay-Per-Click

Pay-per-click (PPC) is a highly efficient but expensive tool for marketing and lead generation. If your marketing is laser-focused on the target audience of your business, you are likely to generate plenty of leads via PPC. However, modern technology, like different ad blockers, can impede this process because it is also possible that some of your targeted users may not even view the ads if they are blocking them.

Automatated Programs

If you need help marketing your business and B2B lead generation, you might be interested in the Macroleads program for an easy way to generate successful B2B leads marketing. You can automate and streamline the process saving you time while simultaneous increasing the efficiency of your marketing.

How to Make More Money Without Having to Look for More Customers

It’s often a lot easier to sell to your current customers than to get a new customer. They already like and trust you and know your product/service works. Tap into that opportunity by looking at what else you can sell to your customers that compliments what they bought previously.

For example, if you have a resume writing service, you could go out to recent customers and also offer an additional service where you submit their resume to X amount of job ads and write a customized cover letter for each ad, and also submit their resume to several recruitment agencies.

One of our followers once had a tech business where he sold server management services, and he was asking me how to increase sales. After pointing out how it’s often much easier to sell to existing customers than get new ones, I asked him what kind of stuff or things his current customers seem to want or ask him for. As I suspected, they were often asking for things like websites, ranking help, etc. among other things. But to my surprise, he wasn’t offering any of these services (or even taking a cut from others he referred them out to). Months later I heard from him that he finally put my advice into action and said that he instantly saw a big boost in sales, and then months after that I heard that he increased his sales to something around 66% more with just adding a couple other offers that he’d approach existing customers on. He admitted that he wasn’t really even trying hard, and that if he gave it some more thought, he likely could’ve more than doubled his existing sales. That’s the power of selling to your existing customers with relevant offers that they likely already need!

Since your customers are going to be buying related products and services anyway, you might as well have them buy it from you! And even if you can’t offer the product or service directly yourself, you can easily reach out to those who can supply them and work out a commission deal for referrals. Reselling to your current customers is often a lot easier and less costly that trying to obtain a new customer. So try reaching out to your current and past clients with a complimentary offer to what they’ve bought in the past.

For other marketing tips on how to maximize revenue from your current customers, and refine your current sales funnel and offerings, check out this tool: BizFire's Free Funnel Maker & Analyzer.

How to Convert More Sales By Using The Power of A Guarantee

Offering a guarantee is a great way to make it easier for customers to buy. It takes the risk out of the purchase for them, as it gives them an out if they don’t like the product. Psychologically, it also gives them confidence in your product - as why would you be offering a guarantee if you weren’t confident in your product? Now, to be clear, make sure you do offer a great product before you whack an awesome guarantee on it!

For example, if you have a mattress company, you could offer a guarantee and word it like this: “Try our mattresses risk free for 30 days - In the unlikely event that you’re not 100% satisfied with your mattress we will give you 100% of your money back.” A guarantee like this takes the risk out of buying for your customers and gives them confidence in your product. Most people won’t take advantage of the guarantee and the amount of returns you’ll have versus the increase in sales will be well worth it.

And having said that, it’s often best to be fairly laid back on your guarantees. If you have crazy fine print or rules to claim the refund, you’ll just encourage chargebacks, piss off your customers (potential future buyers), etc.. It pays to be nice and laid back to an extent.

So consider offering a guarantee that takes the risk out of the purchase for the customer (make sure you have a good quality product that you’re willing to back). Make your guarantee bold and visible, and the amount of extra sales should far outweigh those that make use of the guarantee.

For other tips on increasing your sales, check out his book: 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!

How Creating A Sense of Urgency Can Help Improve Sales: Reducing/Offering Free Shipping Within A Certain Time Frame

Don’t you hate it when you’re searching for an item, find it at an amazing price, then see that shipping is going to cost you an arm and a leg? One way to increase your sales, especially over a short period of time, is to reduce the cost of your shipping, or offer a sale period time where shipping is free. By putting a time limit on when you make free shipping available, you add a sense of urgency, encouraging customers to buy now, as opposed to at a later date. It’s also a good way to encourage customers who may have been on the fence to make a purchase now.

For example, say you have a business that sells gardening supplies online. Reach out to your customers and let them know that for any supplies ordered by midnight on Sunday, you’ll offer free delivery. If you have regular customers that place large orders with you, you may even want to reach out and call them. On your website, make sure it’s clear that you have this offer available for a limited time - it may be a pop up on your website or the first thing your customer sees.

So consider, for a limited time, offering reduced or free shipping on your products. The limited time frame creates a sense of urgency, encouraging customers to purchase now, as opposed to at a later date, and encourages customers who may have been on the fence to make the purchase.

For more tips on boosting sales within your business, check out this book 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!.

How Contests Can Be A Great Source of New Targeted Leads

Contests can be a great way to grab more leads or prospects, get feedback or testimonials from existing customers, encourage participation or attendance on webinars, and more. And, it’s not like you have to give away a car or something crazy expensive. In fact, often times cheaper giveaways will help increase your conversions even more (perhaps because they think they’ll have a better chance of winning?).

For instance, you can run an ad where you’re advertising a contest for a free drone that you’re selling. Anyone who enters you know is probably a potential prospect, as they’re interested in the drone that you sell. When you do that, you can immediately advertise a special deal you have on them in case they don’t win (and offer to refund if they do) and want to get it right away. The benefit here is that you can get dirt cheap clicks and leads when advertising this way (on places like Facebook), all while building up a very targeted list (we’ve built up some big mailing lists and businesses this way at a fraction of the cost of what our competitors pay for ads).

You can also use contests as a way to build up your testimonials. Offer to enter customers into a contest when they submit any testimonials or feedback about your product. People love contests, which is why it can be a great way to get them to take action.

So consider using contests to get lots of cheap traffic and leads to check out your offers. Or, alternatively, use contests to encourage testimonials or feedback on your products.

For more help getting targeted leads, check out the WebFire tool here Web Fire.

How To Sell To Other Businesses

Business to marketing seems like a foreign language to many people who are trying it for the first time. The consumer markets seems so much plainer and easier, after all, we're dealing with every day people. With businesses we feel we are dealing with some mysterious entity or some divine VIP, a thing whose persona is foreign to everything we knew in the every day human consciousness.

The reality that most people miss, and it's a well-kept secret, businesses are people. They are decision makers, executives, highly paid company officers, and even midgrade managers. At the end of the day though, they are people, selling to other businesses is no different than selling to people, except that you have to consider the kind of person you're selling to. Much of this involves trying to get into a person's head. What does a business owner or manager need and/or want? What things will improve their lives, and more importantly, the operations of their business? Answering these questions is the first key to selling to other businesses.

1: Identify Your VIP

The first step in creating a strong pitch for your product and service is considering your VIP, there may be more than one to consider depending on how the decisions are made. You have to know who you're selling to and then consider how your business can benefit them personally. As we discussed, you're dealing with real people, and they taking their own needs and desires into consideration as well as their roles in serving the greater needs of the company. Is your contact a buyer, a manger, or a business owner?

Depending on who you're speaking to, you'll want to come with ideas and features about what you have to offer and how it makes their lives easy as well benefiting their employer.

2: Don't Just Sell, Give Them Something They Can Use

Whoever your VIP may be, you can expect that someone has found them too, and they probably get multiple pitches a day for what you have to offer. A simple letter with a sales pitch is no longer enough to draw people in anymore. Because of this, you want to attach your sales pitch to something they can use. Many companies do this by offering white papers. White papers may be written as guides on important industry topics and trends, and may even highlight problems the industry is facing. This can be accompanied by a pitch explaining how you offer a solution. Either way the white papers are free and useful, so there's no harm in reading.

Writing effective white papers isn't easy, but it can be done.

3: Start With Value Over Price

When you're making a pitch to any business, you may find yourselves in the middle of a bidding war. Too many entrepreneurs focus in only on their prices as a way to put their best foot forward. While pricing certainly is important, it's far more vital to highlight the value your product has to offer. What can your product do that others can't. Can it save the company time or money even while requiring an investment? Can it make life easier for managers or help improve employee morale and productivity?

When you're making your bid don't advertise that you are cheap. If anything this will raise red flags if it's all you have to offer.

4: Highlight The Business Benefits

Whether it's in consumer to consumer or business to business marketing, even professionals have made this terrible mistake in copy-writing. Never just tell someone about the features of what you have to offer. Features are boring and no one wants to hear you list them all day long. They want to know how what you have to offer is going to solve a common problem. Just don't tell them “My computers have a lot of RAM” but instead consider, “Are you tired of losing valuable company time and money waiting for your computers to load? With our CPUs high RAM capability your upload, download, and processing speeds will be through the roof. You'll save time, money, and your business will be moving at lightning speed when processing your data!”

Benefits are everything. Nobody wants to know what you can do, everyone wants to know what you can do “For me”

5: Make it Easy To Act

Your call to action (CTA) is the grand finale of any pitch you write. It needs be dazzling and out of the park, but more importantly, it needs to be easy to act upon. Links in emails should be large, thought not obnoxious, and easy to see and click on, and MUST NOT BE BROKEN OR INACCURATE. Contact info should be prominent, accurate, and very visible. Like it or not, nobody likes a hassle. If your final pitch is hard to act on, even a little, or your lead finds it hard to get in touch you may lose your sale to someone else out of sheer convenience.


6: Gather Leads
This probably should have been the first step, but you need to gather solid prospective leads to sell to. It means nothing if you have the greatest product in the world and killer sales pitch to back it up, and no relevant people to sell it to. Gathering leads can be tricky, but made much easier by programs like Macroleads that help you organize, streamline, and even somewhat automate the process.

How to Show Value and Position Your Price to Encourage Customers to Buy

One way to show value and highlight the great price you’re offering your customers is to point out when you are giving a discount or savings, as this lets customers know you’re giving them a great deal and lots of value. A discount also has a psychological effect - we feel we are getting a better deal and are more likely to buy. Seeing that an item is discounted not only is an incentive to buy it now, it can also encourage new users to buy that might otherwise have not considered it.

For example, when listing your price, you might write: "$97 --- 50% Off Today!" This makes people feel they are getting a great deal, helps them justify the purchase to themselves and is more likely to push them over the line.

If you have several similar offers that are slightly better or more/less expensive than the other, instead of just listing off the benefits of each one next to their price, you can also not only list off the savings, but say “Good Deal,” “Better Deal,” and “Best Deal” next to each one (or “Most Savings” or something similar). Never assume that people will just do the math in their head and know which one is the best deal.

Think about how you can apply this to your business. Can you put a savings amount next to a price point (eg, “$97 --- 50% Off Today!)? This makes customers feel they are getting a great deal and can encourage customers to buy that may not have bought before.

After more tips to show customers the value of your product? For more marketing tricks and strategies, check out this book here: 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!

Want to Charge More for Your Services? And Still Have People Lining Up to Buy From You? Here’s How!

So how can you charge more for your services? How can you increase your price tag and still have customers lining up to buy from you? One easy way is to change your offer from a simple product/service to a done-for-you offer. What does this mean? Check out this example below.

Say, instead of charging $5 to write an article, you instead charge $497 to $997+ to write five articles, create a blog, post the articles up, optimize it for their keywords, and have a custom graphic or two. If you were to outsource a $5 article for $3, the first example only gives you a $2 profit, or if you were to write it yourself, you'd be trading $5 for 30 minutes, at best, of your time ($10 an hour on the higher end if you’re super fast).  However, if you were to offer the second, more premium example, you could outsource the articles for $15, allocate $10 for some custom graphics on Fiverr.com, and put in $25 to $50 to outsource the custom blog with SEO (blogger.com blogs, for instance, can be made in a matter of minutes).  That's a raw cost of $50 to $100 for a $400 to $950 profit. Or, if you were to do the work mostly yourself, you'd be talking about maybe 3 to 5 hours of work, easily putting you in the range of earning $100 to $200+ per hour compared to $10 per hour just selling a $5 article.

So, see what you can add to your offer, or bundle it with, to make it a more premium offer. Or, look at how you can make your offer more “done-for-you.” and price your offer respectively. The kicker is that more people like to buy a premium offer than a basic offer, as it's more appealing and more "done-for-you" than just an item that they'd have to do all the rest of the work on themselves.  And less people offer premium services/offers, so you're competing against less.

This doesn’t just apply to services either, as the same can be done for almost any kind of product out there. For instance, instead of just selling a book on how to lose weight, you could also sell a product or program that gives them daily exercises either through e-mail, a mobile app, software, etc.. So instead of someone just reading how to lose weight, you can make it more easy and “done for you” by literally giving them a way where they simply have to follow the daily tip. Or instead of selling a 50¢ apple at a gas station, one could sell a pre-sliced apple with caramel dipping sauce ready to go for $4+ (even though the raw cost is only a tinge more than the standard apple).

One great example we’ve done is instead of selling a course on how to rank on search engines and get traffic, which would be a challenge to sell even in the $25 to $50 range, we created software that helps do a lot of those tasks for people. And instead of having a challenge of selling a course for $25 to $50, we can charge $997 / year to $2,997 / year much more easily. We’re able to do that because it’s more “done for you” and involves far less time for the end user.

A similar example outside of software was with a real estate investing instructor that we know of who at one point sold several courses on how to invest in real estate. Most of these courses originally were on the lower end of the price point, but she was able to turn those “books” into “webinar trainings” and online courses and charge closer to $997 on up, but she didn’t stop there. She was able to partner with one of us to create software that helped do what she was teaching and sold it for around $4,000 a pop. But she still didn’t stop there. She then took all her teachings and tools and basically made an offer that would be as hands free as possible for the user. That was accomplished by setting up an offer where you’d be able to purchase a $25,000 package where you’d get on a bus with others, tour dozens and dozens of homes in a day that they already did the math on and knew were awesome deals, and then be able to make offers on the spot with bankers, agents, mortgage brokers, etc. all right there with you in one place. Granted, this wasn’t for the average mom and pop investor, but for some big investors, including overseas ones looking to take advantage of the U.S. market at the time, this was an opportunity to jump into it as hands free as possible. And they were willing to pay for it.

An interesting twist on making any offer more premium or done for you is that it doesn’t have to always start with your own product or service! You can find existing service providers or products out there, see how you can make them better / more “done for you,” and then try to either form a partnership with them or just use the outsourced provider to fulfill the work for a service. A few simple tweaks to their package / offer and sales pitch can turn a $5 offer into a $500 or even a $5,000 one without even having the need to make your own offer from scratch!

Now start looking at how you can apply this to your business. How can you make your offer a premium or “done-for-you” offer by adding more things to your service or bundling your products together to give more value? This then allows you to increase your prices substantially, your premium pricing reflecting your premium product.

Now you have ideas for a premium product, need help getting leads to sell this to? For help with how to get leads to promote your product or service to, check out this cool tool: Domain Lead Pro.

How Giving Away Something of Value Can Help You Monetize Your Back End

Everybody loves a freebie! What do you currently sell, that is of value, that you could offer for free? And how can you monetize the back end of that? This works especially well if you can offer something that other businesses would normally charge for.

For example, if you have a corporate cleaning business, you could offer your first clean free, and follow up with your customer to see if they were happy with your service and would like you to continue. This is a great way to get new clients to try your service, as you’re taking all the risk out of it for them and, if you do a great job, chances are they’ll want to keep you on. The principle of reciprocity comes into play here too - you’ve given something of value to them and chances are they’ll feel the urge to do the same back.

A twist on this model is our “free plus shipping & handling” funnels, where we offer something for free on the front-end as long as the customer covers a small s&h fee (usually under $5). As long as they think the value is $20+, they’ll consider this a steal and be inclined to jump on it, even if they normally wouldn’t buy it right then and there. However, a necessity with this model is to make sure that you have a great set of upsells and a good backend to really monetize it. We typically have a continuity offer (like a membership or something along those lines), a low to medium priced offer, and ideally a high-end offer in the upsell path. The real money is made in the upsell path, as it’s hard to make a lot off a free plus s&h offer. As an added bonus with this model, you also get a lot of quality buyer leads (worth far more than non-buyer leads), without often having to pay a lot in advertising costs to acquire them. This allows you to market more offers to them in the future and make even more money off these buyer leads.

Think about something you can give away, that has value, and then look at how you can monetize the back end. Whether it is a sample of your service or a physical product, this works especially well if it something that other people usually charge for.

For more insights on how to create a sales funnel that maximizes your profit potential, check out this tool here: BizFire's Free Funnel Maker & Analyzer

How To Reach Out To Local Business Leads

For many people, their businesses are their primary source of income and the way they provide for their families. In order for a business to continue generating a steady source of income, and to grow, a business needs to seek new clients. Anyone who's been in business for a day can tell you how competitive it is. Your customers have plenty of businesses to choose from so you have to go out and find them. It's hard to be found by new customers, but luckily in the age of the internet we have thousands of platforms and means to advertise and market ourselves.

There are many ways to start with lead generation and it can be done through platforms like Google and social media. Many businesses also like to use a landing page along with other methods to generate leads. Using landing pages effectively can be a great way to gather leads, but first you have to get your leads to visit them.

Whether your business is online or offline both avenues are great for getting the word out about what your business is doing. Many believe multimedia marketing is only for the big dogs in the business, but local companies have many avenues before them as well.

1: Paper Publication Advertising

If you're trying to draw in certain groups or demographics, local magazines or newspapers may be the way to go. This is a great way to reach people locally and to reach a specific audience since magazines and paper publications that operate by subscription will cater to a certain audience. By using local publications you also have a higher probability of reaching people in the neighborhood. Even in 2020 there are still ways to be effective in newspaper advertising as well.

2: Online Paid Ads

Pay per click and similar methods of online advertising are still alive and well and with customizable tools and targeting options, ads on platforms like Google, Instagram and Facebook are becoming better than ever. These platforms allow you to set custom budgets and running times as well as specialized goals and targeting options. Social media is ideal for reaching customers because you can reach out to potentially millions or even billions all over the world, but you can narrow them to those who are most likely to take an interest in your business. Local businesses can utilize this incredible option as well, since the ads programs allow you to also target your customers geographically and may even be able to track local behaviors like store visits. Many businesses are using social media to advertise their business as well as to generate leads on platforms like Facebook. Online ads are the ideal way to reach out to potential clients and customers as well as prospective leads globally, nationally, and yes, locally, at the click of a button.

3: Google

Google is the most widely used search engine in the world. While the platform allows you to potentially reach millions or perhaps even billions of customers all over the world, it's also ideal for gathering local leads and clients as well. Did you know? More than half of smart phone users locally find services on Google by simply typing a business or service name then the words “near me” into search engines to find what they need locally. Optimizing your business webpage, landing page, and social media page as well as local results is an ideal way to find the people you need locally. All local entrepreneurs should consider optimizing their listings on Google My Business.
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4: Business Cards

Local businesses are still often relying on tried and true methods, and where the modernization of the digital age hasn't rendered these methods obsolete it has in many ways improved them. Online websites like Vistaprint make it easier than ever to print paper promotional materials like business cards and flyers to help you get the word out in person when the times comes. Design is made easy by online wizards or cheap freelancer services, and if you prefer not to wait for shipment you can even pick them up at your local Stores that offer this service.

Business cards are still a tried and true method for networking and reaching out to local clients and should be carried on you at all times. Often business owners have complained of networking and business opportunities arising in daily conversation, only to realize they had nothing to give the potential client who may have been to rushed to take down a number. Business cards are still a great way to make people aware of your business, social media pages, web pages, and may even be a great way to draw local traffics to your leads pages.

5: Direct Mail

Many in the business world still have mixed views about direct mail marketing, but it is certainly still effective even as a means of lead generation. It takes some work and research but you can market and reach out to leads effectively through direct mail marketing and it is an assured way to reach out to local leads since you know all your recipients are in the neighborhood. Direct mail marketing may not be as effective as it used to be, but many businesses are still using as effective way to expand their client base.

6: Automated Programs

One thing that's making life easier for business owners of every size and stripe, is the development of software that automates and streamlines the process. Programs like Macroleads allows you to organize your leads and reach out far more effectively to potential clients, all while saving precious time.

Why You Need Content For Your Site And Social Media?

There is no doubt about the fact that unique and attractive content is an essential part of your website and social media profiles. Excellent content, along with a well-thought out social media marketing strategy, will help your website stand out in the crowd and attract more users to your brand.

Initially, it may seem a straightforward and smooth process to write content for your website as you have to add a few pages and blog posts to your website. In actuality, the writing process is time-consuming and even exhausting to some people. Your content must be adequately planned and written for your site and social media page. You need to content to draw the right viewers in.

The quality of content primarily determines the success of a website. Other factors like design, theme, multimedia, and any others that influence the website play a secondary role. The content on your site should be done with aftermarket research and follow a reliable keyword research plan.

Content Is Used In All Things

It should go without saying that content is the most critical part of the web because it is used everywhere and for everything. Compelling content is important to increase ranking and traffic of your site. Some of the advantages of different types of content are:

• Good content increases click-throughs
• Unique and engaging web content increases the ranking of the site and improves conversions
• Attractive content like stylish images with authentic written information is necessary for good social media marketing
• Content of blog posts that is captivating maintains readers interest.
• Verified and accurate content establishes trust and bonds with customers, brands, and other companies.

Content Builds Trust

Content is one of the many ways to exhibit your business’ integrity and credibility. As a result, the audience will begin to trust your products or services, and sales will increase. By producing great content thhat reassures the customers that you're the real deal, you can set your brand apart and attract more consumers.
Building trust through good content is an excellent content marketing strategy which can be implemented in the following ways:

• Ask a renowned person related to your industry to write for your website.
• Try to get a guest post on a respected newspaper, magazine, or blog.
• Ask customers to give feedback on your website and social media accounts.
• Hire an influencer to promote your product with your content. Nowadays, many social media influencers, especially on Instagram, are doing this kind of promotional activities.

Content Creates Loyal Customers

Regular updates are necessary on your website, so providing free information to the audience of your website and social media accounts builds loyalty among the customers. If you provide valued content to your audience, they will be happy with your brand as their time spent in your business will not be wasted. As a result, whenever you publish content, your followers will keep checking in with your site and social media.

Content is important for SEO

Google’s algorithms of SEO have evolved a lot in the past few years. They have become more determined in removing any bad quality content from the top SERPs and keeping the best quality content on the top. Search engines, like Google, are continuously updating their algorithms and crawling the web to improve the quality of the search results for the user.

Google rewards fresh and up-to-date content. Hence, it is important to keep uploading new content on your website and updating the existing content as well to maintain a firm grip on the SERPs. Moreover, search engines penalize the pages which are full of keywords and using a single term too many times. It is important to produce SEO-optimized content for better ranking of your website.

Content on Social Media Improves Customer Service

Social media has bridged the gap between businesses and consumers. You can give instant replies to any of queries or feedback of the customers on social media. With time and proper social media marketing strategy, the business social media pages expand their reach and can connect with more potential customers. However, it is only possible if the content on your social media profiles is exceptional and attractive for your targeted audience.

If you are interested in producing great content for your website and social media accounts, it doesn't have to be hard. The process can easily be outsourced and automated. Programs like Robot Author are available to help.

How Offering A Premium Support Service Can Increase Your Profits And Margins

You’ve probably bought electronics before and been offered the purchase an additional warranty. Or maybe you’ve purchased furniture before and been offered a white glove service to deliver and setup your new couch.

These are all examples of premium support services that can have very large profit margins, so even if only a smaller percentage of customers take you up on them, they can add a lot to your bottom line.

Some of these premium support services can be at little to no cost to you. For instance, one business we’ve seen had a warranty offer where you could get free replacement charger cables forever on your phone, if they ever fail, for a small one time extra fee as long as you just cover the small shipping and handling fee. However, these cables have such huge margins anyway that the small S&H fee literally covered the cost of the cables and the shipping. The “warranty” that was sold was essentially 100% pure profit, despite how it would appear to be an awesome deal for the buyers (paying $5 for S&H instead of $29 for a new cable sounds like, and is, a pretty good deal).

You can even sell access to one on one help, a Facebook group page for extra (and faster) help, etc. Some of these offers you can literally put together in a few minutes, yet some people will naturally buy them just because they think they might have a use for it one day.

Another example would be offering faster support, faster shipping, faster service, etc. All of these can have huge margins for little to no extra work!

So brainstorm at least a couple of extra premium support services that you can offer your buyers (like extra warranties, faster support, faster service, etc.) that come with huge margins despite not really increasing your costs much, if at all.

To find out more tweaks that could drastically change and increase your business, check out our business analyzing tool here BizFire's Free Business Analyzer and Growth Tool.

How Split Testing Can Massively Increase Your Conversions and Sales

Too many business owners and marketers will only create one version of an offer, sales page, opt-in page, ad, etc., and simply hope that it works. If it does, they’re happy. If it doesn’t, they think that the offer simply doesn’t work.

That’s a horrible way to go about it. If your first attempt doesn’t work, you’ll want to create several different versions of all of those to see if maybe it’s something in your sales copy. And even if you get lucky and get a winning offer right off the bat, you’ll want to constantly test new things in the sales copy to see if you can increase clicks to your ads, lead conversions to your opt-in pages, sales to your sales page, and upsells to your upsell pages.

It doesn’t have to be hard. Even just changing around headlines or little things here and there can often have drastic effects. For instance, you might find that changing a headline and shortening down the length of an opt-in page might boost your lead conversions from 20% to 30%.  That alone could increase your sales by 50%! And by tweaking an upsell page just a bit, you might find that you move conversions there from 5% to 8%, which would be a 60% increase on the backend! Little changes can go a long way and can easily turn a loser campaign into a winner.

And the best part about all this is that little increases in conversions here and there can be responsible for massive increases in money made overall. But having said that, you want to be sure to focus your efforts first on the parts that make you the most money. For instance, improving your front-end conversion rates or those on your biggest money making upsell will almost certainly make you a lot more than focusing on your fourth upsell that doesn’t sell much currently (not to say you can’t improve that and make more, though).

One awesome free tool you can use is BizFire’s Funnel Maker, which you can get for free at www.bizfire.com/funnelmaker. This tool not only lets you build out funnels to simulate a real business, but it lets you see what happens when you increase or decrease conversions in various parts. It’s perhaps our favorite tool to play around with and plan out our businesses!

So make sure you are always testing new sales copy and upsells in order to see if you can increase your opt-in rate, sales conversions, or upsell conversions. Little changes can often have drastic effects that can turn a bad campaign into a winner.

And to check out the Funnel Maker software for free to see how even small changes can massively impact your conversions, click here BizFire's Free Funnel Maker & Analyzer.

How to create a better Facebook Ad?

An attractive and engaging Facebook ad is the result of a combination of effective strategies. No advertisement can be declared to be perfect as some ads work better than others due to various reasons. The competition in the Facebook ad market is becoming intense. More and more people are realizing the power of this social media giant and hope to utilize the platform to advertise their products and services.

Laser-focused targeting and creativity in Facebook ad creation are some of the essential techniques in creating a great Facebook ad. However, here are some of the other important strategies from which can be adopted to create a better Facebook ad:

Target a specific Audience

The first step in the creation of an ad is to keep in mind the audience for which you are writing the ad. The audience varies from business to business and the primary purpose of your ad.

A tempting thing to do is create a general ad and target millions of people through a single ad. However, this method is like shooting a gun in the air, and probably won't be pretty for your ROI. A better way to attract people is to create a specific Facebook ad in your niche and focus on a smaller number of people that fit your target customer criteria. An ad that's targeted is more likely to engage people because it will be tailored specifically to that audience.

While creating an ad, you must make sure to answer two fundamental questions: "who will be seeing this ad?" and "What is the message of this ad?"

There is no definite number of people that should be targeted through a Facebook ad. The number itself is highly dependent on your type of ad, kind of organization, the type of the audience, and the scale of your customer base. After selecting the target audience, write an ad that speaks directly to the audience. Make sure that the message of the ad resonates with the readers.

Create Multiple Ads and Test Them

Even after spending hours in creating a Facebook ad, it can fall flat. Hence, you should always create different versions of every ad and test them with your target audience to get an idea of which one works the best.

It is essential to follow the formal structure of the Facebook ad, which has three levels – campaign, ad sets, and ads. The process is started by selecting the aim of your ad and naming the campaign. In the ad set level, the target audience is selected, along with the budget and a few other options. Finally, the ad is designed in ads level.

Facebook allows ads published to upload up to six pictures for each ad. Once the ad is posted, these images are automatically rotated by Facebook. It means that Facebook will show all variations of your ad, and the ad, which is resonating the most with the readers, will ultimately be shown more. Thus, creating different versions of an ad and testing them is important to expand your customer base.

Advertise Discounts and Offers

Many people don't even try some new products because they have a fear of wasting their money, which is proved by the psychological concept call loss aversion – people are more fearful of losing things than gaining. To overcome this barrier, you should offer free products, offers like "Buy One Get One Free," discounted products, and free delivery. If you can afford it, you should conduct weekly or monthly free giveaways as well because, in recent times, they have become a vital strategy in cultivating a loyal customer base. These tactics will ensure that the customers are attracted to your ad and more likely to contact you if the offer is enticing for them.

Make sure your ad stands out

There are hundreds of thousands of ads running on Facebook on a daily basis. It has become very difficult to capture the attention of the users. Therefore, it is important to design your ad uniquely and outstandingly to make sure the user clicks on it and not just scroll it down like any other ordinary ad.

The overall design, style, and images used in the ad are very important in captivating the users’ attention. If you use a bright and right image according to the content of your ad, it is more likely to be clicked on by the user.

Use Call-to-Actions (CTA) feature

Along with being an attractive ad, your advertisement should make it easy for people to contact you and your company. Facebook offers a clickable CTA button through which the audience of your ad can call you or message you directly. This feature should be added appropriately in a good ad to facilitate the users in getting in touch with you.

All of these strategies will be useful to you in designing a perfect Facebook ad. Many advertising agencies and professional programs also offer their services in ad designing to make sure your ad stands out on Facebook and attract the target audience. Once you get your ads up and running, choose a Facebook Ad management system like Automated Ads to manage and optimize your ads.

Why Your Website Never Ranks Well

In terms of cost-efficiency, the most crucial method for attracting traffic to your website is through organic searches. They allow you to reach people who don't even know about your site initially but are searching for a specific product or service related to your website. The primary factor of the success in organic searches boils down to the ranking of your website on search engine results pages (SERPs).
There are a ton of factors that may contribute to your website may not be ranking well on search engines. Some of these reasons are:

A Slow Website

Millions of search results are available to the user as soon as they enter a keyword into a search engine like Google. With such a massive amount of data available on the Web, it's become challenging to hold users' attention for extended periods of time.

Pages that load faster not only provide excellent user experiences but also play a huge role in SEO ranking. Site speed is an official search ranking algorithm in Google that should be kept in mind during website development and management. If your website is not being ranked well, you must ensure that it can be loaded quickly on any desktop along with mobile devices. Mobile site speed is just as important.

Ambiguous Keywords and Title Tags

Ranking your website will become difficult; it is not clear to search engines what kind of products, services, and solutions you are providing to your users and their concerns. Content must be made clear. Make it easily understandable people, what they are reading. The use of appropriate keywords is a necessity in achieving clarity in your content.
Title tags are a crucial part of website ranking. Tags that start with a critical keywords perform much better than those in which the keyword is placed in different positions. Make sure that the title tags of your website are appropriate and work with the content of your website.

Similarly, many publishers make the mistake of writing an ambiguous descriptions and headings that are not related to the content of the page. As a result, such pages are penalized in the ranking.

Unoptimized Content

Content optimization is essential for the ranking of a website. It includes the optimization of the written content as well as images, audio, and other visuals used on a website. Many people use Google to search visual content, and if your website does not have optimized images, it is unlikely to be ranked high on the SERPs. High-quality images, videos, infographics, and other media content must be used to provide a good signal to Google for more top content ranking.

Poor Quantity and Quality of Inbound Links

Generally, a large number of links from other websites to your pages will ensure a high ranking of your website. The quality of the links also matters in this regard, so the links should originate from authority websites.
Irregular Publishing

It is not enough to just publish an optimized post on your website every week or so. Instead, the publishing should be regular and consistent to boost website rankings.

It has been shown that many websites are don't rank well because of irregular publications. Usually, SEO ranking experts suggest uploading at least two to three high-quality posts per week. Regular updates from your website help in engaging your audience, and the traffic will increase too.

The latest content on your sites makes it clear to search engines that you are still active on the website and working on it to make the content fresh and relevant. Moreover, the material should be adapted according to the circumstances of the publication time. In other words, stay up to date. This way, you're most likely to rank very high on search engines. Why? Because your page will provide relevant content about what's going on NOW.

SEO Practices are not being followed

SEO is one of the hottest topics in website management today. Many courses, books, blogs, and guides are available on the internet about the best practices of SEO. Having an SSL certification on your website, using suitable title tags, uploading relevant content, writing engaging meta descriptions, and implementing on-page SEO practices are some of the many latest SEO trends that increase the ranking of your website.

The focus of strong SEO is how content of your website will stand out in the search engines to ensure its ranking improves. If you've had trouble ranking your website, you probably haven't implemented good SEO practices.
If you have a website that's not seeing the ranks you desire consider programs like Web Fire. You'll be able to root out issues with your website and substantially improve its rankings in a fraction of the time and cost it would entail if you tried to go without.