Would a stimulus package help you start your business?

Posted by Jeremy L. Knauff on January 6th, 2009 in WMG News & Press

With the level of economic uncertainty most people are facing today, there has never been a better time to start your own business, even if it’s just to supplement your real income. For most people though, there always seem to be hundreds of reasons not to. Two of the most common excuses are money and a lack of knowledge, and while there is a certain amount of validity to that, lots of people have started and grown successful business with everything stacked against them.

Well, in the spirit of helping others get ahead, Donna Fontenot, an Internet marketing coach, php guru and all around outstanding woman, has come up with a brilliant idea. It’s called Project Jump Start, and the idea is that she and a handful of other Internet marketing experts have come together to provide seed capitol, resources and mentoring. Starting on the 25th of January, Project Jump Start will be providing $175 in cash and over $900 in valuable tools and services to one person each and every month this year!

Any more excuses?

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What marketing challenges are you facing?

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group on January 5th, 2009 in WMG News & Press

Help us to help you by letting us know what marketing challenges your facing right now. This will allow us to develop the exact information that you need so you can meet your immediate challenges and your business can grow like wildfire! We know what’s important to us, but we want to know what’s important to you.

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Your new year’s resolution is…

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group on December 31st, 2008 in Marketing Strategy

Your new year’s resolution is to spend at least 20 minutes every day actively engaged in marketing your company. Start 2009 off strong by being proactive and get ahead of the curve. Instead of waiting until you have downtime to focus on marketing, make it your first priority. You’ll find that this approach helps you to end the feast vs. famine cycle, increase your revenue and profit, and possibly more important, enjoy running your business again.

This doesn’t mean to “try” something out and see how it works. Almost any technique can produce results if you work hard at it. On the other hand, there is no technique that will produce results with a half-hearted effort. For some of you, this may mean developing the best content for your blog so that it becomes an industry hub. For others, it may mean focusing on building your email list so that you can repeatedly reach out to your members. Some of you may want to develop inbound links to rank for particular keyword phrases. What ever it is that you know you need to do, do it.

Think about the results that you’ve achieved with the effort you’ve put in so far. Now if you invest 20 minutes of every working day in this task, what sort of results do you think you can expect this time next year? Here’s a hint: It is far more than you think because your results will grow exponentially.

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7 Ways to increase your website traffic without spending a lot of money

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group on December 10th, 2008 in Internet Marketing

Most of you have a website; some of you may even have an outstanding website. Yet many of you are not getting the most from your website, which defies all logic. After all, you invested your valuable time, and likely a reasonable amount of money in your website design, so shouldn’t you see a return on your investment?

Like most things in life, once a website has been designed and has been online for a bit, the excitement wanes and it becomes less of a priority. Over time, fewer improvements are implemented, less content is added and search engine optimization is left by the by the wayside. Eventually this makes your website about as effective as that box of brochures sitting in the backroom of your office collecting dust.

Fortunately, the fix is relatively simple because once your website is up and running, investing about an hour or so each week is more than adequate in most industries to climb to the top of the search results for some of the top terms and reap the benefits of that traffic.

1. Blog at least once every week. You should spend time developing original content that your visitors will find useful, and hopefully share with others. Coming up with creative content that is more than just a rehash of what everyone else is saying can be a challenge, but it is definitely worth your time because it will make you stand out from your competitors. If you need help getting your creative juices flowing, stop by ProBlogger.net, which is run by Darren Rowse. He’s quite the genius when it comes to writing and blogging.
2. Consistently work on your search engine optimization campaign. This includes keyword research, content development, website architecture, in-bound link development and a bit more. You can either outsource your SEO to a reputable firm, or you can learn it on your own. If you choose the latter, be prepared to spend many late nights studying and be careful who you take advice from. Without hesitation, I would recommend getting a subscription to Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, which is updated regularly by one of the top minds in the industry.
3. Create profiles on social media websites. This may not send traffic to you right away, and it will probably never send it in droves, but it is still a valuable tool to increase your exposure and traffic. Your profiles should include a little bit of information about your company as well as live links to your website, and as with your main website, should be updated from time to time.
4. Advertise your website online. You can often buy advertising on quality websites for an incredible bargain through companies like Federated Media, but there are even more ways to advertise your website than the typical banner ads. Stumble Upon has an effective advertising program that can deliver an enormous number of highly-targeted visitors to your website and many search engines offer pay-per-click advertising programs. You can also buy advertising space in other people’s newsletters.
5. Advertise your website offline. You probably have other marketing materials, such as business cards, billboards or that box of brochures sitting in the backroom of your office. They should all include your website address. You can also utilize your television and radio advertising as well as your office voicemail.
6. Create an email newsletter. Many people think that they don’t have enough visitors to justify a newsletter. They are wrong. Even if you only receive five visitors per day, it gives you five opportunities to follow up with a visitor that you may otherwise never see again. The sooner that you launch your newsletter, the sooner that your list will grow to the size that you dream of. As with blogging, the key is to develop original content that your visitors will find useful. Constant Contact is a great way to manage and send your newsletters, and they offer a free trial so you can see if their system meets your needs.
7. Promote others. It may seem counter-intuitive, but in reality, helping others encourages them to help you. When another blogger notices that you’ve linked to them in a post, chances are that they will do the same for you. If you do this a few times each week, you’ll start to develop a strong roster of people who will eagerly help you achieve the exposure you’re looking for.

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Make it easy for people to do business with your company

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group on November 24th, 2008 in Marketing Strategy

When times are good, it’s easy to just go with the flow when it comes to marketing your company, but when times are tough, it becomes critical to make it easy for people to do business with your company. It’s during these challenging times that your competitors are going to do everything in their power to grab all of the remaining opportunities they can find. It’s up to you to ensure that you earn as many of these opportunities as possible by making it easy for prospects to choose you over your competitors.

The first and biggest mistake most people make in their marketing is focusing on features instead of benefits. Perhaps your company sells quality cigar humidors and your marketing materials boast about their air-tight seal, exotic hardwood construction and Spanish cedar lining. While that is certainly important to a true cigar connisuier, what really matters to them is that these features provide the benefit of ensuring their cigars maintain the proper temperature and humidity, which is crucial to their flavor. Most people won’t “do the math” to figure out what the benefits are on their own it’s your job to inform them. Another thing you should know is that most people make their decisions based on emotion and then use intellect to justify their decision after the fact. Trigger the right emotions by focusing on the benefits and you’ll have a powerful advantage over your competitors.

The second mistake most people make in their marketing is focusing on the quantity of people they reach with their message instead of focusing on reaching the right people. If you reach 100,000 people and manage to convert 10,000 of them into customers, you have probably wasted a lot of the money you invested to reach them. On the other hand, if you reach 1,000 and manage to convert 200 of them into customers, you have invested your marketing dollars much more effectively because the first example demonstrates a conversion rate of 10% while the second achieves twice that. This may seem counter-intuitive because the sales volume in the first example is much higher, but when you focus on quantity over quality:

• Your sales staff will have to work significantly harder to convert less than ideal prospect, so their effectiveness, as well as your profit margin goes down.
• Your customer service staff will have to work harder to keep less than ideal customers happy, taking time away from your loyal customers.
• You lose focus and your core business suffers, resulting in dissatisfaction from an increasing number of customers. This can have a dramatic impact on your bottom line.

The more precise you can be in targeting your prospects, the more effective your marketing will become. Rather than marketing your company as just another HR firm, you could instead market it as an HR firm that specializes in helping restaurants to meet their HR needs. Your marketing efforts will become more effective when you focus on a niche because rather than sending out bland, generalized marketing materials to prospects in various industries, you can send out marketing materials tailored to their specific needs. With this kind of focus, it also makes the decision easy when a restaurant owner needs to decide between your firm, which intimately understands their needs, and another more generalized firm.

Another mistake people make is confusing their prospects. Regardless of how complex your industry may be, you can usually distill the basic information about each of your products or services down to one or two pages. If possible, you should also offer three or four standardized packages so that your prospects can quickly see if what you offer is a fit for their needs. This will save you time and energy during the sales process by quickly weeding out the prospects who aren’t a fit, and giving the rest a solid starting point.

When developing your packages, be sure first to make them sufficiently different from each other. Second, be sure to structure them so that the value increases more dramatically than the price, which helps your prospects to justify investing in your more expensive packages. If your spa offers a level one package that consists of a thirty minute long massage and aromatherapy for $45, and a level two package that consists of an hour long massage and aroma therapy for $90, you won’t sell nearly as many level two packages as you could if you added something additional. It could be as simple as a facial, a manicure or even a small gift bag. The idea here is for the value to increase more than the price so that the logical decision is the more expensive option.

What else can you change in your marketing to make it easier for people to do business with your company?

Posted in Marketing Strategy | 1 Comment »

Do you deserve a #1 ranking?

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group on November 6th, 2008 in Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

Obviously, everyone wants a #1 ranking for the high-traffic, big-money keywords but do they deserve it? In many cases, no. Especially when they think that they should be able to have it for just a few hundred dollars. This is simply not realistic because anything worth achieving takes a proportionate amount of effort to achieve. The companies that deserve a #1 ranking are usually those that provide a quality product or service and have been working diligently at it for some time.

If you are a real estate agent in Tampa, it would make sense to want a #1 ranking for the keyword phrase “Tampa Real Estate” but this would be far outside the budget of most agents. Let’s explore the reasons behind this.

The real estate industry is extremely competitive to begin with, and the keyword phrase “Tampa Real Estate” returns almost 3 million results that you would have to compete with. These are 3 million websites run by real estate agents that have already been marketing online and many of them have invested heavily in SEO for several years. You’re not going to out rank these websites overnight. Search engine optimization usually takes time to deliver significant results, but for a keyword phrase like this, you could be looking at a year or more. Why is it so competitive? Because there is a massive amount of money to be earned by the website controlling the top listing.

Google indicates that over 165,000 searches are conducted each month for this keyword phrase. Assuming that you are only able to convert .05% of these searchers into leads, that gives you 825 leads each month. If you then convert just 1% of those leads into a home sale, you will have sold 8 (8.25 to be exact) homes. With an average home price $189,000 and an average agent commission of 6%, the revenue produced by that #1 ranking is $92,720 for that month. Now, if you’re an experienced agent, you may be able to convert many more leads to home sales, and if you have a professionally designed website, many more of your visitors may contact you, so your numbers could be higher.

What does it take to earn a #1 rank for a highly-competitive phrase?

Contrary to what some people may want you to believe, SEO isn’t magic. The technical aspects behind it range from elementary to insanely complex but the most critical aspect is perseverance and hard work. One of the reasons that so many people fail at business (especially on the Internet) is because they give up when they don’t see the results they want right away. Millions of people have been conned into the idea that because computers and the Internet are involved, online marketing is just a matter of clicking a mouse. In reality, you have to provide a quality product or service and add value in some manner. The search engines have factored this into their algorithms and they know that untrustworthy companies will not last long. That’s one of the reasons why it takes time for new sites to get noticed. Over time, the search engines learn which sites can be trusted and which can’t.

Just because you open a retail store today and advertise everywhere you can, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to become a nationwide chain next month, or even next year. It took Walmart nearly sixty years to become the company that you’re familiar with today. Business online works the same way. Instead of looking for overnight success, focus on doing a little bit more every day. Write quality content, produce useful and entertaining podcasts, build inbound links and participate on other blogs, forums and social networks. Always remember that the price of success is hard work and perseverance, and over time, you will see the rewards that you deserve.

Posted in Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

Website design isn’t art

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group on November 6th, 2008 in Graphic Design, Internet Marketing

Don’t get me wrong, it’s important to have a well designed website that is visually appealing, but the real purpose of website design is to convert as many of your visitors as possible into paying customers. The pretty graphics and high-tech bells and whistles are fine as long as they contribute to that, otherwise they are irrelevant. In business, the best looking website in the world is useless if it doesn’t convert.

Posted in Graphic Design, Internet Marketing | No Comments »

What the election taught us about marketing

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group on November 5th, 2008 in Marketing Strategy

Regardless of which candidate you voted for in this election, today it has become obvious that as a country, we have come a hell of a long way from where we were thirty or forty years ago. As an American, you should be incredibly proud of our collective progress.

The campaigns that we saw during this election cycle have validated a lot of what those of us in the marketing field have know for a long time. They have also outlined a pretty clear blueprint for any business owner who is serious about building a solid marketing foundation. So if you’re ready to take your company to the next level you should follow the steps that made the Obama campaign successful.

Branding can mean the difference between success and failure

Effective branding is the foundation of all marketing efforts. Branding determines how your message is conveyed. It is the image of who you are and helps people to quickly decide if they related to you or oppose you. This polarity is important. A powerful brand can make people feel like they belong to a particular community, ideology or movement. When people feel that they are a part of something, they become extremely passionate about it. Look at the United States Marine Corp, PETA or Tampa Bay Buccaneer fans and you can see that their believers share an almost blinding commitment and personal pride in belonging. They talk about their beliefs at every chance, try to recruit others and remain committed through the good and the bad times. Barrack Obama built this type of brand. John McCain didn’t. Obama’s supporters were energized, active and outspoken, while McCain’s were only moderately engaged. Seth Godin makes a very valid point that “Motivating the committed outperforms persuading the uncommitted.”

Exposure builds more exposure

Despite showing a significant lead in the polls leading to the election, Obama continued wave after wave of advertising across a variety of mediums, sometimes outspending McCain seven to one. As the election got closer and the lead got smaller, Obama increased the frequency of his advertising.

Most businesses take a different approach and seem to look for every reason to reduce their advertising. When business is going great, they often assume that everyone knows about them so they don’t need to advertise. When business slows down, they try to reduce expenses by reducing advertising and often justify their decision by saying they’ll increase advertising when business picks back up. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way. The more exposure you have, the more that you’re going to get. There are an infinite number of views on any given story, and the more people that are exposed to that story, the more that will opine, and the cycle continues. Use every opportunity you can to create more exposure, such as traditional media, write-ups by bloggers, press releases and event participation, then leverage that into more exposure.

Form sometimes has a greater impact than function

Charisma works, plain and simple. No one has ever accused George Bush of being a genius, despite having some impressive scholastic achievements. This is because of how poorly he communicates. Obama, on the other hand seems to a comparable, or maybe even more proficient orator than Bill Clinton. Regardless of what he is saying, the pattern, tempo and intonation of his speech often makes it more compelling to most people, including those that disagree with him.

The same principles apply to your marketing. Don’t think for a second that your prospects will look at your poorly designed website and understand (or even believe) that you’re more concerned with taking care of your customers than improving your website. They won’t. Instead, they will think that you are a bottom rate company that can’t afford to invest in a professional website designer. They know that there are hundreds, maybe thousands of companies with the same level of skill as yours that also present themselves effectively, so they won’t take the chance. Ensure that all of your marketing materials help you to communicate in a clear, powerful manner and your prospects trust in your company will increase dramatically.

Never underestimate your competition

The lead in the polls that Obama enjoyed through much of his campaign didn’t give him a reason to become complacent because he knew that McCain was a worthy and competent opponent with a history of coming back from the bottom.

In business, we sometimes achieve a certain level of success and then forget how we got there. We begin to ignore our competitors, thinking that they could never reach, let alone, surpass our position in the market. IBM thought this once. So did Yahoo. It didn’t work out so well for either of them as Microsoft and Google quickly took over their former positions as leaders in their respective industries. The same thing can happen to you. Take what ever you’ve done to get where you are and keep doing it. Better yet, increase it a little more each month. Just because you’re in the lead today doesn’t mean you will be tomorrow unless you keep working just as hard at it.

Posted in Marketing Strategy | 2 Comments »

We’ve opened up comments on our marketing tips blog

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group on November 3rd, 2008 in WMG News & Press

It’s been a long time coming, but today we’ve opened up comments on out marketing tips blog. We’ve also removed the rel=”nofollow” attribute so that our contributors get a little extra benefit from a quality link that the search engines can crawl and give them credit for.

Feel free to post your comments and let us know what you think.

Posted in WMG News & Press | 1 Comment »

There is very little difference between success and failure…

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group on October 23rd, 2008 in Marketing Strategy

There is very little difference between success and failure…when you look at it from a day to day point of view. Over time though, the difference is huge. The small business owner that makes one extra sales call a day may only bring in an extra client or two each week, but over the course of one year that becomes 52-104 new clients a year. How much of a difference would that make over 5 or 10 years?

Seth Godin wrote a great article on the sad truth about marketing shortcuts which outlines a perfect example of how most companies handle their marketing. They “give it a shot” and when they don’t achieve instant results, they give up and move on to something else instead of focusing on actually producing the results they claim to be looking for. How much more exposure could you company achieve in a year if you made one extra blog post or one extra sales call each day? What else could you do a little bit more on a consistent basis to really stand out?

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