Never Ending Thoughts…

Article Marketing is one of the proven techniques of spreading the word about a product or a service. There are so many variants of this concept that are available that it can easily span into a full book. You can have someone write articles about a product, write reviews, feature comparisons and what not. At the end of the day, the technique is pretty much simple. You or someone writes articles about your product or service. Articles are circulated across to target readers. But wait. What about “effectiveness”?

What is “effectiveness” in Article Marketing?

The answer to this question pretty much differentiates the “pro” marketing managers from the “not so pro” ones. Everyone can run an article marketing campaign. But then how many campaigns actually help you track the effectiveness of your article marketing effort? For that matter how do you even measure it in the article marketing scenario? Here’s what I think can be measured:

A. How much traffic are the articles bringing to you?

You can measure the traffic coming from articles by checking your website analytics reports. But then what about the articles that were distributed in print format during a conferences? What about those pdf’s that you emailed your target audience? To be able to find the true effectiveness of any article marketing campaign, you need to take into account all the channels that you will be using to spread your articles and a closed loop mechanism that allows you to track exactly how much traffic you are able to generate from your article.

B. How much is it costing you to run the campaign?

Good article writing can cost you some good amount of money. Be it in-house, or out sourced, the articles you write need to be quantified in terms of how much is it costing you either on weekly or daily basis or on per article basis.

C. Is it all worth it?

Once you can clearly identify how much traffic your articles are generating and how much is it costing to write articles you can find the “true cost per click” that’s coming from the article you just spread to your target audience.

This simple case study shows how companies are already doing this using ellipsis AdNet: http://apps.ellipsissolutions.com/adnet/article-marketing.pdf

Comments and Thoughts are Welcome!

I have recently read an article written by John Cameron, an expert in business coaching. He is very passionate of what he does and his expertise in the domain of sales and commerce in general is seen now as highly important. In his article, “Dealing with objections”, John Cameron speaks about all the barriers that a sales person faces when trying to contact a potential customer and sell a product or a service. This article has inspired me to post about this subject too and try to find the best methods that might work in the most common situations.

The fact that it is really hard to come up with a universal sales statement when contacting a potential customer is a fact. Nevertheless, it is essential not to come up with a universal sales statement! Why? Well, each customer must be treated in a different manner, because each of them has different interests, education, opinions and has been raised in a different cultural environment or background. A smart sales person must be capable to come up with an appropriate strategy each time a customer is contacted. Still, the sales person must act and react friendly. There might be potential clients that might use “I’m not interested” phrases. Well, this happens in a fairly amount of cases.

The question that is being raised is the following: What to do when a potential customer is not interested in your products or services that you sell? Well, the best manner is to find and present the advantages that the client has at the moment of purchasing. You need to explain the customer what are the advantages of the product or service and how the client can benefit from them. Furthermore, a good sales person reminds of both pros and cons, putting emphasize on the pros of course.

A good sales person must captivate the potential client in the first 10 to 30 seconds of the discussions. Sometimes, it is really hard to do this, but don’t feel discouraged. There is always the chance to improve your technique. Recognize that each client must be approached in a different manner and that might be a step forward. No one has been born as a great sales person. Everyone has learned how to discuss and approach potential clients in both the real world and the online environment. Hope that this article has been interesting for you and helped you in your business.

You can read John Cameron’s article at: http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/1971/Dealing-With-Objections.html

The idea for this article has its roots in Ellisa Brennerman’s article entitled “Small Business Operations Managers Deliver Huge Value”, which explains how operational managers can improve the way the company does businesses. This all makes sense for the reader, but Ellisa targets operational managers in small businesses and firms, not in huger, multinational corporations. Most of the small businesses that are started represent the creation of entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur is the person who does almost all the things in the company in the first few weeks or months till the brand is created and the company has employees that are doing the entire job. The entrepreneur does the calls, talks with clients and suppliers and tries to find a good way to make profit from the business activity.

However, Ellisa is right. Operational managers have their roles and must be employed by small businesses if they want to expand their businesses and be more organized. This idea is really good and it can boost the productivity and sales of the company. So, although “Operations Manager” sounds like a position held in a corporation, it is good to employ these kinds of people in small businesses as well. The firm that has a person in charge with the company’s operations will benefit a lot from the experience and move forward and try to expand the businesses.

We hope that you liked this article posted on our blog. Please read our other articles as well.
Also, feel free to comment and tell us what do you think: Is it OK for small firms and companies to employ Operations Managers?

You can read Ellisa Brennerman’s article at: http://www.evancarmichael.com/Small-Business-Consulting/4298/Small-Business-Operations-Managers-Deliver-Huge-Value.html

OK, you must be thinking this guy has gone nuts. When everyone is talking about how important it is for any company to spend money on Internet Marketing, he’s telling that there are down sides to that? If you will read on further, you will agree with me, and trust me it won’t take more than two minutes. Yes, two straight minutes.

Currently Internet Marketing is mainly done via either online banner Ad campaigns, or email marketing. And it’s not that it doesn’t work. In fact it works great! Better than any other advertising medium; especially if your product or service is Internet related. And that is one of the biggest downsides of Internet Marketing. So it’s cost effective and works great; So how’s it a downside? You will know if you have run a successful campaign. Having been easily available and much more quickly modifiable, Internet Marketing can sometimes attract more visitors and bring in more customers than you can handle. That would directly impact your service quality and in the end bad customer experience is going to bite you back with negative ratings which are far more harder to fix than any other thing.

So now we know the risk and downside of Internet Marketing. And how do I make sure not to risk my business into this situation? It’s much easy and straight forward. All you do is make some ground rules and follow them. For example, a) Before spending money on Internet Marketing, carefully analyze your market and your product and figure out what kind of customers you’ll be able to serve. And then b) use extremely targeted Internet Marketing methods to reach out to only those potential customers. This will not only help you spend less Internet Marketing Dollars, it will also help you get the customers that you will be able to easily serve and build a good trust within your market.

The analogy of Fire goes very well with Internet Marketing – It’s good as long as it doesn’t spread out of control.

Happy Internet Marketing Folks!

When it comes to online advertising, there are two main schools of thought – people who want to pay for an impression and people who want to pay for a click. While it might sound obvious that you’d always want to pay for a click, but there are situations where paying for even an impression might be justifiable. The reasons for going with one approach or the other are so hard and subjective that even Google provides both the ways of advertising and leaves it up to the user to decide which one to pick for their campaign.

When would Pay Per Click Make Sense?

Although there is no specific formula around what approach to follow, people generally tend to use pay per click when the intention is to grab a sale. The idea here is to be able to find out how much did it cost you to generate a sale. So for example your margin from selling a book is $10 and your aim on marketing is $5 (so that you make at least $5 on the sale), and you know that 1 in 50 people who will visit your site will buy your book (i.e. 50 clicks would result into a sale), your CPC should be 5/50 = $0.10.

When would Pay Per Impression Make Sense?

On the other hand, with pay per impression, your aim is probably just to be visible and leave an impression at the back of the mind of the person who saw your Ad. Or perhaps it’s a blog that you are marketing – from which you don’t really make any money. So tracking by the click might not make much sense because you can’t really relate it to any sale that you’d make. While, personally I believe it’s still a hard argument to make, but the more I deal with various publishers and advertisers the more I find that pay per impression works well in case your aim is really to just to gain more buzz and not much real sales. The reason is also because traditionally “per click” costs are higher than per impression and so when you know that you are not going to make any sales anyways, you’d rather go with per impression model.

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It has been a few months and I realized that we have gotten into the habit of posting a blog each day. Yesterday we sat back for a while and thought that what are the benefits of posting a blog each day. I know there’s a lot of material out there that talks about the benefits. But we wanted to set that aside and see how much difference has it made to us since we started posting a blog each day. And here’s what we found:

Increased User Base by Exponential Times

Ever since we started blogging on daily basis, we found that our user base started growing up almost exponentially. It was so large in the first few weeks that we had to check server logs, etc. to make sure that users were legitimate. It was amazing to see how people like to come back and even search engine bots start tracking you on daily basis.

Helped us write better blogs!

We found that when we were posting “one of blog” every once in a while, we were really loosing focus and weren’t conveying a focused message in all the blogs. And that’s quite understandable. When you work on something and then leave it for a few days then work again, you tend to loose the grip on the thought. Blogging daily at a certain time becomes pretty much like an ongoing activity, like going to the gym, or meditation, or even like taking a bath each day! You can focus on the thought process and continue on it each day.

Helped us being more aware about our Market!

Believe it or not, blogging each day helps you get more aware about your market! That is only if you are writing good blogs. A good blog is one that is unique, has your personal touch and does not repeat. You don’t want to create 10 versions of the same message and simply bore your readers to death! So then how do you come up with new material every day? You read news and keep up with the latest trends going in your market or topics of interest. You then use them as the basis for your blog. This in turn helps not only write good blogs but also being more aware about your market.

What benefits have your reaped by blogging every day? Share your experience with us!

Let’s talk about something that everyone wants from their Internet Marketing efforts – The Click Through Rate (or better known in short – CTR). Why is CTR important? What makes it a more attractive parameter than many others out there? And what is the best approach to get a high CTR, hands down?

Why is CTR important?

CTR is really important to measure the success of a marketing campaign. Some people still debate that it’s not really the CTR but the actual sales that should be used to measure success of a marketing campaign. But I would humbly argue on the fact that what if you did the best possible marketing and got a really high CTR, but then your product itself wasn’t that good enough – after all customers are not stupid – and you don’t end up making a sale. Who is to blame in this situation? Is it the marketing team who did a phenomenal job getting an exceptional CTR? Or is it the sales team for not doing their part well? Or is it the product development team for not building something that really solve customer’s problems? The question is not who’s to blame, the question rather is that when that happens how do you find where the problem is and how you fix it? Having read that, now most probably you’d agree that a CTR is a good indication of how well your marketing campaign was crafted and run.

What does having a high CTR mean?

Having a high CTR directly reflects how effective your marketing campaign is. This means how many visitors who saw your Ad actually clicked. That tells you won the first step of the battle – i.e. creating the first initial curiosity in the visitor and having him/her come to your landing page.

What is The Best Way to get High CTR?

Before we go into the complicated discussion of finding the right keywords, and going into the territory of speculating how Google Adwords works and things like that, let’s step back and think about it. Let’s take an example. Let’s say you are looking for car loans. And so you of course use Google or Bing or any other search engine and land on pages that talk about how to take car loans, what are the available rates and so forth. Now while you are reading through all those pages that have information related to car loans, would you ever click on a Ad that says “Join school this summer”? Probably not; well may be if that’s something that’s going on at the back of your mind; but then that’s just you. Every person is unique and thankfully Internet is not smart enough to read the “cookies” of our brain! God knows how Google Search Results and Ads would look if they start reading into our brains and start leaving cookies directly into our brain!! Anyways, so the point is that you’d rather click on an Ad that’s relevant to what you are reading about; what you are looking for, etc. For example, you might click on the Ad that says “Looking for a great car loan? click here”, or may be the one that says “click here to compare car loan rates” and so forth.

The best way to get high CTR is by advertising to extremely targeted pages that have content that’s relevant to your Ad. Unfortunately there are very few (in fact none!) systems out there that will provide complete transparency and let you choose exactly where your Ad goes, how much you pay and how much does the person who is hosting the Ad gets paid. If there were such a transparency how would the Ad companies make money! That’s a separate discussion, if high CTR is something that you are looking for, then you might want to check AdNet.

This weekend I spent some time looking at some of the CRM solutions out there. We have personally used zoho and sales force, and while they are paid CRM solutions, and are really quite good, I wanted to try out some of the good open source and free CRM solutions that are available in the market. While there is nothing wrong with zoho and sales force and many other paid solutions out there, there’s something about open source and free solutions that attracts everyone (besides the fact that they are free). That is a) ability to have full control over the solution and customize it which ever way you’d want to; b) no fear of being locked in with a particular vendor or a particular proprietary technology; and c) in house deployment and thus not having to worry about and rely on a third party for the hosting needs.

So when there are so many benefits of an open source and free CRM solution, what makes them not so popular in this market where people are biting by the bit? I think the biggest problem is that most of the open source CRM solutions are written by highly technical folks. And most of the good ones like openCRX, sugarCRM are way too extensive for many people. The value that paid CRM solutions provide is first of they are extremely simple to use. For instance you can get going with zoho or sales force in literally 15 minutes. And if you don’t understand something, simply call up their 1-800 line and you will get the answer for whatever you’d be looking for within 10 minutes. Yes you have to pay for it; As they say “what you get is what you pay for”. In case of openCRX or sugarCRM, you will be at the mercy of 160 page Admin Guide and will be spending 2 days understanding the complex realm based security, multi-database connectivity and other things that you as a sales manager wouldn’t even want to worry about.

So where’s the holy grail then? I think the holy grail is really in coming up with the linux red hat kind of model. Let’s go back in time and see how linux was invented. The core linux operating system is still free and that’s how it was brought into the World. The idea was of a free and extensible operating system that almost anyone could use for almost anything they wanted to. And no doubt it’s a great idea and the Operating System in itself is great too. However, the fact that it was extremely tech centric, red hat spun a business concept around it and provided a full support based model and the concept of “enterprise version” of the linux operating system. Now, you had the liberty of still getting a free open source operating system, but at the same time you had a team of professional technical and business staff who were there to guide you in case you got stuck somewhere. Not even that, red hat went ahead and came up with their pre-packaged versions of the linux Operating System that businesses could simply use out the box.

I think something like this is still missing in the open source CRM solutions. Yes, sugarCRM has had good success coming up with a similar model, but there is still a huge market to conquer. And until the open source CRM providers follow the route that red hat followed years back, I believe companies like sales force, zoho and Microsoft will keep on enjoying the major chunk of the CRM market.

Have you tried any of the open source CRM solutions that you found were extremely simple and worth looking at? Share with us!

How many times have you faced the frustration that you think that you spent all the time on earth preaching and teaching and nurturing a lead, everything moves along rather slowly but steadily and after all the back and forth meetings, and calls, and more meeting, after the back forth finalization of the scope of the project, when it comes to the final invoicing the lead backs off! This is one thing that’s unfortunately hard to teach and so I thought I’ll cover my experience on this topic and perhaps get other people’s input on this.

What are the top three reasons that leads would back off at the last moment?

While it’s really hard to pin point the top three reasons because the reasons can be different based on your product, target market and the size of the leads you are following up with. For example a company doing complex B2B sales lead generation for large clients would face much different problems as compared to a company doing the same job for small / single man companies. However, I believe there are still some commonalities so to speak. I believe the top three are:

a) Not being comfortable with the invoicing cycle

The other party might not be comfortable dealing with a very large number. For example if you were pitching for a year long project that would cost say $12000 and you know your client is a small merchant who probably won’t spend more than $2000 per month, you should then send a recurring invoice of $1000 per month for a year instead of sending an invoice with full amount or even 4 invoices because anything above $1000 will most probably scare the client.

b) Unclear and Conflicting information

Many times it would happen that the sales team would pitch a product as extremely simple with very minimal laws and restrictions involved. However when it comes to invoicing the accounts department would send a long list of “fine print” rules which might just confuse the client further because nothing like this was discussed at earlier stages of the engagement. So as a sales person, try to make sure that you know enough about the your state/country laws and won’t fall into any trouble later.

c) Invoice Slapping

To be frank I’m not even sure if that’s the right term because I have come up with this term just as I am writing this article. The concept here is that many times people invoice the client without a prior notice. This can become a deal breaker especially in larger B2B projects. So you have spent days and may be weeks building a relationship with the client. The last thing you want to do is loose all that effort due to one simple mistake – invoicing. So instead of “slapping” the invoice on your client’s face, ask them when they’ll be comfortable paying for the project and create an invoice accordingly.

While there could be many more reasons why a lead would just simply back off, I think the most valuable outcome of that (if you take it that way) is the amount of learning that you will get trying to understand why they backed off at the first place! This will help you improve your lead nurture processes too. What do you think? How has your experience been as far as invoicing the client for the first time goes?

Let’s talk about some thing different today – Website Analytics. This is something that is not directly related to sales, marketing and lead generation, but has a lot of influence on it. And so there is a reason why companies spend so much time and energy on this topic.

Why is website analytics important?

There are lot of good reasons to have some kind of website analytics on your website. First off, no matter how good your content is, it’s really hard how people would perceive it. Analytics systems can help you find out which pages visitors are spending most time on, what is the demography, you can find out common trails and paths of how people browse through various pages on your site, from where they enter and from where they choose to exit. This gives lot of clarity into what are the places you need to improve upon to be able to give more clarity to your visitors about what you do. The better use-ability you can provide to the visitors, they’d be easily able to understand what you have to offer, which in turn get you more focused and targeted leads and also decrease your sales cycle.

The Pros and Cons of Google Analytics

Google analytics gives you a quick jump start into the world of analytics. It’s easy to set up and it’s Free! The biggest barrier for most of the companies before Google opened the doors for analytics was the cost associated with setting up a good analytics system. Google pretty much killed the market by providing an extremely powerful analytics system that provides more than what many small merchants would ever need. However the cons are that Google stores all the transaction data at their end and their updates are done once every midnight. That means that you don’t get realtime analytics, which is fine; but the bigger issue for many merchants is that Google now has all the transaction history and they don’t share it with the merchants. There’s no harm in that, but many merchants are not comfortable with this approach.

Piwik – a better alternative to Google Analytics

Piwik is a free and open source analytics tool that is slowly becoming more popular in the market. It is quite commonly used in Australia and Europe (at least that’s what I am hearing in various blogs) and is slowly catching up in the US. To check this out, I installed piwik on one of our systems, and I’d have to agree, the UI is super slick. It’s as clean (and some would argue better than) as Google. All the data resides in your local database. The installation is fairly simple but if you really want a real plug and play solution, google analytics might still be a good choice for you because piwik does require a very little admin help. It took me less than 15 minutes to install piwik and configuring was pretty simple too.

Should everyone switch from Google Analytics to Piwik?

Well, I’m not 100% sure about that. One big reason is that many small merchants run very simple websites that are hosted on a shared server. These low budget websites don’t even have a database! If you have a bare bones 5 static page website, piwik is probably not for you. But if you are a decent size company and are definitely worried about having Google keep track of your transaction history and never share it with you, piwik is definitely a good tool to look at.

What are your thoughts on open source and free analytics tools?