In the past few weeks I’ve had an influx of new clients and there appears to be a common trend amongst them. Fuelled by the economic downturn people are realising the need to crank up their marketing efforts but they are looking OUTSIDE their businesses for new leads and sales. The truth is that people are leaving bags of untapped revenue on the table. They are not harvesting the opportunities that lay dormant within their current business.

In this article I share my key credit-crunch busting tips for squeezing tons of untapped revenue out of your business even if you’re just starting out: -

1. Ensure Your Marketing Funnel Works

How are you handling new and existing leads? How is your marketing funnel working? Do you have an effective follow up sequence set in place or are people falling through the gaps? This is where you should be spending the majority of your time right now. Follow up is queen in this economy. Ensure that you are cultivating the relationships that you already have. These are the people who already know you, they may have bought from you before so will understand the value of your offerings.

2. Focus on Your Current Client Base

Begin harvesting the relationships that you’ve been cultivating in the past months and years. Acknowledge your community. Let them know that they are important to you. Make them feel special and thank them. Now is a good time to be utilising information marketing techniques. Be mindful of your clients needs and tailor everything you do to helping them fulfil them. Give away lots of meaty information; provide value and assistance that builds trust and confidence. Your clients do still have money to invest, but they need to understand the value of what you offer and be well informed to feel confident about making a purchase.

3. Design Special Pricing, Products and Programs

Begin by identifying the top 20% of your clients and the top 5% and start to create special pricing, products and programs that specifically cater to their needs. Ask your list and past clients what they need. Do a survey. What are they struggling with now? What are their obstacles? Think about ways that you can create both niche products and multiple offers at varying prices points that will fulfil those needs. A one price fits all business model will not work in this economy. Just remember, people STILL need your products and services, their challenges ARE still there. In fact, their situation is probably accentuated by the current economic climate. Be aware that if you don’t fill your clients needs they will look elsewhere. So it’s your job to be creative. Offer multi-level pricing for your services and offer information products at lower price points which act as the lead in to your higher priced products and programs.

4. Increase Customer Value

Don’t focus on getting more new people on your list unless you’re just starting out. Your focus should be on getting those you have to spend more with you. Your list will grow naturally when you’re seen to be doing well and your clients will refer you to others when you help them get results. People are most likely to buy from you when they have just made a purchase. Implement immediate upsells which will increase your customer value. Do your clients know that you offer other products and services? Are you upselling? Identify each customer touch point and ensure that you are upselling new and exciting products and services at each of these points.

WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EMAIL NEWSLETTER, WEBSITE OR BLOG? Feel free but may I ask that you include the resource box below in full. You are also welcome to use my photo.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Victoria Player works with coaches and small service-based businesses. Want to increase your online visibility, position yourself as an expert and attracting more of your IDEAL clients without the need to sell? Get your FREE audio training program packed full of practical how-to marketing advice for attracting repeat and increased business each and every month, visit http://www.VictoriaPlayer.com

Article Source: http://bb-articles.com

It’s been difficult to get much done this week, my day job has intruded massively into my free time. Too many people off on the sick and far more overtime than I want, but with a shop that’s open 7 days a week from 7.00 am until 10 pm you can’t just go home and leave them in the lurch.  However I’m still pleased with this blog’s progress and everything that I’ve done.

Plug Ins

New plug ins keep appearing in my dashboard and my favourite this week has been the get free web designs plug in. You can see screenshots of website templates down the right hand side, they are all free and will update as newer templates become available. Apart from there being some pretty good free templates this is another way to update my blog automatically and keep the search engines happy.

Article Marketing

I wrote an article for the blog called ‘Rag And Bone Internet Marketing With Free Tools And Resources’.  It’s the sort of article that can be expanded upon greatly, or split into smaller articles with plenty of information about each free resource that I list. My next step will be to write a condensed version of the original article and submit it free to article directories with a link back to this blog.

That is called article marketing which is a form of free advertising. The more backlinks that websites and blogs have the higher the search engines favour them and especially if you can get backlinks on sites that have a higher page ranking.

Normally I wait for an article to be found by Google on one of my sites first and then submit to my own article directory and a few of my favourites. Ezine Articles is currently the top article directory with a page rank of 6, but there are a handful with higher PRs. I also submit my articles to Isnare which has a PR of 5 and a submission service to websites, ezines and blogs. A service for which I pay a small amount and I consider to be worth paying for.

As I’m limited for time I always try to write decent quality articles and of at least 500 words. Some article marketers write many shorter articles about the same subject and with little more information, some use software to spin them with dreadful results. I prefer to go the quality route to ensure that my articles are accepted and to give them a better chance of a viral effect.

Article directories are not just there to get free backlinks, the other part of the service that they perform is to offer free content for websites, ezines and blogs. You can see on this blog that the articles have mainly been plucked from my article directory giving them a little bit of a viral effect.

The best viral effect that one of my articles has had was when I wrote an article about a bad experience with Trogan Malware and how I got rid of it free. That article ended up on hundreds of websites and blogs and some of them geek sites or authority sites, gaining me lots of high quality backlinks and of course free advertising.

So it makes more sense to aim for the quality viral effect than submit low quality articles that are less likely to be republished on websites, blogs and ezines where the real juice is.

Email Course & Free Gifts

Every serious Internet Marketer needs to build a mailing list and one of the best ways to do that is to offer free information in the form of courses, reports or products. I set up a free course offering information about how to easily create free reports and profit from them.

It’s a 5 day course and every day I’m giving away a couple of useful products for newbies. Some are new products, some that provide good information, most have resell rights.

Squidoo Lens

I also started to build a free Squidoo lens for this blog. Still got a lot to do but it will compliment the blog and generate some traffic.

Progress

This blog started out 3 weeks ago with an Alexa ranking of 7,094,643 and last week it was 1777,235. This week it’s gone up again to 1,437,223 a pleasing increase and mainly due to adding regular content.

The stats seem to contradict the Alexa rankings which are connected to traffic. Average visitors a day has gone down from last weeks 93 to 88 and the bounce rate has increased from 73.2% to 76.8%, but there are still a healthy amount staying on longer.

I’m not disheartened because this blog has had 509 unique visitors since the beginning of February with return visits also and that outstrips my original target by far. I’m sure that once I get my article marketing into gear and do some more promoting that the figures will improve gradually. I’ve got to remember that I’m still building and once that lessens more time will be spent on promoting which will bring in more traffic and then I will be aiming for profit.

It is a well known fact that the key to successful online marketing comes from building a well targeted and responsive opt-in email list. This is mainly because your online marketing success comes from building relationships with a large subscriber base, but just how do you go about doing this?

An opt-in list is when you are given the option to receive bulk emails that are also sent to a large majority of other people. Generally you need a person’s permission to add them to such a list otherwise it will be seen as spam. Regardless of what you’re promoting or selling, if you want to succeed online you need to build up your own opt-in list. Most professional marketers use double opt-in which means subscribers must fill in an opt-in form on a web page and then confirm or verify their subscription in an email sent to them. This eliminates any spam complaints.

Virtually everyone uses email so it won’t be too hard to build your list if you use some of the simple tactics listed below. Keep in mind, using an opt-in contact list should have a place in everyone’s marketing plan as it is cheap, fast, and still more effective than other outdated methods of promotion and marketing. This is because a large majority of the people who are making money on the Internet are those who have built up a large opt-in list or are using strategic follow-up emails in their marketing. They will have refined, looked after and built up a trust with the people on their list who they can contact in the future.

If you need any help with how to approach compiling your opt-in email list then below are 10 quick and sure ways of getting people to sign up for your contact list:

1. Set up an auto-responder which will automatically send out messages to your visitor. It can be set up with a series of compelling messages, which will encourage your subscribers to buy your products or join your business. Using Pop-Ups, Pop-Ins and Slide-In forms on web pages will quickly build your list. Some professional marketers make the “Close” button on this pop-up form very hard to see, so that visitors will subscribe as a means of closing out the window. Use your own judgment here, do you want to be this sneaky? It’s not exactly the best way to start a relationship, but many savvy marketers use it. This is the equivalent of “getting your foot in the door” and then these marketers follow-up with quality content to really get and hold your attention.

2. Have a concrete image or graphic of your ezine or newsletter when giving people the opportunity to sign up as this will increase your conversion rate. Your ezine or newsletter can then be sent out daily, weekly, monthly or whenever you need to send it. Relationship building is the key here because you just don’t want a list, you want a responsive list.

3. Make it real simple for people to subscribe to your opt-in email; it needs to be quick and easy in order to encourage people to do it. For example you could put a simple form in the left hand column of your websites home page and other pages if possible. Most professional marketers place their opt-in form on EVERY page of their site.

4. Use social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter… truth be told all of these sites are only glorified List Builders; make sure you’re taking advantage of them to build your list of contacts.

5. Use Forums ? there are literally thousands of forums and discussion boards so all you have to do is find one that relates to your particular business and then participate in the discussion. The key is to get targeted subscribers, ones interested in your topic or subject.

6. Promote your website and yourself ? this can be done through such things as article writing. This will promote your site in a way that will get your site known and recognized by more people; become an expert and people will want to get to know you and what you have to say.

7. Ezine advertising is a cost effective and quick way to attract visitors to your site in order to get more subscribers. Ezine ads can be a very cheap and effective way of building your list quickly. Many professional marketers also use co-registration strategies – this can be simply done by adding a form where your subscribers can check to subscribe to other related ezines or newsletters. You promote my list, I promote yours.

8. Have well written content ? you need to ensure that your website content is well written, informative and appealing so that when people visit your site they will hopefully opt-in to your email list. Again, if you have nothing valuable to offer your visitors, they won’t join your list.

9. Always use incentives to reward people for joining your opt-in list. Enticing potential subscribers with a free report, video, article, ebook or software is still the quickest way to get subscribers on your list.

10. Provide access to “Members Only” areas of your site ? this part of your website will be accessible only when people have signed up to your opt-in email list. Same can be done for articles or reports… give your visitors a good teaser and then they have to opt-in to get access to the rest.

These are just some of the ways to build your list quickly but there are countless others, especially if you have a product to sell and you can do JVs (Joint Ventures) with other marketers or big-name Gurus. Then using a “Squeeze Page” to collect contact information to quickly build your list. So too is creating an affiliate program and letting your affiliates build your list for you!

Just remember, building up the perfect opt-in email list won’t happen over night but by following the above steps it will build quickly. Just make sure that as your opt-in list grows, you provide your users with quality content and you keep the list organized and managed in order to keep your subscribers happy and satisfied so that they will be willing to do business with you over the long term.

Author Bio: The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous niche sites. If you want to learn how to make your online marketing much more effective by building your lists try here: list building ecourse Copyright ? 2009 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

Article Source: http://hot-resell-rights.com

First, I should say that there’s some debate about what a squeeze page is. However, it’s generally understood that a squeeze page is a page with the goal of getting only two things: the collection of prospects’ personal information and permission to contact them later.

You might be saying that there are other ways to go about getting those things and that might be true. But squeeze pages do a little something extra while getting that information out of prospects?they squeeze in some advertisement.

Why do squeeze pages exist?

Well, they exist because online business owners know that prospects aren’t likely to buy from them on the first go-round. It’ll take a bit of convincing, and that can be done by advertising on a webpage and making regular contact through email.

But the major thing to understand about squeeze pages is that they’re designed to “squeeze” information out of your prospects. That’s their main objective. They’re where you collect that vital information about your prospects that you’ll use later on in your marketing efforts.

How do they collect that information?

Squeeze pages dangle something in front of prospects that is impossible pass up. In order for prospects to get access to it, business owners require that prospects input their personal information. It could be a free report, free software or even more information about a particular product.

So what kind of information do squeeze pages usually request?

That usually depends on the business owner, but the most popular requested information is:

- Names
- Email addresses

What is this information is used for?

That should be obvious- more marketing. By providing email addresses, prospects can be put on email subscriber lists. Business owners contact them later and tell them about their businesses and what they have to offer.

Squeeze pages simply give prospects the option to take a specific action or leave a website. The trick is to design the squeeze page so that prospects can’t even imagine leaving.

When squeeze pages are optimized, a large amount of traffic visits them and business owners are knee-deep in prospects’ information. If you’re using squeeze pages, that means that you’re sitting on a pile of valuable information and that you’ll be able to study subscriber and buyer habits. You’ll also have a new advertising avenue.

Make no mistake- these pages are all about leads.

Generating interest in your business and its products is a major component of squeeze pages, but gathering that personal information is more so.

If prospects leave without giving you that information, the success of your squeeze page is questionable. It’s all about opening doors to communication, building relationships with people who will then buy your product and turn into full customers.

Creating squeeze pages can only benefit your business, since they’re easy to make, save time, are highly effective and give you permission to communicate with a list of prospects who want to be contacted. In essence, they do a lot of your target market research for you.

But don’t think it’s too easy. You’ll first have to design a winning squeeze page that both appeals and caters to your target market.

Author Bio: Looking for ready-made squeeze page templates? Get free lifetime access to a huge library of hard-to-find squeeze page templates, private label rights products and articles at PLRWholesaler.com.

Article Source: http://hot-resell-rights.com