How To Turn Online Visitors Into Customers

Websites are the face and lifeblood of many small businesses.  With more and more people using the Internet to find information, do research, locate businesses and select service provider and products – the Internet can be the catalyst that makes a company succeed.  While anyone can throw up a website, using your site to generate ROI takes focus and effort.

Businesses wanting to capture more customers online should focus on:

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•             Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Google and Bing have published guidelines on what will help your site go up in the rankings.  For a detailed list click here.
•          Advertising: You can advertise on search pages both on the top of the page and to the right.  While this costs money it can place you, visually, at the top of a key word search.
•          Reputation: Customers looking for products and services online will often conduct research to find out what other people are saying.  Make sure your reputation is solid by asking existing customers to write reviews.

Once visitors are on your site it is important to convert them from visitors to customers.  If many people view your site, due to positive SEO, but do not book an appointment or purchase a product, you haven’t accomplished your goal.

Here are some tips for converting visitors into customers:

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•           Know how visitors use your site.
•          Create guarantee and return policies and post online.
•          Write clear and concise messages with a call to action on every page.
•          Ensure your pages easily flow from one to another.
•          Use purchase or appointment buttons so that a visitor can complete a transaction easily and quickly.
•          Add social signal buttons like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest to pages and posts for easy sharing. This will expose your brand to more consumers and improve your SEO.
•         Incorporate reviews into the site.  Whether strategic quotes or full reviews, post the positive things customers say directly on your site.
•         Make it easy to pay for items by using PayPal and a traditional merchant services company.  Make sure that your website is an e-commerce site prior to completing development.

Review your website on a regular basis.  Talk to your customers and find out what they liked or did not like about the site.  Use their feedback to make strategic edits.  Remember your site and online presence is the only opportunity you have to convert online visitors to customers.  Make sure it is easy to use and customer friendly. 

Back to Basics Management Workshops Inspire Your Team to Succeed

Back to Basics Management Workshops Inspire Your Team to Succeed

We have had multiple request to issue our management workshops in print form so that managers can use them with their teams on location.  These workshops take the concepts discussed in the Back to Basics book and provide comprehensive and easy to use ways to implement these strategies.  If you are a manager or business owner and are tired of pushing your team to increased success without their buy in, want to cultivate a better company culture, or are looking for a breakthrough these workshops are for you. 

For more information email thebacktobasicsbook@gmail.com or visit www.thebacktobasicsbook.com

Copies of the book can be purchased at Amazon

Winning

"All right Mister, let me tell you what winning means? You're willing to go longer, work harder, give more than anyone else." 

Vince Lombardi

Winning is something that matters to us from the moment we are born.  It is an instinctive desire yet one we often forget in adulthood.  The reality is in business you can win, you can loose or you can float through your career in a haze of uncaring.  Whether you want to play the game or not is irrelevant.  The game of life marches on whether we want it to or not.  With that in mind it is best to decide to play, step up to the plate and take the swing.

Vince Lombardi said it best when he said "go longer, work harder, and give more".  This is just as true in business as it is in sports.  Your company will not achieve great success by quitting early.  You will not get promoted by doing the bare minimum and you will never reach your goals if you stop half way to the finish line.  You must continue to fight to win if you want to achieve your goals.  This article written by Donald Quinn talks about the importance of winning and motivates us to once again make winning an important part of who we are.

Control Your Schedule! Don’t let it control you…

Life is busy!  I hear that all the time.  People are too busy to meet, too busy to go to the doctor... to busy to exercise... to busy to see their family... too busy to accomplish what is on their "To Do" lists... too busy to do what they enjoy.  The list of excuses are endless but at the end of the day it comes down to a complete lack of control.  The demands of life have become such that they no longer have control of their schedule, no longer have control of their lives.  If this sounds like you it is time to regain that control and stop being busy for busy sake. 

Dr. Hollowell wrote in his book "Crazy Busy", “You can feel like a tin can surrounded by a circle of a hundred powerful magnets,” he writes. “Many people are excessively busy because they allow themselves to respond to every magnet: tracking too much data, processing too much information, answering to too many people, taking on too many tasks — all in the sense that this is the way they must live in order to keep up and stay in control. But it’s the magnets that have the control.”

Technology has given us increased ways to stay connected and communicate with the world around us.  We have access to more information, faster.  The problem is, as Dr. Hollowell suggest, that we are too responsive to this information.  Feeling obligated to constantly be connected and responsive we never stop being pulled in different directions.  One of the first steps to regaining control of your schedule is to put the devices down, cell phones, email etc. and choose when you will be available.  You do not have to carry your smart phone, checking it every ten minutes and replying to text and email constantly.  Things are typically not that urgent.  Decide when you will take phone calls, return emails and text then stick with that schedule.  Do not feel the need to jump every time your phone or computer dings.

Here are additional steps you can take to regain control of your schedule:

1. Take the time at the start of the week to put on the calendar things you want to do.  That is right, not what you feel you have to do but what you want to do.  Scheduling things that you enjoy and are important to you personally is essential.  If you do not do this life will come along with a set of demands and what you want will slip to the back burner. 
2. Determine how many social engagements you want to participate in.  Whether it is the company fundraiser, networking event, cousins birthday party, or party for a client the invitations will come.  It is smart to determine how often you want to attend these events in advance.  Then when the invitations come instead of saying yes to everything you will make choices based on what is the most important and prevent yourself from having event overload.
3. Decide how many late evenings or early mornings you want to work and do not make appointments that create additional late days.
4. Think about your reactions to certain tasks or events.  What caused you to feel stressed or overloaded?  See if you can delegate these things to someone else or higher help.  For example if Saturdays yard work causes you to feel tired and stressed on the weekends get a gardener or at the very least higher the neighbor kid.  Things you dislike feel like they take longer and can put you in a bad mood so it is better to avoid them.
5. Focus.  When you are doing things that are important do not let yourself be interrupted or deviate until the task is complete.  Leaving things half done will cause you to constantly think about them even when you are not working.
6. Prioritize.  List your task out and determine how important each one is.  Tackle according to priority.  This post from Women on Business has additional suggestions for this.

For more ways to regain control of your schedule read the time management section in Back to Basics .  We only have one life to live and it is best to enjoy it.  No one can force you to slow down, evaluate what is important to you and regain control.  However you can make the choice to do so and if you do the results will pleasantly surprise you.

"Life is like a coin. You can spend it any way you wish, but you only spend it once. "

~Lillian Dickson

Starting Again

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently”.

– Henry Ford

With the changes in our economy over the past several years many people have found themselves starting again.  They are not starting over exactly but are placed in a situation where they must reinvent themselves or their company.  What worked before does not work today and what works today may not work tomorrow.  We are operating in a global economy where media connects us in ways it never did before.  While there are many positives to this hyper connectivity it also means that change is occurring on a scale like never before and quickly.  This requires business leaders to be more creative and nimble.  New ideas and strategies have less time to develop and be tested which means failure is bound to occur from time to time.  The important thing to remember is that failure is an opportunity for growth.  As leaders we often learn the most during difficult times because it causes us to stop and evaluate the mistakes that were made along the way, determine how to not repeat those same mistakes and analyze what would have worked better.  If you have experienced a failure recently do not be discouraged.  Value the lessons learned, shake the dust off your feet and start again.

Culture of Funny People

Forbes had an interesting article out regarding humor in the workplace.  A lot of people are afraid that using humor will offend the HR gods... while that may be true humor correctly used can positively impact company culture.  Employees that enjoy coming to work every day will perform better, stay through challenging times and work with you to build a positive culture.  Your company will develop one whether you like it or not.  As we say in the book if you don't actively create your culture the one that develops will likely be exactly what you do not want.

To read more about the positive impact of humor in the workplace read the article, http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2012/02/21/funny-people-more-successful-in-business-humor-workplace/

To purchase a copy of Back to Basics management book and learn how to create the company culture you want go to http://www.amazon.com/Back-Basics-Becoming-Fundamentals-ebook/dp/B007DCEAY0/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1330467512&sr=1-1

When I grow up....

It is impossible to go back to the beginning without looking at our past, without reflecting on our childhood.  We start our lives full of promise, of dreams, of ambitions unhindered by the reality of adulthood.  As we get older and more mature we realize that life is not so simple, that life takes hard work and too often we lose the dreams that we once had. 

The thing about dreams is that they are our hearts desire in the purist form.  They speak to our character, who we are as individuals, the core of what it means to be us.  Dreams do not have to be practical or founded in the “real world” so they are often more truthful.  Our dreams remind us of who we are.  In the Back to Basics book Donald spends a chapter taking us back to our initial hopes and dreams, to what started us on our journey in life.  Where you are in your life and career today started somewhere and identifying the things that make you who you are, the things that are important to you, and the strengths that you naturally have will make you more successful and help you refocus on what makes you happy.

This video reminded me of the innocence of the dream and helped me to remember my own.  I hope it does the same for you… 

By Bethany Wood