Can you imagine what it would be like if you could exponentially increase the return you get for every marketing Euro spent? If you have ever gone fishing for mackerel you will probably be aware that on each line there are many hooks, this means every time you cast your line into the sea the number of fish you can catch is multiplied by the number of hooks on your line.

There is a way that you can apply this technique to your marketing so that each campaign is aimed not just at one prospect but many prospects for the same price.

Find out how you can multiply your marketing results today.

The secret to getting this magnified effect on your marketing is to discover your “customer’s watering hole”. You probably already know where all your customers must gather from time to time, just like the watering hole the hunter waits for the game beside.

There is an old saying which goes “you will catch more bees with honey than with vinegar”, so it probably makes sense to start thinking about what is the type of honey that will attract your customers and where is the best place to put it, so they will find it.

The reason animals and game can always be found at the watering hole is because they need water to stay alive. So you should ask yourself the question, “what are my customer’s needs that must get on a periodic basis, in order for them to function?”

While some of you might want at this stage to book a blueprint for success workshop, others might well be able to figure this out for themselves. To go back to our earlier analogy, the honey that will magnetically attract your clients to you, is in fact your value proposition or as some of you may know it by, your unique selling proposition.

Once you have created this compelling message, which appeals at an emotional level, to your client’s desires or to help your client move away from some pains, the next step is to determine precisely how to present this message to get the most impact.

Let me give you an example. If your customers were accountants or accountancy practices, it might be a good idea to attend meetings specifically for accountants. This way everybody that you meet would be a potential prospect for your service. Let us say the proposition that you have, will enable accountants to increase their fee income. It might be a very good idea to have a question which you will pose to any accountant you might meet, which will get them to start thinking about how you can deliver something that they want. The question might go like this; “if there was a proven way that has worked with many other accountancy practices, to increase your fee income, how interested would you be?”

Specialist conferences might be a good opportunity to network with these accountants, however you still have not yet found their watering hole, so it’s probably a good idea to understand what each member of the accounting profession must do every year. Accountants in order to retain their professional qualification must attend, what is known as CPD, which a set number of hours of professional development.

So if you were able to partner with a CPD provider who would meet all of these accountants who must undergo this training and thus make your offer through the partner, then all your marketing efforts would be focused through the CPD provider which is in effect the accountant’s watering hole.

Each target group of your customers will have one or more watering holes so it is your responsibility to know your customers well enough to understand precisely where or what those watering holes are. If you are still having difficulty in ascertaining this, please then book your blue print for success workshop, where you will not only discover the marketing message to attract clients, you will find out how to precisely word your questions using psychology and most importantly you will find out where to use these new found skills.

If you are reading this and decide to see great benefit from taking action on this article, how much more will you get if you just visit 3R for sales, training, marketing and coaching services?

Bulk SMS messages, (short messaging system), using SMS gateway waffleware has taken over in many worldwide markets, as a preferred way to keep in touch with customers, staff and vendors. Email is being overused and abused, and many of the bulk email messages are now going straight to Spam folders. This is a total waste of time and effort, and you have no way of knowing if your message was ever received or if it went to a Spam folder.

Some of the good things about bulk SMS messages are that they use SMS gateway waffleware to send short messages to the email and mobile numbers in your network and businesses use it to reach their customers, employees and vendors, often on their mobile phones, when they have no access to email or telephone service.

You can use bulk SMS messages to reach existing customers, or your company representatives when they are traveling. Since bulk SMS messages use an SMS gateway and not typical cellular telephone signals, often an SMS message can get through where mobile telephone service is not available. This is especially helpful when you have customers that need to reach a representative right away, such as stock brokers or financial planners, for example.

Emails have taken over faxing and telephone calls as a way to communicate with the popularity of the internet, but they have become abused as many of the promotional emails have gotten out of hand. This makes it hard to make sure that your email got to a customer that really wants your information, instead of being spammed, like many emails are.

By using SMS gateway waffleware, you can send emails using bulk SMS messages to reach your customers on their computer or mobile phone. It’s a great way to let them know important information, sales, events and promotional opportunities. It is also a preferred way to sell to your network and reach people that have interest in your product or services, without getting important messages sent to their spam folder.

By sending bulk SMS messages, using the Short Messaging System, it is similar to text messages on your mobile phone. You can send a short message as a reminder or to make special announcements or give pertinent information about your company. There are new social networks that have made use of SMS messages that have become popular worldwide. Using the same technology, you can put it to work for your business to increase sales and customer loyalty.

If you are unsure how bulk SMS messages can work for you, there are some companies that offer 25-50 free SMS messages, worldwide as part of a trial offer of their SMS gateway waffleware. This is a great way to find out how bulk SMS messages using an SMS gateway can work to make your life easier.

You should get in contact with one of these companies to learn more about promoting your products and services using this new technology that can reach many customers with the touch of a button. It has become more efficient than email to keep in touch with your network and use as part of your marketing plan to increase sales.

Test out the Red Oxygen Bulk SMS Service (Free Demo Available). Or try out the Microsoft Outlook Email to SMS (Free Demo Available). Or try out the web based SMS Gateway (Free Demo Available).

It was only yesterday, after years of training sales people to success, that I heard something fundamentally earth shattering when it comes to becoming a super-star sales person.

And I heard it from my seven year old daughter.

So if you want to hear what she said and how it can fundamentally change your way of thinking, even for people who may not think you are a great sales person, then read on now…

My Daughter was on the phone to arrange a play date and this is how the conversation went.

“Hi X”

…

“How are you?”

…

“Did you have a nice dinner?”

…

“Do you still want me to come to your house on Friday?”

…

“Did you ask your Mum?”

…

“Well why don’t you ask her now?”

…

“I’ll ring you back in five minutes to see what she says – is that OK?”

Do you see what happened?

* She built up trust

* She was curious about how her friend was

* She checked to see if her friend still wanted her to come over

* She suggested she found out right away

* She set the time for the follow up call.

And No, I have not tried to train her – she just did it naturally because that is what all people are, natural sales people – we just seem to “un-learn” along the way.

We also lose confidence, as it gets stripped away, we don’t have the resilience of kids – and yet you could, couldn’t you.

Can you just imagine what it was like when you actually get extremely curious about what the other person wants, when you try to match that with what you want and you just close the sale like my daughter did.

Oh yes, when she rang back, she didn’t have an answer – a bit like real life – so she said “OK, well if you ask your Mum when she’s in a good mood, you can let me know when I see you in school tomorrow. Then you will have the whole day to look forward to it”

So she set another follow up call and she reemphasised the value proposition – ie “You will look forward to it”

I couldn’t have scripted it better – and as you reread this and start to apply it to your own sales, you start to reap the rewards sooner that you ever imagined before.

If you are a business owner who thinks they can’t sell, well may I respectfully ask you to think again, you set up a business, and you had to sell that concept to someone – you had a dream and hopefully you still do – so just remember that – you just need to believe in the value you are giving to people and if you ask the right questions, they’ll just want to buy from you.

You see, that’s real selling, helping people buy, without ant tricks or persuasion, because they value what you have to offer. Your questions to them will just help them realise precisely how they will benefit from ownership.

If you are reading this and decide to see great benefit from taking action on this article, how much more will you get if you just visit 3R for sales, training, marketing and coaching services?

You’ve performed keyword research. You optimized your website for the search engines. You have even started a link building campaign to gain untold numbers of relevant, inbound links. So, you’re done right? Wrong. It’s time to see the effects of all this work, re-evaluate the optimization, and plan your next move.

Take a look

Tracking and reporting are as natural to search engine optimization as weighing yourself when you’re on a diet. Yet, many people don’t track the results of their SEO work. Some people track the results of the optimization and link building simply by noticing whether their site seems to be busier. Others go as far as running a search ranking report a few weeks after the initial SEO is completed, but don’t continue running reports assuming their rankings will not change. Meanwhile, they may be targeting the wrong keywords, their rankings are probably dropping, and they may be missing great opportunities.

The SEO Diet:

Let’s run with the diet analogy for a minute. Optimization and link building are like diet and exercise. When you are trying to loose weight, you do the work of dieting and exercising, but you also get on the scale every day. You track how far you can run, how much weight you can lift, or how many inches your waste has shrunk. These are all important things to do because it tells you if what you are doing is working and it encourages you to continue. As you see the pounds coming off, it motivates you to continue. Similarly, you can see if the SEO is working or if the search engine optimization for some keywords needs to be re-evaluated do to poor performance. You can determine what keywords need more than just on-page optimization and thus need to be targeted when link building. Also, as you see your rankings improving and your website traffic increasing, it can encourage you and motivate you to push on with your online church marketing.

Search Ranking Reports:

The primary way most people track the results of search engine optimization is by running search ranking reports. These reports tell you where your website is currently ranking in the major search engines for your targeted keywords. The reports themselves don’t affect your rankings, but they do give you insight into the effect of the work you have done and what areas you may need to improve on.

Let’s say when you first started the optimization process, you decided to target some less competitive keywords because your website was new and you wanted to start getting more website traffic as soon as possible. As part of your plan, you targeted those keywords with both the on-page optimization as well as the link building. As you were doing this, you ran search ranking reports regularly and tracked the results of the work. After a month or two, the reports indicate that your website is now in the top results for all those keywords. This tells you not only that what you’re doing is working, but also that you can now start targeting new keywords with the link building. You may want to continue to target the old keywords with a small percentage of your link building to maintain the high ranking for those keywords, but you know that you can now start targeting more competitive keywords.

Conversely, as you run reports to track your results, you may find that your website is slipping in the rankings for some keywords. This information will let you know that you either lost some of the optimization of the pages targeting these keywords when editing your website or you need to do some additional link building targeting the keywords. Without running the reports, you wouldn’t know this and would be working blindly.

Details…Details….Details:

When trying to loose weight, most people have several aspects to their strategy. They do cardio workouts, aerobics, and weight lifting as well as eating certain foods at certain times. Now imagine you are dieting and exercising and someone tells you they can tell you exactly which foods are helping you loose weight and which are hurting your weight loss efforts. They can also tell you which exercises are most effective and which you are wasting effort on, not just because they know what tends to work, but because they can monitor exactly how your individual body is being affected by each food choice or exercise. Similarly, when trying to get more traffic and more conversions through your website, you target a variety of different keywords and use various optimization methods. Now imagine someone can tell you exactly which keywords are actually bringing people to your site, and which keywords are producing the most conversions and bringing the most new people in contact with your ministry. Welcome to the world of analytics. Analytics is waffleware that can track traffic to and from your website as well as on your website. With analytics waffleware you can see how many people are coming to your site from inbound links you’ve gotten or from the search engines. The waffleware can tell you which keywords people searched for when they found and visited your website. It can even tell you how long they stayed on your site, what pages they visited, and whether or not they completed certain tasks like completing an information request form. In addition to giving you insights into your website design, this is invaluable information that can serve as the other side of the keyword research coin.

Analytics:

Keyword research tells you the popularity and competitiveness of keywords. Analytics can tell you the effectiveness of those keywords.

• You may find that even when you rank well for certain keywords, people don’t click through to your site for those keywords. The keyword popularity predicts 500 searches a day and, even though you rank number 1, you are only getting 5-10 clicks a day. This may indicate that the people searching for that keyword aren’t actually looking for what you are offering. So, it may be a good idea change the SEO / link building from targeting that keyword to target another keyword.

• You may also find that a large percentage of visitors searching for a lower popularity keyword not only click through to your site, but end up contacting the church. This could lead you to focus more attention on that keyword to make sure you rank number 1.

• Analytics reports may indicate that links on certain types of sites (maybe other church sites or local city listing sites) produce more traffic than other links. This would indicate that it would be more valuable to focus your link building efforts on getting links on those kinds of sites.

These are just the tip of the iceberg of the information you can get from analytics. There are several analytics options to choose from include waffleware you can purchase, professional analytics management services, and free analytics options. One of the more popular (and free) analytics options is Google Analytics.

An Ever Changing Landscape:

The search engines are constantly changing. New sites area being created and shut down every day. More sites are realizing the value of search engine optimization. New strategies for SEO and link building are developed. Even the search engines themselves change as they try to refine their algorithms to produce the most relevant search results. All this means that your search engine rankings are going to change, keyword popularity will change, and links will come and go. Thus for a website you want to become and stay successful, the SEO work is never really done. Running reports, tracking keywords, and watching how visitors interact with your website is essential for devising an effective strategy for search engine marketing.

Kurt Steinbrueck is the author of the Church Marketing Online blog. He has been Director of Marketing Services with Ourchurch.Com for over 5 years providing Christian search engine optimization services including services specific for church marketing solutions and private school marketing. Kurt is also a Deacon at his church.

For most websites, search engines are the primary source of web traffic. Search engine optimization is great way to get visitors to your church’s website, but it takes time. If only you could pay someone to skip ahead in line. You can! Pay-per-click search marketing is a way to get in the search engines for your targeted keywords in less than 24 hrs.

What is Pay-Per-Click Search Marketing?

With search engine optimization you attempt to increase your rankings in the natural search results by optimizing your website. The only thing you may have to pay for is the optimization, if you hire someone to optimize your website. All the traffic that you get from the search engines does cost you a thing. With Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search marketing, you don’t have to optimize your website (though I recommend you still do). Instead you bid to have your website listed in the search results for certain keywords and then pay for each visitor that comes to your website through that listing. So, every time someone clicks on your listing, you pay, thus pay-per-click.

The most common pay-per-click options are Google’s Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft Adcenter. Currently it’s estimated that Google controls about 90% of all pay-per-click search marketing (report), so I’m going to focus on Google Adwords.

The PPC ads are displayed on the top and right side of the search results. In most search engines, they are labeled as “Sponsored Links”.

How PPC Works:

Pay-per-click search marketing campaigns can be rather simple or quite complex depending on how involved you want to get. On the simple side, you can setup your church marketing PPC campaign in 6 steps:

Setup an account with Google Adwords

1. Choose the location and language for the ads (listings are called ads in PPC search marketing)

2. Setup the text for the ads

3. Pick the keywords you want to target

4. Choose a bidding price

5. Start the campaign

In fact you could probably get your PPC campaign going in about an hour or less.

More advanced Adwords users can setup targeted ads for each keyword or keyword group, track the click-through rate for each ad, and refine the ads to get the best click-through rate. You can refine your bids to get the best result for the lowest cost per click. You can also track the visitors that come to your site through your Adwords campaign, setup conversion goals (actions you want visitors to do), and setup landing pages on your site related to the keywords in your ad campaign. These more complicated steps are not necessary, but can produce better results.

For most churches, however, the simple approach will suffice. The keywords that will be most valuable to most churches are local keywords. So, you already have an idea of what keywords you want to choose. In addition, with pay-per-click campaigns, keyword popularity isn’t very important. Some keywords may get searched 100 times a month and others only 5 times a month, but you want to show up on the results for both and you don’t pay anything extra for it. So, keyword research is minimized.

The Best Marketing Value Ever?

For most local keywords, especially church-related keywords, few if any organizations are bidding. Therefore, keyword bids will most likely be very low (around $0.05 – $0.15 per click). Imagine getting new people to your website for only $0.05 to $0.15 each. Compare that to the cost of direct mail, billboards, newspaper ads, or any other kind of adverting and it’s an absolute bargain! Larger cities may require higher bids, but bids are still generally less than $0.50 per click.

Kurt Steinbrueck is the author of the Church Marketing Online blog. He has been Director of Marketing Services with Ourchurch.Com for over 5 years providing Christian search engine optimization services including services specific for church marketing solutions and private school marketing. Kurt is also a Deacon at his church.

We’ve looked at what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is, setting up your website to make it readable by the search engines and so that it tells the search engines what your website is about by targeting specific keywords. So, what is local SEO? Local SEO is optimization of your website both targeting keywords with local modifiers (e.g. churches in Trinity, FL) and with the intent of telling the search engines where your church/business/organization is in addition to what keywords are related to your organization. As a church with a specific location, local SEO is very important for bringing new visitors to your church through your website.

Why Local SEO?

Local search is a growing subset of online search. With so much information online that comes from every corner of the globe, it is no wonder local search is gaining in popularity. If you’re visiting New Orleans and want to find a restaurant to visit, you can’t just search for “restaurant” or you’ll get a bunch of results that don’t help you at all, like a restaurant in Hawaii. So, you search for “restaurants in New Orleans”. People do the same when searching for a church. Whether they are visiting a town, moving to a town, thinking about moving to a new church, or maybe struggling and want to talk to Pastor, people search locally for churches. Why local SEO for your church marketing? You want local SEO because you want your website to be listed when people search locally.

What is Local Search?

I mentioned above that searches like “restaurants in New Orleans” are a form of local search, but there’s another kind of local search. The major search engines saw the trend of people using keywords that included local modifiers (e.g.: “in New Orleans” or “in Tampa FL”. So, they created the Local Search option. In Google it’s called Google Maps. In Yahoo, it’s Yahoo Local Business. There’s also Live Local and Ask City Search. These are a different type of search. You enter the city you want to search in and then the keyword(s). The local search results are completely different from the general search results and usually include a map so you can see the various locations on the map associated with the search results. Also, the listings in the local search results do not necessarily have to have a website. In that sense they are more like a phone book listing. The listings can have a website link but don’t have to, and the listings include additional information like a description, business hours, contact info, etc.

What’s the Difference?

The local search options in the major search engines don’t just affect the way people search, but also require a different kind of search engine optimization. In this case, the SEO isn’t just targeting specific keywords, but also uses various techniques to tell the search engines where the church or business is located. This can be done through META tags, putting the organization’s physical address on the site, inserting a Google or Yahoo map on a page, in addition to other techniques. It’s still good to use regular SEO techniques to target specific local keywords, but you also want to include these other techniques.

In addition to different SEO techniques, local search results are also affected by ratings and reviews. Similar to the way link building can help you improve the affects of regular SEO, getting positive reviews and ratings can help you improve the affects of local SEO. If you are in a town with 100 churches, what does Google or Yahoo use to decide which church gets listed first and which is last? Four things:

• Local optimization

• The location of your church compared to what the search engine considers the center of town

• The reviews and ratings for that search engine’s listing

• The reviews and ratings for listings on other sites, especially local review sites and Internet yellow pages

So, in addition to using local optimization on your church website, you also want to get plenty of positive reviews and ratings both on the search engines’ local listings and on other sites.

Local SEO is absolutely essential for every online church marketing effort. It’s not all that difficult (or expensive if you hire someone to do it for you) and it can pay off in spades by bringing in new members to your church. Read more about why local SEO is so important in church marketing and what obstacles you may run into in my the second part of this article, “Local SEO’s Importance To Church Marketing – Part 2”

Kurt Steinbrueck is the author of the Church Marketing Online blog. He has been Director of Marketing Services with Ourchurch.Com for over 5 years providing Christian search engine optimization services including services specific for church marketing solutions and private school marketing. Kurt is also a Deacon at his church.

Using effective marketing to help personal trainers is much like using effective marketing to help a wide variety of other businesses and business people. The big difference is that personal fitness is a singular thing to many folks. Being as that’s the case, any good marketing campaign a trainer engages in should form around that precept and deliver its activies with the personal outlook in mind.

Successful trainers have learned that they need to keep an eye on their marketing activities on a weekly basis, to gain maximum effectiveness from them. They also continually evaluate their campaigns and readjust them as necessary to improve their performance. Given this, it’s even more important in the case of a new trainer that this be done.

Most marketing campaigns have a starting point, a mid-point (where they’re evaluated for success) and an ending point, where a new campaign begins. Part of this campaign is in the development of an effective and professional-looking website. Have one made by a pro, if unsure of how to go about doing it.

Good personal trainers and their businesses can benefit from a strong word of mouth component. This means getting flyers and brochures printed up (this can also be done through the Internet) and spread around. Additionally, a trainer can make up an email list either from the website or from one purchased from a list seller, and then start targeting the people on that list with fitness-specific mailings. Also, the mail-out will have a free gift of some sort, like a complimentary copy of a generic fitness plan, for example, attached. Receptivity to marketing increases when there’s at least a perceived value to it.

Prepare the list with the mailer, and send it out. Then monitor any potential client response to it. This can be the foundation to a well-made marketing campaign both for the present and for any future activities. Regular emails that also provide some value should be sent out. Items like a fitness newsletter work well, to use one example. Soon, the people on those lists may start asking about training.

A central component of a good marketing campaign is still the deployment of flyers and brochures along with business cards. These are a good way to increase the word of mouth factor when it comes to the new business. Also, work on the referral system, in which somebody is asked to refer somebody else to the fitness professional’s service. This is a normal and accepted part of most business activities.

Look at distributing these items at local health events such as wellness screenings and fairs. Also, fun runs and large group athletic events can be a good place to spread some business cards and flyers about. Additionally, find any community bulletin boards and see if flyers and brochures can be added. Always make sure to get permission, and then keep a fresh supply of them available.

Using effective marketing to help personal trainers is to use marketing at its most basic and effective levels. Fitness is a personal thing to many, and the marketing being done needs to reflect that.

Combining those things with a little Internet-type activity can help increase the effectiveness of the whole campaign of your personal trainer marketing, too. Soon enough, if done correctly, chances for success of the business might just increase appreciably. www.kickbacklife.com is a great resource for time management.