Monday, December 20, 2010

Small Business Idea Generator (small business)

REVIEWED BY: Marguerite Zelle

MY RECOMMENDATION: YES, with reservations

AMAZON SUBSCRIPTION LINK: Small Business Ideas Generator, by Alyssa Gregory

WEB ADDRESS: http://smallbusinessideagenerator.com

BLOG DESCRIPTION: Practical ideas for using marketing, networking, technology and social media to give small businesses a big advantage.

MY REVIEW: This is an excellent blog for the small business person, with lots of ideas on running your business, and plenty of "cool tools' brought to your attention. The only problem is that it is only updated once a week. On the other hand, since its only 99 cents a month to subscribe, it's still worth it. Check it out.

Sample post
Internet marketers often get tunnel vision while they brainstorm ideas to reach their customers. If I asked you how you bring high quality leads to your website, you would probably give me a full dissertation of your SEO strategy or how many of your Twitter followers retweet your content.

It’s easy to forget that we can control our Internet marketing strategy ourselves. Sometimes, we need to just take the initiative to pursue leads on our own.

It may seem easy to wait for customers to come to you, but you need to think about how much time and energy you need to spend optimizing your site in order to get organic traffic. Also, check your Google Analytics logs to see how many visitors leave your site because they are not interested in your content. From this perspective, it may make more sense to pursue leads on your own that are most likely to convert.

In order to pursue direct leads, you need to build a list of target customers. List building is not a difficult process, but you don’t want to waste time following useless leads.

If you are going to market your services to anyone in the world, you should always begin by asking yourself what they want. You can’t start building a list of potential customers until you’ve identified which ones are going to need your product.

Analyzing their company and industry is necessary while you are developing leads. It is also helpful because it helps you understand how they are going to respond to your marketing efforts. You can tailor your messages to each recipient so that they will have a better sense of what you are offering and how it will benefit their business.

Once someone has arrived at your website through a direct communication, you need to get them to convert the same way you would with any other customer. When you are contacting your prospects, you need to make sure that you give them a link to a contact page where they can easily contact you or sign up for your program. Keep your contact pages and squeeze pages simple and minimize distractions. Loud messages and annoying graphics are just as likely to annoy your prospects as anyone else. Worse, they may be angry that you wasted their time contacting them.

Direct marketing can actually be less work than optimizing your website. Just think from the mind of your target customers and always show that you are trying to put their needs before your own.


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Reviews published every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
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