Trends

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A little bit on conversion marketing

Did you know that less than 2% of typical website visitors complete a transaction and also that the average website receives only ten visitors a day?

This is only 6 transactions a month!

That is not very exciting!

It is also clear that if you just put a site out there and don’t take very specific action to convert better, you will never see a good return in sales.

There are two things that you need to pay a lot of attention and work towards improving:

1- increase the traffic to your website. This can be done through SEO, Pay per click or social media. Hopefully you will use all of them.
2- Increase the rate of conversion from visitor to leads to buyers. so, you need to capture some of the visitors and conert them into leads and then into buyers.
In order to do that you might want to offer an ethical bribe that they give name and e-mail to get it. Those e-mails will go to an auto-responder program where you can do proper follow-up in order to get them to buy.
You will also make sure that your website is very clear in which path your visitors need to follow. what they need to click next, what they will get and how many clicks it will take them to get waht they want.
You want as fewer clicks as possible when asking them to buy something and you want to make the purchase process as simple as possible.

60% of sales are lost in the checkout process. This is a lot! Some of the resons why this happens are: asking for irrelevant or too much information in the checkout, too many screens before transaction is complete, name of product different than what was offered.
The next thing to improve conversion is to pay attention to your follow-up strategies.

Leads need to go to an auto-responder system where you have sequential messages increasing credibility and asking for the sale.
Remember that if people don’t buy from you, usually the main reason is that they don’t trust you. Use messages, newsletters, videos, video testimonials and direct mail to increase the level of trust.

From moment zero, when you think about your website, think how you will improve conversion into sales.

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Facts on small business marketing and social media

  1. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
  2. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%
  3. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
  4. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the  populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.  Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
  5. 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
  6. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé – some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts
  7. Instead they are distributing: eReaders + iPads + Tablets
  8. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
  9. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
  10. While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
  11. Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
  12. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
  13. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
  14. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
  15. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
  16. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
  17. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.
  18. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
  19. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
  20. Only 14% trust advertisements
  21. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
  22. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
  23. Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas

These are facts from the video social Media Revolution

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This is Better Than Ice Cream

Let’s go right to the point: We’ll be offering a full day to increase your profits.

Not only we’ll be working with you we’ll also allow you to look over our shoulders to see how we create online profits.

This will be in Salt Lake City on the last week of June

Check it out right now: Profit Magnifier

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Twitter Trivia

I got this from a presentation by Corey Condello and thought it would be useful to my readers:

Retweets:

*Retweet serves 2 important functions
allows you to post another user’s tweet to your followers
it makes sure you give credit to the original tweeter

* 2 ways to retweet
Click the retweet button on the original tweet
add RT@ with the Twitter name to your post
DMs

*what is a Dm?

A direct message is a private Twitter message.

*2 ways to send a DM
Click on the Direct Message button on the sidebar of the user’s profile

* D+@username + message in the tweet box

Hashtags:

*Hashtags (#) help categorize tweets. You can add a hashtag to any tweet
*When someone searches for that hashtag, they will see your tweet.

Twitter Lists:

*They allow you to organize your followers into groups
*The lists that you follow show up in your sidebar
*You can create a list by clicking on the “New List” button.

Use Bit.ly to shorten urls.
#FF

#FF stands for “Follow Friday”. On Fridays you can post a tweet that suggests people to follow. This is a way to help your favorite tweeters to gain more followers.

Place the @ symbol before the username so that it will link to the user’s profile.

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Creating a bridge between offline and online

I’ve pasted below a post from FourSquare.com on a promotion Starbucks is launching.

It is exciting to see how offline businesses can benefit from technology to market their businesses. What is not exciting is looking at all the small businesses that could do the same but just keep waiting to jump and try new ways of promoting their business until it is too late.

Foursquare is one way to bridge an offline business with online technology, but there are other things small business should look into like the QR codes.

These codes are an amazing bridge between offline media and online media and businesses in the US should be using them more. After all they can be easily created, can be free and be very effective. You might not be using it, but remember, you are not your audience.

Here is the post I mentioned earlier:

Facebook may be teaming with McDonald’s, but Foursquare refuses to be outdone in adding big brands to its portfolio. Starbucks is increasing their partnership with Foursquare by offering a mayor special at select locations across the US from May 17 through June 28. Mayors will receive $1 off a Frappuccino beverage by showing the unlock screen on their phone to the barista.

Starbucks is a frequent experimenter in the social media space, with a heavy presence on Facebook and Twitter. In fact, Foursquare and Starbucks have previously teamed to offer the Barista badge to users who check in to five or more Starbucks locations. At that time the NY Times’ Bits Blog reported Starbucks was excited about Foursquare because “it’s where the intersection between digital and physical starts to get interesting,” said Chris Bruzzo, vice president for brand, content and online at Starbucks. “Starbucks loves that, because we’re always looking for that intersection, which we think is the evolution of social networks.”

The biggest problem I see with this initiative is that Starbucks employees are not prevented from holding the mayorship of their stores. For instance, at one local Starbucks the mayor is an employee with 40 checkins over the past two months. It would be almost impossible for an honest-to-goodness customer to become mayor of that venue and unlock the mayor special. Starbucks has claimed most of their stores as the owner, but they haven’t added any of the local employees as staff, which would prevent them from holding the mayorship.

Starbucks becomes the largest major national chain to offer a mayor special nationwide. Partnering with Starbucks will certainly help propel Foursquare use into the mainstream as users at more than 11,000 locations will be exposed to the Foursquare concept for an extended period of time.

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Looking for Sales Reps

BuzzBooster is looking for people motivated to promote one of our new services for local businesses.

Commissions are very good! Contact us by e-mail buzz@buzzbooster.com