1. Keywords - Target the keywords that your target market uses.
2. Content - It’s got to be great, unique, linkworthy, fresh, keyword-focused content.
3. Links -No links? No rankings.
4. Site Structure - It’s essential to get the technical details right (redirects, HTML templates, URLs, internal linking structure).

Selling vs. Effective Marketing

Confusion on this issue will always exist. That’s why so many companies have marketing departments and sales departments.

The only reason you need both is because the marketing department is doing such a lousy job differentiating the business and products, the sales department has to hit the streets and do the educating for them. That’s why selling can be such a tough job.

Source: Duct Tape Marketing, John Jantsch

Au contraire to Neil Patel’s post Want to be successful? Learn how to sell!, I believe effective marketing is much more valuable to an individual and business’ success. Neil’s post outlines some of the characteristics of a great sales person. All of which I would consider short term success, besides customers become warn out from a sales person’s antics. You should simply just need closers.

Indeed sales are always being made and persistence does pay off, but launching, testing, monitoring, and tweaking effective marketing tactics is much more fruitful to companies and the sales are just the results from your marketing efforts. This includes all of the following benefits of an effective marketing program: product / service communication, good customer service, happy customers, empowered referral sources, and challenged employees.

Nowadays, companies should focus on precise marketing strategies and tactics to implement and test. Yes, that sounds obvious. However, there is no better time than now to start planting marketing seeds and capture market share.

If your marketing department isn’t clever and effective, don’t bring in sales people or business developers for a short term solution to drum up some business. Look to hire a more creative marketing person that can more effectively market your business, products, and services. Marketing can turn your pipeline into a never ending “closing machine”.

Well, we all have Tiger Woods to thank for disappearing from the game of golf over the past 8 months. Because of his time away from the Tour, the economy has slid into this recession.

The good news is that Tiger Woods is back and the economy should get back on track because of his return.

Are “good times” gone? Did someone really turn the light off at the end of the tunnel?

Here’s the Sequoia Capital presentation outlining what went wrong and what’s going to happen for startups and venture-backed companies.

What are your thoughts on the Sequoia presentation?

I don’t think the light is turned off at the end of the tunnel. I think it shines as bright as ever for some.

In fact, I think now is the time for you and your company to roll up your sleeves and get the marketing going. Marketers, This is Your Time to Innovate and Lead, Not Hunker Down gives you an “optimist’s” perspective of proactive marketing and drowning the fear factor.

Over the next 6-10 months, marketers should be thinking about low-cost, high-impact marketing strategies. Focus on driving revenue and building / keeping a flat revenue line this year and your company will be considered a winner in these economic times.

Sample Landing Page

Landing Page Sample

Why do you need a Great Landing Page?

The answer is simple. You want to convert traffic into the behavior you desire a user to take. In most cases, this is revenue. That’s ultimately what the goal of a great landing page is.

The only way to measure the effectiveness of your search engine marketing campaign is through the reaction to your landing pages. Landing pages are the heart of the search engine optimization and PPC strategy, and your statistics will show whether or not you have done the work you need to in order to make sure your website works for you. Let’s take a look at what a landing page is and why it matters so much for the success of your web site.

What is a landing page?

Basically a landing page is any page on your site where searchers “land” when they click a link on a search engine. Search engines rank pages according to formula known only to their staff but that is the subject of a lot of educated guess work and testing, and the better the criteria matches the material on your page the higher your landing page will be in the rankings.

There are two basic types of landing pages, both defined by the type of site you are running. Reference landing pages present information that the searcher is looking for; the value for the visitor is in the facts or entertainment they can glean from the page. For the web site developer, the success of the reference landing page is measured in the revenue of the advertising that is displayed on the page.

Transactional landing pages are landing pages which encourage a searcher to take a direct course of action, which can be anything from signing up for an account to simply filling out a form with some basic questions. While it might seem easier to create a successful reference landing page, creating a transitional landing page can be a lot more fun, especially if you really know what you are doing.

Source: SEO Crunch

Starting with a good landing page:

Create a page specifically designed to capture leads. Your landing page will need the following:

• Information about your product or service
• Call to action to convert lookers into buyers
• A goal

How to make your landing page great:

In order to make your landing page great, you need to remember that users gravitate toward graphically friendly pages. You need to tease your traffic, lead the eyes of the viewers with color, bold fonts and graphics – keep them interested in your message.

• Above the Fold – Keep all critical details and call to actions above the fold. The imaginary line on your screen before scrolling down.
• Keep Focused – Landing pages are about ONE thing. One product, One Service and One Call to action.
• No Clicks – Remove the navigation bar so that they either have to complete the action or go to another page. Don’t let them click navigation and leave your landing page. Once their gone… their gone.

Source: Tech Talk

Good Landing Page Resources

• Landing Page Tutorials and Case Studies - copyblogger
• E-Commerce Conversion Rate Resource
• Exact Target
• Dime Sports Affiliate Landing Page

Currently, we are in the process of developing a landing page campaign for a client. I will share the designs and the results.

Realizing that there are a lot of books out there to read, some interesting, and even better some are actually useful. I compiled my current library of recommended books to help you skip past some of the useless, over-marketed books.

Leighton Ventures Book Library

Right now I am reading Click by Bill Tancer. As I find interesting snippets of information, I will share them with you.

Slide #109 is important.

Here’s some inspiration my friends working on startups.

Infomercials do work. If you don’t believe me, watch the complete infomercial below with Vince for ShamWow! In 2 minutes you’ll be buying one of these, trust me.

Here are some quick marketing lessons:

• Demonstrate and re-demonstrate the value your product brings
• Solve a problem consumers are having (spills are a problem)
• Hire a great (not good) spokesperson; Vince is simply GREAT
• Make the offer enticing and for a limited time
• Purchasing your product must be easy

The ShamWow! is an excellent traditional television / infomercial marketing campaign. But, how does this translate to small businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs?

Take a look at the Slap Chop and how strategies and tactics from this online marketing campaign can be used to sell your products or services. Again, this product is being promoted by Vince the captivating spokesperson. Vince is very blunt and persuasive.

The Slap Chop webpage is an example of a good landing page for to convert searchers into buyers. Take a good look at the video, the offer, the fine print, and the warranty.

An example of a misleading management tool is the ordinary monthly sales chart.

People think up is good and down is bad, but what if the chart goes up less than the same month last year? What if that continues for 12 months? When will you finally notice that your growth has slowed to a crawl? Too late is the answer. A simple tool called the trailing 12 months chart (T12M) will forever solve this problem. Where ordinary charts regularly lie to you, the T12M always tells you the truth.

Well, I have found this T12M chart to be very insightful for forecasting and understanding my business and my client’s businesses. In fact, utilizing Excel is nice. But, there is a better, more interactive way of looking and documenting your sales.

Why not make notes on why sales went up, and went down? Below is a link to an easy way capturing this data to help CEOs track their company’s monthly sales, per Kraig Kramer’s T12M.

Creating your T12M Spreadsheet in Google Docs.

Google Spreadsheet

Adding an Interactive Time Series Chart

Interactive Time Series Chart

Check out the tutorial on creating an Interactive Time Series Chart.

Now you can use the power of Google Finance for your company’s monthly sales and trailing 12 months sales numbers. Simply rollover the line graph and the top right of the gadget displays the value.

You can also make notes to document the reason why sales increased or decreased so you can track all the necessary variables. For example, in October 2008 this company obtained 4 new clients and bumped the sales to $16,000.

Let us know if you need Leighton Ventures to customize your company’s T12M chart.

Well, if you and your company are looking to respond to an economy that’s in a recession, look no further than these 40 inspirational speeches that are shown in 2 minutes.