Small Business Marketing Sucks

Please visit the new site at:

SmallBusinessMarketingSucks.com

See you there!

In my latest SitePoint blog post, I talked about inbound vs. outbound marketing. In case the difference isn’t clear to you, here’s a quick definition of inbound marketing:

A marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers, where the customers find you through various search engine marketing efforts, social media, or word-of-mouth referrals.

Outbound or traditional marketing would be things like print advertising, direct mail, cold-calling, and television and radio advertising – essentially, anything a company does to find customers, as opposed to “being found.”

It’s become quite vogue to characterize outbound marketing as “old school.” But is traditional marketing really as dead or ineffective as inbound marketers claim?

It sounds good in theory to say the every business should utilize inbound marketing. But how would you advise someone who just opened his own carpet cleaning business? Build a website and hope people find it? Create a Facebook page or Twitter account and look for people to ‘like’ it or follow him? Blog about carpet cleaning? Honestly, how many homeowners would engage a carpet cleaning service on social media? Besides, it’s the cart before the horse.

The best strategy would be a combination of old school: Yellow Page advertising, direct mail and cold-calling. That’s what will get him customers right away. Once he’s built up a sufficient client base, then he can begin using social media to engage them, offer discounts and incentives, and generate marketing gravity.

Many people think that outbound marketing more expensive than inbound. But how much does cold-calling cost compared to search engine optimization or paid search? (You’ll spend a lot less on the phone calls.) Certain keywords are becoming quite expensive and ROI is dropping because only large companies with huge marketing budgets can afford them.

Another thing that’s dropping is the cost of Yellow Page advertising (due to independent directories entering the field). In some markets you can buy display advertising for less than $1200 for the entire year.

For most (if not all) small businesses, a combination of inbound and outbound marketing may be the best option. I owned my own web business, so you’d think I’d be singing along with the “outbound only” marketing tune. But my experience has shown me that those who preach that message usually have their own agenda – to sell their own inbound marketing services. And what better way to accomplish that than to disparage their “outbound” competition?

Whew! This SitePoint post of mine certainly generated a lot of controversy, comments, and tweets.

Is quoting a ballpark price always a losing proposition? In this article, I talk about how to turn a potential losing situation into a win.

It has all the markings of a lose-lose situation. Quote too high a price and you probably won’t ever hear back from him. But if you under-estimate the cost, you’ll look shady if you actually bid for the job and your proposal comes in higher. So what’s a poor web designer to do? Bite the bullet and throw out a number? Or tell him you can’t quote a price without knowing exactly what he needs? Here are a couple of approaches you can try...

Read the full story at SitePoint.

In my latest SitePoint blog post, I finally reveal what stapling bacon to your face has to do with cold-calling and I explain how to overcome the single biggest obstacle you’ll face when it comes to actually doing it.

Several years ago, the company I worked for held its international sales meeting, and reps from all over the globe came to our corporate headquarters in Los Angeles. I was asked to stand up in front of the group and make a presentation. Two of the reps from Australia approached afterwards to tell me they thought I’d done a good job. One of them expressed his fear of public speaking with this statement...

Read the full story at SitePoint.

In my last SitePoint article, I promised to show you if and how cold-calling can generate new clients. In this article, I’ll tell you why it works so well and reveal a deep, dark secret behind it (hint: it stinks).

In my last post, I promised to show you if and how cold-calling can generate new clients. As I mentioned in that post, the company I work for uses cold-calling and cold-canvassing as its primary means of getting business. That doesn’t mean we ignore other marketing methods. It’s just that we don’t just sit around waiting for people to respond to our mailers. We have a sales force on the street and a telemarketing team on the phones actively looking for new business.

Get the full story on SitePoint.

After publishing an article on their website, the folks at SitePoint have asked me to be one of their business core bloggers. I’ll be publishing about 6 blog posts a month. Here’s the first:

In 2008, Eyes on Sales featured an article entitled, “Why Decision Makers Hate Cold-Calls.” If you want to be convinced that cold-calling doesn’t work, that it’s a colossal waste of time, and that it’s the most “ineffective and costly” way to find prospects, then go ahead and skip what I’m about to say and go directly to that article. (Just be sure to read the numerous comments from people who vehemently disagree with the author.)

On the other hand, if you’d like to explore how cold-calling can be a great way to find new clients, then stick around, because that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Full story on SitePoint.

I’m conducting some intensive training for the lead generators I manage and oversee, based on curriculum from appointment setting expert Scott Channell. I’ve broken the training into four distinct phases. Although this is specifically geared towards cold-calling, the steps in this process apply to any type of marketing you do.

The first step in the process is What to Say when you have a decision-maker’s attention. Whether that’s over the phone or on your web site, you’re going to have to plan in advance what you’re going to say. If you don’t have something very compelling to tell them, you will lose them. Without the right message, even the person who has a need for your product or service will tell you ‘no.’

Answering Objections and Responding to Resistance is phase 2. We hear the same objections over and over, so there’s no excuse not knowing how to respond to them, be it face-to-face or in your marketing material.

Phase 3 is implementing a Seven-Touch Call Process. This is where most sales people struggle… how often should I call? How many emails until it becomes spam? Unless you figure out how to consistently touch your prospects numerous times, you will become lost in the clutter.

Targeted Marketing is phase 4. Most businesses would love to clone their five or ten best customers, but few make the effort to try. Does it work? We’ve only done it to a small degree but we’ve seen some dramatic results

The final step is Creating a Killer Value Proposition. A value proposition is ”a clear statement of the tangible results a customer gets from using your products or services”. The best source for this information is from the mouths of your customers themselves. Once you know why they buy from you, weave that into all of your sales and marketing messages. Why did I save this step for last if it’s so important? Because you need to start marketing as best you can, as soon as you can – with or without a “killer” value proposition. Once your marketing machine is in motion, you can tweak it as you go.

I’ll be covering each of these steps in more detail over the next few days. Until then, happy marketing!

I’d like to think I’m a good boss, but I’m certain that at least a few of the people working for me hate me this week.

That’s because I’ve been subjecting them to some extensive training on setting sales appointments. The first step was to develop an effective script. Everyone worked hard coming up with a good one, and today we completed our final drafts. I gave everyone until Monday to make any last-minute tweaks and to practice, practice, practice before launch day.

But a few of the more rebellious ones decided to start using the new script right away. In the first hour after today’s meeting, 3 people set appointments with their new script; and one person used a portion of his to overcome an objection and book an appointment. Way to go, team!

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing some of our techniques and strategies, successes and failures. Regardless of how you’re marketing, I think you’ll read something to help in your endeavors.

I just discovered that an article I wrote for SitePoint in 2005 is mentioned in the book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Creating a Web Page & Blog:

Bulletproof Web Design Contracts (www.sitepoint.com/article/bulletproof-web-design-contract) is an outstanding article by John Tabita, chock-full of smart and useful advice about creating contracts for site design jobs. (p 282)

Not to toot my own horn (well, maybe just a little), here are some of the reader comments on the article:

This is THE best, most comprehensive article I've read on SitePoint...

Thanks for such a stunning article!

This is a great article. Very well done.

Excellent article — very useful, thanks!

An insightful and informative read, John. You da man.

An article of mine has been published on SitePoint.com.

SitePoint is an online media company and information provider targeting the Web professional market, specifically web developers and designers. Its website contains a vast variety of tutorials and articles coupled with a vibrant and well-informed community of over 400,000 members. It was named the third most popular eBusiness website and is currently the 749th most visited web site in the world.

The article is titled, So What Exactly is “Value” and How Do I Use It to Sell? It can be found here.

A company I worked for had a particular manager that I had never met. Despite that, I felt like I did know him because, whenever his name came up in conversation, the typical reaction I heard was, “He’s a real a$$*#%! hole.” After about the fifth or so time of hearing those exact words, I had begun to develop a very distinct impression about him. Like it or not, he had been branded.

When we think about commercial brands, we tend to think of a name, sign, symbol or slogan… anything that is used to identify and distinguish a specific product, service or business. But on a more basic level, a brand is an identification mark… such as when using a branding iron to mark an animal to indicate ownership.

That “mark” can also be a symbol of disgrace or infamy, as in the Bible when it says that “…the Lord set a mark upon Cain” after he killed his brother, Abel. A mark or brand can also stigmatize, accuse or condemn, or brand as disgraceful, as in the case of the a$$*#%! hole manager.

Companies often confuse their brand with the logos, trademarks, signs, symbols or designs that identify the product or services they sell. But your brand is a distinctive identity that is associated with the product, service or organization. Brands are more than just names slapped on your products by the marketing department. They embody the value those products have in eyes of your customer. Or at least they ought to.

To most companies, their brand is centered around their product. But brands are more about the promises you deliver than the products sell. The promise of value (and the delivery on that promise) is at the heart of it. So true branding is about selling a promise of value.

But promises are serious business. Making too many or changing them frequently raises questions about the character of the individual or organization doing so.

Companies can say (or promise) whatever they like about their organization, product or service, but what they say is typically what they want the buying public to believe about their organization, product or service. But what you do proves what you believe, not what you say. And if what you believe about your company is not the same as what you want the public to believe about your company… well, that’s the definition of a hypocrite.

And if what you think the buying public believes about your organization, product or service is not what they actually believe, well, that’s called denial. (Or stupidity… you choose.)

Want to know what your real brand is? It’s whatever word your customer uses to complete the following sentence:

“Oh, [Company Name]… that’s the company who _________________________.”

How would your customers answer that question?

I once worked door-to-door sales for a lawn care company. A common response I heard from homeowners after I identified myself was, “Oh… you’re the company who constantly calls and calls and won’t leave me alone.” More than one customer told me that they refused to do business with us because of this – despite being satisfied with the quality of lawn care.

Remember how I said that a brand can also be a symbol of disgrace or infamy?

The owner of a small restaurant in Cherryvale, Kansas, recounted how she and her husband had always thought their restaurant was unique because they were the nicest restaurant in town. But, by surveying their customers, they found out otherwise. In her words, "We were surprised to learn that, instead of being the 'nicest' restaurant in our small town, it was known as the 'birthday' and 'anniversary' place. Why? Because it was the nicest place in town. So now we market it that way, always collecting data from our customers as to when their birthdays and anniversaries are, and sending them cards for a free piece of pie or box of candy when they dine here for their occasion."

As you have probably noticed, your brand is closely associated with the value you provide to your customers. The people in Cherryvale valued this small town restaurant as the “birthday” and “anniversary” place because it was the nicest place in town. And its owners delivered on their promise of value by making sure it was the nicest place in town.

Determining what your customer values and then delivering on that value is what true branding is all about… regardless of whether it’s a professional or a personal brand.

When it comes to strategic vs. tactical planning, it’s easy to fall into either/or thinking – that is, either strategic thinking is better, or tactical thinking is better. This is especially true when you realize which type of thinker you are. We tend to believe that our type of thinking must be superior. But regardless of whether you are a strategic or a tactical thinker, you must come to realize that both types are critical to success; and you must learn to appreciate your business partner and/or your employees’ way of thinking and value the contribution they can make towards accomplishing your goals.

So when I use the term strategic vs. tactical thinking, it’s not to imply that they are at odds with one another; rather it’s to contrast the difference between the two, so you can begin to distinguish and appreciate those differences. It’s also critical to recognize when you are not applying both types of thinking to the situation.

Difficulties arise when one or the other, rather than both, is used to tackle a problem. Strategic thinkers tend to analyze the situation but often fail to take action. “Paralysis by analysis” is their downfall. Tactical thinkers are all about “doing something,” but they often don’t think before springing into action; so oftentimes, their action is ineffective, and perhaps unnecessary. If only they’d taken the time to step back and analyze the situation beforehand.

Think of strategic and tactical thinking like the strings of a violin. In order for the instrument to create beautiful music, each string must have tension applied to both ends. If tension is released from either side, then the music it was intended to create cannot be produced.

The apparent tension between strategic and tactical thinking is seen in the statement, “Doing Things Right vs. Doing the Right Things.” Tactical thinkers tend to focus on “doing things right,” and strategic thinkers are concerned with “doing the right things.” But let’s consider that statement for just a moment. If you do something “right,” but it’s the wrong thing to do, your efforts will be futile. Conversely, if you do the “right thing,” but you do it wrong, you’ll also fail miserably.

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before the defeat - Sun Tzu

Let me give you a couple of examples.

Doing the Right Thing, but Doing it Wrong

When my partners and I began our web development business, one of the “things” we did to find clients was cold calling. Today, I run a telemarketing department, so I know something about it, but eight years ago, I was completely ignorant on the topic. Without a script or much of plan, we opened the phone book and started calling.

As you can imagine, we were less than successful. We landed two very small jobs (one of which we ended up refunding the money), so we decided that cold calling wasn’t the way to find clients in our market. It wasn’t until a few years later that I met some colleagues who were having great success with cold calling. One even told me that it was the primary way he gained new business. Our failure caused us to conclude that we were “doing the wrong thing,” when in reality, we were “doing the thing wrong.”

Doing the Wrong Thing, but Doing it Right

A few years later, I met a business woman whose product was coffee gift baskets. Previous to this, she’d been a freelance computer programmer and IT consultant. Now, the primary way that such a person gets business is through networking: belonging to groups such as chamber of commerce, establishing relationships with people that could become clients or who know others who could become clients. Much of this type of work is gained by “word of mouth.” Jackie knew this and was good at it. And since that was all she knew, she was using it for her coffee gift basket business.

The problem was that, unlike computer programming, where she only needed maybe one or two new clients every few months to make a living, Jackie needed to sell several dozen baskets each week to make a profit. What Jackie needed was a website and a retail outlet to expose her product to the public. Networking meetings were getting her one or two sales, at best, a month. If Jackie had been a different type of person, she might have concluded that she was “doing the thing wrong” and tried harder – more networking meetings, talk to more people, and so on. Fortunately, she realized that, although she was “doing the thing right,” it was “the wrong thing” to do for her new business.

So let’s get away from either/or thinking, and engage in both/and thinking: both strategic thinking and tactical thinking are critical for success.

Lets face it... if you’re in business, you need a plan.

You did create some type of business plan before you set up shop, didn’t you? If not, I highly recommend you do so now. Go ahead, I’ll wait...

Great! Now that you have a plan, let’s talk about some of the components of that plan. Let’s talk about strategies and tactics.

I’m sure “strategic” and “strategy” are not words you use in everyday conversation. (Heck, I can barely even spell it.) Yet, your success depends upon learning and applying the concept. Let’s first talk about what it means. Here’s my working definition:

Having a long-term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, most often “winning.”

So “winning” in the business world requires both strategic and tactical planning.

Business consultants draw a distinction between the qualities of a manager and those of a leader, because it’s rare that one person will posses the qualities of both. In other words, managers seldom make good leaders and vice-versa. Managers are primarily concerned with “doing things right,” and Leaders are concerned with “doing the right things.” The first is Tactical thinking, and the second is Strategic thinking; the first is Management, and the second is Leadership. In a nutshell, Leadership is about creating the vision, and Management is about implementing the vision.

When I was a kid, Dad was big on “setting goals,” and was always telling me that I needed to have some. What he failed to teach me was big picture, strategic thinking. How could I set a goal when I didn’t know where I wanted to go? Having a goal without a strategy is like trying to buy an airline ticket without a destination in mind. Just go somewhere, already!

But without a plan, you’re like Alice wandering around in Wonderland:

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don't much care where...” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“...so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

Benjamin Disraeli once said, “Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.” But what we’re aiming for is action based on a strategic, long-term plan – doing the right things and doing them right.

It my next post, I’ll give you some practical examples of what that looks like.

In my last post, I talked about how raising prices can actually bring you in more business, reduce your workload and make you more profitable. The reason is simple: raising prices drives away the cheapskate customers. And what’s left are the ones who spend the most.

Another way to accomplish this is to deliberately target customers who spend the most. The idea here is to clone your best customers.

I spoke with Scott Channell on this very topic last week. Scott is an author, speaker and sales consultant – and an expert on setting sales appointments. I’ve been getting his marketing emails and following his advice for the past few years. I was familiar with the concept of targeted marketing, but I never got around to it with my web business. So when I read Scott’s emails on the subject, I decided to try it with my telemarketing department.

I started off by looking at sales from the previous year, 2008, and identifying what types of businesses spent the most money with us. I gave the biggest spenders – attorneys – to my best appointment setter.

The results, shown in the graph below, were nothing short of dramatic. By the end of 2009, we had increased attorney sales by more than 660 percent over the previous year.




Looking at 2009, the next graph shows how dramatically attorney sales jumped in June when we began this strategy.




Targeted marketing works because it makes your efforts more effective. You can be super-efficient and make 150 calls a day. But if those 150 calls are random and non-targeted, your results will be less than stellar. Why not focus your efforts on calling those who buy more often and spend more? We did, and the results speak for themselves.

Even during prosperous times, it’s suprising to hear this. Yet, even in an economic downturn, some customers will tell us, “I have more business than I can handle.” Some think that’s a good thing… while others are overwhelmed by it. When we tell them that they ought to “raise their prices,” we often receive a puzzled stare back in response.

The website FreelanceSwitch has posted a list of the “Top Ten Signs You May Be Charging Too Little.”

10. Your clients mistake your daily rate for an hourly one.

9. You’ve won every job you’ve ever bid on.

8. Even though you work 80-hour weeks, your income level qualifies you for welfare payments.

7. New clients are always asking what “the catch” is.

6. Clients pay your invoices in cash from their wallet.

(You can read the rest here.)

The Marketing Blogspot has an interesting and informative post on the concept behind how raising prices can actually bring you more business. The author says that most people believe that raising prices equals less business because fewer people will want to do business with them – when the exact opposite is actually true.

I read a great definition of capitalism recently:

A system in which there are winners and losers, in which someone with a brilliant idea gets rich, while most of us get by.

I think of Apple CEO Steve Jobs when I read that. He had several brilliant ideas (like the Macintosh, the iPod and Pixar, to name a few). He’s rich while I’m getting by.

Then there’s Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. I should have been Mark Zuckerberg. I was a web designer and my partner was a web developer. We could have created Facebook… we had the technology. But Mark Zuckerberg had the brilliant idea. He’s rich while I’m getting by.

Guy Kawasaki, one of my favorite speakers, encouraged a group of high school students to “challenge the known and embrace the unknown.” The story he shared is a telling example of innovation and the lack thereof:

In the late 1800s there was a thriving ice industry in the Northeast. Companies would cut blocks of ice from frozen lakes and ponds and sell them around the world. The largest single shipment was 200 tons that was shipped to India. 100 tons got there un-melted, but this was enough to make a profit.

These ice harvesters, however, were put out of business by companies that invented mechanical ice makers. It was no longer necessary to cut and ship ice because companies could make it in any city during any season.

These ice makers, however, were put out of business by refrigerator companies. If it was convenient to make ice at a manufacturing plant, imagine how much better it was to make ice and create cold storage in everyone’s home.

You would think that the ice harvesters would see the advantages of ice making and adopt this technology. However, all they could think about was the known: better saws, better storage, better transportation.

Then you would think that the ice makers would see the advantages of refrigerators and adopt this technology. The truth is that the ice harvesters couldn’t embrace the unknown and jump their curve to the next curve.

Challenge the known and embrace the unknown, or you’ll be like the ice harvester and ice makers.

This reminds me of the company I worked for in the mid-nineties. In the 1980’s, the company developed a large-format computer painting machine. At that time, all billboards were hand-painted, but this machine could produce signs faster, with greater consistency and with colors more vivid, than the best hand painters could. For the next ten years, they dominated the industry.

But by the late-nineties, advances in technology enabled other companies to develop large-format devices whose output began to first match, and then exceed, what the company's machines could do. So now anyone with some capital could buy a $20,000 large-format printer, produce a product superior to what the company’s multi-million dollar patented painting machines could, and sell it for much less… which they did. During the dark days of plummeting profits and subsequent lay-offs, one of the VP’s told me that they had gotten “fat and complacent.” They were in danger of becoming an ice harvester.

It also reminds me of the industry I’m currently in, the Yellow Page industry. In the mid-nineties, when companies like AT&T and Ameritech were enjoying high profits from their Yellow Page monopolies, two Stanford University students were quietly setting up shop in a garage in Menlo Park, CA. I’m sure that the multi-billion dollar telecommunications companies could never have imagined that this newly-formed company named Google, with its measly $100,000 of investment capital, would ultimately be poised to topple them as the preferred medium that consumers would use to search for local business information.

So what’s the lesson for the small or medium-sized business today? Never assume that the products and services you sell today are going to be the same ones you sell tomorrow. If you focus exclusively on the how and neglect what you do and why you do it, then you’ll find yourself in the same position. Yellow Pages have been extremely successful “connecting buyers with sellers,” but they were asleep at the wheel and didn’t see that the Internet could fulfill that role and be in position to eventually displace their print directories. With all of their capital and resources at their disposal, they could have been Google. They should have been.

In my previous post, Internet Marketing 101, I explained the difference between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. (If you missed that, I suggest you read it first before continuing.) In Internet Marketing 102, I’ll explain the pros and cons of each to help you decide which might be best for you.

PPC Pros and Cons

Pay-Per Click (PPC) ads have the advantage of getting you instant ranking. You can create an ad today and be #1 on the search results tomorrow… provided you are willing to pay top-dollar for the search phrases you want. For this reason, many marketers use PPC to test a product. You can create a short campaign, set a limit on how much money you’re willing to spend, and quickly know if there’s an online market for your wares.

And here’s another tip for product testing. More people use Google than any other search engine. (Over 90 percent of all searches are done using Google.) That means that if you’re serious about selling online and determined that PPC is the way to go, then you’ll want to use Google’s PPC program, AdWords. But because of the high volume of traffic, Google can command top dollar for their cost-per-click prices. So smart marketers test their product on Yahoo! instead, because their prices are more affordable and their ad program simpler to use than Google’s.

Another advantage of PPC advertising is that it’s do-it-yourself. I say that somewhat reluctantly, however, because in Google’s world, “do-it-yourself” doesn’t mean easy. One expert describes it as “not rocket science… but darn close.”

The only reason PPC is remotely do-it-yourself is because Google offers an extensive (and free) online training course to help you learn their AdWords program. (In case you were wondering, they don’t offer one for SEO, because they want to sell advertising, after all.) And while SEO may not be rocket science, it is computer science – and Internet marketing savvy, all rolled into one.

The disadvantage of PPC is that you’ll be bidding against similar companies for the search phrases, or “keywords,” you want… and the highest bid gets the best ranking. In a highly-competitive field, such as weight loss or work-at-home jobs, the cost of your keywords may simply be too high for you to see a return on your investment. Compounding this is that, if you jump in without really taking the time to learn how it works, it’s easy to lose your shirt.

SEO Pros and Cons

If the main advantage of PPC is instant ranking, then the biggest disadvantage of SEO is that it takes a long time – too long, in fact, if you’re testing a new product for marketability. Achieving top ranking in the natural results can take several months. But the good news is, once you’ve gotten a top ranking, it cost much less to keep you there than it did to get you there. Here’s where one of SEO’s main disadvantages – its initial high cost – becomes an advantage if you’re in it for the long haul.

SEO has a much higher cost to get started – anywhere from $5,000 to $8,000 in your first year. But most experts will tell you that SEO is cheaper in the long run. Here’s why.

With PPC advertising, your costs will never decrease. In fact, they may increase as your keywords become more competitive. But that’s not the case with SEO. Most SEO companies charge an initial $2,000 - $4,000 to do keyword research and optimize your site’s code, structure and content. This is Phase 1.

Phase 2 is getting your site to begin to climb the long ladder to top ranking. To make this happen, a good SEO specialist will do things like write press releases and articles or create videos and distribute them on various sites across the web. They will also look for ways to get top sites to link back to yours. These help to improve your Page Rank. This phase may cost $300 or $400 a month for 6 to 8 months.

But once you get top ranking, they may only charge $150 a month to keep you there. So your first year investment may total more than $6,000, but Year 2 may cost you less than $2,000. And if your total online sales gross a quarter-million a year… well, you do the math.

I once met with the owner of a casket manufacturing company who was very successful selling caskets online with PPC advertising. But they were spending several hundred dollars a week to do so. In the scheme of things, even if they were spending $20,000 or $30,000 a year for PPC, they were still getting a return on investment. But if they could invest in SEO and ultimately reduce that to $2,000 a year, why wouldn’t they? (Which is why they were talking to me.)

That brings up another advantage of SEO. More people look at (and click on) the natural search results than the paid ads. So ranking high there may drive in more business over the long run than PPC.

To recap, PPC is great for achieving instant ranking and is more do-it-yourself than SEO, but it’s easy to lose your shirt if you don’t know what you’re doing. SEO takes longer and has a higher up-front cost, but is usually less expensive in the long run. But it’s much harder to learn than PPC, so it usually requires hiring an expert to do it for you.

But PPC vs. SEO is not always an either/or proposition. Many successful companies use both. The key is to measure and monitor both to be sure you’re seeing a return from each.

My dad has been experimenting with search engine marketing and Google AdWords. The other day, he called me with a question. He wanted to know how to create an ad that would appear on Google…not the top or right section where the paid ads appear, but in the main center portion of the page.

Dad was confused; he was trying to do something that’s not even possible. Most small business owners are equally confused about search engine marketing. A recent survey revealed that the majority of small business owners feel that Internet marketing is very important. Yet, 59 percent of small businesses with web sites don’t use paid search marketing... and of those, 90 percent have never even attempted it! So if you want to know more about search engine marketing, but you don’t know a PPC from a SERP, you’ve come to the right place. Here’s my Internet Marketing 101 Primer.

(I’m going to use Google in my example, because they are currently the 1000 lb. Internet marketing gorilla. But the information here applies to all search engines.)

When you type in a search phrase in the search box, Google serves up several pages of results. This is called the Search Engine Results Page, or SERP. (There’s one acronym down.) The search results come in two varieties, paid and natural, and they appear on different parts on the page.

Paid Search Results

The search results at the very top and on the right are paid ads, as shown below:



These are called Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads because the advertisers pay Google money each time their ad is clicked on. The advertiser who is willing to pay the most for a particular search term (such as “fishing lures” in my example) is the one who will appear at the top.

Natural Search Results

The search results that appear on the main body of the page are not ads. These are called the “natural” or “organic” results.


Where my dad got confused is that, appearing under each website listed in the natural search results, there is a short description, which looks similar to the paid ads on the right. But this description is not a paid ad… it’s a snippet of code that Google and other search engines pull from the HTML code of the website:


As I said, these are not ads. You cannot pay Google to appear in the natural search results. Google’s complex (and highly secret) mathematical algorithms determine who gets well-ranked and who doesn’t.

To achieve a top ranking (especially in a highly competitive field), you must either be very smart, or you must hire someone who is very smart to do it for you. These very smart people are known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialists. Part art and part science, Search Engine Optimization is the process of making a website’s code, structure and content as “search engine friendly” as possible in order to get the search engines to rank it as high as possible on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

When I ran my web business, I helped clients get good search engine ranking by sub-contracting the services of these very smart SEO people. But in order to explain the benefits and pitfalls, I also had to be able to talk about it in non-technical terms. Here’s as non-technical as it gets: search engine marketing is only successful if you get a return on your investment.

Some companies choose to exclusively use Google’s Pay-Per Click to sell their products online. Others use search engine optimization. And still others use both. What you choose to do depends on many factors, and each one has its advantages and disadvantages. So it’s not a question of which is best, but which is best for you. In my next post, I’ll outline the pros and cons of each to help point you the right direction.

You’ve probably heard the saying, “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” As a telemarketing manager, it used to baffle me how two telemarketers could deliver the exact same pitch and yet one would set five times more appointments than the other. I’ve come to believe that how we say it is at least as important as what we say.

The reason for this lies in the physiology of the brain, so here’s some Science 101. But don’t worry… I’ll keep it simple.

Your brain is made up of many parts, but for our purposes, I’m only going to talk about two. The first is the outer portion, or the neocortex.

The neocortex is our “Thinking Brain.” It’s primarily responsible for things like:

• Rational thought, Logic and Language
• Reasoning and Problem solving
• Judgment and Impulse control

The other portion is the limbic brain. This is our “Feeling Brain.” The limbic brain is the first part of our brain to react to anything we see, hear, feel, etc. In other words, the first response we have to any situation or event in an emotional one… because all sensory input hits the limbic brain before the neocortex. This means we feel before we think.

Now that you know a thing or two about the brain, which part do you suppose controls decision-making?

Is that your final answer?

If you picked the limbic “feeling brain,” then you answered correctly.

Does it surprise you that the feeling brain is what drives decision-making rather then the thinking brain? It doesn’t if you’re in sales, because you’re probably familiar with this well-know quote:

“People usually buy on emotion and then they justify it with logic.”

- Zig Ziglar

Science is now confirming what salespeople have known for years – and the physiology of the brain explains why it is so.

This means that, as sales people, business owners and marketers, if we want to persuade and influence others’ decisions, we must communicate to the feeling portion of the brain more than the thinking portion. It’s not that people don’t want logic, facts and figures when making decisions – they do. It’s just that logic doesn’t drive behavior and cause people to take action… emotions do.

Need more proof? Let me channel Cliff Clavin for a moment. The word emotion comes from the Latin word emovere. Here’s a word picture:

emovere

It’s also where we get the word motivation. The bottom line is, we don’t move or make any decision unless our emotions are involved.

So what does this have to do with using your voice more effectively? Well, everything… because the limbic “feeling brain” also processes vocal intonations or “tone of voice.” This means that your tone of voice is the direct link to the “emotional mixing board” in another person’s brain. Your tone of voice has a huge impact on the other person’s emotional response – for better or for worse…