Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

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Turn Your Average One-Time Website Visitor into a Customer Posted: 13 Feb 2013 07:47 AM PST Today, at 1:00 PM CST you can learn: 10 Tips to Turn Your Average One-Time Website Visitor into a Customer in my webinar brought to you by McKay Allen with LogMyCalls! You will even get the chance to ask me one on one questions! Time: 1:00 PM CST Place: https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/524085863 Star: Your very own SHOEMONEY What you will learn today: How to turn your website into a conversion machine 10 Tactics to turn visitors into engaged customers Action items you can change on your website today Tools and tips to fix your website’s problems Talk to you soon!

6 Things I Learned about Making Money with Local Lead Generation Posted: 13 Feb 2013 05:00 AM PST OK my last post was like a hemorrhoid (rather inflammatory), so I’ll tone this post down a bit.. If you are in performance marketing space and are sick of doing affiliate marketing, local lead generation is an awesome way to transition into. Why? Simple: most small businesses/retailers have ZERO idea how to do this.. nor do they care to really know because they’re too busy, well, running their business. Imagine if you were a dentist or an optometrist looking for more sales leads, are they going to learn PPC, conversation optimization, landing pages/HTML/wordpress/javascript, etc…? Probably not. A few caveats before I go into details: I don’t claim to know everything about lead generation, but I do run a lead generation company specializing in solar leads. These solar leads are valued higher because of the nature of the cost of solar systems, so these might not apply to ALL types of local lead generation. This is in TWO parts: first three – me “venting… then last 3, what I’ve learned. 1) If the companies you deal with can’t close the leads, they will blame your leads. Fundamental truth about sales: I can deliver 1,000 HIGHLY qualified sales leads but if the sales guy receiving the leads is a turd salesman, ain’t NONE of them going to turn into a sale. And of course, what do they do? Turn right back around and point the finger in YOUR face. If they do, make sure you tell them: Ok, let me explain.. this usually happens with small or new shops where they haven’t really figured out how to work the sales process yet. Or what’s worse.. you give them more leads than they know how to deal with. Essentially you are jamming their sales pipeline, so to speak. Would companies be happy with that? You would think so.. but sometimes it can backfire. 2) Technically challenged – Multi-ten-million dollar companies STILL use Email & Excel spreadsheets over CRM It’s mind boggling to see companies doing $10m+ revenue a year are STILL using email / spreadsheet to track their sales leads instead of using some web based CRM. Often times, I’ll ask if they want their leads posted via CRM.. and once a customer told me if I can call them with each and every lead. Ugh. 3) People bitch and complain, a LOT Yes, local lead generation is a service business. Highly scaleable and if you do it right, highly profitable. BUT.. it’s STILL a service business. And as with any service, expect your fair share of bitchin’ and complainin’ about what they receive, no matter how well you present it. It’s amazing that your leads could double or triple their existing revenue yet they bitch and complain about the littlest things. 4) For “higher” value leads, the best conversions come from PCs (I know you tech geeks are drooling over that pic..) If you’re not green inclined, home solar systems can petty much wipe out your electric bill forever (assuming your electric usage doesn’t go up). So obviously, the cost of entry into solar can be quite high.. which means, the person looking for solar is going to be doing a lot of research. When was the last time you did any kind of serious online research using your smart phone? Nope, more likely they’re going to be using a PC or a tablet. Meaning, your best chance of interrupting them and getting to sign up is going to be HIGHER on PCs/tablets. 5) Display/Social leads can sometimes actually be better than search leads Do you know the AIDA steps in purchasing process? (If you don’t, here’s a primer on AIDA.) Problem with getting leads who are in the decision process is that they’re often shopping around. Which means, if they fill out your form, they’re probably filling out forms on other sites too to do their “shopping around”. Yes, these people are more likely to buy.. but at the same time, they’re more likely to have been pitched 3-5..even 10 times before they make their final purchase decision. So if your client (i.e. the one receiving the lead) calls this person and has to compete with half a dozen other sales people, he/she is probably going to end up with lower ROI. 6) Rich get richer OK, this one is going to be a subjective opinion and you may not agree, but oh well, too bad.. i’m writing this post. ;P Here’s what I’m talking about. My solar lead generation company, Solar One Media, gets TONS of inquiries from small to midsize solar installation companies, looking for solar leads. Often times, they’ll have few lead qualification criteria – such as electric bill usage and county/zip. In another words, there are companies that specialize in various “levels” of qualification. Some are able to offer cheaper solar systems (from monthly payment perspective) and can accept lower electric bills. Some have more sales people and more installers in the area, which mean they can accept more counties/zip codes. So if two companies approach me, one asking for leads for entire Southern California and with $X/mo electric bill,  vs. another company who can handle, say just Orange County and with $2x/mo electric bill, who am I going to send the leads to? <think about that for a second> The answer is… the FIRST company. Here’s why 1) People MOVE around – For example, say I target people in Orange county, and “Bob” happens to see my ad. Bob works in downtown Irvine but lives in LA (1 hr north of Irvine in a different county). So when he fills the form, the lead ISN”T for Orange county. 2) The one with $2X electric bill is going to be MORE likely to close than a person with $x electric bill. Why? Higher pain… thus more motivated to purchase. In another words, i might have multiple buyers but I am going to reward the company who is going to make it easier for me to sell them my lead. Donald Trump says “think big”.. and this is a perfect example. I’m NOT going to give the better qualified sales leads to small time buyers.. makes no sense. Why am I going to give them better leads when they pay me less (overall)? I am going to  reward the bigger guys because their “net” is bigger, so to speak. Am I wrong?  Got an opinion about local lead generation to share? Leave them in the comments.   Looking for an SEO service that won’t get you banned?

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You Don’t Need to Invent It, Only to Identify It - DailyBlogTips

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You Don’t Need to Invent It, Only to Identify It Posted: 12 Feb 2013 07:36 AM PST If you want to build a successful startup or company and make a lot of money with it, especially in the tech sector, you need to come up with some innovative product or service. Something that will drastically improve the way things get done, something that will solve an existing problem in a much better way, something that will allow people to do things they couldn’t before. Most people know that. What most people don’t know is that you can build such a company even if you don’t invent the product/service yourself. Instead of inventing it you can identify someone else’s idea, purchase the rights to it or partner with the inventor, and then bring it to the market. Not convinced? Here’s a powerful example that backs up my case. Most of the early database systems used a hierarchical model, where data would be represented under tree-like structures using files in the computer memory. Then in 1970 a guy named Edgar F. Codd published a paper titled “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks”, where he proposed a new model based on relations (tables), where users would be able to declare directly what information they wanted back from the database, and the system would take care of the rest. Codd was working at IBM during that time, but the upper management didn’t give his idea any attention. Peer reviews of his paper were even more harsh. Here’s a quotation from one of them: This paper proposes that all data in a database be represented in the form of relations—sets of tuples—and that all the operations relative to data access be made on this model. Some of the ideas presented in the paper are interesting and may be of some use, but, in general, this very preliminary work fails to make a convincing point as to their implementation, performance, and practical usefulness. Adding together the lack of any real-world example, performance experiment, and implementation indication or detail, we are left with an obscure exercise using unfamiliar mathematics and of little or no practical consequence. It can be safely rejected. There was one guy, however, that thought Codd’s idea was interesting, and he decided to build a company that would develop and sell databases using the relational model. That guy is called Larry Ellison, and the company he co-founded is called Oracle Corporation. The relation model quickly became the de facto standard for databases around the world, and Oracle the largest company developing and selling those systems. The interesting thing is that in this case the revolutionary idea was just that, a concept. It wasn’t a patent or a proprietary design, so anyone was free to use it, and many did. Want some more examples? Apple and Steve Jobs didn’t invent many of the flagship products of the company. The mouse and the graphical user interface, for instance, were invented at Xerox’s PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), and Jobs came across them while visiting the premises. He then made a deal to be able to use them with the Mac, and Apple became the first company to launch bring those innovations to the market. Similarly Apple didn’t invent the MP3 player, but it managed to polish the concept with the iPod, which became the industry leader. MS-DOS was the product that solidified Microsoft’s dominance as a software vendor, back in 1980. Microsoft didn’t create that product, however. They knew a company called Seattle Computer Products which had a compatible operating system to the x86 microprocessors (the ones used by PCs), and they knew they probably would be able to purchase it for a moderate price. With those cards in hand they approached IBM, and they managed to close a deal to supply the operating system to the next line of PCs. Once the deal was closed they purchased the software from the Seattle company and renamed it MS-DOS. The bottom line: keep your radar on and always be looking for innovative ideas and products, as identifying one of them can be just as profitable as inventing one yourself. Original Post: You Don’t Need to Invent It, Only to Identify It

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