Five Ways to Turn Your Website into a Sales Machine

Your online presence is a vital part of any sales strategy. But is your website the sales powerhouse it should be?
Replicating the effectiveness of the face-to-face sales process online -- and getting customers to go from clicking to buying -- can be difficult. The good news is that there are a few simple tricks and tweaks that can improve your site's revenue-generating capabilities.

How to Create an Engaging Facebook Welcome Page for your Software Business

Everyone wants to make a good first impression, right? If you have a brick and mortar building for your business, you want visitors to feel welcomed as soon as they come through the door. The same is true for online landing and welcome pages – you want the individual to be attracted enough to stay on the page, and interested enough to either leave you their email address immediately, or start engaging with your business in some way.

Items to include on a landing page:

How to Create Your Own Product Online

In this article I will share the key steps you need to take to create your own online product. An online information product is one of the easiest and cheapest products to make and sell. Typically information products sold on the internet take one of the following formats: ebook, audio or video. The choice of which format to use depends on the nature of the information you are presenting, the needs and preferences of your market and also your own preferences. The steps I'm going to share work with all three types.

How Your Online Surrogate Should Sell

Your online presence is your surrogate salesperson. She lives there, and she is always working, even when you are sleeping. When your dream clients are looking for you, they find your web presence, your online surrogate.

To make certain your online surrogate salesperson is doing her job, here are some rules to follow.

Πως να ξεπεράσετε 6 εμπόδια που αποτρέπουν την ανάπτυξη του blog σας

Από την στιγμή που δεσμευθήκατε να τρέξετε ένα μπλογκ, είτε προσωπικό είτε επαγγελματικό, πρέπει να δεσμευτείτε και για πολλούς μπλόγκερς αυτό δεν είναι και τόσο εύκολο. Ωστόσο προτού απογοητευτείτε σκεφτείτε ότι υπάρχουν εκατομμύρια μπλόγκερς που μπορούν και λειτουργούν μακροχρόνια μπογκς με επιτυχία.
Ανακάλυψα 6 πολύ συχνά εμπόδια που είτε αποτρέπει ανθρώπους να ξεκινήσουν το blog τους ή το παρατάνε μετά από λίγο καιρό. Αυτό είναι ένα συχνό φαινόμενο που συναντάω πολύ συχνά στα ελληνικά blogs. Αυτά τα εμπόδια μπορούν να προσπεραστούν με λίγο υπομονή και λίγη αποφασιστικότητα.

How Advert Scheduling Can Benefit Your Business

When creating an advertising campaign on Google, the scheduling of an advert can be set by going to the 'Edit Campaign Settings' page and adjusting the scheduling settings to best suit the requirements of your business.
If you're just about to launch an advertising campaign, then the obvious scheduling settings should be adjusted so that it runs every hour of the day, 7 days a week. The reason for applying these settings is because you would not have yet established what hours/days provide your campaign with the most conversions."

Why Your Business Needs to Pay Attention to Consumer Feedback

Knowing what customers find important and how they want to interact with a brand is important to any business's success. A new study encourages brands to take note of what consumers think is necessary in order to improve a product or service and then make the changes that will satisfy shoppers.
Here are five suggestions from the “Conversation Index” released by Bazaarvoice, a Texas-based company best known for its ratings and reviews software. The tips are garnered from the millions of pieces of user-generated content from online reviews:

Ειδικές στρατηγικές marketing τουριστικών προορισμών

Οι τουριστικοί προορισμοί θα πρέπει να έχουν ως κινητήριο μοχλό για την ανάπτυξή τους συγκεκριμένες στρατηγικές marketing, οι οποίες και θα καθορίσουν την υλοποίηση των στόχων τους. Στη σύγχρονη τουριστική αγορά η αντίληψη των πωλήσεων του παρελθόντος δεν αρκεί. Οι προς ανάπτυξη τουριστικοί προορισμοί -αλλά και οι ήδη υπάρχοντες- θα πρέπει να καλλιεργήσουν την επικοινωνία με τους παλαιούς πελάτες αλλά και με τους μελλοντικούς ενδιαφερόμενους, και φυσικά όχι μόνο πελάτες αλλά και προμηθευτές και άλλους συνεργαζόμενους φορείς.

In-Video Shopping: Η (δια-δραστική) επανάσταση στο ηλεκτρονικό εμπόριο

Εδώ και αρκετό καιρό, η αγορά του ηλεκτρονικού επιχειρείν αναζητεί λύσεις για το πώς θα μπορέσει να αντιμετωπίσει δύο προκλήσεις του διαδικτύου: πρώτα την εύρεση δυνατοτήτων χρηματοποίησης των βίντεο κλιπ και γενικότερα του περιεχομένου των βίντεο και ύστερα την αναζήτηση τέτοιων τρόπων, ώστε η online διαφήμιση να γίνει για το χρήστη πιο ελκυστική, πιο βιώσιμη και ως εκ τούτου πιο αποδοτική.

Double Sales without Increasing Advertising

FACT: '50% of Visitors are LOST because visitors can't easily find content' - Gartner Group
FACT: '40% of Repeat Visitors are LOST from negative experience' - Zona Research
FACT: '85% of Visitors ABANDON a new site due to poor design' - cPulse
FACT: 70% of people who are ready, willing and able to buy online - don't complete the sale. 
Just imagine, if you can improve your web site's conversion rate, you have the potential to increase your sales by over 233%. And you can do it without spending any more on advertising, or bringing any more traffic to your site.

8 Guaranteed Ways to Drive Customers Away

If your long-term customers are leaving--and not coming back--you're probably making one of these mistakes.

Your most profitable customers are almost always long-term customers.
Don’t lose them by making any of the following mistakes:
1. Change too many players. It’s tempting to assume long-term customers love your brand. More often than not they love your employees.
Customers don’t buy from companies. They buy from people—your people.
Since relationships are the lifeblood of a small business, don't rotate salespeople, customer service reps, or key contacts unless you have to. Do everything possible to protect and foster the relationships your employees forge. Employees are rarely interchangeable where strong business relationships with customers are concerned.

How to create a blog: Blog Revenue

Blogs are quite popular nowadays. I know a lot of people creating blogs on the topics of their interest and to share their knowledge with the world.
Many of them are making their living through the blog revenue. Blogs are similar to websites, the only difference is, it is not as organized as websites with the navigation bar and tier 3 pages.

Blogs are more considered to be like diaries. It's free writing. Not so organized, you write short updates on your niche about 5-6 paragraphs.

Your Homemade Website Isn't Cutting It Anymore

Americans spent $200 billion online in 2011. The opportunity for retailers is huge--but you're not going to grab it with a DIY website.
A report this week from Forrester Research confirmed what just about everybody in business already knew: Americans are buying online and they are buying a lot.

The study reported that Americans spent more than $200 billion online in 2011 and projected that total would rise to $327 billion in 2016. The 2016 figure represents 9 percent of all retail sales (up from 7 percent in 2011).
Among the report’s interesting findings:

• 53 percent of Americans made an online purchase in 2011.
• 58 percent are expected to make an online purchase in 2016.
• People believe they get the best deals when shopping online.
• Tablet devices like the iPad have spurred online impulse buying.

How to turn your Blog into a Profitable Venture

Overview of 3 major sources - - advertising, donations and paid membership

The next step, after you’ve met those requirements, is to determine how you can generate revenue to turn your blog into a profitable venture. There are three primary revenue sources for blogs: advertising, donations and paid membership.

Advertising:
One of the easiest ways to bring in advertising dollars is through Google AdSense, a free service that provides both text and graphic ads that are relevant to your content and target market. You get paid when someone clicks on the ad from within your blog.

Social media for hotels: What’s the problem?

In today’s marketplace, hotels cannot afford to ignore social media; but looming questions and uncertainties undermine how effectively most hotels use their social media channels. Here's a new white paper that breaks down social media for hotels into six basic steps or phases.

Some hotels don’t do social media at all, or make only a token effort (i.e., they set up the accounts … and then let them sit). These hotels are missing a powerful opportunity for:

- Branding
- Building and managing online reputation
- Serving customers better
- And last but not least, cultivating a new sales channel for direct online bookings

Be smart in your approach to social media

There is no doubt that the potential of social media as a marketing and communications tool for businesses, including real estate franchises, is significant – making it hard to ignore.  Yet the very nature of the platform leaves businesses across all industries open to a variety of issues that can arise, as many organisations are now finding.  
You can never fully control what your customers say about your business on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter – and nor should you want to.  One of the biggest benefits of using social media is to allow your customers to express their opinions and discuss your services amongst themselves, spreading the word about your business across vast networks.  

How to Get More Value from Your Site

When we put up a website, blog or even an article, in most cases we do so hoping for the visitor to do a particular thing, take a specific action. Those actions are called conversions. We are converting the visitor into something else, a subscriber, a customer, and so on.
As you know from daily life, getting people to do what you want them to can be tricky. We have our own agendas, we see the world differently, there is also self interest, which can work for or against you.
That is why many bloggers and webmasters take the easy route. They don’t even try to get any real conversions, they are happy to sit at the bottom of the web metric food chain.
The value pyramid looks something like this, but obviously will differ from case to case:

Making social and email work better together

Today more than ever businesses can put social marketing to work for them and leverage its power to create profitable relationships. You can send out a campaign that creates a series of social contact points where customers can “like” or share the message and propel that message further into the social network to find more customers.
Just how far it travels depends on the value of your content and how well you execute your social campaign. Here are some steps to help make sure your message has a money-making trip:

Define Goals for B2B Social Media Success

One objective for a social media program is to build brand equity. When people are interested in a firm’s products and services, Facebook is a great place to check them out and discuss them. Twitter is perfect for keeping tabs on sales promotions and company news.
Unfortunately, building brand equity via social media is not easy for B2B companies. First, their customer bases are far more limited than those of consumer brands. Second, brand awareness is often a much more important need, especially for small and midsize firms.
And, whereas social media is superb for building equity, it is not particularly effective for building brand awareness. B2B marketers too often miss this crucial distinction. If people aren’t aware of your brand, they don’t care about your brand. Motivating them to care about your brand enough to connect and engage on social media is a monumental task. It can be done, but it requires more effort in terms of content production and outreach than most B2B companies can muster.

Προβλέψεις για το web και το ηλεκτρονικό επιχειρείν για το 2012.

Έχοντας διανύσει τους πρώτους μήνες του 2012 και αφουγκραζόμενοι την εποχή και τις δεδομένες τεχνολογικές και οικονομικές συνθήκες σε παγκόσμιο επίπεδο, μπορούμε να κάνουμε πλέον κάποιες προβλέψεις για το web και το ηλεκτρονικό επιχειρείν για το 2012.

1) Τα κινητά δείχνουν το δρόμο

Όλοι μας έχουμε συνειδητοποιήσει πως τα κινητά πλέον είναι από τους κινητήριους μοχλούς στη βιομηχανία της τεχνολογίας και δημιουργούν τάσεις και καινούριους διαύλους επικοινωνίας. Τα smart phones βρίσκονται σε κάθε σπίτι και το 2012 πρέπει να μας βρει προετοιμασμένους, είτε έχουμε στη κατοχή μας ένα απλό website είτε ένα πιο σύνθετο ηλεκτρονικό κατάστημα. Εφόσον θέλουμε να επικεντρωνόμαστε σε ευρύ κοινό, δεν πρέπει να αποκλείουμε κανέναν από την πρόσβαση στο site και μία mobile έκδοση θα γίνει απαραίτητη.