Search Engine Optimisation | White Chalk Road

Is Twitter an Effective Marketing Channel?

July 14th, 2010

A few years back I first caught wind of a new social media platform known as “Twitter”. It was explained to me as follows:
“Twitter – it’s like Facebook, with only the status updates.”
And I thought to myself, “What a silly idea, with an even sillier name!”

And then Twitter took off in a big way, it seemed like everyone had jumped on the Twitter band wagon, from shoe companies to celebrities to your next door neighbour. But after the first couple of months, I discovered that Twitter’s business value was negligible.
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Posted in News, Social Media |

How to Detect Poor SEO Consultants or Companies

July 7th, 2010

Anyone who’s anyone in the SEO biz will remember about half a year back when Derek Powazek went on a wild-eyed, mouth-foaming diatribe against SEO.  ”SEO is not a legitimate form of marketing…SEO is poisoning the web…you’re sacrificing your brand integrity in a Faustian bargain for an increase in traffic that won’t last the month.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in Website Marketing |

The Psychology of Sales Conversion

June 14th, 2010

To conclude our series of articles on how to effectively sell online, I wanted to finish with a small piece of wisdom I found in a blog post on Entrepreneur.com, written by Jon Rognerud.

He had this to say in his article entitled “Who Else Wants More Money From Their Landing Pages?“:

You should set your ego aside, and recognize that most new users who come to your website, have a “bad” or “I’m busy” attitude. If you can generate relevant pages that try to answer their problems quickly (“the 5 second rule to action”) – you are on your way. The 5-second rule (or less) must engage the user to do something on your site.

Look to overcome this user psychology and test your pages against them: Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in News, Sales |

Sales Conversion Secrets Of The Worlds Best Websites

June 7th, 2010

Now, I can hear some of you saying: “But I’m not a big firm with a well established and known brand, like Amazon.com or Microsoft or even BMW. So, how on earth can I build trust when I don’t have the financial resources and market recognition to achieve what these companies can?”

Understand this: Trust relies on a lot more than just big dollars to spend on a branding campaign and a huge multi-national firm behind it all.

Instead, it relies on answering the (often) unspoken fears of potential customers visiting your website. Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in News, Sales |

Does Your Website Sell?

May 31st, 2010

The most beautiful websites in the world are about as much use as a screen door on a submarine if they don’t convert visitors  (to buy or at least ask for more information, which then allows the sales staff to close the deal).

Yet, scarily enough, this obvious fact seems to be not so obvious to web design firms or their clients.

Why spend even $1 on a website, let alone the $5000, even $20,000 and upwards price tags that most web design firms charge for your shiney new site, without making sure that your site can and will sell? Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in News, Sales |

Selling Online vs Selling Offline – What’s The Difference?

May 24th, 2010

It amazes me how often website owners have this strange idea that selling online is radically different from selling offline!

As a business owner, would you set strict guidelines for your sales staff that they were only allowed to say 10, 20, or even 50 words (maximum) to a prospective client before they ask for the sale?

Of course not! You’d think that was stupid, wouldn’t you?

Yet, time and time again, I see websites that are trying to sell something (whether it’s a product or service is immaterial) that do just this. Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in News, Sales |

How To Increase Sales To Clients And Prospects

May 19th, 2010

If you are not keeping in contact with your past clients, you are MISSING out on a golden opportunity to boost sales & referrals!

If you view a first purchase from a new client as the START of a great relationship, and maintain contact with that client in a positive, helpful respectful way, over time that client will make more purchases from you and/or will refer new contacts to you.

The problem is, keeping in contact with clients can be expensive and time consuming.

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Posted in News, Sales |

5 Top AdWords Landing Page Tips

May 19th, 2010

As I mentioned in my previous post, setting up a successful AdWords ad campaign isn’t as simple as just stuffing a few “relevent” keywords into an adgroup, writing an ad and putting a bid amount on the keywords and turning it all on.

Chances are, if you’ve ever dabbled with AdWords before and done this (as most beginners do), you had a pretty poor result.

Either your ads didn’t show up often, or they didn’t get clicked much, OR (even worse) you got lots of clicks but very few of them turned into a sale or a lead.

So, one of the pieces of the puzzle is the landing page, and I thought I’d make a few comments about them, since we are (once again) designing landing pages for clients who have NO IDEA about how to make this work properly – which is NOT their fault. We’re the adwords specialists, not them, which is why they came to us for help!

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Posted in Google Adwords, News |

Some Google AdWords Best Practises

April 19th, 2010

One of our main business offerings is Google AdWords consulting and management services. We manage close to $1,000,000.00 worth of adspend per year through Google for various clients, so I thought it would be worthwhile giving you a quick overview of what I consider best practises for a successful AdWords campaign. Hopefully, you can get a feel for all the steps we have to go through for a client in order to achieve a positive result when it comes to adwords.

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Posted in Google Adwords, News |

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