Archive for the ‘Teleseminar’ Category

By Doug Staneart

Many small businesses pay thousands of dollars for pay-per-click ads for lead generation, and then, when the leads come in, blow it by waiting too long to follow up with them. When people look for information, products, or solutions on the internet, they want instant gratification. If they have to wait for you to send back an email or wait for a phone call from you, you’ve probably already lost them. If they have to wait for you to send them something in the postal mail, you never had a shot anyway.

The first time that I realized just how critical this was, I had been in business for a few years, and my company was a preferred vendor for a training website. Every day, people would visit this website, and because it was so comprehensive, it was very difficult to navigate. As a result, a lot of people would just fill out the form on the website requesting whatever type of training that they were looking for. As soon as someone filled out the form, it automatically got posted onto the secure side, so if you were one of these preferred businesses, you could login at any time and see what had been posted.

To help us all out, though, the owner of the website would send out a summary at the end of the day, so every evening about 8:00 PM or so, we’d all get an email with a list of all of the leads that came in that day.

I responded to hundreds of these leads without any success whatsoever. Then, one evening, there was a lead for a public speaking class in Dallas. (I owned a company that taught public speaking classes in 50 cities around the world, but we were based in Dallas.) I thought, “Oh, I got this one.” And I responded to it. The next morning, I called the person and introduced myself, and she was the most cold and distant prospect I think I have ever talked to. She just said, “We’ve already chosen someone else,” and hung up. I was totally confused.

So I thought about what I should do to try and close some of these leads, and I figured that I really needed to know what everyone else was doing. So I went onto the site and created a posting of my own. It was about 10:30 AM, and I put into the posting that I would only accept email proposals.

By 11:00 AM, I had already received three proposals. The first was just a generic email with a HUGE attachment that took quite a while to download. It was about 20 MB of brochures in eight separate attachments that I never really went through. The second was just a simple email saying, “If you still need help, call me.” (Okay it was a little more involved than that, but not much.) The third, though, was a beautiful, professional looking proposal. After glancing at it, I had pretty much decided that if I had really been buying a public speaking class, I would have hired that company.

By 3:00 PM, I had about 25 proposals.

By 6:30 PM, I had received almost 50 proposals.

By 8:00 PM, the time that I was typically receiving the summary email from the website, I had received over 72 proposals.

The next morning when I woke up, I had received 143 proposals. After the first 20 or so, I didn’t look at any of them – not even out of curiosity.

When new proposals kept coming in the morning (less than 24 hours since I posted the listing,) they just ticked me off. I was thinking, “What a loser! You’re number 150 on the list.” But remember, that less than 24 hours prior, I was consistently number 73 or 74 on the list every single night.

I met with my team that day to share what I found out. We made a commitment to be the first to respond to every request. We only had six people working for the company, but we decided to assign one person every day just to wait for the phone to ring, one person just to wait for individual email leads to come in, and another just to wait for corporate contract requests to come in.

Our goal was to call any email inquiry back in less than five minutes. The most common comment that we started getting when we made those phone calls was, “Wow! I just hit send. You guys are really fast.”

That year we went from a small half-million dollar company to almost one and a half million dollars. The next year we doubled sales again. The only thing that really changed was the speed at which we were following up with potential clients.

Typical Web Surfer

Typical web surfers will usually do something like this. They have a question and quickly do a Google search. They will scan the first page that pops up looking for a listing summary that most closely relates to what they are looking for. If they find one, they will click the link to see if an answer can be found.

Not finding the answer right away, they might fill out a web form requesting additional information.

Then they will go back to Google and look at the next listing. This one has an FAQ page, and they read a few of them and feel comfortable enough to fill out another form to get a second opinion.

Then they will go back to Google and look one more time. This time, the website has a blog with dozens of helpful articles and a few videos that look really nice. They now pick up the phone and end up getting a voicemail.

They might look at a few more listings, but most will not likely to fill out any more forms. No one wants to be bombarded with spam from a lot of websites, so they will probably be cautious about filling out more forms. They will probably only call additional listings from here on out and only if the website is very compelling.

So here is the big question…

Who is most likely to get the business?

If the owner of the third website had answered the phone instead of having the call go over to voicemail, then that person would have had a tremendous advantage over the other two companies. In fact, if the person replies to the voicemail right away, that owner still has an advantage.

In reality, the person who makes contact with the prospect first and builds rapport with the prospect is always in the driver’s seat.

However, if you respond to the email the next day, the person will answer the phone saying, “Huh? Who are you again?” The person typically forgets entirely that he/she requested the information in the first place.

If the person gets a brochure in the mail a week after sending the email, well… you get the picture.

Speed is your friend in online sales. If you can’t personally follow up on the requests, then hire someone. If you can’t hire someone, then at least invest in a good email follow up system.

Don’t make your good prospects wait for you.

Move quickly. Move nimbly. And make a ton of people happy and a ton of money in the process!

Doug Staneart is the founder of The Leader’s Institute Entrepreneur Boot Camp author of the book Cultivating Customers, Small Business Lead Generation in a Digital Age. His small business seminars help entrepreneurs generate new customers and build small business infrastructure. Visit the Entrepreneur Boot Camp website for details about his programs.

The Golden Rule of Small Business Growth:

“It is a LOT easier to sell to prospects who CALL YOU than it is to sell to people YOU CALL!”

Most small businesses are the proverbial Needle in a Haystack because, since they are small businesses, most potential customers/clients will not even know that the business exists. The ones who do, will often not want to take the risk of working with a small company. This session is designed to help you create a MAGNET for that Needle so that you potential customers can find you more easily than your competition!

Step #1: Avoid the 10 Major Mistakes that Many Small Businesses Make

The remaining sessions of this teleseminar series are designed to help entrepreneurs, small business people, managers, and sales professionals avoid each of these mistakes and maximize their revenue — FAST! Since most “experts” will tell you that word-of-mouth advertising is the best advertising (it may at least be the cheapest… but just wait until you explore session #2 of this series,) let’s start with a quick session on networking.

Networking 101 – How to Work a Room

Below is a Bonus Video recorded at a recent Entrepreneur Boot Camp in Dallas, Texas. Doug Staneart explains how to increase your sphere of influence and avoid the Entrepreneur Mistake, “Salesperson Fangs“.

Increase Your Sphere of Influence

• Pull Back Your Salesperson Fangs – Don’t try to sell at networking events. Build rapport and help other people increase their sphere of influence, and your sphere will grow as well.
• Realize that your sphere includes not only the people that you know, but the people that the people who they know as well (and the people that they know). This powerful with in=person networking, but is exponentially more powerful with social networking (which we cover in session 2).
• Negative will always travel faster than positive. Protect your sphere of influence with integrity, effective follow through, and good people skills.
• The easiest way to increase your sphere is to help the people who you know increase their sphere in a positive way.

Questions to Ask to Get the other Person Talking

• Nametag: Hi, my name is ______. What’s yours?
• Work Glove: What do you do? How long?
• Map: Do you travel? Or Where are you from?
• Almond Joy: What do you enjoy about what you do?
• Black Sheep: What makes you unique or different?
• Blue Ribbon: What are you most proud of?
• Prospector: What kind of people are good prospects for you?

For more great questions to ask, read my friend Bob Burg’s book, Endless Referrals.

Final thoughts about Small Business Networking

• Network with people who help you access your market. Ex. Unless you sell to small business people, don’t waste your time at Chamber of Commerce business card exchanges. Trade shows or industry associations will likely give you better results.
• Sometimes the best type of business networking occurs when you identify other entrepreneurs who sell to the same market but who do not compete with you. We have a whole other series called Small Business Alliances that help participants build these alliances.
• When you meet new people, ALWAYS connect with them on Linked-In or Facebook. The bigger your in-person sphere grows, the bigger your social network should grow as well.

In Session 2, we’ll get to a lot of the real meat of this seminar. We’ll show you the following…

• Why spamming and cold-calling just don’t work.
• How to get to the top of Google search results.
• How to get a free one-page ad on 1000′s of prominent websites for free.
• Optimize your website to get people to call or email you and increase your closing ratio dramatically.

Continue to Session #2 >>

Session #1 | Session #2 | Session #3

The Golden Rule of Small Business Growth:

“It is a LOT easier to sell to prospects who CALL YOU than it is to sell to people YOU CALL!”

Now that we are getting prospects to visit our websites, how do we get them to contact us so that we can make the Golden Rule above kick in? And once they do make contact, how do we turn them into initial customers and long-term champions of our products and services? Welcome to Session 3, Responding to Inquiries to Turn Leads into Cash.

Responding to Inquiries to Turn Leads into Cash

Tip #1: Make it Easy for Prospects to Contact You Put phone number at the very top of every webpage in a very prominent place. Invest in a toll-free number. (I know, most people use cellphones to talk today, so long distance calls are a thing of the past, but a toll-free number shows the world that you are a REAL business… Not one in your garage.) People who pick up the phone and call you are serious buyers. In addition, put a web form on pages of your website where people can fill it out to request information. Good rule-of-thumb, the more web forms that you have on your website, the more leads you will generate. Finally, put a Buy Now button on your site. Give visitors the option to buy something right now without have to talk to or email anyone.

Stop Right Now! Click on your website homepage and see how many clicks it takes you to find a way to buy something. How many pages do you have to visit? How many hoops do you have to jump through? Make it easier for them, and they will buy.

Five Big Mistakes that Will Ensure that Someone Who Contacts You will Always Buy from Someone Else and How to Eliminate Them

Make sure that you 1) Give people a way to easily contact you on every page of your website, 2) Follow Up with every lead fast (and often by phone works best), and 3) Ask prospective customers questions to get them to clarify their actual need for you. Once you do these three things, just offer the prospect a solution, and they will likely put you at the top of the list for solution providers. Try to give a sales pitch, and you will play “20 Questions” with the prospect and likely end up competing on price.

How to Take Luke Warm or Cold Leads and Turn them into Future Income

When visitors to your website call your toll-free number or fill out a form giving you their contact information, your closing ratio at turning those leads into sales should be fairly high. The closing ratio is often determined by your industry (how competitive your industry is), how well you follow up with them, and how good your product or service is. So if your not getting a fairly high closing ratio, you can either 1) make your marketing focus more specific so that you have less competition, 2) change the way that you follow up (get faster and follow up longer), or 3) improve your product offering.

What happens with all of those, possibly thousands, of people who come onto your website, but never call and never fill out a form? These are the people who may not be a good lead or a good prospect right now, but may be a good prospect in the future.

Participant Warning If you are in an industry where people contact you ONLY when they need a result RIGHT NOW, skip this entire section. For example, if you are a plumber who focuses on emergency plumbing issues, this will not work for you. However, if you work primarily as a subcontractor for general contractors, then this process can help you build rapport with potential general contractors over time. If you are a collision repair center, it won’t work, but if you are an oil change facility where you see customers every four to six months, it will.

Not everyone who views your website for the first time is going to be ready to buy right now. So the tips in this video will help you trade some of your expertise for contact information so that you can educate potential leads over time. When they are ready to buy, they will already know you and trust you.

Continuity Programs: Turning Satisfied Customers into Long-Term Repeat Business (Steady Streams of Income)

So, what the heck is a Continuity Program? A continuity Program is a service that you provide for a large group of customers over time so that each customer pays very little (and sometimes nothing) individually, but when the group gets big, this steady stream of income can help you provide more services to customers that would otherwise be unattainable. This video shows what these programs are and what a great benefit they can be for you and your company.

Don’t underestimate the power of $9.99 or $19.99 per month. If you have a million people paying you $1 per month for a valuable service, you’re still pulling in $1,000,000 every month. Continuity programs are a way that you can do the work one time to create value for your clients and create a steady stream of income forever. When continuity programs are done correctly, you will have a huge following of satisfied customers. Realize, though, that if you promise your customers grand things and don’t deliver, you will get the opposite effect. So over deliver in your continuity programs.

Review and Create a Plan of Action

1. Now that you have completed the course, go back and re-watch the first video, Ten Mistakes that Entrepreneurs Make. If you have started to take action from this seminar, these should already be becoming a thing of the past.
2. Continue to network, but ask a lot more questions than you ask. Get to know them, and add them to your Linked-In Account. Build your network in person and online.
3. Use the Google Keyword Tool to identify two or three keywords or phrases that you can monopolize on the internet.
4. Optimize your website title, description, keywords, content, images, and links based on the keyword phrases that you found.
5. Write eight or more articles for each of the three keyword phrases and post them to at least 25 article directories, your blog, Facebook page, Twitter account, and Linked-In account. (Post them one per week or one every couple of weeks until all eight are published.)
6. Record a few two minute video tips related to your keywords (an easy way is to just record yourself speaking the content from your articles) and upload them to YouTube.com and other video websites.
7. When you get leads from the internet, RESPOND FAST! Be a consultant and a problem solver. Help the person see that he/she has a problem by asking questions. Often, they will talk themselves into buying from you.
8. Give away some of your expertise in order to get visitors to give up their contact information. Then educate these cold leads over time to create future business
9. Create a continuity program as a service to customers and a way to generate long-term streams of permanent income.

Do these things, and you will be the go-to company in your industry!

Need Additional Help?

• The Leader’s Institute Entrepreneur Boot Camp is a three-day, in person, seminar where we take you step-by-step through how to implement these and other ways to move from small business to big business. Class meet in May and December. Click here for a schedule.
• Your articles are the key to improving your search engine results. If you need to get better at writing, we cover a whole session on this in the Boot Camp mentioned above. Another great resource is our Fearless Presentations class which helps participants write and deliver great presentations. Guess what? The same technique makes for fantastic articles as well. Classes take place in cities all over the US, Canada, and Europe. Click here for a schedule.
• If you’d like help publishing (or writing) your articles, purchase article submissions through our service.

Start the Seminar Over with Session #1 >>

Session #1 | Session #2 | Session #3

The Golden Rule of Small Business Growth:

“It is a LOT easier to sell to prospects who CALL YOU than it is to sell to people YOU CALL!”

Most entrepreneurs understand the Golden Rule of Small Business Growth listed above, but misunderstand how to use it effectively. Intuitively, we know that if someone picks up the phone and calls our business or if they send an email to us requesting information, they are probably serious buyers, however, when we contact them, the first reaction is to be skeptical of anything that we say. Since we can’t just wait for people to call us, we will likely fall into the spam or cold-call trap.

Why Spam and Cold Calls Just Don’t Work

There are shortcuts to generating leads and customers, but making a cold call or sending out massive amounts of spam aren’t them. The video above shows a short history of how American companies have generated leads in the past, and once these techniques are outdated, they give you much less return on investment. For instance, when the US was comprised of local villages, a local butcher would have a permanent customer base. In today’s world, though, opening up a butcher shop next to a Super Wal-Mart would be nuts. In the information age, making cold-calls is just as outdated. See why…

Search Engine Optimization in 2011 (Get to the Top of Google without Spending ANY Money!)

A Simple Search Engine Optimization Technique that Almost EVERYONE Skips! By the way, if you skip this step, you are wasting all other optimization techniques. Pay VERY close attention to this first step!

The key to increasing traffic on your website is to offer information that people are looking for. For instance, if you are a dentist, and your entire website is designed as a brochure for your dental service, very few people will ever find your site. However, over one-million people searched for “teeth whitening” last month. Since that is what they are looking for, that might be a good phrase to target on your website. The Google Keyword Tool is vital to making your website popular. Find out what people are looking for and make your website where they can find it.

Now that We Know What the Customer Wants, Let’s Re-Design Your Website

You don’t have to know how to write website code, but you do need to know some basics no matter how competent the person who is designing your website is. The reason why is that most professional website designers are graphic people who really want the website to LOOK GOOD. Most have no idea how to make the website easy for search engines (customers) to find. So if you understand some of the basics, you can instruct your web designer exactly how you want the website to function.

Non-Negotiable Website Functions

• Title: The title of each page is one of the first things that a search engine or visitor looks at, so whatever keyword (phrase) you determined people were looking for using the Keyword Tool above should be the title of the page or at least the first few words of the title should be. Ex. If you type “Dentist Ft. Worth TX” into Google, and a page title pops up that says “Dentist Ft. Worth, TX”, you’ll probably click it. Whatever title that you come up with, make sure it is placed in the Title Metatag (If you don’t know what this is, your web person will) as well as on the top line of text on your page. The top line of text and the title metatag should be EXACTLY the same. Exactly the same.
• Description: The description is the short paragraph that gets listed under the title in search engine listings. My advice is to rephrase the title in a sentence format as the first sentence of the description. For instance, if your title is “Teeth Whitening Dentist in Ft. Worth, Texas”, then your description might read, “Dr. Jim White is a dentist in Ft. Worth, Texas specializing in teeth whitening and general dentistry.”
• Keywords: Keywords are the “search terms” (that you identify yourself) used to give search engines and readers an idea of the main content of your web page or posting. Many people use the keyword list as a way to slip in multiple terms and phrases into your content. Some unethical people will put competitor names or repeated keywords into the list. Guess what? People who design search engines aren’t stupid. These techniques actually hurt your results. Instead, since you have already identified the key words (hence “keyword”) and phrases that people are searching for, and you have added that word or phrase into your title, description, and page content, just use those words and phrases in your keyword list. Try to limit your keywords to five to ten words or phrases separated by commas. An example of the keyword list that we would use for the page that we are designing might be “dentist, ft. worth, texas, dentist ft worth, teeth whitening, teeth whitening ft worth”
• Categories or Pages: If you are posting pages on a blog or if you are designing a website with pages, make the categories or pages your keyword or phrase. For instance, one of the pages might be “Ft. Worth Dentist” and another might be “Teeth Whitening.” If you are designing a blog, make these term your categories instead. (If you are designing a blog, make sure that you one list ONE CATEGORY for each article or posting that you write. Otherwise, the same posting will be listed on multiple pages on your website and search engines will consider you to be spamming them.)
• Content: This absolutely the most important point! If you have a phrase in either the title, description, or keywords, then it HAS to be on the page or posting somewhere (at least once, but preferably multiple times). The best way to do this is to just copy the title that you created and paste it at the very top of the content of the page and either bold it make it a header. Then paste the description as the first sentence or two of the opening paragraph of the page or posting.

Teeth Whitening Dentist in Ft. Worth, Texas

Dr. Jim White is a dentist in Ft. Worth, Texas specializing in teeth whitening and general dentistry. His practice…

• Images: The images that you use can greatly add to the “searchability” of your website. They also make people more likely to read your blog postings. Remember that search engines don’t actually “read” the image itself. Rather, they read the information attached to the image. The most important piece of information is the Name of the image (what the image is saved as on your computer). For example, let’s say that you use your Sony camera to take a picture, and upload that picture to your website. When you transfer the image from camera to hard drive, it will likely have a name like “Sony5643.jpg” Just right-click the image and “Save As” a name that has your keyword or phrase in it. One picture might be called “FtWorthDentist.jpg” and another might be called “TeethWhitening.jpg”. The next big piece of information is the ALT tag (alternate). This is the text that shows of when you mouse-over the image. Just change that alternate to whatever keyword or phrase that the picture represents. Ex. Alt=”Ft. Worth Dentist” The last piece of information is the link. Most images link to the storage location of the picture so that when people click the image, they access the image itself at full-size. If you leave this link as is, it will begin to show up in image search results if you go to Google Images and do a search. However, if you make that link go to the page or post that you are promoting, then it will make the page or post easier to find on Google. Special Note: Make sure the image that you put in is an image of the keyword you are promoting.
• Links: The links going to each page or post should be the keywords or phrases as well. For instance, if I put the phrase Public Speaking Training in my text somewhere, I can make it a link to a page on my site related to Public Speaking Training. Search engines put a high level of trust in terms that are used as links. So if I have the phrase Teeth Whitening in a paragraph on the page, make it a link to the Teeth Whitening page on the site. Special Note: Only put one or two at most text links like this on each page. If you overuse this, #1) it’s annoying to readers, and 2) search engines see it as spam.
• Social Media: The larger your social media following that you have, the more popular your website or blog will be. For instance, if you have 1000 Facebook followers and you post a new article on your blog, all you have to do is create a link to that posting on your Facebook update, and that link will show up on every follower’s Facebook page until they get additional postings that knock it off the page. So temporarily, you’ll have 1000 links back to that page! The more links, the more popular the page. Put a new keyword-filled posting up every couple of days, and you will have a very popular site. The key to using this technique is to get lots of followers on social media like Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter, and more.

If you just do a few of these things right away, you’ll climb up the search engine rankings within a few months, because most of your competitors don’t understand these non-negotiables, so they aren’t using them appropriately. If you do ALL of these things, you’ll climb up to within the top 20 results for just about any industry. Once you are there, you just need one more piece to get to the top…

Get a One-Page Ad on THOUSANDS of Prominent Websites — For Free!

This is one of my biggest secrets to success, and this one thing has made me millions of dollars, has let to many interviews for newscasts, magazines, and newspapers, countless radio interviews, and a couple of book deals. And it cost me absolutely nothing to implement. Pay attention to this video, and you can be a published author in less than an hour!

Remember that what is common knowledge to you is uncommon to other people. What you know, just by doing what you do for a living everyday is valuable (and what your customers/clients are looking for). You are the expert. Give people your expertise a little at a time in articles, blog postings, quotes from you, and tips, and you can generate a LOT of free publicity. Note: Your knowledge is valuable, so I’m not suggesting that you just give it all away. I’m advising you to write multiple short articles giving valuable information away in bite-sized pieces.

Steps to Write and Publish Articles

• Choose a topic based on your Keyword Research above.
• Pick the three or four most important tips related to this topic and write a 600 to 1000 word article expanding on them.
• Post the article to your blog, Facebook page, Twitter Account, Linked-In Account, and any other social media.
• Search Google for Article Directories in your industry. Search: [Your Industry] Submit an Article
• Post the article in 20 to 50 Article Directories
• It will take a couple of months for search engines to index all of the articles, but you’ll begin to get activity within a few months.

*** There are paid services out there that will submit your articles to directories automatically, and they are better than nothing. For best results, though, the articles need to be submitted manually to make sure your links get added perfectly and the article is formatted properly. The best auto-submitter that I have found is SubmitYourArticle.com. If you don’t have time to write or submit your articles on your own, one of our consultants can write and submit your articles for you. [Submit One Article to 20 Directories] | [Submit One Article to 50 Directories] | [Submit Five Articles to 20 Directories] | [Submit Five Articles to 50 Directories] ***

Marketing Through Video

In addition to article submissions, there are thousands of video websites on the internet that you can use to promote your company and receive free publicity. Use the same step-by-step process that you used to write your articles above, but this time, record yourself (or an actor) delivering the information on video. The only additional thing that you’ll want to add is a title page with your website address and a conclusion with a call to action. The call to action could be to “Like” your Facebook page, visit your website, call an 800 number, or whatever else you want potential clients to do to contact you.

Post your videos just like your articles, but when you search Google this time, just type in “Video Upload”. Often, these sites will let you put your website address in the description, so make sure and begin the description with your URL and load the title and description with your keywords and phrases.

There are a number of auto-posting video services. The one that I use is Traffic Geyser, and their Platinum Membership gives you access to dozens of free how-to videos that will help you design, edit, and post your videos.

Five Best Website Optimization and Lead Generation Tips

1. Use Google Keyword Tool to Identify What Phrases Customers Use to Find You.
2. Optimize Your Page and Blog Titles, Descriptions, Keywords, Content, Images, and Links for the Phrases that You Found in Your Search
3. Create One Category or Web Page for Each Keyword or Phrase
4. Post Keyword Filled Articles to Blog, Social Media, and Article Directories
5. Create Videos and Post them to Video Sharing Sites

Do these things, and you will increase your traffic dramatically and boost your website to the upper levels of search engine results!

In Session 3, we’ll cover best practices for turn site visits into sales. We’ll show you the following…

• The Silver Bullet for Turning Leads into Cash
• The Top Mistakes that Entrepreneurs make when Following Up (and How to Avoid Them)
• How to Turn Luke-Warm Contacts into Future Business
• Create Long-Term Customers for Permanent Revenue Streams

Continue to Session #3 >>

Session #1 | Session #2 | Session #3

By Doug Staneart, The Entrepreneur Boot Camp

Every small business is the proverbial Needle in the Haystack, so small business lead generation is critical to an entrepreneur’s survival and the growth of his/her small business. The thing that most entrepreneurs forget, though, is that it is a lot easier to turn a prospect or lead into a customer if the lead calls you versus when you call them. It cracks me up when I hear titles of articles, seminars, or books about how to “Make Effective Cold Calls” or how to “Warm Up Cold Calls”. In the past decade (through two recessions, mind you,) I’ve built a total of four multi-million dollar businesses from scratch, and none of that revenue was ever generated from any “cold call”. In fact, I’ve had over 405 of the Fortune 500 companies become clients, and they have all called or emailed my companies. They searched my companies out when they had a problem instead of us trying to find people within these companies that were facing the specific problems that we could solve. These are a few of the secrets that we have uncovered to help small businesses generate more leads (and more quality leads).

Cold Calls do not Work at All in a Digital Age

Cold calls, email spam, blast faxes, popup windows, forced “opt-in” subscribers and the like just don’t work in this digital age (I’m not sure any of them ever worked very well for very long). The ones that crack me up the most are the companies that send out blast email spam guaranteeing us that they can get our website to the top of Google in 48 hours. Seriously? Do you think that if they could actually do this that they would be wasting their time spamming millions of people trying to beg someone to buy their service? Last month, there were 165,000 people who went to Google and searched for the term “Google search optimization”. If they could get to the top of Google with just that one term, they would have about two million people potential leads coming to them every year. So why would they need to spam people? If you are so good at what you do, why are you spamming me? Why are you cold calling me? Why are you trying to force me to subscribe to your newsletter? The truth is that cold calling and spamming people shows desperation, not success.

Get Potential Leads to Call You to Turn more Leads into Customers

The internet is the great equalizer for small businesses. Big businesses have websites, but their bureaucracy forces them to move very slowly in implementing new technology and captivating on new opportunities. However, nimble small businesses can capitalize on these opportunities immediately. It is actually very easy to get to the top of a Google search result. It is very difficult, however, to stay there. In fact, it is a fulltime job. But it is a very lucrative fulltime job. Logically, this is why this is your most important goal for your small business. When someone has a question, where do they go for an answer now? In decades past, if you had a challenge or a question, you might ask a friend or coworker or if it was a really big problem, you might go to the library and search for an answer. Today, though, people go immediately to Google. The listings at the top of the first page have a lot more credibility than the ones on the second, third, or four-hundredth.

If your small business is listed at the top of the results when they enter their question, and then they click through to your website and get the answer to that question, your small business is now at the top of their short-list for solution providers. If they call you or email you, you automatically have about a 25% chance or so of turning that lead into a client. In contrast, if your small business is listed at the top of page two on Google, in order to have someone contact you, they will have already looked at listings from at least 10 other competitors. Most potential customers will not be that thorough, so you will generate fewer leads, and now, since you are competing with at least ten other competitors, your percentage of closing drops to below 10%.

Get Leads to Call You by Giving Away Something that They Need or Want

What is common knowledge to you is uncommon to most people. Remember that your expertise and knowledge is extremely valuable to people who are searching on Google for answers as in the previous example. So if you can help them answer the question – and really help them in the process – they are more likely to share with you their contact information. Once they do, you now know two things about them. First, you know that they have (or had) a specific problem that you can help them solve. Second, you know that they already know who you are and trust has started to develop from them that you are an expert in your industry.

What you give away doesn’t have to be costly, but it must be valuable. Costly means that it doesn’t have to cost you anything to give it away. For instance, if you have a lot of informational content on your blog, then you might ask people to register in order to conduct a search of your blog for specific topics. Or, you might give away a special report or access to a video or audio file with information that a prospect might need. For example, if you are a dentist, you might offer a video about how to teach a three-year-old to brush properly. Anyone who requests the free information will likely have a young child and be concerned about the child’s oral health. Whatever the gift, just make sure that your costs are low and the value of the item is high from the customer’s perspective.

So forget the cold calls and spam, use your website to get more leads to call you, and then use a high-valued free gift to encourage prospects to contact you, and you will generate great success through small business lead generation.

Doug Staneart is the founder of The Leader’s Institute® and the creator of the Entrepreneur Boot Camp that helps small business owners grow their companies by sharing little-known secrets of successful entrepreneurs with new business owners. This article is one in a series of helpful small business tips, and you can read all of them for free on his Entrepreneur Boot Camp blog at http://www.bootcampgifts.com.