An infected root canal may lead to gum disease, which can in turn lead to heart disease. For this reason an infected root canal should be treated as soon as possible.

Root canal treatment used to be very painful, but that’s no longer the case – if you select the right dentist. I had reason to do this recently. I’ve learned (the hard way) that all dentists are not created equal, and when it comes to something as important as a root canal, a good dentist is worth his/her weight in gold.

If you live in or around the Battersea area of London, I strongly recommend you call SW Smiles. Especially if you need root canal treatment, and desire a friendly and pain free experience! These guys are very very good.

• Write an article that links back to my site, and publish it in one of my blogs
• Post a tweet about the article on Twitter
• Ask a friends, colleagues and clients to retweet

Of course, it’s a little more involved than that. I’m not interested in sending random traffic to my site’s homepage. My goal is to generate targeted traffic for a specific landing page on my site.

The purpose of the landing page is to generate leads for a specific product or service. For example, let’s say I’m looking to pick up a new SEO client. I might create the following offer…

• A 3 month SEO campaign for £250 per month
• I’ll achieve a specific agreed SEO objective
• I’ll give a full refund if I don’t achieve the agreed objective

I then create a landing page based on this offer. At the bottom of the page I include a web form that allows prospective clients to indicate their interest by filling out the form to find out more.

I’ll then contact anybody who fills out the form.

What I now have to do is get people to visit the page. And not just anybody, but people interested in hiring an SEO guy to optimise their site.

The Traffic Triangle I outlined above says that I must now write an article and publish it on my Blog. This article should appeal to people interested in hiring an SEO guy.

The big mistake I see self-proclaimed web-marketers make is to write informational articles about SEO. This isn’t the right approach to take (in this situation), because it will deliver the wrong people to my landing page. A much more effective approach is to write an article that explains how to go about employing an SEO guy.

Naturally, the article must be compelling to my target market, and has to convey an obvious benefit. In this case, I’m offering a low-cost way to get achieve a specific SEO objective. So the article should be designed to appeal to this type of prospect. For example, it might be headed “5 ways to save thousands on Search Engine Optimisation”

The article can then disclose 5 ways, one of which is to take advantage of exactly the sort of offer described on my landing page.

It’s important to understand the purpose of the article. It isn’t to sell my service. Instead, it’s purpose is to filter out people unlikely to be interested in my offer. Put another way, the article is a targeting tool.

Once the article is in place, I need to find ways to send visitors to the article. There are numerous ways I can do this. For example, I might use some of these 66 ways to get visitors to my site.

In the case of the Traffic Triangle, I’ll use Twitter as a way to generate traffic. I can do that by simply tweeting about the article. For example, I might say…

5 ways to save thousands on Search Engine Optimisation (#SEO): http://link-to-article

NOTE: I’ve placed a hash (#) character in front of the keyword ‘SEO’. This ensures the tweet shows up in prepared keyword searches, such as custom columns in Twitter utilities such as TweetDeck.

This tweet will appear in searches for ‘SEO’ and ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. It will appear for as little as a few minutes though to as much as half an hour. It depends on the amount of activity there is at the time I post.

As you can see, a single tweet simply isn’t enough to achieve the result I’m looking for.

As I’m keen to ensure plenty of people get the chance to see my tweet, I’ll ask friends, colleagues and clients to retweet my tweet. This ensures the tweet gets a much wider circulation.

Each of the people who retweets sends my tweet to their followers. This has 3 benefits…

1. A wider group of people get to see my tweet – people who aren’t currently aware of me
2. The tweet lives on, allowing more people to find it through Twitter’s own search tools
3. The tweet lives on, increasing the chance that somebody unknown to me will retweet it (i.e. organic retweets)

I may also pick up extra followers as a result, thus increasing the chance of getting organic retweets in future.

As you can see, the combination of a landing page, Blog article and Twitter make for a powerful traffic generation tool.

In my opinion, it comes down to one or more of these 3 factors…

1. What is the #1 purpose of the site (the actual rather than intended purpose)
2. Who is attracted to the site and why do they visit?
3. What happens when those people arrive at the site?

The Site’s Purpose

A business website that sets out to make money must have one of the following objectives…

1. Generate a targeted business enquiry (i.e. lead generation)
2. Generate a sale direct from the site (e.g. shopping cart)

Most business sites achieve neither objective, even if they set out to do so. Instead they seek to inform, educate or otherwise satisfy some in-house need to boast.

A business website can’t afford to fart around with the latest design fad, or rave on endlessly about the site-owner’s knowledge, experience, qualifications or skill.

If the site’s purpose is to generate leads, the owner must make sure it starts doing that immediately. Right there on the home page. If you have a need to boast, start a blog and use it build PageRank. Then let it flow to the main site and help get it ranked in search engines.

If the site’s purpose is to generate sales, find out what the visitor is looking to buy and take him/her right to it. Immediately.

Who Visits and Why?

The site’s objective provides the owner with focus, and that helps him/her determine what needs to go on the homepage. To make use of that focus, the owner needs to understand who visits the site and why?

One simple way to find out is to ask visitors to complete a short survey. You can set up a free online survey here.

Once this is understood, s/he must ask whether the site’s visitors and their reason for visiting are consistent with the site’s objective. If they’re not, then it’s time to rethink…

• What you’re doing to get people to visit your site
• The site’s content

It’s often necessary to rebuild a business site to reflect the actual market required to achieve specific objectives (e.g. a specific sales target, or to attract the right kind of prospects from which to generate leads).

This process needn’t happen overnight. Allow yourself the luxury of moving toward your goal over time. In my opinion, site development works better when it occurs over time and toward a specific objective.

What Happens when People arrive at the Site?

What do visitors to your site see when they arrive? If the site has a sales focus, do they get immediate access to a method of finding the product or service they’re looking for? They should do.

If the site is meant to turn visitors into leads, how is information being collected? What is being said or offered that will make the right kind of visitor want you to contact him/her?

Whatever your site’s objective, it’s essential that the entire site contribute to the goal. This includes the site’s homepage. If your site’s homepage consists of nothing more than a fancy flash movie, get rid of it. If the design doesn’t allow you to say everything you need to say, change the design.

Let the site’s objective determine everything about the site, and consign pointless distractions (and uncooperative web designers) to the dustbin.

Hi, my name is Peter G Simony. Thank you for taking the time to checkout this report.

I help businesses with their marketing strategies. I have talked to thousands of business owners – many of whom have become great friends.

We first created the PromoCard marketing concept in 1998 and have been developing and refining it ever since. We have helped over 1,000 businesses create their own PromoCards® and have helped many of them them to implement some simple successful marketing strategies.

I hope you will find this useful, and will be very happy to advise you on any aspect. Just contact me and I’ll do my best to guide you.

In any event I wish you every success.
Peter G Simony

Don’t Let Business Slip Through your Fingers

The Seven Simple ways of “catching more customers” that you are not using!

1. Increase the amount of recommended business you get.

Reach areas other marketing strategies cannot reach by accessing the ‘Marketing Blind Spot’.

Most successful businesses already understand the power of ‘Word of Mouth Recommendations’ and count on them to perpetuate sales. A lot of attention is rightly given to the product or service provided in order to entice existing clients to return and to recommend their friends. This is the first and most important thing to get right otherwise customers will be lost and not get many recommendations will be received.

The overlooked marketing ‘blind spot’ is that the amount of recommendations that a business gets, also depends on how effectively a happy client recommends. Most businesses are already doing the best it can. So the question is how can we increase the ‘success ratio’ and get even more recommendations from the happy clients that we have.

There are two things a business can do to increase the ratio of recommendations:

1. Somehow improve the product or service even more. This may be expensive and difficult.
2. Have better recommendation strategies.

The ‘PromoCard® Concept’ is one such strategy. At present businesses rely on the expertise and enthusiasm of happy, loyal clients to successfully recommend. We believe that most genuine recommendations are given from the heart not because of an incentive to gain something from that recommendation.

The marketing ‘blind spot’ is not seeing how we can actually influence the ‘success ratio’ of recommendations by simply increasing the ability and effectiveness of a happy client, to recommend. Short of sending them to night school to be better recommenders, the only answer I can see is to get a PromoCard® (or something like it) into the wallet or purse of happy clients. This can be achieved in various ways depending on the business, I will elaborate on some ways later on.

How it Works!

If after having provided the best possible product or service, a happy customer accepts an offer to take away a PromoCard®, positive things start to happen! When the PromoCard® is produced alongside any recommendation, it adds weight to it, making the recommendation more effective and likely to convert to a new customer, an inquiry or a visit to your Website.

Ask yourself this question: As an existing customer recommends my product or service to a friend, how useful would it be, if they had to hand a neat PromoCard® of my business? Would it be valuable to help “back up” that recommendation?

The PromoCard will certainly be useful, if taken away as an attractive ‘Memento’ and it will certainly ‘stand out in a crowd’ of normal business cards. Without major changes to the business, I cannot think of simpler way of increasing the ratio of recommendations that a business gets. Often referred to as the 2nd Most Powerful Recommendation Tool (you being the first)

2. Keep potential customers attracted to you for several months and years like a magnet.

All The Money You spend on Advertising, Does It Work? Of course it does. But what form of advertising is the most effective of all? Television? Radio? Newspaper? Billboards? Networkers know the answer, and it may surprise you, because it’s one of your least expensive and smallest ads, dozens of which will fit easily into your pocket or purse: your business card.

When you hand someone your business card, you’re setting in motion a chain of contacts that can become a new branch of your network. That’s why you want your card to be attention-getting, pleasing, informative, and memorable — so people will look at it, comment on it, pass it around, and keep it handy.

• It could demonstrate why people should do business with you
• It can show the person that you present it to that you are resourceful and creative
• Can stick in the memory like a great TV ad
• It presents the message to anyone who gains possession of it long after it has left your hands
• Bottom line this tiny advertisement which keeps working and working can be the most cost effective promotional devise that you have.

“Inserting your business card into your mini brochure PromoCard® or using the PromoCard® as your business card can naturally put you message across more quickly and effectively.”
Dr. Ivan Misner, Author of It’s in the Cards

3. While networking help people to remember you and what you do more easily

Become memorable in seconds without saying a word!

When networking or meeting new people in everyday business situations, it may not be possible or appropriate to bring out brochures and marketing materials. However it is easy to pull out a PromoCard® from a wallet or purse in a natural way, as one would a business card.

Besides just showing contact details it can show what you do and why people should do business with you. It can become a reminder and a hook to a website or for more information.

As a proud member of BNI and doing quite a lot of networking I find my PromoCard® very useful. Sadly sometimes in general networking situations I come across people who many not remember my name or even face (unbelievably), however they all remember my PromoCard® BNI mini invitations.

4. Get more website visits by the right people.

Are you fed up with spending money on expensive marketing & brochures – when all you really want is to get potential clients to look at your website – which has it all?

A PromoCard® can replace larger more expensive marketing material in a lot of instances. We don’t need to sell or tell the whole story on a PromoCard® – simply create enough interest and curiosity for potential clients to visit your website where everything is clearly shown, or pick up the phone.

We all know that websites have become the main focus of marketing for many businesses. More resources are being committed to SEO. It may well be necessary, I am just suggesting not to let the business slip through your fingers business from people that you or your team bump into every day and their contacts, including customers and potential customers.

5. Cross promote with other businesses.

Many non competing businesses, especially locally, would be very happy to cross promote if asked.

It is easy and very cost effective to cross promote with joint alliances and other non competing businesses, especially local business and businesses that have the same customers base. For example:

• Restaurants – Hotels – Bars – Florists- etc…
• Hair Salon – Beauty – Therapists- etc…
• Kitchen shops – Bathroom shops – Flooring – Estate Agents- etc…

Even a customer or client of yours that has a business may be very happy to help by displaying a neat dispenser of PromoCards® from your business

6. At conferences and exhibitions be remembered long after the event.

Promote yourself in seconds, show innovation, creativity and be remembered long after the event.

Quite often visitors to exhibitions are overwhelmed with material and just keep the relevant business cards and PromoCards® because of their convenient size. So they remain more visible and continue working you for – usually standing well out in a crowd of other bland business cards.

Give away a PromoCard® more freely because it does the job and are less expensive then brochures and leaflets. They also have more mileage being a convenient credit card size, ending up with the business cards.

If you have not seen PromoCards® at the exhibitions in the past here is the opportunity to show innovation and originality.

7. Increase business, by reminding customers moreeffectively about you and what you do.

Give customers an ‘aid memoir’ to refer to long after they have gone

Again a PromoCard® is more likely to be kept with business cards and will act as a reminder for years and stand out in a crowd of bland business cards. A lot of businesses rely on repeat business to keep viable.

This mostly depends on the nature of your business and how good a service is provided. Offering customers a PromoCard® at every opportunity, i.e. with invoice or receipts, is useful as they will likely be kept with standing out in the crowd of normal business card and act as a reference for may months even years.

In the past I’ve tended to rely on a commercial FTP package to manage my websites, but had installed Filezilla for clients that wanted to upload a file to their sites from time-to-time. When I bought a new laptop, I decided to switch to Filezilla rather than upgrade my commercial FTP package for Windows 7.

Naturally I downloaded the latest version, which is a significant upgrade over the one my clients were using. It includes many fantastic features, including the ability to run multiple sessions in tabs. This is a welcome advance, and wasn’t even included in my previous commercial package.

However, it wasn’t all wine and roses. There was a major thorn in version 3, and it constantly annoyed me. Every time I saved changes made to a file, Filezilla would display a window telling me the edited file had changed and offer to upload it for me.

I often make changes that I don’t wish to upload immediately. For example, where I have to change several different files and upload them together for the change to work on a live site. So I would always close the pop up window.

When you find yourself closing a window you never use over and over and over again, it isn’t long before you start to curse the day the programmer who inflicted it on you was born!

So I went hunting for a way to switch it off. I couldn’t find an option in Filezilla’s preferences (though it is there), and resorted to Google. I quickly came across this interesting exchange.

It’s an example of a problem inherent in some Open Source projects. My take on this exchange is that the programmer believes his/her approach to be right. End of story. And of course, s/he is under no commercial pressure to take any notice of his/her users.

Commercial software companies may well have support staff that operate in the same high-handed manner (I’m being polite). But there is usually somebody somewhere in the organisation who does care, and has the clout to bring the support team into line.

This pressure doesn’t exist inside a small Open Source project like Filezilla. Ultimately, the users who protested the compulsory popup window got their way. You can now switch this annoying behaviour off, and I have done just that. But it also brought home to me what a fragile proposition Open Source software is for large organisations. If I had a large company with lots of ‘regular’ folk using computers, I wouldn’t rely on Open Source software. Unless it came in conjunction with a support contract and training.

This wouldn’t apply to defacto standards such as PHP and Apache. Especially as these packages tend to be used by experts rather than ‘regular’ users. But it would certainly apply to the likes of OpenOffice. Why bother, when the relative cost of Microsoft Office is fairly low and it’s well supported by a large number of third parties?

Don’t get me wrong. I see no need to use commercial software if there is a viable Open Source alternative. But I’m a very sophisticated user, capable of resolving most problems on my own. And more to the point, I’m usually happy to spend the time hunting down a solution. For me, it’s fun.

I wouldn’t dream of inflicting most Open Source software on my wife. She has no interest in hunting down solutions to annoying problems. All she wants is to have the software work the way she expects it to.

The site Abicord.com has a Smoking Cessation page. If the site’s owner wants to improve the performance of the smoking cessation page in search engines, s/he could generate links back to that page.

Of course, there’s a little more to it than that. The site itself should also link to the smoking cessation page. These internal links must reflect the external linking on the site.

When you create external links to an internal page on your site, you’re telling search engines the page is important. If internal links on the site don’t reflect this importance, a search engine may decide you’re simply trying to fool it into ranking the page. This doesn’t usually end well!

As you’d expect, all the normal rules for linking apply. You want link diversity…

• Links from different domains
• Links from different types of web site, not only from directories or blog comments

You also want your links to appear over a period of time, rather than all at once. Linking works best when it happens naturally, and at a steady place.

In other words, people tend to buy on the basis of emotion rather than logic. The low-fat low-salt nitrate free organic bacon might be healthy, but is that really what you think about when it comes to eating bacon?

For some people, it might be. But even those people are buying on emotion. They’re not responding to the ‘low-fat low-salt nitrate free organic’ message. They’re responding to good health, a long life and a vibrant and satisfying old age.

Of course – I didn’t write this article to explain salesmanship. If you disagree with the above 2 paragraphs, there’s no point reading further. This article is for people who face a new dilemma that exists only when it comes to writing web copy.

What do you do when the needs of SEO conflict with the sales message?

You might well wish to sell the sizzle, but there’s little point if people are typing Bacon into Google. How can you write optimised content that contains plenty of sizzle? Here are my suggestions…

1. Use the opening and closing paragraphs to sell sizzle, and focus on optimising for SEO in the middle section. Use a keyword density report to ensure you get the balance right for SEO
2. Use testimonials, straplines and flyout text to add extra occurrences of your main keyword phrase if you need to boost keyword density
3. Try a 2-page approach. Only the first page needs to be optimised. Naturally you’ll want to test this to make sure the 2-page approach isn’t losing you leads (you may even find it out-performs a single sales page)
4. Create a special offer that contains its own compelling reasons to buy (e.g. special gift or discount), allowing you to seed it with keywords because it doesn’t need additional sizzle

Perhaps you have ideas of your own you’d like me to add to this list. If so, leave a comment and together we’ll build an awesome resource that everybody can put to good use.

The trouble is, who has time to keep on top of these 7, let alone the hundreds of other social media tools out there? Recently I found a way to use otherwise dead time to keep on top of social media.

Look no further than the humble iPhone. Perhaps the iPhone isn’t quite so humble, but don’t surf off just yet. I didn’t pay any attention to the iPhone until a friend of mine showed me just what it could do.

I’ve had it less than a month, yet it’s already made me far more productive. Here’s how…

• I run my day using an iPhone app called Pocket Informant. It’s a Personal Information Manager. I’ve never been able to run one of these on a desktop, as typically it’s not present when I need it. And a laptop means always having to lug my laptop around. I’m carrying my iPhone anyway, so I finally have a PIM I can live with. It takes care of my projects, to do list. and appointments. It cost £7 or thereabouts (i.e. nothing I’ll miss). Thanks to Pocket Informant and the iPhone, I completed a project this month that would otherwise have completed in January. This increased my billings in December by over £1,000. Sure, I would have finished next month, but now I have all this extra time to focus on my next big project (and it’s really big). I’ve also been able to bring forward another client, and that particular project is a lot more interesting
• I’ve installed iPhone apps that allow me to work Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and You Tube. Yesterday I invited 3 people to connect in LinkedIn while standing in a long supermarket queue
• This morning I responded to client emails while waiting for a tyre to be repaired
• The nearest tyre place wasn’t able to repair my tyre, so I used the built-in browser to locate another tyre repair place. I called them by pressing a finger on their phone number right there on the web page, and confirmed they had the required repair patches before making the trip (it’s easy to underestimate the utility of being able to make a call by clicking a number on a web page when you don’t have the means to write the number down)
• On the way there I overshot. I realised I’d gone too far, pulled over, and told the built-in map to locate me by clicking a single icon. I could see I was about half a mile too far down the road, so turned around and headed back
• Last week I resolved a problem for a client during a break in an SEO seminar I was running. This was possible thanks to the iPhone’s ability to handle all my email addresses (including Google Mail), and surf the web from anywhere. Sure, I could have done it when I got home that evening. Instead, I put my feet up and relaxed after a hard day of training
• All my music sits on my iPhone, which has a built-in ipod
• While out for a walk one afternoon, I was listening to music when my iPhone rang. I was able to answer and talk using the supplied earphones. I didn’t need to fish the phone out of my pocket. Neither did I know the earphones could act as a hands-free system. The music faded automatically as the phone started to ring. I suddenly had a hunch, and squeezed the ‘pause/play’ button on the earphones. I said “Hello?” in an experimental sort of way, and to my surprise the person on the other end (an important client) started talking. I ended the call by the squeezing the ‘pause/play’ button again. The call ended, and the music started up automatically
• I booked myself into a B&B using an app called B&B. This located me automatically, and displayed a list of suitable B&Bs in the area. I selected one based on photos and user reviews, and completed the booking there and then on the phone itself

This is a sample of various ways I’ve found this thing to be enormously useful. It’s made my life considerably easier. If you’re in business, and find you have little time to make use of social media, go get yourself an iPhone.

I got mine through Orange. I get 600 minutes of talk time and 500 texts in my plan. While this is plenty for me, there are loads of other options should you require less/more to meet your needs.

It’s a different story when it comes to link building. This is something that you simply can’t do in one go. In fact, you’re rewarded for regular activity spread over a period of time.

You gain less in SEO terms by doing 8 hours worth of SEO work in a single day, than you will if you do 30 minutes twice a week over 8 weeks.

Why? Because search engines like to see content and backlinks appear naturally over time. The key to success with SEO is a small amount of regular activity spread over time.

It’s worth noting that SEO Research and Content Optimisation are one-off activities. Once they’re done, they’re done until some future date when you need to revisit your content (e.g. you’ve fallen off page one, or there is a major change in the way search engines work).

As such, you may well decided to take on SEO Research and Content Optimisation first and get them over and done with as quickly as possible.

Alternatively, you may decide to employ me to do SEO Research and/or Content Optimisation for you. And take on link building yourself.

The point is, SEO Research and Content Optimisation are tasks you can (and should) get done as soon as possible. Get them out of the way, and then allocate regular weekly activity to link building.

• It’s easy to understand:
  This intro is written for beginners
• It covers everything:
  Even though it’s aimed at beginners, it covers SEO from start to finish
• It’s convenient:
  Everything you need is contained on a single page
• You save time:
  It links directly to the best SEO resources on the web
• You save money:
  It’s totally free, and so are the sites/resources it links to

Do you want an easy (and free) guide to search engine optimisation? Are you overwhelmed by all the options out there? Have you found yourself bamboozled by highly technical information?

Perhaps all you need is a gentle introduction that brings together the various pieces of SEO, and puts them in content. It then links directly to more in-depth information should you need it.

In short, this is an excellent way to discover the power of SEO Optimisation.