To Close Or Not To Close
Are you choking when it comes time to close the sale? Here are some
approaches that will make it easier.
Shakespeare might have put it this way:
To close or not to close, that is the question! Whether ’tis nobler to
suffer possible rejection Or to invite the prospect to take action…
Independent Professionals have suffered the angst of closing ten thousand
times more than Hamlet has recited his famous soliloquy on stage.
Two reasons:
1) Fear of rejection
and
2) Not knowing exactly what to say when closing.
The good news is that, if you …

The herd mentality nevër fails to amaze me. When the pay-per-clíck concept was first pioneered in 1997-98 by GoTo.com (now Yahoo! Search Marketing), it was years before the model was widely accepted. GoTo virtually created the market for pay-for-performance search single-handedly and redefined how businesses market online while other search engines sat on their collective hands. Then, when it was obvious that there was “Gold in Them Thar (PPC) Hills” hundreds of search engines entered the PPC arena and hordes of advertisers followed suit.
As a search engine advertising model, pay-per-clíck …

“Sinning” is an archery term, which literally means “to miss the mark.” If you’re blogging to establish a two-way dialogue with the world, the “mark” is the optimal reader experience. The following is a líst of ten things that can hurt your blog’s usability.
10. Sending Mixed Messages
The focus of your blog should be decided before your first post and then committed to. Random blog entries about a melee of topics might work for a personal blog read by friends and family, but is not a good approach for a serious, …

Many small business owners have a hard time seeing the value of a website redesign. They believe “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” And this is understandable. Unless you are eating, breathing and sleeping technology and staying up to date with the moving target of Internet business, you’re not likely to know intuitively if your site needs a redesign.
And as a small business owner, you may be concerned about the up-front costs of a website redesign. But once you understand how a redesign can help you drive traffíc to …

When you walk into a sporting goods store, does the salesperson immediately assume that you play hockey? Of course not. In fact, he’d probably never make a sale if he greeted every customer with “Hi! We’ve got some great ice skates in just your size. Would you like to see a pair?”
On the other hand, the one-size-fits-all sales pitch — “Hello, may I help you?” — doesn’t exactly entice shoppers to break out the old wallet either.
Instead, the really good salespeople are trained to discover details about the customer before …

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings. (Wikipedia)
This definition of SEO sounds simple, but beware! Search engine optimization is a minefield, even for professionals, and although necessary to a business, should not be undertaken lightly. Below, is a brief look at the top 10 mistakes and how to correct them.
1. Non-Relevant Linkage.

External links to your site play a large part in most of the major search engine algorithms and can be considered an endorsement of your …

Choosing a Web Designer

When you choose a web designer, there are many things that you need to be aware of and that need to be taken into consideration before you make a decision.
To some extent, the ability to work successfully with your web designer is sometime as important as their actual skill in being able to deliver the project.
A web designer that is skilled in what they do but is a pain to deal with can make the whole process frustrating and not worth the money being spent, especially if …

The PageRank of a website is determined largely by the importance, or popularity, of the site based on the PageRank of the sites linking back to it. You must take advantage of quality backlinks to increase the PageRank of your site.
What are backlinks?
Plain and simple, backlinks are links that point back to your site. They are links you have exchanged with or received from other sites, as well as links placed strategically by you in forum posts, blog posts and comments, and the resource box of submitted articles. The submission …

Link popularity is by far the most important factor for determining your search engine ranking. You need to know what link popularity is, why it is so important, and how Google measures your link popularity (over 50% of all search engine traffic comes from Google, and if you can rise to the top of Google, you will rise to the top of all the other search engines as well). But, before we talk about how Google measures linking, we need to cover some basics.
Link popularity is defined as the number …

The year 2006 saw the emergence of social media. If you are engaged in operating a website, you must realign your site to exploit the popular social media sites for increased traffíc.
You should also introduce social media components to your site because web users are experiencing these new forms of interactions on more and more sites and they may have an expectation of the same from your site also.
If you want to attract repeat visitors and want them to stay longer, your focus this year should be on the social …