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Google Alerts is a good tool for joining with the converstaions which matters you most. Just insert your email, search terms and edit some settings and Google will send you an alert if somebody is talking about these keyword(s).

Why it’s good for your business?

You can improve the communication between you and yours target group. Let’s look this little example. Imagine that you have a restaurant in Skopje and you want to know what people are thinking about your business. Do they like your meals, what kind of drinks they miss and so on. Just type in your restaurant name into the Google Alerts and you will start knowing if somebody is talking about your restaurant. It can happen that somebody who ate in yours restaurant wrote about it in his blog. Now you can go there and add a comment, get to know what he liked and disliked, ask the feedback, explain and do a lot of other valuable things.

So, if you don’t use it yet then start using, because it’s going to be good for your business.

Almost all sales texts what I have seen are with this same BIG mistake. They are product descriptions, not sales texts. Okay, maybe they are working, but the point is that they can be more effective.

People don’t buy your products, they are buying values what this product should give to them. And that’s the point. Don’t sell descriptions, sell values. Lets look these 2 very easy examples:

You are selling a house in very safe, nice and clean part of the city.

Bad sales text would look like this:

This house is in safe, nice and clean part of the city. Good neighbours, good place for children, nice garden, quiet neighbourhood, no trash on streets.

Good sales text would look like this:

In this house you don’t need to be afraid-en of thieves. You can walk lonely at nights and nobody are going to steal your wallet and cell phone. Your neighbours look after your house if you are going to be away. You and your husband are very happy, because you know that yours children are very safe and secure. Find yourself enjoying your beautiful green garden and enjoy this wonderful fresh air what is surrounding you and your family every day. Did you know that this part of the city is the cleanest in a whole city? We are sure that you will like that you don’t hear any loud noise of cars, because there are no big roads near a house. Every morning you will wake up with a wonderful feeling that you are living in very safe, nice and clean part of the city.

I guess that the 2nd sales text is more effective and better.
Also the Skype is not saying that they are an Internet telephone. They are saying that you can talk more, pay less with unlimited calls.

So start selling your product values, not product descriptions.

Here is a good exercise for understanding your product values:

Take a piece of paper. Make a big line on the center of paper. Now you should have 2 sections. Into the first section write your product properties and into the second section write every property value. Now start selling your product values.

If you are interested of being more succesfull by using social media then this post is for you. You don’t even need a business for doing that. If you don’t want to be more succesfull, then feel free to close this webpage.

What is a business blog?

Business blog is a blog where you write about topics which are related to your business. Also you can add there good videos, slideshows and a lot of other things, which can be valuable for your readers.
Real life example: Alex is a construction expert, who gives consultations to people who are struggling with some construction problem. And he have a business blog where he writes about topics that are related with constructing (which bricks to choose, how choose colors, where to find good constructors …). Alex have blogged almost one year at now and he haves approximately 5oo readers per a week. To him it means that if somebody of this 500 have some construction problem then they automatically contact with him and he can be more succesfull.

Businessblogging main values for you:

You can present yourself as an expert

Start writing about your topic and people will find your posts and they should get benefit of them. And they will (if you don’t write about your stomach problems and friend birthday).
Who do you trust more? Advocate Igor who have written a lot of practical and useful blog posts about laws or Marco who just says that he is a supergood advocate. I think you’ll prefer Igor.
Give good advice, explain some complicated things and people start calling you as a expert.

Create relations

If your business blog have good content, then journalists are going to ask your opinion for some articles which are related with your blog topic. So you can raise your popularity and this is a good fundament for creating useful relations. And you should know that it’s all about relations.
If you create good content, then people start commenting it and you can start communicate with them. It means that business blogging is a very good way to create relations.

Raise your reliability

And all the sales are about reliability. If you don’t trust somebody then you don’t buy his products. Write good posts which really are helping people (good advices, recommendations …) and your readers start trusting you. If you don’t believe it, then check again the advocates example.

Become smarter

Ok, you are a big expert but there’s still a lot of what you don’t know yet. Sometimes you need to read some articles or watch some videos to make a better post. Businessblogging is a great way to develop yourself.

Get ideas and feedback

You are a gardener and you just published a blog post about tree planting. After some hours you can see a comment: ”Hi you. Yes, it’s a very good way to plant, but do you know something about this teqhnique? …. ” Again you can develop yourself and get some good ideas too.
Also you can get feedback to your posts, because people like to discuss and share their opinions.

Find a job

You know a lot of about cars, but don’t have a job. Start writing about cars, give good advice and raise your popularity. I’m sure that this will help you to get a job. If you would be a car repairing company leader, who is needing a car mechanic then who do you prefer: car mechanic with a living proof (blog) or just a car mechanic?

Businessblogging is good for the search engines marketing

Google, Bing and other major search engines will start putting your website on higher positions in search results. If somebody googles ”business blog” then is my website more likely to come out in first results if I have wrote some blog posts about business blogging and business blogs.

It’s cheap

Just make an account to some blogging platform or add blog to an existing domain and start blogging. It’s cheap and easy.

Do you have a business blog or do you want to start with a business blog? What do you think, can businessblogging raise your sales?

An estonian internet-enterpreneur Peep Laja wrote on his internetmarketing blog about 20 free tools that can make your website better. I think that it’s a supergood post and I want to share it with you.

Some of these tools are just partly free tools (if you want it to be more powerful then you must pay).

1. 5 Second Test

This is that kind of place, where you can upload a screenshot of your website and then other users see this screenshot only 5 seconds. After they type in keywords which they noticed in this 5 seconds. Also they can click on places, which at most leap to them eye. So you can get a overview about that what people actually notice on your website. And did you know that the first 5 seconds is time when people decide that do they stay on your website or not?

2. Feng-gui

It’s similar tool, but people are not deciders. Your screenshot will be analyzed by algorithm. A free version have some limitations.

3. ClickTale

See every mouse movement and every click on your website. Increase revenues and improve site usability.

4. UserFly

Userfly gives you a bit of code, what you can add to your website and then ‘’saves” their activities on your website. Trail your visitors mouseclick moving and clicks.

5. BTBuckets

Engage your users with free segmentation and behavioral targeting tool.

6. 4Q

The 4Q online survey provides answers to the following 4 essential questions:
1) What are my visitors at my website to do?
2) Are they completing what they set out to do?
3) If not? Why not?
4) How satisfied are my visitors?

7. Website Grader

Analyzes yours website and gives a score. It’s not a tell-all tool, but it can help you with some things for sure.

8. Mibew Messenger

An open-source live support application written in PHP and MySQL. It enables one-on-one chat assistance in real-time directly from your website.

9. Clicky

Web analytics software. They claim that they are even better than Google Analytics.

10. Google Analytics

I think that it’s the best web analytics software. For me it’s very elementary and should be for you too.

11. Piwik

Piwik is a download-able, open source (GPL licensed) web analytics software program. It provides you with detailed real time reports on your website visitors: the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, your popular pages… and so much more.

12. Google Website Optimizer

You don’t need to guess which design or heading earn you more money. Just test it and you will know.

13. Feedburner

Govern yours RSS.

14. Google Webmaster Tools

Provides you with detailed reports about your pages visibility on Google. To get started, simply add and verify your site and you’ll start to see information right away.

15. Kampyle

A simple way for users to write feedback.

16. Loop11

A user experience tool which is helping you to understand users behaviour.

17. Google Page Speed

Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

18. ConceptFeedback

Free feedback for marketers and designers from other marketers and designers.

19. Yahoo! Site Explorer

Overview about your website incoming links and indexed pages.

20. Google Keyword Tool

How many times are some certain phrases searched via Google? This is very important tool.

What do you think of this list and do you know some great tools?

I found a supercool event from glocalconference.com and I decided to register. I clicked on ”Register now” button and what happened? They wanted to know a lot of information about me. Ok. I will write a book about my life when I will be 75, but I don’t know why they need so much information about me at now. Just check this registering page…

Why they must know my title, middle name, first name, last name, name for badge, street address and so so so on? Is this vital for them? Maybe they can still organize this event without knowing my department and middle name? Why they don’t ask for my sexual orientation? Different researches have proved that if you ask more then you’ll get less. It’s a fact. Don’t ask for information what is not vital for you. Even small changes can make big changes.

Let’s check one example more closely. This schooling company didn’t already ask so much information than the above-named picture.

After some time they decided that it’s not vital to ask so much information. They took off one question.

Results: shorter form raised incoming selling contacts amount 3,3%. It may not look alike big number, but for them business it meant extra 33 000$ per year. Yes, a long form gave more information to them, but they decided that extra 33 000$ per year is better than the extra information.

If Clocal Conference should remove maybe 5 questions then it’s interesting to know how many additional incoming selling contacts will they get?

How to make this contact form stuff right?

1) Ask only vital information
In most cases you only need a person email, name and a telephone number (often you don’t need a number too). If you already have this information then you can start to communicate directly with your prospect and you can get other information too if you need. And for addition you can start to improve yours relationship with a prospect and for the result he is more propable to buy your stuff or sign up to another conferences.

2) Personalize contact
Give a personal look to a contact form. Almost all contact forms never tell you that where your info is going, who reads it, when I’ll get an answer and so on.
Add this human photo to the side of your each contact form, who are going to answer for these messages. Add there his name and a number (if somebodys wants to contact immediately). Definitely mention that how long answering to this message should take.

3) Talk about your privacy policy
Some people afraid that you are going to steal them personal information and use it in bad ways. Tell to them that you are a very nice guy, who doesn’t do anything bad with this information. Just add something like this under your contact form. We will keep your email 100% safe and secure. Promise! Also it’s a good idea to write about your privacy policy and link to it.

4) Make your ”Send” button to the only choice and make it more visible
It’s is very very important that you have only one choice. Don’t put there a choice ”Clear all lines” or ”Go back to the homepage” or something like that. It’s a disaster when sometimes I fill all lines and then misclick on ”Clear all lines”.
There are a lot of convincing proves that a striking ”Submit” button puts more people to click on it.

Here is also one good example how to ask information.

A popular travel portal tripadvisor.com uses that kind of new user registering system:

At first they just ask for your email address, because they know that if you ask more, you will get less.

At now they already know visitor email and they can start communicating with him. And they can still ask for additional information and confirmation.

Do you have bad experiences with contact forms or can you share a story how you boost your incoming selling contacts by removing some fields? What do you think of this? Write a comment.

Is social media a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?

What do you think? Is social media a fad?

Found a good and very informative presentation and I decided to share it with you.

Thank you Darko Buldioski.