Pay Per Click Marketing Centricity

Trust in Advertising

Syndication Header: Rob Reed is president of Terrakon Sales and Marketing Consulting. Terrakon provides sales, marketing, and internet marketing services that increase online and offline conversions using a trust-building framework.

Post: If you are exploring different advertising mediums, you may want to consider survey results from comScore Networks conducted in Fall 2006. The question of 1,000 respondents representing the general internet population:

Where would you find trustworthy advertising for any product or service?

Advertising Medium - Percent of respondents

1. TV - 63%
2. Corporate sites - 51%
3. Print - 50%
4. News/Media sites - 49%
5. Radio - 28%
6. User Generated Content Sites (UGC) - 23%
7. Billboard - 19%

There are at least three significant takeaways from this survey:

1. If you offer a service or more complex product where trust is critical to your success, you may want to think twice about which advertising vehicle is used in your marketing mix.
2. It appears the majority of people do not believe advertising is trustworthy for products and services. The lack of trust could be because many companies and ad agencies use way too much hype; focus too much on the creative and not enough on the consumer; and don't understand how to build trust elements into their advertising.
3. If you can create trustworthy advertising, you can significantly differentiate yourself in the minds of potential customers and win more business - regardless of which advertising vehicle you choose.

How to Achieve Your Personal Goals This Year

Syndication Header: Terrakon is a sales and marketing consulting firm in St. Louis that specializes in helping clients differentiate from competitors through marketing strategies and sales processes that build greater prospect trust.

Post: Like many of you, I recently completed my FY2007 goals. Here’s a suggestion if you want to significantly increase the likelihood you actually achieve your sales goals this upcoming year.

Write your SMART goals down as you normally do. Again, SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-based. If you’re not familiar with the SMART process, simply Google and you’ll find plenty of information.

Once you’ve written down your SMART goals, write the words, “I will:” at the top of your goal page. Then, print your name and a signature line at the bottom of your goal page. Sign your name on the signature line and prepare yourself for the most important step. This task is critical, so please make sure you take this final step! Make a copy of your signed goal document and hand the signed copy to at least one other individual.

The individual may be a co-worker, manager, mentor, subordinate, spouse or even best friend. The role the person plays is not as critical as that you give your signed, goal document to someone you respect. If you want to increase the likelihood you achieve your goals even more, hand your signed goal document to a number of different people.

I use this process in my sales seminars and I encourage clients to use the process with their sales reps for a variety of sales processes.

This simple process leverages the well studied principles of commitment and consistency. Humans feel a strong internal drive to remain consistent in their actions with commitments they’ve made. According to well known social psychologists, Robert Cialdini, we significantly increase the likelihood we will “live up” to commitments made when those commitments are active, effortful, public and voluntary.

Writing your goals down, signing your name and providing your FY2007 goals to another individual or a group of people, leverages these four factors to increase the likelihood that you are consistent (live up to) your goals.

While this is a very easy process, I promise many of you will not take the final step. Quite frankly, it is actually somewhat difficult to make these commitments because we don’t want others to know we’ve failed if we don’t achieve our goals. That’s part of the psychology that drives us to action – if you take the final step.

One final thought. Repeat this process with your weekly, monthly or quarterly action plans you’ve developed to achieve your goals. You have those action plans - right? Leveraging the principles of commitment and consistency for these interim processes will make it more likely you achieve your longer term goals.

“Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes, but no plans.”

--- Peter Drucker ---

Happy New Year!

Rob Reed
Terrakon

Interviewed for Selling Power Live by Jeffrey Gitomer

I was recently interviewed on the topic of trust development in selling by best-selling author, Jeffrey Gitomer, for the award-winning Selling Power Live audio magazine. It's my understanding from Jeffrey's producer, Lisa, that the interview will be published in the upcoming October issue.

While you have to be a Selling Power Live subscriber to listen to the full cd, Lisa was nice enough to send an audio of my interview with Jeffrey. I'll have it posted on the main page of the Terrakon website as soon as I receive the audio cd. Should be in the next couple of weeks.

New Sales Process Improvement Method

I just completed a report on HAVE™ Trust Selling, a new sales process improvement methodology. I'd be interested in your thoughts and feedback.

HAVE™ is an acronym for the four key factors that determine how much trust you develop with prospects. I identified these four key factors by researching over 20,000 pages of material on the sales process and trust development. HAVE™ helps you identify the small actions and steps that align with these four key factors to either build or diminish trust levels with prospects. 

HAVE™ Trust Selling is best suited for professionals who:

• sell services or more complex products where some level of perceived risk exists for the prospect
• firmly believe in selling without lying, deception or manipulation

Click here to begin the download process for the report on this new sales process improvement methodology.

Again, I'd really appreciate your thoughts and feedback as I continue to shape and hone this new selling perspective.

Best Regards,
Rob Reed

SEO: Naming Your Files

One of the many "basic" things you can do to "optimize" your site for the search engines (and humans) is to use descriptive file names. In other words, if you have a web page about "sales tips," name the file www.yoursite.com/sales-tips.html. Don't use some obscure name like www.yoursite.com/slstps.html. Two big reasons:

1) The words used in the file name (url) have some impact on where your page will appear in the search engine rankings. More descriptive names using keywords and phrases will help your pages appear higher in the rankings for those keywords and phrases.
2) A descriptive name, using keywords, is more likely to be clicked on by searchers when your page appears in the rankings.

It is also important to note the structure of the file name. In the past, there has been a question whether it was better to use "/sales-tips.html" or "/sales_tips.html."

Two big clues indicate you are better using the /sales-tips.html structure.

First, if you download the Google jpg for RSS feeds, Google uses the structure "Add-to-Google-plus" for the file name.

Second, perhaps a more definitive answer on how you should name your files for better search engine visibility from Vanessa and Matt at Google.

This structure may only be preferable for Google (not Yahoo or MSN), but since Google has over 50% of the search market, it is something to consider.

SEO: Leverage Your Blog to Get Your New Web Page Indexed Faster

If you have a blog, here's a tip how to leverage your blog to help search engines quickly find a new page on your web site. If you have a website, but no blog, perhaps this will convince you to consider starting your own blog.

I conducted this test a few months ago when both my website and blogs were fairly new. My website, in fact, was still experiencing the Google and Yahoo delays for new sites and I had only a few pages indexed in both Google and Yahoo. My blogs had significantly more pages indexed and more search engine traffic.

I created the new web page on my website (http://www.terrakon.com/sales-questions/). Then, I created a relevant post on this blog (Marketing Centricity) with a link to the new web page on my site.

Within ten hours, the web page had been spidered by the major search engines (Yahoo, MSN and Google). In less than three days, the page was indexed by MSN and Yahoo - and Google a few weeks later. Even better, the page regularly appears in the top rankings for one of my keyword phrases in at least one of the major search engines.

For my "control," I created a different new page on my web site (http://www.terrakon.com/sales-book-summaries/soft-sell.php). After three days, it had only been spidered by one engine (Yahoo) and not indexed by any of the search engines.

Based on my limited test, as well as several other test results I've seen, it seems you can speed up the spider and indexing process by utilizing your blog. Give it a shot and let me know what happens with your site test.

Smarter Searching from Yahoo?

Yahoo has had a new search feature in beta for nearly one year. Yahoo Mindset is an "intent-driven" search that allows you to influence the order of the top 100 search results by telling Yahoo if you are shopping or researching. Check out the Yahoo Mindset demo here.

A sliding scale -2 (most commercial) to +2 (most informational) is offered to the searcher to determine the order of the results. A 0 represents a balance of informational and commercial.

Two quick thoughts:

1. While content has always been important for search engine rankings, it will be increasingly important to have a mixture of both informational and commercial content on your site. Informational content pages to draw potential/future customers to your site so you'll be in their considered set when they're ready to buy and commercial pages to sell your products or services for those searchers who already have their credit cards out.
2. As Google, Yahoo, and MSN continue to develop new features to help them provide the most relevant results for searchers, it will become even more difficult to have your web pages consistently appear in the top results for all searchers. Google, for instance, has already instituted a "learning" feature that will track your search engine results clicks (if you want it to) so that Google learns your search habits and then "serves" the most relevant results based on your past search habits.

Finding People Who Steal Your Content

To the best of my knowledge, it's nearly impossible to prevent someone from copying/stealing the content from your site. It is possible, though, to find the culprits.

Copyscape offers a service that identifies other sites that are plagiarizing your content. Just enter the web page url from your site that you'd like to check and click "go."

Copyscape will return any pages that match significant parts or all of the content for the requested page.

The free version allows you to conduct 50 "searches" per month.

Search Engine Limits: How Much of Your Page Do They Index?

Is it possible to create a web page too large for the search engines like Yahoo, Google and MSN to index?

The answer is a definitive "yes." However, most small business web pages will most likely never reach those limits.

I came across a really interesting experiment that analyzed each of the major search engines, Yahoo, Google and MSN and the maximum amount they'll index on any given page. The results are actually very surprising. Maximum amount indexed per page:

Yahoo: 210kb
Google: 520kb
MSN: 1020kb

It never ceases to amaze me how these intelligent folks are willing to spend a lot of time and resources conducting experiments and then share the results with the entire world. My hats off to Mr. Serge Bondar and others like him.

Perhaps a more critical and interesting point Mr. Bondar made in an associated forum had to do with the question: "How long does a web page need to be in order to be considered 'informative' by the search engines." Mr. Bondar's response:

The page "informativeness" is better expressed through the number of words, rather than the number of kilobytes. From the analysis of thousands top-10 SERPs, I suppose that the "informative" - from the SE's POV - text is anywhere above 300-400 words. Most commonly, we see 600-1100-word pages among the leaders.

A New Resource for Local Search

If you're a small business owner, I recommend you check out this new website designed to "connect you with customers in your area." I first read about MerchantCircle in a post on John Jantsch's Duct Tape Marketing Blog. There's also a CNET brief as well.

The biggest item that caught my eye from their website, in addition to the service, is the major horses this start-up has behind it:

MerchantCircle is led by an experienced team and funded by investors who share our vision and believe in the power of local businesses. Our backers include Rustic Canyon Partners, Bank of America Ventures and Disney's Steamboat Ventures, who each bring their specialized expertise to help us develop and improve your MerchantCircle experience.

You can sign-up for free - it takes 5 to 10 minutes. There are other services for $.