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Tag Archive: strategy

How to Chase Away Your Website Visitors

Written on July 21, 2009 by George Krueger & Mary-Lynn Foster in Marketing

running_away Most businesses and non-profit organizations have a web site by now. Good thing since more and more people are searching online for services instead of using the phone book.

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Hear George & Mary-Lynn share tips for your website on The Bigg Success Show! Click the purple player to listen while you read: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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There’s a lot of advice about how your website should look. It’s important to pause to realize …

It's the experience that counts the most!

Just like in the bricks-and-mortar world, people value the experience.

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marylynn I've had two bad user experiences recently. The first one has to do with a local not-for-profit organization for which I volunteer. I produce the audio for the radio and television commercials that promote the event. The commercials mention a web address to get more information. However, that address takes you to the organization's national website. I spent ten minutes trying to find the page with information about our local event.

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george If memory serves, Mary-Lynn, you told me that you saw a link, “Find your local event.” But it directed you to sign up or log in to get more information.

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marylynn Right! It’s crazy. I shouldn't have to sign up to simply get information. Regardless, I finally recovered my user name and password. Then I logged in, but I still haven't found the local page. I ran out of time and will have to go back.

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george People who aren’t as invested as you probably wouldn’t put that much effort into finding the local information. Worse yet, they may never go back to the site.

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Tip #1: Create a landing page specific for what you are promoting.

Make it easy for people to find the information they want. For example, our local branch could have a page that ends with the name of our city. They could set up an address like this: nameoforganization.com/champaign.

That's a landing page. It’s the address you want to promote to people in your area for information about your local organization – especially when you’re using local TV, radio, or the newspaper.

Here's another example for a business: If you are promoting a deal, use a web address like one of these:

yourbusinessname.com/deal

yourbusinessname.com/summersale

Create your landing page in advance. It can reiterate the most important points of your advertisement and provide more information. Also provide links to your home page and any other pages that people interested in this promotion might find useful.

Integrating your offline marketing with online marketing makes all your marketing more productive. It’s a time-tested strategy. If visitors to your site get the information they want quickly, they’ll be more likely to take the time to visit other areas of your site.

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marylynn The second bad experience occurred when I read an article online about a local tech series that is free and open to the public. The article was on our local newspaper's website. It gave details on the upcoming session and offered a link to the organization's website to get more information on all of the sessions in the series.

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george So you went to the website to find out more information, and I remember hearing a … how should I describe it … a frustrated sigh coming from you.

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marylynn That’s a good way to say it. I was frustrated because I couldn't find anything about the series. I clicked on several page links, including their events link. Nothing. I used their search tool to search for the name of the event. Still nothing. Finally I went to their calendar and typed in the exact date. The first session in the series came up. It contained the same information that was in the article. Nothing further about the entire series. I was planning to put all of the dates on my calendar. I guess I’ll have to call them.

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Tip #2: Make it easy to find the information you promote.

If you want people to know about your events, make it easy to get that information. Especially if your event is getting press!

Create a page like we suggested above. If you prefer to link people to your home page, create a link and highlight it so people can find it quickly and easily. For example, in the case we mentioned above, you could highlight it this way:

"Tech series starting in August"

Make it very visible on your site. When people click on that link, it will take them to the page you've created with all the information about that event.

Your site is an excellent tool to compliment your other marketing efforts. But if you don't make it easy for people to find what you’re promoting, they won't participate in your sale or event.

Prepare your web site for visitors before you advertise or send out a press release. That will help make your campaign a bigg success!

Do you have any tips from your bad user experiences? Or maybe a good experience combining your web site with traditional media? Share that with us by leaving a comment below, calling us at 888.455.BIGG (2444) or e-mailing us at bigginfo@biggsuccess.com.

Thanks so much for reading our post today. Please join us next time when we’ll discuss artificial dissemination. Yes, you read that right! Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes.

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Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00442-072109.mp3

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Making More Money Per Hour

Written on June 23, 2009 by George Krueger & Mary-Lynn Foster in Time Management

time_money_balance Bigg success is life on your own terms. Today’s topic really covers two of the five elements of bigg success – time and money.

Specifically, we want to discuss charging for your time. If you’re a consultant, a coach, a freelancer or anyone who bills hourly, how do you determine what an hour is worth?

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Hear George & Mary-Lynn discuss today's topic on The Bigg Success Show! To listen while you read, click the purple player: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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One of the biggest reasons small business people don’t reach bigg success is because they don’t charge enough. In fact, in many cases, the business fails for this reason.

So pricing your service is very important. We can think of two primary methods to arrive at a price:

The Market Approach

This is probably the most common way that entrepreneurs arrive at a price. With this method, you simply look at your competition to see how much they’re charging. Then depending on your strategy, you charge the same, a little more or a little less.

The Cost Approach

Here you determine how much you need to charge based on your cost structure and your opportunity costs. By opportunity costs, we mean:

How much could you make working elsewhere?

Add your hard costs to your opportunity cost to arrive at your price per hour.

Limitations

The downside to just using the Cost Approach is that it ignores the market. For instance, your price may be a lot lower than the market but you wouldn’t know it because you haven’t looked at the market. You would be leaving money on the table.

Or it may be a lot higher and the market won’t compensate you what you the amount you need for your time. The result would be a failure that could have been avoided.

The Market Approach also has its limitations. We have a friend who looked at his competitors’ hourly rate to determine how much he should charge. He opened up his shop and started losing a lot of money every month.

He was perplexed, so he did a little more competitive research. He discovered that all of his competitors were losing money as well. Everybody was in a price war; nobody was charging enough to make money.

So he increased his price based on his costs. He lost some customers when he did this but he started making money.

Because of the limitations each method has, we recommend that you use both methods when you’re trying to arrive at a price for your service. Then you’ll have two reference points from which to make decisions.

The Value Equation

Now we want to move to making more money per hour. From the customer’s point-of-view:

Value = (Service x Quality) / Price

From this equation, you can see that there are three ways to increase the value to your customer:

decrease your price

increase your service level

improve your quality

Of course, decreasing the price will very likely hurt you in the long-term. Look at it this way – do you want to work just as hard to make less money? Of course not. Yet a lot of small business people do this first.

So you would prefer to increase the value to your customer by providing a higher level of service or quality.

Let’s focus on service since quality is more up to you. Think about these four D’s:

dirty

difficult

dangerous

designed

By designed, we mean customized but we had to have a “d-word”! Dangerous might mean “risky”. However, keep in mind that risk is a matter of perspective. The customer may view something as extremely risky but you know how to manage the risk so it’s not really risky at all for you.

Here’s the key to these four D’s: Find something that your customer
doesn’t want to do, doesn’t know how to do, is afraid to do or just simply can’t do.

When you can do that, your customers will perceive more value for your service. You’ll find it easier to charge a premium. That’s more money per hour. That’s bigg success!

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Thanks so much for checking in on us today. Please join us next time when we’ll talk about the downside of education. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes.

Subscribe to the Bigg Success feed.

Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00422-062309.mp3

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(Image in today's post by hisks)