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From the Sofa to Success

Don't you love hearing stories of the underdog - winning? Especially people having success even when starting with absolutely nothing but a dream?

I sure do!

How is this for an underdog story: Brian was an unemployed former Marine, just out of the service so broke he's sleeping on his best friend's mom's couch and doesn‚t have any real job prospects. How did he pull himself up by his own bootstraps and convince multiple businesses to start paying him thousands of dollars a month for his new-found expertise? I'm pumped up to share this amazing story with you from my friend Mike – it goes into a LOT of detail and you'll walk away with an action blueprint… just for dropping by.  You need to check this out now… really!  Click Here to experience Brian's Story

P.S. You don't need to be a genius to get a LOT of out of this, go here now before its gone:  Here's Brian's Story

Question:  Hi Sally.  Thanks so much for allowing people to write in with questions – I have a doozy!  Everyone told me that I should have a website because it would bring me more business. Well I now have a website but I don’t seem to be getting any hits and it has not increased my business. Am I doing something wrong?

Answer:  Hi back and thanks for writing. I wouldn’t say that you were doing anything wrong, per say.  What I would say is that you probably haven’t done enough - yet. If you think about your website, it’s much like a business card or a flyer that is advertising your business. The only difference is that flyers and business cards are on paper whereas a web site is in an electronic format, on the internet.  So let’s look at a flyer as an example of an advertising marketing tool. 

Flyers are used by many companies to advertise and can bring in new customers. You get them in the mail, you see them posted on shop windows, inserted in newspapers, so you decide to spend the time and money to get some printed for your business. But just having those flyers made and sitting on your dining room table will not bring you more business. You can even hang one on your front door but unless people just happen to walk by or you give them your address, they won’t even know it’s there so chances are, it will not be seen by many and probably won’t bring you any new business. Your next step would be to market those flyers – get them into people’s hands; you could post them on hydro poles, in supermarkets, send them out via mail, and where ever you think prospects might see them.  You could also pay one of those services to market them for you, by including your flyer in with all the other flyers they stuff into envelopes and deliver directly to people’s homes. The point is, people won’t come to the flyers – you have to take the flyers to the people.  Your website is very much like that.  You can build a website and it can be the best website in the world but if people don’t know how or where to find it, then they won’t find you. So your question really becomes, how do people find my website?

As explained in the example above with the flyer, simply building a website is not enough to bring you new business. There are literally millions of websites out there in the world wide web, all competing for the same customers. If you want your website to act like a static business card, then simply build it and tell your friends, family and existing customers the URL (that’s the WWW web address) so they can find it.  But if you want your website to actually work FOR you, to draw people to you and bring you new business, then you need to market it. This is what’s commonly known as “Internet Marketing”.

Unfortunately, there is no 1 true way to bring more customers to you. There are many strategies for marketing a website and most successful companies use a variety of these strategies to drive more traffic (people) to their site.  There is a ton of both FREE and paid information available if you want to learn to do-it-yourself, or you can pay a company (much like the company who stuffs your flyer into envelopes with all the other flyers and delivers them house to house), who will market your site for you. Launch Now! is unique in that we specialize in developing strategic marketing strategy plans that you can either:

• take and implement yourself (simply follow the plan and do all the work yourself, saving you money) or 
• contract us to implement the plan for you (we’ll do the work)

Either way, Lauch Now! works with small and mid-sized businesses  -most with modest budgets, to help them get the most out of their internet presence and make the site work for them by driving new business (sales!) to them.

In the near future, I and a colleague will be teaching Strategic Internet Marketing and Internet Marketing for Beginners Courses, both on-line and in person at the Sweet Spot Training Centre in Pickering.  If you live within driving distance to Pickering, I strongly encourage you to take a few hours out of your day to attend one of these sessions in person. The information you will learn will be of great value to you and your buiness. You cannot afford NOT to attend!

In the meantime, something you can do right now (and for free) is get your URL out there! Here are some examples of what you can do right now to increase your website traffic:

• Comment on people’s blogs (be sincere and include your URL
• join social networking groups like Facebook, My Space, Digg, Twitter, and others, and include your URL 
• post your web address in any emails you send out (create a signature that includes your url, so you won’t forget to include it in your outgoing messages)
• Keep track of where you post it, so you can include those pages with the links back on to your site.

For example, I placed a link to http://launchnow.ca on my Twitter account. I then added my Twitter link http://twitter.com/iamzelda to my website.  This is what’s known as a *link back* (because it goes both ways) and is a good marketing strategy you can start with. 

* One word of caution with link backs, be sure that the sites you are linking to and the sites that are linking back to you are respectable websites. Being linked to spamming sites can actually harm you!

Good luck with your site and let me know if I can be of any further assistance.

Question:  I’m currently a national sales agent for “Excellence Rewards” and looking for an additional product to offer my corporate accounts in the HR and sales departments.   I used to teach and train corp sales from commercial to Fortune 500 type of accounts. I’m currently looking for national program that I could offer my accounts.

Do you know any top end sales programs that you would recommend?

Ron Davidson

PS…great web site!

Answer:  Hi Ron, and thanks for the compliment on the site!  I don’t know of any brand name sales programs off hand that I can recommend; we are developing all of our own training materials for Sweet Spot Training, based on our years of study and experience. Nor do I know your clients or their specific needs so I’m not sure whether our programs at Sweet Spot would accommodate or not. You are welcome to visit the site to see what we offer. 

My recommendation would be to do a formal RFI (Request for information) pitch to the top 20 companies you are considering. To develop this list, try doing a search on Google for ”Corporate Sales Program” and see which ones rank highest.  RFI’s are (or should be) common practise when tacking any new major project. You can then narrow it down to the top 5, at which time you will reply back to them with an RFP (Request to Purchase). The key differences between an RFI and an RFP are the level of detail you are requesting and the level of product detail and personal contact you receive back from the prospective company.  (If you are working with a smaller scale project, sometimes you can skip the RFI and go directly to the RFP. However in your case, since you do not have any products in mind and plan to use the program extensively across North America, I would suggest including both steps.)  

One of the many benefits of submitting an RFI and RFP is that it takes a great bulk of the workload off your hands and into the hands of the prospective sales training company. If they understand it’s something you will be rolling out and promoting nationally, most companies will bend over backwards to show you demos and all the benefits of their program, to try to gain your business saving you hours upon hours of research time.  So while this may appear cumbersome, the process can be fully executed in only a few short weeks and you’ll be left knowing that due dillegence was done with a program on hand that best suits you clients’ needs. Many Training companies offer the flexibility of both on-site and training centre classroom locations so if this applies to you, this may be something you’ll want to include in your requirements. Whether this is a program you purchase or one your clients will attend, don’t forget to negotiate a corporate rate for the bulk buisness you’ll be bringing them.  (I’ve negotiated as much as 20% off listed class fees.)

Launch Now! does produce these types of documents, ie: RFI, RFP, Marketing Plans (specializing in on-line with off-line support), Business Cases, Project Plans, Proposals, etc. A formalized RFI would cost approximately $300-500.

Good luck! Feel free to write back if you have any questions.