A year or so ago I was contacted by a marketing consultant who’d found me via the web. We swapped emails. Bumped into each other at an event. And eventually he asked if I’d like to meet for a coffee as he had a few questions he’d like to ask my advice on.

We met up. I liked the guy – genuinely nice fellow with lots of experience. He asked me a bunch of questions about a new market he was trying to move into and I gave him some ideas to try.

In the meantime he signed up for my newsletter and joined a webinar I ran.

All good so far.

But then he signed me up for his newsletter without asking.

I assume he did it with all his contacts. Somehow believing that the more people that read his emails the better.

Frankly, they weren’t very good. The headline story last month was about his new website. Followed by articles on a new column he was writing for a local newspaper and a new client he’d taken on.

Nothing of any interest to me or any potential clients or referrers who might be reading it. All about promoting him, nothing of value.

So eventually I gave up and unsubscribed. My inbox – like I’m sure yours is too – is full of useful stuff I don’t have the time to read, let alone useless stuff.

Yesterday when I was looking through the list of people who’d unsubscribed from my emails recently (yes, it does happen) ready to zap them from the database, I noticed his name.

He’d unsubscribed from my emails within hours of me unsubscribing from his in a kind of “tit for tat” measure I guess, I checked back and before that he’d pretty much opened and read all of my emails. So I assume he found them useful.

So the net result: he now doesn’t get emails from me that he was presumably finding useful. And he’s annoyed me. He’s lost my goodwill and any chance of me helping him out again.

And all because he subscribed me to his newsletter without asking me.

Because I didn’t want the emails, or find them useful, and because they added to the clog in my inbox I just got more and more cross with him.

And when I finally unsubscribed, that obviously upset him.

It’s not that he’s a bad guy or some kind of spammer. As I say, he was a genuinely nice guy. Just misguided when it comes to email marketing.

So if you’re thinking of blanket adding your contacts to your newsletter, or if you take all those business cards you get at every networking event and automatically plug them in to your system – think twice.

Ask first. You’ll get fewer subscribers. But the ones you get will be appreciative. They’ll be loyal. They won’t build up simmering resentment because you’re clogging their inbox with something they didn’t ask for.

And you won’t lose potentially valuable relationships.

Why you should NEVER subscribe someone to your newsletter without asking is a post from: How To Get More Clients: Practical Marketing And Sales Strategies

Stupid really. The book was The Challenger Sale and there’s a lot of good stuff in it. It echoes a lot of the things I’ve been saying about how our clients are changing and how that impacts the way we need to market and sell (Check out The Top 3 Reasons You Lose Sales for example).

But here’s what annoyed me…

The book took an “everything has changed so everything that’s ever been said about sales before is wrong” stance. Worse still, they proceeded to mis-characterise things like consultative and relationship selling as “good ‘ol boy backslapping” (doesn’t sound like any good professional-client relationship I know).

Their goal in this, I assume, was that by saying “everything that’s gone before is wrong” you’d go out and buy their book.

And so I got annoyed. What could have been great insight and advice became misleading – causing many to drop a lot of the good sales practices they’d learnt over the years.

So when my friends at Raintoday sent me an advanced copy of their new report “What Sales Winners Do Differently” I opened it with a bit of trepidation. I wanted to like it, I like Mike and John and know they do good work. But would it tread the same risky path that Challenger went down?

“What Sales Winners Do Differently” starts out with research, just like Challenger. In this case it’s based on interviews with 700 odd buyers of business to business products and services worth over $3.1 billion dollars.

One of the key things the research did was compare buyer ratings of the winning salesperson (or professional in the case of services) and the guy or girl who came in second. They found a stark difference between the two.

You can read the details in the report here. But what I particularly noted was the top two characteristics of sales winners (which the #2s scored really quite badly on).

According to buyers, the #1 characteristics was that winners “educated me with new ideas or perspectives” and the #2 was that they “collaborated with me”.

So in other words, successful salespeople built both strong credibility and an effective collaborative relationship.

It’s not just about demonstrating insight and opening the eyes of your clients. They also have to see that they’ll be able to work with you. It’s not just challenging them (though that helps to bring insights) it’s also about giving them the confidence that you’ll get results together. It’s not just an academic “I’m smart”, it’s an emotional “I’m on your side”.

And here’s where the report works for me. While The Challenger Sales team claim that it’s “the end of solution sales” and that “selling is not about relationships”, the Raintoday team wisely show that successful sales approaches like consultative, solution and relationship selling haven’t suddenly and magically become obsolete. Those skills are still vital. We just need to add some new skills to the mix.

It’s an evolution, not a revolution. Something I wholeheartedly agree with.

To download a free copy of the report, click here >>

What Sales Winners Do Differently is a post from: How To Get More Clients: Practical Marketing And Sales Strategies

Ganesh has written this article to share his experiences as a professional who’d never had to sell before, suddenly thrust into a world where if you don’t sell, you don’t last long. there’s something to learn for all of us in his expeiences.

Building a successful website or any company for that matter requires a great deal of patience, a hell of a lot of perseverance and a hearty helping of good old fashioned luck!

I am a doctor and my business partner is an Optometrist and we both left our respective medical careers to start our own web company. With little experience and blind faith that we would be millionaires within 6 months we set about developing our idea.

As we were both from medical backgrounds and had an interest in technology, we figured the most likely route to success would involve combing the two. We had noticed an increasing number of comparison websites but realised there wasn’t anything similar for clinics.

This was where our idea came from to build a comparison website for clinics that allowed people to book laser eye surgery and cosmetic surgery appointments online. This was how our website TreatmentSaver.com was born!

We soon realised that building a great product was only half the battle. If no one was going to pay us for our services then we weren’t going to be around for very long. We both had very little sales knowledge bearing in mind our professions and consequently had to learn on ‘the job’ so to speak.

Our customers are the clinics themselves as they pay us every time an appointment is booked through our website. For users our site is completely free and this was always our intention. When we set about selling to clinics there were number of key principles which we found worked well for our business.

It did however take us a while to refine our sales process and there was a great deal of rejection in the beginning. For seasoned sales experts the following information may perhaps be old news, but it certainly helped us “sales newbies” build our website up to decent turnover.

So here are my 5 “sales revelations”:

Doctors like taking to Doctors:
It was amazing how much more success we had when I called up as Ganesh the doctor as opposed to Ganesh the salesman. I think there are 2 main reasons for this, the first is that it allows you to get past the ‘gate keeper’ and speak to the decision maker. And secondly it immediately gave us a connection with the clinic as it meant we understood how they worked.

In your business, if you’re in the same position of having a similar background to your target clients then this could work for you too. Or if not, try to align your or your sales staffs’ interests with the person you are trying to sell to. Make sure they’re educated on what that person is like, they day to day problems they have, their typical goals in life.

Try to close the sale in one go:
When a clinic signs up to our service they need to build an online listing of their treatments etc. In the early days after closing the sale we would send the clinic log in details and tell them to update their listing. What we invariably found was that hardly anyone ever completed their brochure and over time they kind of forgot about us.

Now before we close a sale our aim is to get all the required information to put the listing ‘live’ on the site. This means that the minute you put the phone down they are effectively a paying customer.

Pay as you go works:
We initially started trying to sign clinics up on a monthly fee but we had very little success. We soon realised that as we were not an established brand, clinics were very wary of committing to us as they were unsure of whether we could deliver what we promised. We considered offering clinics a free trial but realised that our traffic wasn’t high enough to guarantee sufficient referrals which would justify them signing up after the trial.

Consequently we decided to only charge clinics based on results and this made selling so much easier. We effectively said to clinics you only pay if someone books an appointment.

Don’t do demos over the phone!
It was surprising to us how many of our potential customers had very little knowledge of the internet or even how to use a computer in general! Health practitioners are often technophobic and resistant to change.

We originally thought it would be a good idea to get clinics to visit our website so they could try it out for themselves. But more often than not they typed in the wrong web address or picked the wrong result from Google. This inevitably led to confusion and lost the whole momentum of the sales call.

Only sell one thing:
In addition to what we were trying to sell we also have a number of free add-ons for our partnered clinics. The problem was however that this led to confusion and a confused person generally loses confidence on what you are offering them. We now make a point of selling only our core product and then contacting them at a later date to offer the extra services.

Whether you’re a startup or a more established service business, there’s a lesson or two for all of us in Ganesh’s experiences – make sure you take note!

5 Surprising Sales Lessons From A Startup Service Business is a post from: How To Get More Clients: Practical Marketing And Sales Strategies

You get visitors to your website, but only a few of them ever turn to clients.

Worst case: none of them are the kind of people you’d want to work with.

You’ve probably tried changing your home page and maybe even hired a web designer to polish the design.

Still your results aren’t nearly as good as they could be.

At the same time, some of your competitors seem to get more than their fair share of clients.

If I said you could get every visitor to turn to a client, I’d be lying (especially if I claimed they’d all be fun to work with).

But there are definitely some things you can do right now to increase your conversion rates and start getting more clients (the good ones)…

You’re Not Saying The Right Things

You seem to be doing everything right:

• You attract great potential clients to your site; you could help them, and you would enjoy working with them.
• You have a site that looks professional; it doesn’t have all the latest bells and whistles, but it looks clean, and it’s easy to use.
• You say all the usual things that you’re “supposed” to say: the basic information about you and your business.

Unfortunately, that’s not nearly enough because your competitors do the same things.

Your visitors are likely to go to their sites as well. Their sites look just as professional as yours does. They say the same things on their sites as you do.

And if you’re unlucky, they’ve started to optimise their sites to increase their conversion rates.

So, why would your prospects choose to work with you?

The one thing your competitors might still get wrong is the same thing you’re likely to get wrong: they’re presenting a monologue when they should start a dialogue.

Your Visitors Don’t Feel Like You’re Talking to Them

Most people seem to forget that their websites should have a conversation with their potential clients.

It’s not there just to tell the visitors facts about you and your business.

The whole point is to capture the visitors’s interest and persuade them to take the next step towards hiring you.

There are several things you need to do to make that happen.

• Tell what specific results you can help them achieve. When people come to your site, they’re looking for a solution to something; either they have a problem they want to solve or they have a goal they want to achieve. You need to tell them you help people with those exact problems and goals.
• Help them see you’re an expert. Your title and formal education are rarely enough to convince visitors; having a fancy degree says hardly anything about your true expertise. Would you like to work with the person who was the worst of their class? So, find another way to prove you know what you’re doing.
• Give them an easy next step. Don’t ask people to hire you immediately. Don’t even ask them to call you before they believe hiring you is a good option for them. The first step could be joining your email list, reading a case study about one of your previous clients, or filling a self-evaluation questionnaire that you use to qualify clients.

Give them what they want. Help them imagine the results you can help them achieve. Show them the next step they should take.

But even if you get the basics right, you could still increase your conversion rate significantly.

The 3 Conversion Principles

Turning visitors to subscribers and clients —consistently— is difficult if you don’t know how to systematically improve your conversion rates.

These conversion principles help you look at your site and pages objectively and find the opportunities for improvement.

Clarity and Relevance:

• Visitors need to understand how to use your site without thinking about it. If they need a user’s manual to find their way around your site, they won’t even try to do it.
• They need to feel your services are relevant for them. If their business has more than 100 employees and you only talk about helping “small businesses,” they won’t believe you’re the right person to hire.

Perceived Value and Desire:

• If you can help them achieve something extremely important, they might jump through a few hoops to hire you. Nothing affects your conversion rate (and your business’s success) as much as how well you communicate your value proposition—the reasons you’re the best option.
• If you don’t give visitors any reason to act quickly, they won’t move forward. People are natural procrastinators—most of us anyway—so their default action is no action.

Trust and Risk:

• You need to earn your visitors’s trust before you can hope for them to hire you. Would you hire a coach, consultant, lawyer, or doctor if you didn’t trust them?
• Find ways to minimize the risk hiring you imposes on your clients. Can you guarantee results, deadlines, or budgets? Don’t ask your clients to take a risk you can remove.

What Makes The Difference?

The conversion principles are the foundation of the work I do; every recommendation about conversion optimization I give is based on them.

But they alone aren’t enough to make your website reach high conversion rates.

They create the foundation for improvement.

But the first thing you should think about is your value proposition.

It’s a collection of the most persuasive reasons people have for taking the action you ask for.
The conversion principles are essentially meant to help you make the communication of your value proposition more effective.

“Clarity and relevance” help you understand how people see your value proposition. In other words, if your site isn’t clear and relevant, people don’t see the reasons for even paying attention to you.

“Perceived value and desire” help you evaluate how people see your value proposition; do they think they have good reasons to listen to you and do they really want what you offer.

“Trust and risk” help you minimize the obvious reasons for not taking any action.

But first you need to know what is your value proposition.

If you’re not sure about it, take a look at the 5-step process I use with my clients to find the core of their value propositions.

And if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to leave a comment.

Right now, Peter Sandeen is probably knee-deep in snow with his wife and dogs (he lives in Finland). But you can download his 5-step system for finding the core of your value proposition and landing page checklist to improve your conversion rates.

Converting More of Your Web Visitors to Clients is a post from: How To Get More Clients: Practical Marketing And Sales Strategies

“Clarity Trumps Persuasion”

It’s a phrase much beloved of marketing and conversion expert Dr Flint McGlaughlin of MarketingExperiments.com.

And it’s really been brought home to me recently as I’ve been reviewing a number of websites from consultants, coaches and professional speakers.

One of the things I see so often is sites that jump too fast to persuading. Here’s what I mean by that…

Put yourself in the mind of a potential client visiting your site. Not one who’s already 90% made up their mind, but one who’s researching who to hire. Let’s say you’re a professional speaker.

Here’s what goes on in your potential client’s mind…

They’re searching for someone to speak at their event. They’ve had a handful of names recommended and they’re googling to find some others. They click on to your site. What are they thinking right now?

The question most people have in their mind when they first visit a site is “Am I in the right place? Am I going to find something useful for me here?”

In the context of someone looking for a speaker for their event – that translates into “Do they speak to audiences like mine? Do they speak on the topic I’m looking for and/or my audience will find interesting?”

And that’s where most sites go wrong. They jump straight into persuading.

They lead with their testimonials and differentiatiors. Great stuff, and very important. But too early. Or worse, they try to say something clever or funny but really don’t say anything at all.

The question your potential buyer is asking is “am I in the right place?” remember. Until he knows that you speak (or consult or train or whatever you do) to people like him on subjects that are important to him then he doesn’t care how great you are or how you’re different to your competitors.

He needs to know you’re relevant to him first.

That’s where clarity trumps persuasion. Don’t try to convince people how great you are until you’ve made it clear whether you work with people like them on the sort of goals or problems they have.

To a busy buyer with a pile of research to get through, if it’s not clear the second he arrives on your site whether you’re a fit then he’s going to click that back button pretty instantly.

No matter how persuasive your site is; if it’s not clear, he’s gone.

Clarity trumps persuasion.

Clarity Trumps Persuasion is a post from: How To Get More Clients: Practical Marketing And Sales Strategies

In this new age of media 2.0 the media is much more likely to search for experts when they have the need rather than poring over hundreds of useless press releases that don’t have information that is relevant for their audience.

So even if you haven’t sent out a press release you could get that important call from the media – if you’ve positioned yourself correctly on the web.

On the flip side: did you know that now with YouTube and The “Wayback Machine” that what you say could haunt you forever?

Once a video of you is posted or something you said shows up on the Internet there’s no way to take it back. With the advent of technology what you say will stay around in eternity and anyone can access it at any time.

This is why it’s so important that you pay attention to what you say and how you say it.

That’s right, your reputation, your credibility, your brand, your livelihood could disappear with one bad article or one TV appearance gone south. But it doesn’t need to be so. Don’t make these five mistakes.

1. You waffle.
Many people I media train waffle. They meander off into a tangent or blurt out a thought that just came into their head in the heat of the moment, instead of carefully planning their messages and delivering them.

I just saw the movie Fair Game about the Valerie Plame story. When Plame spoke to one of her contacts overseas from whom she wanted information she was firm as a mountain, soft as breeze, fluid as water. She was never harsh, but she got her way. She knew her facts so when she spoke to one of her own team members or someone whose cooperation she wanted she quietly, but firmly repeated her request.

You can do the same when someone asks you a question. You calmly assert your pre-rehearsed answer no matter how many different ways a reporter or host ask you a question to elicit a different response. Know what you want to say and stick to it. Stay firm as a mountain, soft as a breeze, fluid as water.

2. You don’t quote industry leaders or competitors.
It might sound counter-intuitive to quote your competition or other high-stature people in your field, but it shows that you are on top of what’s happening in your industry. In an Inc.com article titled 10 Tips for Giving an Important Speech by Alyssa Danigelis, anthropologist, filmmaker, and National Geographic explorer Elizabeth Lindsey said, “The more we talk about the things that matter to us, and less about our achievements, people breathe a collective sigh of relief.”

When we focus on what’s important to us in a sincere way it translates to our audience. They get it. Quote people you admire whose philosophy resonates with your own to help get your ideas across in a novel way. They often say things that give a different point of view given we are all entangled in our own perspective. It’s a way of broadening our own views and the views of our audience.

3. You don’t tell how you’ve helped people.
The most potent way to persuade people to buy or buy into you isn’t for you to talk about your achievements but to tell a story about a person you’ve helped. I recently media coached a client who said he wasn’t a good story-teller. As a doctor he preferred to cite facts so he would be more authoritative. But the human warm fuzzy factor was a bit lacking. It’s important to use facts and stories to build trust. And it’s also necessary to tell stories that reveal our effectiveness human to human.

Facts show you have knowledge, and personal and professional stories illustrate your understanding – how you do what you do and how well your methods work. I suggested that he tell dramatic or funny stories about people who came into his office with an acute problem whom he helped quickly recover using both his doctorly intuition and the product he was promoting. In our next media coaching session he did this beautifully in preparation for his NPR interview. Giving your audience a story about how you helped another person is the closest thing to giving them an actual experience of you.

4. You don’t transform your wounds into wisdom.
Your hardships are the mistakes that others don’t need to make. Your wounds make you loveable. We all have an Achilles Heel. Don’t hide it, highlight it.

Comedian Craig Ferguson said, “I think that sometimes fear is god’s way of saying paying attention to this could be fun. I’ve learned from people who are braver than I that fear is necessary, failure is necessary. When I talk to people and they tell me how well they are or how well they are doing I think they’re crazy and they’re failing. And when I talk to people and who are telling me how they feel. I’m not saying that misery is more authentic than joy, I don’t mean that. But I do think that sometimes self promotion can be tiresome as I sit here talkin’ about my book. Which is available reasonably priced from all good outlets.”

What I love about Ferguson is that he doesn’t wallow in any sentiment. He moves into the wound and the moves out of it with humor. And aren’t you interested in his book just from reading this one quote? I was.

5. You don’t have your opinion ready.
Thought leaders have opinions. They back their opinions with evidence or piggy back them with humor to soften a tough point of view. Have your opinion ready. To become a respected thought leader spend some time every week thinking about the issues in your industry. Consider some of the trends that are happening. Formulate your thoughts. Concretize them in writing on your blog, Facebook, or in an article.

When a reporter who had interviewed me before called and asked me my opinion of the new Conan O’Brien Show I told her I hadn’t seen it, but I still had an opinion about it. We laughed. Then I transitioned from what I didn’t know into what I did know – which was Jon Stewart. I watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and think he’s hilarious, smart and self-deprecating.

Even though he’s super smart he’s not a snob about it. She really wanted my comments about the future of the talk show format so I talked about that in relation to Jon Stewart. As you can see I got a paragraph at the end of her article – without knowing a thing about the topic of her piece – Conan O’Brien. (http://www.prsecrets.com/articles/ChristianScienceMonitor_111010.html)

The important thing is to transition to what you know and make the connection so you are serving the reporter and her audience. Folk singer Joan Baez said, “I’ve never had a humble opinion. If you’ve got an opinion, why be humble about it?” Thought leaders aren’t afraid to voice a strong opinion.

Susan Harrow, CEO of http://prsecrets.com, is a top media coach, marketing strategist and author of Sell Yourself Without Selling Your Soul® (HarperCollins), The Ultimate Guide to Getting Booked on Oprah, and Get a 6-Figure Book Advance. Clients include Fortune 500 CEOs, bestselling authors and entrepreneurs who have appeared on Oprah, 60 Minutes, NPR, and in TIME, USA Today, Parade, People, O, NY Times, WSJ, and Inc.

Join Susan and me to learn how you can speak in sound bites to get what you want in business and in life (FREE teleseminar / webinar) here: Speak in Sound Bites >>

5 Sound Bite Mistakes is a post from: How To Get More Clients: Practical Marketing And Sales Strategies

Since then I’ve had a few people ask about other resources to learn about conversion rate optimisation. So here’s my list of the best resources for improving conversions on your website with a special focus on increasing email optins.

The Heavyweights

If you want to dive deep into conversion rate optimisation, there are a few “heavyweight” resources you should bookmark. These are the folks who do constant research and publish their latest findings. They look beyond just tips and teach you why some things work and some don’t so you can apply the lessons to your own situation.

Your first port of call should be MarketingExperiments. This is the most comprehensive source of optimisation information. They run regular webinars where they do live optimisation on viewer submitted sites. And they have a huge backlog of research papers and webinar recordings.

A great place to get started is their primer on Building To The Ultimate Yes.

Online marketing veteran Bryan Eisenberg has a great series of Conversion 101 blog posts that cover everything from landing pages, webinar invites, sales videos, etc.

Practical Hints and Tips

Blogs and resources with regular articles on improving conversion rates and email optins.

Peep Laja’s ConversionXL site is pure conversion. It’s got article after article on tested conversion strategies. No fluff. Targeted at the intelligent reader. I’m a subscriber – you should be too.

My friend Peter Sandeen focuses on conversion optimisation specifically for small businesses. You can read his articles here, and grab his excellent landing page checklist here.

The Kiss Metrics blog regularly showcases the best guest writes on conversion and web optimisation topics.

Michael Aagard is another Nordic conversion expert (must be something in the water over there). He often reports on extensive tests he does of button designs, headlines, etc. on his blog Content Verve.

Clay Collins does regular videos on optimising website optins and sales and frequently includes free downloadable templates and entire web pages (or you can use the rather excellent LeadPages software that Clay sells). Check the MarketingShow blog for details.

Case Studies and Examples

Often the best way to learn conversion optimisation is to see it applied to live sites.

Conversion Rate Experts have a series of excellent case studies and infographics showing how they optimised seomoz.com and crazyegg.com. They talk not just about the results, but the research steps they went through to figure out what they needed to do to improve conversion. Check out the Articles section and the Learning Zone for details.

In this post, the Aweber team show the changes they made to their primary signup page to quadruple optins.

One of the classic case studies in optimisation is 37 Signal’s repeated updates to their signup for Highrise. Here’s the first article on the original changes they made.

And here’s what happened next.

The Visual Website Optimiser team often showcase examples of sites and pages that have been improved using their split testing software. You can get see all their case studies here.

Of course, the learning resources at Marketing Experiments are full of examples and case studies, as are their live webinars.

And finally, there are two websites dedicated to reporting the results of optimisation testing: ABTests.com and Which Test Won (in the latter case you can only see the latest tests for free so it’s worth keeping up to date with the latest posts).

Tools for Improving Conversions

One of the challenges many smaller businesses and solo professionals have is creating effective landing pages and optin forms without needing to know any complex code. Here are the tools I recommend:

Premise is a good option for removing all the clutter and making simple opt-in or sales pages – especially if your standard theme doesn’t include a landing page template. A lot of my current sales pages and optin pages are based on Premise.

Optimizepress (wordpress theme) is a good choice when you want to create a micro site with a good basic optin page design. There are a handful of templates based on best practices.

LeadPages is the solution I’m currently using to create all my new landing pages. It’s a fill-in-the-blanks system that enables you to create effective landing pages based on a variety of best practice templates that are being added to all the time. You can get a high converting landing page up and running in 10 minutes or less.

Unbounce is a site that lets you create Landing Pages based on their standard templates on their site and with a bit of tweaking, to invisibly redirect some of your website pages there.

Lander is a new service similar to Unbounce that lets you quickly create effective hosted Landing Pages using a drag and drop interface and/or predefined templates. I’ve not used it myself yet, but it comes highly recommended.

If you really want to make improvements to your conversion rates, the ultimate solutions is to test how things work in your own specific market rather than relying on best practices from others and hoping they’ll work for you. Use the best practices for ideas on what to test, then see what actually works for you.

The basic testing tools for small businesses and solo professionals are:

Google Content Experiments. Sadly Google have downscaled their website optimizer tool, but it’s still good for simple tests and has the benefit of being free.

Visual Website Optimizer is a powerful suite with an easy to use interface meaning you can set up tests without knowing any code.

Optimizely is the new kid on the block with apparently an even easier to use interface (though I’ve not used it myself)

Any More?

That’s my selection of the best of the best – do you have any recommended resources for optimising conversions on your site? Pop your recommendations in the comments box below. Would be especially interested in comments from anyone who’s used Lander or Optimizely.

* I’ve used a couple of affiliate links for some of the paid tools I mention so I’ll get a nice little commission if you end up buying one of them. With the exception of Optimizely and Lander I’ve used all the tools myself and continue to use LeadPages, Premise and Optimizepress today as my main tools.

21 Of The Best Resources For Improving Your Website Conversions is a post from: How To Get More Clients: Practical Marketing And Sales Strategies

But how?

Here are a couple of videos – one from me and one from Ago Cluytens with our best tips on building those executive relationships.

In the first video I share some of the findings from some recent research on the psychology of senior executives. And I reveal what I’ve found to be the most reliable (but underused) strategy for building relationships with senior executives.

In Ago’s video he shares the three big mistakes most people make when trying to build executive relationships. Check the video out to see if you’re making them.

How To Build Relationships With Senior Executives is a post from: How To Get More Clients: Practical Marketing And Sales Strategies

David Tovey is a director of the Principled Group and author of the recently published Principled Selling: How to Win More Business Without Selling Your Soul.

For most of us consultants, coaches, lawyers, engineers, accountants; sales is not something we enjoy. And one of the reasons for that is that we assume it’s all about manipulation and persuasion.

In this podcast interview, David shows us how we can sell effectively in a principled way: without manipulation, without pressuring our clients, and without “selling our soul”

To find out more about David and principled selling, head over to the Principled Selling website.

Principled Selling: Winning Clients Without Selling Your Soul is a post from: How To Get More Clients: Practical Marketing And Sales Strategies

Project 10K is my goal to get to 10,000 engaged email subscribers by the end of the year. In my previous P10K blog post I reviewed my website traffic and identified how I was going to increase the right sort of traffic to get more subscribers.

In this post I’m going to look at how to get more of your website visitors to “convert” – in other words to subscribe to receiving emails from you.

Now this is not a “how to tweak every last detail on a landing page” guide. Instead I’m going to focus on the big, broad strategies you can use to get more of your website visitors to opt in.

So first off, let’s look at what motivates people to opt in.

You can look at it in lots of different ways, but my own particular “formula” for optins is:

So in other words the higher V and I are, the more likely a visitor is to opt in. And the higher F and R are, the less likely they are to opt in.

So what are V, I, F and R?

V stands for the perceived long term Value a visitor sees in subscribing to your emails. In other words, the more value a visitor thinks they’ll get from your emails, the more likely they are to subscribe (obvious really).

So if you’re already pretty well known as being an expert in your field with lots of useful advice to give, that will increase your chances of people opting in. As will the quality of the material they’ve already seen from you on your blog. And spelling out exactly what they’ll get (e.g. what they’ll learn from your emails and the benefits it’ll bring) and showing quotes from happy subscribers will increase this perception of value too.

I stands for the short term Incentive you offer for opting in. So if you offer a high value Lead Magnet like a short report or video when people opt in, they’re more likely to do so.

There are a million free newsletters on offer on the web, so often it’s the immediate value offered by a Lead Magnet that convinces people to opt in. Of course, you don’t want them just opting in for the freebie and then unsubscribing or ignoring your emails. So your Lead Magnet has to be closely related to what you talk about in your emails.

F stands for Friction. If your visitors have to give you a ton of information from their email address to inside leg measurement to subscribe, it’s going to put them off. As is a badly designed form or page that distracts them, or if their attention is taken away from opting in by lots of other options on the page.

Moving graphics (like the “sliders” so many website designers love to put on their pages these days) are notorious for distracting visitors away from the main thing you want them to do. As is having too many menu items, social media buttons and links to lots of other exciting things close to your optin forms.

R is the perceived Risk of opting in. In other words, visitors are going to be put off from opting in if they think you might misuse their email address and other details. So does your site look a bit scruffy or spammy? Does it feel like a “get rich quick” site that will then bombard them with sales pitches.

Have you got a clear privacy policy and anti-spam message? Is it clear who you are from your about page – are are you pretty anonymous? All these things will impact how risky your visitor thinks giving up their email address is going to be.

The Big Strategies For Getting More Email Subscribers

So if those are the factors that will motive vistors to subscribe to your emails – how can we make sure our site is addressing them?

The first and simplest strategy is to Use Dedicated Landing Pages.

I do a pretty good job of this, but I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve seen who direct traffic just to their home page (the most generic page on your site) when they’d get far more optins by sending people to a dedicated landing page specifically designed to encourage people to opt in.

So if you’re paying for traffic from Adwords or other pay-per-click services, for heavens sake send the traffic to a dedicated page which relates specifically to the advert, offers a great lead magnet for opting in, sells the benefits of subscribing, and doesn’t have all the normal distractions of your menus, sidebars, social media icons etc.

If you’re sending pay-per-click traffic to your home page (as sadly, many businesses still do) you’re throwing away money.

But you can go further than that. In your social media profiles, instead of linking to your home page, link to a dedicated landing page – ideally written for visitors from that specific social media site.

When I changed the link on my twitter profile to go to a landing page rather than my home page, optins from visitors from my profile went up 3x overnight.

(And as proof that everyone has room for improvement – when I was writing this post I realised that on my Linkedin profile the link to my website was to the home page when it should have been to a dedicated landing page).

You should also make sure that any guest blog posts or articles you do direct people to a landing page with your lead magnet rather than your home page.

So rather than “Ian Brodie is a blah blah blah, read more of his articles here…” use something like “To get a free copy of Ian’s Pain Free Marketing Blueprint for attracting and winning more clients without the pain and expense of traditional marketing, click here…” and send the traffic to a page where they can opt in to get your lead magnet.

The second strategy is to have an enticing Lead Magnet.

This is straight out of the optin formula. The more attractive your lead magnet, the more likely people are to opt in.

A lot of folks spend endless hours making minor tweaks to the design of their website and landing pages (to be honest, I’ve done it myself). But far more important is the perceived value of what you’re offering to people who opt in.

You can increase the value of your Lead Magnet by focusing it on the big problems your potential clients are most likely to face. And give it a name that highlights its value.

In my case, my Pain Free Marketing Blueprint appeals to people who find marketing painful. And “blueprint” implies a step by step guide.

But I could perhaps increase the perceived value to a wider range of people with a Lead Magnet that promises faster results. Or, since I know that lead generation is a critical issue for most of my potential clients, I could focus it on that.

Another strategy is to have multiple Lead Magnets, each focusing on a different client problem. So if you work in the field of leadership you could have one on strategy, one on motivating your team, one on setting a vision, etc. Each would appeal to leaders with slightly different challenges. But by focusing on these very specific problems you really “hit the spot” for those leaders.

You can also try using a medium that seems higher value. A physical CD or DVD may appeal more to your potential clients than a PDF for example.

The third strategy is to make sure your Landing Pages are effective.

So going back to our optin formula, that means making sure you’ve clearly explained the value of subscribing and your lead magnet, and you’ve removed all distractions like menus, sidebars, social media widgets etc.

Ideally, you want to use something like Google Content Experiments (free) or Visual Website Optimizer (paid) to test what the most effective landing pages for you and your specific audience are.

You can get a head-start by learning from what landing pages are working well for other sites. But you have to be careful here.

A lot of so-called “best practices” being touted on the web are created by people in the “get rich quick” markets. And often what works for them and their particular clients (people rather desperate to earn some money and hopeful the next scheme they try will let them do it with minimal effort) don’t work nearly so well for real markets with sensible and typically rather conservative buyers.

So while a scruffy looking page with big red letters shouting WARNING and promising push-button riches may excite the get rich quick crowd, they’re likely to send your and my clients running in the opposite direction pretty darned fast.

Instead, seek inspiration from sites that cater to real businesses.

Unbounce.com have some great landing page examples and simple templates to learn from. If you dive into the archives of marketingexperiments.com you’ll see their testing of different landing pages and elements for a variety of businesses to use as starting points.

At the end of the day, only your own testing can tell you what really works for you – but these are good starting points.

In terms of creating the landing pages, if you don’t have your own pet web developer, then there are a variety of shortcuts you can use.

Some WordPress themes have built in landing page templates. I use the Thesis theme with the Marketers Delight skin for this site and it has a simple landing page format.

Unbounce allows you to create landing pages on their site using their templates and then “redirect” your pages to theirs.

Optimizepress is a theme for WordPress that allows you to quickly create landing pages (and sales pages and membership sites).

The Premise plugin works with your existing WordPress theme to create simple, clean landing pages.

And the solutions I’m using for all my new landing pages is LeadPages. This comes with a dozen or so pre-configured landing page templates you can tweak by changing the colours, text, graphics etc. All in a few minutes per page.

Strategy four is to maximise opportunities to optin from your blog.

Dedicated landing pages are always going to have a higher optin rate than your normal blog or website pages. But you’re going to get the most traffic (e.g. from google or social media) to your blog. So you need to make sure there are plenty of opportunities for visitors to opt in when they’re looking at your blog.

Most people just have a simple optin form in their blog’s sidebar. But I’ve found you can get way more optins by using the following locations too:

• Using a “Feature Box” on your website home page. This is a technique I learned from Derek Halpern when he reviewed my site. Most people come to a specific blog post. if they then choose to visit your home page it’s a sign they’re interested in finding out a bit more. So make the optin box on your home page big and bold. I also use a welcome video to encourage people to opt in.
• On your “About Me” page. Another Derek Halpern tip. Instead of just having your About Me page talk about your background, make it about the website too. And tell people that best way to get the most from the site is to sign up for your newsletter. Again, if they’ve taken the trouble to go to your About Me page it’s a sign they’re more than casually interested in what you do, so give them a chance to get to know you more through your newsletter.
• Putting an optin box at the end of each blog post. If someone’s interested enough to read to the bottom of a blog post then they’re probably interested in what you have to say. So while they’re there, give them the opportunity to opt in. There are plugins like OptinSkin or Hybrid Connect that allow you to configure and add optin boxes fairly easily. In my case my WordPress theme makes it pretty simple to add automatically.
• Use a Scroll Triggered box. As an alternative to a box at the bottom of the post, you can trigger a box to appear when people reach the bottom. Look in the WordPress plugin directory for the free plugins Qoate Scroll Triggered Box or Dreamglow Scroll Triggered Box – both of which can do this.
• Use a “Welcome Gate”. this is a dedicated landing page which appears the first time someone visits your home page. I’ve been using one for a month and optins from my welcome gate are running at about 12% (vs a 3.1% average for the site). I use LeadPages to create my Welcome Gate, but if you’re handy with html you can also get a plugin to generate one for free from the people who made LeadPages here.

Strategy Five is to use Google Analytics to tell you what’s working (and what’s not).

You’ll need goals set up on Google Analytics to trigger when someone opts in – usually that’s done by triggering the goal by a visit to the “thank you” page visitors get sent to after opting in.

What you can then do is look at your top converting traffic sources to see if you can get more visitors from those sources (we covered this in the last Project 10K blog post).

You can also look at the top converting landing pages on your site. Can you send more traffic to that page (e.g. if a certain blog post converts well, can you tweet it out regularly? Or link to it elsewhere from your site?).

Are there common themes in your top converting pages? A particular topic you could blog about more?

In my case I spotted that my highest converting blog posts were almost all videos where I was using LeadPlayer. It’s a plugin that lets you add optin forms inside embedded Youtube videos. My posts with LeadPlayer videos get between 2x-5x the normal optin rate. So the obvious conclusion is to make more of them and to get more traffic to them.

And finally, look at blog posts or pages that get a lot of traffic but have low conversion rates. Is there anything you can do to improve the conversion rate? Is there a mismatch between the traffic source (e.g. searches for a specific keyword) and the content of the blog post itself which you can fix? Or can you change the format (e.g. from text to video) to something that’s working better for you to get optins.

Your Turn

I’ve covered five pretty straightforward but powerful strategies for increasing your website conversions.

Which are you going to use?

If you’ve got any questions or want to share your strategies, drop me a note in the comments box below.

* The links for Thesis, Optimizepress, LeadPages, LeadPlayer and Optin Skin are affiliate links. If you follow these links, fall in love with the product and buy it, I’ll get a commission

Project 10K: Increasing Website Conversions is a post from: How To Get More Clients: Practical Marketing And Sales Strategies