May 26, 2009

Dear {FIRST_NAME},

It looks like the stock markets are starting to move again and people are slowly getting back out to buy things. What are you doing to find and attract new customers? More importantly, how are you using your web site to find new customers?

Here are four and a half thoughts to help you move forward with your online marketing:

1. Make Internet Marketing a Priority

Internet marketing isn't going away. In fact, it will be even more pervasive this year than last.

If you aren't currently doing any marketing on the Internet then you should take steps today to make room in your marketing budget to do so.

2. Brainstorm your Web Site

Take a hard look at your web site. Bring in lunch and have a brainstorming session on what should be on the site.

Better yet, ask two or three outsiders to look at your site. Most of us are too invested in our web sites to see them objectively. Ask people to evaluate it regarding the following criteria:

• Overall appearance
• Ease of navigation
• Communicating your message
• Helping them take the next step (Call to Action)

You’re bound to get 2-5 good ideas you never thought of. Just make sure you compensate them for this in some manner. We took our own advice and recently did a slight redesign on our site, GreenChair.net.

3. Make Email Newsletter a Priority

If you aren’t using email to market your biz, here are some steps to take:

• Get an account with an email service provider to send out your newsletter. I’ve been using Vertical Response for several years and like it a lot.
• Add an email sign up form on your web site. Most web designers can do this in less than an hour.
• Put together a list of customers, sales prospects and partners to whom you can send your newsletter. Pull them from your Outlook, as well as from the Outlook of your employees.
• Outline an editorial schedule for when you will send your newsletter and a general schedule of topics.
• Write into your schedule when you will send your newsletter.
• Don’t fudge on sending out your newsletter. Don’t wait for a new product of service to be active. You can catch it on the next newsletter.

4. Be More Strategic within your Online Marketing

It might mean spending more time on site optimization and less on paid search, or moving away from Yellow Pages into concentrating on local search engines.

We had one client who had spent $35,000 in magazine advertising with little to show for in sales. Since we took over their marketing, they’ve been averaging more than 30 conversions a month on their site, not including phone calls.

4.5 Do Something, Anything

Even if you just concentrate on one of these first four items, your goal should be to do something. None of us has a perfect web site or Internet marketing strategy. One of the things I’m going to be doing is writing more articles and distributing them to article directories. I’ve done this in the past and it has been a good source of links back to my site and a way to get my name out there.

We are offering a free one-hour consultation to look at your web site, search engine marketing and email marketing. Just call me at 720-922-3124 to set up an appointment to talk. I think it would be worth your time. You can also fill out a form to explain what you need.

Dave Carlson

Green Chair Marketing Group

JUST FOR GRINS: Business and Dead Horses

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.

In business, however, it seems that we often try other strategies with dead horses, including the following:

• Buying a stronger whip.
• Changing riders.
• Saying things like, “This is the way we always have ridden this horse.”
• Appointing a committee to study the horse.
• Arranging a visit with other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
• Increasing the standards to ride dead horses.
• Appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse.
• Creating a training session to increase our riding ability.
• Comparing the state of dead horses in today’s environment.
• Change the requirements, declaring, “This horse is not dead.”
• Hire contractors to ride the dead horse.
• Harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed.
• Declaring, “No horse is too dead to beat.”
• Providing additional funding to increase the horse’s performance.
• Do a CA Study to see if contractors can ride it cheaper.
• Purchase a product to make dead horses run faster.
• Declare the horse is “better, faster and cheaper” dead.
• Form a quality circle to find uses for dead horses.
• Revisit the performance requirements for horses.
• Say this horse was procured with cost as an independent variable.
• Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Please visit our site at www.GreenChair.net to see the many services we have to offer. Also, feel free to forward this to friends who might be interested in improving their online marketing strategies.

Dave Carlson
Green Chair Marketing Group
david@greenchair.net
www.greenchair.net
Phone: 720-922-3124