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The online world is brimming with competition.

At Traffic4Me, we see dozens of campaigns every day, and we know just how full of rivalry every industry is. No matter how niche you think your camel teapot company really is, the fact is that there’s someone else doing the same thing with you out there – and they might even be doing it for a lower price. So how the heck are you going to hang onto your customers?

The first step is not to look at your competition as a massive threat, but to think of them as a great opportunity for learning more about your brand, your business, and your customers. Note that we’re not saying you should run out and start copy-pasting your competitor’s ideas into your own campaign, but a little bit of inspiration never hurt anyone. In fact, no matter which business you’re in, chances are you’ll benefit greatly from studying your competition.

Just look at the world’s best athletes, executives, and entrepreneurs for example and you’ll soon see that they make studying the competition a valuable part of their routine. Kobe Bryant gets pumped up with videos of his opponents before a big game, and if you’re planning to be the best around at what you do, you need to know what else is out there in the industry and what they’re doing.

Of course it’s no good simply marking down everything you learn about your competitors, from their favorite color to their shoe sizes. Instead, you need to know what to look for. It’s not about copying ideas, it’s about figuring out your competition’s strategy and learning what works for them so that you can adapt it, improve it, and use it to make yourself more money.

So how do you get started?

1. Do More than a Google Search

There’s little doubt that most research projects should start with a Google search. I did a google search before I even started this article!

However, it’s worth noting that when you’re gathering intel on your competitors, you’ll be better served if you take your search farther than peeping through their office windows. There are plenty of tools out there that can give you an interesting glance into what your competitors are doing. For instance:

• Google Alerts – Keeping an eye out on why people are talking about your competitors is a good way to figure out what you should be focusing on more in your own campaigns.
• Google trends – If you want to stay on top of the latest information in your industry, Google trends is great for that. It can also help you to compare your company to others, see where the people who come to your site go, and more.
• SpyFu – If you’re looking to see what AdWords and keywords your competitors are buying, then few tools are more popular than SpyFu.

2. Tap into Your Social Spies

We’re not suggesting that you initiate your social following into some sort of shady cult that records information about competitors on your behalf, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t use your popularity to your advantage in the business world.

At Traffic for Me, we get you traffic, then you use that traffic to build a loyal following that might reach from email marketing to social media. On social media – whether you’re big on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or Google+ (Hey, someone uses it) – you should be able to pick up interesting things about yourself and your competition just by tuning in.

Monitor blog posts, Facebook posts, Tweets, and other social media mentions for key phrases for a cost-effective way to stay in touch with your adoring public and learn more about their relationship with your competitors.

In a similar way, scouring through online reviews on things like Yelp can be a great way to see what other people are saying about your biggest competitors – so that you can adjust your techniques for better profits. If your competitors are getting rave reviews about their customer service, while your help-line runs using a single half-educated monkey – then you probably know what’s going wrong already.

3. Speak to your Customers

Crazy, we know. But how hard could it be?

When it comes to finding sources of information about your competitors, don’t skip the most obvious option: your customers. Speaking to your customers will give you a cheap and easy insight into why they bothered to pick you over the other people out there.

Sure, you might get your traffic from us, but why did the people who make up that traffic decide to become repeat customers with your business? Whenever you win a customer, find out why they chose you, who they used before, and whether there’s anything you can do to maintain their loyalty over the long-term.

The same applies when you lose a customer. You can identify what they preferred about your customer with a quick “Sorry to lose you” email. These emails can even come with extra gifts to try and tempt your lost customer back into your corner. The more you learn from your customers, the more you can adjust your own offerings and shout down the other companies holding you back.

4. Recruit Your Competitors’ Talent

You might already have your own great staff members that are holding your business aloft, but chances are that for most small businesses that there’s a skills gap somewhere that simply needs to be filled. One of the primary reasons people turn to other companies instead of sticking with you is that those companies can offer them something that you can’t. In other words, you need to up your game!

A particularly effective strategy for putting yourself ahead of the competition is to poach their most talented employees and team up with the partners that your competitors are already working with. It might seem shady, but business is full of difficult dealings and you’re probably not in it to make friends.

Of course, taking your competitor’s talent isn’t as simple as approaching someone from an opposing company on the street and requesting that they leave their cushy job in exchange for a place at your less successful business. You’re going to need to sweeten the pot quite a bit. Go digging in your books and see what kind of loot you can free up for new hires. (It probably won’t be a hidden pirate treasure, but it’s okay to set achievable goals).

Still, if you can offer something special that’s going to make your rival’s workers come running to you, then do it. Even if it means dipping deeper into your staffing budget for a couple of months, the chances are that the results will be well worth the price.

5. Get In Touch with Your Competitors

Finally, once you have a good idea of who your competitors are and you’ve looked into all of the sneaky and secretive ways that you might be able to gather information about what they do to generate success, you could always try an old-school method. In other words, you could just call them up and ask more about them.

One of the best ways to research your competition is to call them and act like you’re an interested customer. The chances are that most companies will be happy to tell you everything you need to know over the phone, especially if you phrase your questions correctly.

For instance, if you want to know how many people work within a specific sector of a company, just say: “I need a lot of focus for my project, and I’m worried your organization might be too small. Do you have enough staff to help me?”

If you want to know exactly how profitable certain techniques are within a business marketing strategy, the same technique can apply. Just ask “I want to feel as though I’m investing in a sure thing. Can you give me some studies on how you’ve found success in the past?” The possibilities are endless.

Revamp Your Marketing Methods

When’s the last time you really looked at your digital marketing campaign?

Analyzing your competitors will give you a good idea whether it’s time to really start making some changes to whatever you’re doing in your business.

If your competitors are getting more click-throughs and better conversion rates than you, chances are that something you’re doing (or not doing) is the problem. Compare yourself to the biggest players in your industry and find ways that you can boost your marketing methods based on what’s working for other people.

It’s not stealing, it’s just…the quiet and discrete liberation of ideas.

I once spent all the money in my pocket on a raffle because I wanted the chance to win a big bottle of merlot. I don’t even like merlot that much, but the value of the bottle seemed so much greater than the value of my pocket change, and my time, that I couldn’t resist at least attempting to win.

I know I sound like a less than stable person, but bear with me, because psychology suggests that I’m not alone. Human nature is – for better or worse – filled with one resounding issue: greed. In other words, we all want to have as much stuff as we can possibly get our hands on. If there’s a chance to win something expensive for free, then you can bet we’re going to grab it with both hands.

At Traffic for Me we know what it takes to grow a successful email campaign. We know exactly what you need to do to get all of the traffic that you need to run an incredible business, and we also know that you need to keep that traffic engaged if you want some great conversion ratios. People need to be entertained if they’re going to stick around.

Running a competition for your business is one of the best ways to attract a list of targeted leads straight to your brand. That’s because promotions and competitions are fun, exciting, and easy to understanding. Sort of like the gladiatorial games, except (hopefully) no one gets eaten by tigers.

While many marketers consider running contests for sales, branding, and more, an option that’s often overlooked involves using competitions to grow your email list. Created correctly, contests can help you to fill your funnel with excited leads, which makes you and them happy at the same time.

Win-win.Step 1: Choose your Poison

You can’t run a competition from your mom’s basement. Well – you can, but few people are really going to enter.

The first step in using competitions to engage your email list is choosing the perfect platform. Shop around and look at the different options that are available to you, making sure that they check off all the boxes that are important to you and your customers. For instance, a good competition platform should provide:

• Great functionality and lots of flexibility to play with new ideas.
• Options to tally entries and watch over campaign goals.
• Mobile responsivity so that you can access your campaign and make changes wherever you are.
• Clear and straightforward systems that make it easy to use for your target customers.

The goals that you want to achieve with your contest, and the type of contest you’re running, will have a direct impact on which features are the most important to you when you’re searching for a useful way to connect with your audience. However, if there’s one rule of thumb that all contest platforms should follow, it’s that they should all have access to social media.

Being able to share “I just entered to win a free iPad with “____” means that your customers can not only share their excitement with their social following, but do some of your advertising for you. After all, your campaigns are far more likely to go viral if everyone shares their entry with others. Imagine you get 100 entrants into your competition, and they share with 10 friends, and those 10 friends share with 5 friends, and so on.

If your aim is to engage your email marketing list, try using the following features:

• Share via email
• Share via Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share on LinkedIn

Step 2: Choose the Rules of your Contest

Rules are boring – but they have a part to play in any competition. After all, everyone can’t be a winner, right?

Once you’ve picked a platform that has all of the features you need to run a kick-ass competition, it’ll be time to put your contest wheels in motion. This means making a few more decisions about what you’re trying to achieve with competitive engagement. For instance, ask yourself:

1. How many winners are there going to be?
2. How long am I going to run this competition for?
3. What are the prizes for the top winners – and runners up?
4. How am I going to advertise this competition to people beyond my mail list?

Remember to think carefully about the goals you’re trying to achieve in the long run, and to make decisions about your competitions from there. For instance, if you’re hoping to create 100 leads from your contest, and you know that your general visit-to-lead ratio is around 20%, then you’re going to need around 500 visits to your content.

From there, you can come to us at T4Me for help with boosting your traffic while you’re looking for other ways to get more people excited about what you’re sharing. Just remember that outlining your goals will help to keep your expectations realistic and give you the insight that you need to achieve better things for your business.

Furthermore, choosing the rules and deciding the ideal outcomes for your contest in advance will give you a good benchmark to work towards when it comes to deciding what success will look like in your competition.

Step 3: Make your Dreams Come True

Here’s the part you’ve been waiting for – actually making your contest happen.

Turning your competition from a dream into a reality means thinking carefully about how you’re going to promote your efforts, get entries, and make decisions about who wins and who loses. To generate initial interest, you can buy additional traffic while hitting your social media accounts and your homepage with notices that something big is in the works.

You can also go ahead and blog about your upcoming attraction, put together some Pinterest boards, and share other content to make the competition out as a big a deal as possible. Just make sure that you’re actually creating something that’s worth getting excited about. There’s not much point in raving about a competition when the grand prize is a packet of marshmallow treats.

Remember that while you’re promoting, you’ll also need to watch the temperature of your contest and evaluate how it’s performing. Determine whether your promotions are bringing in the attention that you want and whether specific platforms are more beneficial to your goals than others. You might also want to ask yourself whether your technology is working the way that you’d expect, and whether you’re getting more engagement overall.

Analyzing the results of your competition as regularly as possible will help you to get an insight into whether you’re actually making a difference with your campaign. Just remember that you can’t necessarily pull out and tell your followers that it was all a joke if you don’t get the incredible results you were looking for.

Even if you wanted 1000 people to get involved, and only 100 people did, you still need to pick a winner or risk being marked out as a flakey, untrustworthy company for all of time.

You don’t want to be THAT guy.

Step 4: Pick your Winners – and Make a Big Deal out of Them

Finally, once all your entries are in, it’s up to you to select your winners and inform them that they’re the lucky recipients of…whatever it was you were offering.

If your competition platform lets you select winners at random, then you should probably do that unless your contest rules require you to do something different. Once you’ve picked your winners, email them and let them know, then get them to share their experience on Facebook, twitter, and any other social platform you can think of.

You can always follow up with the winners of your campaign at a later time to prompt more free promotion by interviewing them about how they like their prize and getting them to send pictures in that you can share across your email and social campaigns in the future. Sometimes, winners will happily share the story about their win with the world – and this is great press for you.

Remember, there are 1.79 billion active users on Facebook every month. That’s nearly 2 billion people that can read your story and learn more about your brand. Sharing the results of the “big win” not only helps to get people more excited the next time you run a competition, but it generates more content for you and builds your authenticity. After all, the last thing you want is for all of your non-winners to think that you didn’t really give anyone the grand prize.

A Couple of Golden Rules to Keep in Mind

Before you run off to get your competition going, remember that there are a few extra factors to be aware of if you want to run a killer contest campaign. For example:

• Your prizes need to be relevant to what your company does. In other words – if you’re a shoe shop, then you can’t offer prizes that are for free flowers or a free wax. No one will know what the heck is going on and you won’t be promoting yourself effectively.
• Set big goals to help you keep on track. The more you can track your journey to success with little benchmarks and smaller goals, the more chances you have of seeing what goes right – and what goes wrong with your competition campaign. This means that you’ll be better prepared next time around.
• Check rules and regulations – Before you get your competition started, remember to check up with the legal department in your business for tips on laying out your terms and conditions.
• Remember, a quick competition might seem simple, but it’s one of the best ways to keep your traffic engaged and grow your following on a more intimate level!

How dull is your digital marketing experience?

Click – home page that looks like it was made in 1993

Click – twenty pages of sales copy

Click – God help us

Even though most companies are aware of how crucial a good website is to their business performance, the internet seems to be full of terrible sites. Chances are you’ve happened upon one or two digital disasters that you couldn’t wait to click away from. At Traffic for Me – we’ve seen our fair share of catastrophes in our time. But we do our best to deliver an incredible service anyway – because that’s what we’re all about.

We’ve all spotted the graphic nightmare – a website brimming with flickering images, contrasting colours, and difficult to read text. Then there’s confusion central, a website that seems to have no navigation, no company aims – and no clue. At the end of the day, you only need one disastrous design mistake on your website to chase away the customers.

Unfortunately, while we here at T4Me might be able to help you track down more traffic and seek out the perfect response to your various email marketing strategies, it’s up to you to ensure that your leads are going somewhere attractive. In other words, you’re gonna need to design a good digital experience.

From responsivity, to SEO, we’re going to cover some of the ways you can design the perfect digital experience for your audience.

Speed is Key: Don’t Lose Their Attention

Would you have even bothered to read this page if it hadn’t loaded in less than a few seconds?

Most companies know by now that a faster website equals a better website. However, just because they have heard that this is true doesn’t mean that they understand how speed equates to success. The truth is that knowing why a fast and responsive website is key to online performance today could help you to better optimise your web presence in the future.We live in a world where everyone wants results instantly. If you order a pizza, you generally want it on your doorstep in time for dinner. If you call a cab, you need it to arrive at your home just in time for your date. If you click on a link, you want it to give you a webpage within seconds.

Don’t waste the traffic you get from us at T4Me by leaving your prospects out in the cold.

Studies conducted by Kissmetrics found that a single second of extra loading time in a page can result in a 7% drop in conversions, with around 40% of users abandoning a website completely if it takes more than three seconds to load.

What’s more, now that Google has placed “speed” on their list of factors which affect page ranking, a slower website could mean that your intended audience never see your website at all, particularly if you end up on the third or fourth page of the search results.

The bottom line is simple: your customers expect that they should be able to navigate your web pages quickly. If your website can’t deliver that speed, then your bounce rates will begin to skyrocket and your conversion rates will plummet.

The Human Attention Span Is Short

Have we still got your attention? If the answer is yes, then we must be doing something right.

The average person is easily distracted, quickly bored, and ready to turn away from your website at just about any second. Studies have found that a person will leave a web page in between 10 and 20 seconds if it bores them, which means that you have a matter of moments in which to catch someone’s attention and keep it.

When it comes to marketing to your audience, if your loading times are so slow that your visitors leave your page before they’ve even had a chance to read your sales pitch or evaluate your content, then your profits are going to suffer.

What’s more, psychology suggests that humans feel calmer when they believe they’re in control. If your website takes forever to load, then your visitor isn’t going to feel in control – they’re going to feel like someone else is wasting their valuable time.

Finding Your Website: Where SEO comes In

“It don’t mean a thing if it ‘ain’t got that swing.”

-Duke Ellington, It Don’t Mean a Thing. 1943

So we’ve covered why speed is important to your website, but that doesn’t really count for much if you’re not drawing in traffic to begin with.

Sure, a great user experience is important, but where are you going to find those users to get you started? The way that we find and engage with people has changed over the years. After all, when’s the last time you used a phonebook for anything other than keeping your table legs straight or filling the space at the back of your cupboard?

Yeah. We figured.

Once, phonebooks were the go-to solution for shoppers who wanted to figure out where they could get a service or product nearby, and yet now they’re completely obsolete. The world has changed into one that focuses on a mantra of “go digital or go home,” and that means that companies need to embrace a new way of making themselves visible to customers.

Internet search engines replaced the phonebook years ago, and they’re still going strong today. Want to find out where you can get a great meal in your local area? You turn to Google. Need to know more about a product or a service, or even have a question that you want to ask the world-wide web? All you have to do is load up your favorite search engine. So how can businesses take advantage of the new norm? The answer is SEO.

SEO, or search optimization is the strategy that helps to get you to the top of the listings whenever a person searches for something related to your company, product, or service. Since most customers prefer not to slog through pages of search results to get the website they want, being on top matters now more than ever.

Why SEO Matters to Your Business

Your website won’t give you the best results unless you have at least a simple understanding of how you can get people to visit it. It’s like standing in the middle of the street screaming your brand name to the masses otherwise. Chances are people are going to avoid you, ignore you, or remember you as being a total psycho.

Becoming familiar with the foundations of SEO should be enough to help you make your content accessible via search engine searches. Here are a few reasons why SEO actually makes a difference to your business:

1. It Works

Most people won’t need any reasons beyond this one. SEO works.

Let’s face it, SEO isn’t as fast as most businesses would like it to be when it comes to generating traffic. That’s why you come to us – after all, at Traffic 4 Me we give you the instant interest your company needs to generate better and more committed followings. From there you’ll need to develop the long-term approach that will build and maintain your brand’s identity over the years.

SEO is the master of effective digital experiences. It helps you to get more traffic to your website, increases your chances of converting visitors into customers, and therefore enhances your earning potential – making your business ultimately more successful.

The more you work on using a great SEO strategy, the higher you’ll rank on the search pages, and the more exposure you’ll get to people that genuinely matter to your company – customers that want to buy your products, clients interested in your services, and even partners who want to work alongside you to help you increase your income and share in the success.

2. Consumers Want to Know You

Don’t get a big head – your customers want to know you because they want to feel like they can trust you, not because you’re such an awesome guy. (Even though that might be true).

As great as the world of ecommerce may be, some shoppers are still a little nervous when it comes to making purchases online. Did you know that more than 70% of consumers prefer to research companies before they hand over anything as small as their email address?

And why not? We feel more comfortable if we have evidence to suggest that the websites we’re shopping with are authentic, honest, and not filled with spam-wear ready to take all of our money the second we type in a couple of bank account details.

If a customer searches for your company and you’re lost somewhere deep within the caverns of low search rankings, then chances are that you won’t get the business that you crave. That means that you need to work on building up the visibility of your business before you can start earning happy, loyal customers.

3. It’s Not Going Anywhere

Finally, unlike the phonebook, which was bound to go out of style at some point, SEO isn’t going anywhere any time soon. For as long as people are using the internet, search engines are going to be a vital resource in tracking down companies, information and products.

Even though how we use SEO is changing, that doesn’t mean that isn’t just as effective as it’s always been, if not more so.

Today you can’t cheat the search engines into putting your content ahead of the masses by simply stuffing it full of keywords, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t authentically earn your place at the top with good content, a great following of loyal customers generated through email traffic and social media, and more.

Investing in SEO was a smart business decision two decades ago, and there’s no sign of that changing in the decades to come. It’s not like companies are going to stop chasing new customers and new leads.

So, How Can You Speed up your Website?

So, what do you need to do to make your website speedier than ever?

Fortunately, there are a lot of different options available. We’ll give you just three simple suggestions that you should be able to implement in no time at all.

First: Minimize your HTTP Requests

According to information from Yahoo, about 80% of the loading time attribute to a website is spent on downloading all the different jigsaw pieces that make that page – from scripts and stylesheets, to images, and flash. Every one of these pieces needs a HTTP request, so the more components you have to work with – the longer it takes for a page to render.

The quickest way to speed up your website then, is to streamline your design. Use CSS instead of images, combine numerous style sheets into one, and reduce your scripts so that they can be slotted in at the bottom of the page.

Second: Limit your Plugins

Plugins are great.

You can use plugins to count the number of people who visit your website, or show you how great your SEO efforts are. Yoast, anyone? However, if you have too many, then you’re just going to slow your site down with unnecessary weight.

Look at all of the plugins you’re currently using, then delete and deactivate anything that appears unnecessary. Trust us – as cool as that calendar looks – if it’s not doing anything for your users, you need to ditch it.

Third: Optimize Images

Finally, when it comes to images, make sure you focus on format, size, and code.

•         Your code should look like this: <img scr=””>.
•         Your image should be carefully sized to ensure that it doesn’t take extra time to load. For instance, if your page is 570px wide, you don’t need a 2000px image.
•         Your format should always be JPEG. If you can’t have a JPEG, for any reason, then PNG is the next best thing – but some browsers still don’t support this option.

Speed and SEO: Making Your Website a Success

Today, there are many elements involved in making a website a success, and you need to make sure that you cover all of them if you want to avoid the heartache of a bad website and convince your audience that it’s a good idea to do business with you. Here we’ve covered some of the essentials of speed and SEO – the key factors in getting your customers to find your website and stay there for longer.

Of course when it comes to instant results, there are few things as effective as having your prospects delivered on a silver platter. That’s why you come to us at Traffic 4 Me – we give you the means you need to get started. Once you’ve got your piles of awesome traffic, you can start making the most out of it.

Do you ever wonder why math geniuses and computer whizzes often hide their creations from the world? Perhaps they doubt their abilities and fear public critique, or maybe they view even their greatest masterpieces as unexceptional, since creating them felt perfectly natural.

Here at TrafficForMe.com, our computer whizzes are simply being modest. We want you to take center stage when it comes to building your company’s success. You know that you can offer something great; you just need to get your content in front of those who will act on it. We’ll be the Wizard and you can be Dorothy. Now go put on those shiny red shoes; after all, there is no place like home…your home page that is.

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Measuring Target Audience Engagement

 

How do you know if you are successfully engaging your target audience? An email click-through rate is a metric that provides quite a bit of insight into whether or not you are successfully connecting with your audience, as it provides a measurement of how many recipients feel your message is worth a closer look.

What do you think is average for click-through rates? 15%? Perhaps a more realistic 10%? If so, hold onto your hat because you are in for a surprise. According to 2014 data, the average click-through rate was a mere 3.5%. While it is true that this value is low, don’t lose hope just yet. By following a couple key steps you will be the proud owner of a website that gets more clicks than your lazy neighbor’s TV remote during primetime.

Use Subject Lines to Catch Attention

We know that an eye-catching subject line is your first line of attack when it comes to building your click-through rate. Take a tip from us and keep the following in mind when crafting your subject line. After all, we are geniuses and all…

1. Deliverability is key: Avoid content that may set off spam detectors such as words in all caps, excessive punctuation, and spammy words like “free” or “limited time offer”.
2. Include a call to action: The right action-oriented language can create a sense of urgency and intrigue.
3. Personalize it: Knowing your target market is key in crafting a standout message.
4. Keep it clear and concise: We live in a 140-character world. Keep your title short and easy to understand.
5. Test your options: Employ A/B testing to try out a couple headline options and select the one that warrants the greatest response.

Make it Mobile

According to recent research, 70 million US consumers use their mobile devices to check email. Of these 70 million, a whopping 43% check email at least 4 times per day. By failing to optimize your message for mobile viewing, you could completely miss out on connecting with a massive number of potential leads.

Keep messages concise and easy to skim. Lengthy paragraphs look like walls of text when viewed on a small screen, prompting readers to skip over all of your content in search of a “tldr” sentence at the bottom of the page. For those of you less familiar with internet lingo, “tldr” stands for “too long, didn’t read”. Yeah, we’re hip too here at T4Me. (Look at that, we even abbreviated our own name).

Is it working?

The only way to find out if you’ve set it all up right is to test it.  Let TrafficForMe.com help you with that and order some traffic today.

Sources

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http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/30451/11-Sure-Fire-Ways-to-Increase-Email-Click-Through-Rates.aspx#sm.0001na9rq5m8xetorby2puj4upkh6

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/30451/11-Sure-Fire-Ways-to-Increase-Email-Click-Through-Rates.aspx#sm.0001na9rq5m8xetorby2puj4upkh6

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/29362/6-Ways-B2B-Marketers-Should-Optimize-for-Mobile-Browsing.aspx#sm.0001na9rq5m8xetorby2puj4upkh6

http://images1.fanpop.com/images/photos/2000000/Wizard-of-Oz-Caps-the-wizard-of-oz-2028565-720-536.jpg

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As you walk out of the movie theater munching away at the cold, greasy stragglers left in your brother-in-law’s oversized jumbo popcorn box, you suddenly realize that everyone is uncharacteristically speechless. Your friends usually make a million comments after watching horror movies like this one right away. This time, however, you hear nothing but murmurs and the distant clacking of high heels.

When you get into the car, you finally decide to ask, “What’s up? Was it that scary?” Your buddy eventually responds by saying no, it wasn’t scary at all, and that it wasn’t even good. Now things start to make sense. You’ve loved watching scary movies ever since you were a little kid and so you know that a successful scare is all in the buildup. The movie you saw, on the other hand, tossed out mini-frights as if they were rice at an Italian wedding.

Like crafting a suspenseful fright, building a successful email list takes planning and time. The goal is not to increase the sheer number of emails, but rather to maximize the number of leads who are liable to opt in. What you ultimately want out of a potent email list are satisfied customers, not cheap scares.

Traditional Face-to-Face

Before mulling over where next to purchase a sack of mostly phony, bot-driven, ostensibly good email leads, give traditional business a shot. Design and print professional business cards and hand them out to potential clients with a firm handshake after actually spending time with them. Attend conferences relevant to your product and meet people there. There are still real people out there.

You can even make the bold move of hosting your own event. Be it a luncheon, an outdoor adventure, or a topic talk with a special guest speaker, find a way to get people to dip their toe in the water. Drop off invitations, post notices, send out flyers, and even try advertising through local media outlets. Whatever your strategic choice, don’t forget to ask people to RSVP via email or phone.

Yes, old school marketing seems like a pain in the flabby behind. You might be thinking it’s just way too much work. In the long run, acquiring a few opt-ins who know and trust you and can thus sincerely back you up may help you get more leads and actually save you work and time.

Social Media

Take advantage of the relevance of social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, or even your own landing page. Social media gives you immediate publicity and access to people who are interested in seeing what you have to show. You don’t have to belabor people with pitches because leads can zip in and out on their own time.

Through Twitter you can promote a special offer, a gift, or a nifty resource that would require nothing more from viewers than an email address to get access to. Facebook offers on your Timeline with social sharing buttons could spread whatever promo you’re currently running like wildfire. A Pinterest board is another means of collecting leads while getting your brand coveted exposure and an intriguing visual palette.

Real testimonials and reviews written by pleased subscribers are the way to go. People crave authenticity with the abundance of phony goods being thrown around. Online mentions by clients, even if short, also help increase your credibility.

Email Marketing Program

There are email marketing programs available that provide the convenient and image-defining services of making customized templates with unique themes. Aesthetics are huge for attracting email leads since people often instantly decide whether or not a certain look interests them. Various programs also integrate your designs with social media.

On top of that, some programs organize and manage lists. They also may be able to track your leads and safeguard them. The downside is that such programs generally do come at a small recurring cost for continued upkeep.

Free Stuff

Incentives work. Some people like free things and others enjoy competing to win them. Whatever the case, neat offers for bonuses, discounts, and add-ons are a classic way to draw leads. Creating special deals available only to subscribers is another distinct treat for many customers. Remember that people come to you for an experience, a service, a product, not to do hard work. If you’re a horror movie, you have to justify their ticket purchase by scaring the pants right off them.

United We Stand

Numerous platforms, such as Buddypress and Linkedin, empower you to find a community and establish connections. Take advantage of those useful resources to develop interactions with your customers. Visit various forums and even blogs and share insightful comments along with a way to get in touch with you. Collaborating with friendly businesses could draw in new faces and benefit both sides of the equation. Go team!

There are countless additional ways to strengthen your email list, like setting up sandwich boards, attending local fairs, printing postcards, or using paid search ads, to name a handful. At the end of the day, how you want to build your list is up to you. Keep in mind that building a substantial email list is no walk in the park. Like setting up a movie scare, it takes creativity, good timing, and plenty of patience.

It’s not easy to forget the times you’ve been slapped in the face. More than the mere throbbing of your delicate cheek, the shock of having been mistreated in such a crude way is haunting, to say the least. In some cases, the simple fact of remembering the instance goes so far as to provoke a bit of righteous indignation in you.

If you’ve been in the habit of directly sending your product pitch to potential leads, let’s just say those very same leads may still be applying a pack of frozen peas to their face, and understandably so. It’s an unpolished marketing method that some people find downright offensive. All this to say: Please, do not blast your leads with a pitch without first warming them up.

How Rude!

In many spheres, effective marketing boils down to establishing a solid relationship. Developing relationships, in turn, hinges on a certain level of trust between business and client, which is a process that demands an investment of time. Just as flashing your personal goods isn’t standard protocol on a first date, neither is immediately exposing your deepest, darkest marketing goal to your lead.

For starters, get to know your potential leads’ backgrounds to the best of your ability and use that knowledge to your advantage. Determining what type of people are actually opting-in after learning about your product is a top-notch maneuver to weed out uninterested leads in cases of cold calls and emails. Here are a few ways to figure out who you’re dealing with.

Get to Know Your Current Customers

The conspicuous first step to determining what kind of people enjoy your product or services are your current clients. Duh! Ask or even interview customers about their thought process behind why they chose you. Try out friendly surveys or questionnaires. You can even make a full-scale case study that would provide them with personalized customer service and you with critical information. Looks like a win-win on both fronts.

Take Advantage of Web Analytics

On top of all the other data your web analytics provides you with, feel free to use them to learn about your buyers. Frame your website investigation with fundamental questions: Where do your visitors come from? What search words did they use to find you? What sections of the site did they look at and for how long? What information and type of content seems to interest them the most?

Use Online Alert Services

There is a goldmine of online information available to you through internet services, like Mention, Talkwalker Alerts, IFTTT, Meltwater News (PR), and Bloomberg Professional (financial). Through such services, you can learn about prospective buyers’ interests as soon as they are reported online. They essentially enable you to identify key patterns and trends while locating likely customers. Now what steps do you take after acquiring the juicy deets?

Try Warming Them Up First

Yes, flirting is a good thing. Not only because it’s a fun way to display your creative prowess, but more importantly because it gets leads (who are real people, by the way) to listen to you as you explain potentially technical offers. Plus, how often is getting people to like you a bad thing?

Warming someone up is simply another way of getting their attention. There are various ways to warm up a lead, but whatever your choice, easing a possible lead into your product depends on the type of clientele you’re seeking. A clever quip or striking anecdote could entice the high-minded crowd. A neat offer, on the other hand, is something almost anyone can enjoy. It can be a promotion, a rare gift, a discount, or even a subscriber-based competition. It’s important to create a spicy deal that caters to your particular audience based on your research.

Take your time while you’re at it. A video funnel, for example, could be broken up into a series of short clips that are at once connected within the collection itself as well as tied into your actual product. Video funneling is a sort of mental prepping of leads that is intended to increase the likelihood of an eventual opt-in.

Desensitization

Average social media, email, and general internet users come across so many advertisements and news blasts that they have nearly become desensitized to the existence of ads. Pop-ups are so routinely closed that ignoring them has now surpassed the stage of actively closing an annoying page and evolved into an instinctive reaction. Practically speaking, people are ready to instantly delete ads and email pitches without a second thought.

Buttering up the overcooked, steak-like hearts of today’s leads is a decisive approach to garnering their attention. Try investing time into developing a solid warm-up geared specifically to your type of lead. People are almost always looking for something to pique their interest and blowing on the flame is a sure way to build up that fire.

It had been over a hundred years since the Cubs took the World Series (until recently). Whatever the reason for the drought, throwing consistently stellar pitches wouldn’t hurt the cause. A perfect pitch is crucial for marketing success as well. Whether your approach is cold calling, sending lead-based emails, or making proposals face-to-face, launching a powerful pitch could very well be the jumpstart your business needs.

Taking the Mound

Before actually offering a pitch, you need to prepare one. Every strike needs a windup. The more time and energy you invest in its preparation, the more likely it is to succeed on some level. After brainstorming ideas, you should be able to boil down your preliminary pitch proposal to a clear statement that is only a few sentences long. Each word should ideally have a purpose, maintain a genuine feel, and be precise about what it actually has to offer.

There are various points to take into consideration, too. What is the end goal and is it feasible? Winning the World Series might not be practical just yet. Try striking someone out first.

What is the overall business strategy? Have finances been put in order? How long will the process take and what is the projected return? Being practical is an advisable way to keep your pitch grounded and realistic.

Choosing the Type of Pitch

When creating your pitch, there are three fundamental perspectives to take into account: the business, the investor, and the client. A refined pitch depends on the needs of all three groups. Constructing the pitch taking into account the angle of each may help put things in the right light.

The pitch itself is composed of a few key elements. The central idea should be thoroughly examined.

• What does the pitch actually do?
• What problems does it solve, if any?
• How is it going to increase profits?

The market is an important factor as well. What is the size of your particular community and what are its standout patterns? The customer is just as critical. Who are they, what are some common characteristics they share, and what are they looking for?

Winding Her Up

Here are a few ways to make sure your pitch sails into the catcher’s glove:

1. Stick to the Essentials. When you’re giving a pitch, less is often more. Highlight the key points of your presentation and stick to them.
2. Crystal Clear. Practice your pitch with someone who knows little about your company and have them repeat back what they believe your business model is. Your values and your offer both need to be very clear. Avoid technical jargon and acronyms as much as possible.
3. Outline. To exemplify the first two steps, outline your business model. Why should your customer be interested? How sound are the finances for investors?
4. Numbers Help. What are the actual numbers behind it all? Present your forecast and the reasoning backing it up. What other specific data and information do your clients need?
5. Challenge the Competition. Acknowledging competitors is a professional way of demonstrating confidence in your product. Differentiate your services from your competitions and highlight why yours are better.
6. Who Are You? Clients and investors are looking to back not just a product, but you as well. Demonstrate why you and your business are a valuable investment. What have you done to warrant such support and how? What are some of your relevant accomplishments?
7. Keep it Real. Sharing an actual customer’s story turns your product from a still artifact into a living, breathing memory.
8. Show Your Product. People like to see what they are being sold. Visual representations, even if they’re only mock-ups, can do wonders.

Bringing Her Home

Trust in your preparation and present your pitch as it is. People dig sincerity, and sometimes they’re even willing to give you the benefit of the doubt once it’s established. There’s rarely a need to spin your arm multiple times to get a solid wind-up. Just pull back, release, and watch it fly.

If the only thing that comes to mind when you hear the word “funnel” is the epic beer-bong challenge you completely botched at a party while trying to impress the cute girl in your first year Biology class, you probably had a wicked fun time at college. Congratulations. Unfortunately, dousing yourself in excessive amounts of cheap beer probably didn’t get you the girl then, and it certainly won’t help you win over new leads now.

Then how can you cozy up to potential leads and boost their opt-in rate? One of the many benefits of contemporary technology is that you can use it to get people psyched about your products and offers. A currently cherished tactic storming the marketing universe these days is referred to as video funneling.

What Is a Video Funnel?A video funnel is a marketing strategy that incorporates the seemingly limitless inspired energy of video technology to captivate people. You make a video, or more commonly a series of them, that serves as a prelude to the presentation of a product. This way your leads don’t have to worry about reading large chunks of text or getting belabored right off the bat with details.

Video funnels are routinely used by businesses to introduce products or offers. The new wave of marketing is now pushing the utility of video content as a comprehensive business model. Through videos, you can pitch an idea, feed necessary information, and even enable actual sales to take place through the video. Effectively, it’s an entire journey wrapped into a package of shipshape pixelated frames.

Set the Bait

The first set of videos should be geared toward attracting a lead’s attention. In this sense, the video funnel starts out as a kind of bait. No, leads are not clueless fish, but they are attracted to tasty live bait. The more delicious the bait, the higher the odds of getting a customer to bite.

Create a video filled with authentic content mixed with attractive offers and you’ll see schools of new leads swarming toward your goods. This could mean mean high caliber how-to procedures, stimulating interviews, engaging webinars, or other forms of exciting content. Consider ideas that will draw people in, like a comedy sketch or a mockumentary, rather than a straight-up ad made to shove ideas down their throat.

As introductory material, these top-of-the-funnel videos should aim to help potential customers understand your product or services in a creative manner. Brand films, for example, are a neat way to share your goals and ideas with style. People prefer buying products from companies they respect and like. Catching their attention through eye-popping video content, even content as ambitious as short dramatic films or miniature adventure serials, is an ideal way to begin forging that relationship since you’ll be able to center on values over commodities.

Reel It In

Pulling your catch the rest of the way in requires validating your funnel’s initial content with equally, if not more intriguing, content farther down the funnel. Since they’ve already shown interest, you could deliver more in-depth material concerning your particular product and how it would be beneficial for them. You can also get a closer look at who your clients are as they begin to surface.

At this middle-of-the-funnel stage, your probable leads could benefit from a little bit of a creative thrust. Sticking a nice video into an email could boost both open and click-through rates. If you plan on using a video email, try having the video directly send the customer to your landing page and automatically starting once there.

Interested customers frequently don’t watch entire video emails through, so sending them straight to the next step smoothes the entire process out. You can also slip in seamlessly integrated looping gifs that demonstrate how to make use of your products or services. However you decide on presenting your goods, visual stimulation done well can play a massive role in capturing your audience.

Seal the Deal

Videos are a tidy way to close deals because they provide necessary details without boring customers who have already opted in. At this point, creative video content is meant to reinforce your leads’ decision and make them feel good. You can try out instructional videos that detail a step-by-step process on how to use your products.

You webinars and training sessions could contain demonstration videos instead of yet another lackluster monologue explanation. FAQ videos may also help put your clients at ease as it displays a much more personal approach to customer service. Post-purchase videos are also a way to provide a cheery exit for people you hope will become repeat customers.

So the next time you find yourself in the same room as the person you like, try funneling them in with interesting material and a splash of creativity. Hey, it can’t possibly turn out worse than that time you got yourself completely drenched with beer, can it?

Would you rather have a large number of acquaintances whom you sort of know, or a handful of  true blue best friends?  While on a surface level a large number of acquaintances may appear impressive, a smaller handful of best friends will provide you with far more support and encouragement.

Imagine the Following Scenario…

Need an example? Reflect for a moment on the following scenario…You started a new job about four months ago and you are attending the first big holiday soiree with your fellow coworkers. You’ve quickly grown quite close with two of your coworkers and are merely at acquaintance-level of association with the others. About halfway into the event your boss selects you to retrieve additional wine bottles from an upstairs storage closet. Lucky you.

You are making your way back down the stairs, wine in hand, when you stumble and proceed to fall head over foot down the staircase. You end up sprawled out at the base of the staircase – dazed, bruised, and covered in wine. In this situation, who do you think will offer a hand to help you up? Your two close friends, or your acquaintances who are already slowly inching away in an attempt to distance themselves from your embarrassment?

Here at TrafficForMe.com, we will be your best friend too. Oh, we’ll still laugh – we are human after all and falling is funny – but we’ll extend a hand to help you back onto your feet.

So, How Does this Apply to Lead Generation?

How does this apply to leads and traffic generation, you ask? When examining the value of your traffic you should consider whether your leads are acquaintances or best friends. True opt-in leads are like best friends in that they are far more likely to stick with you for the long term, providing consistent support to help your business grow and flourish.

The Importance of the Opt-In

Emails and newsletters can get a bad rap, especially if the prospective leads who receive these items feel like you did not obtain their consent to contact them. By using an opt-in procedure when generating leads you can take action to guard against building a bad reputation. Additionally, since opt-in procedures require prospective leads to purposefully sign up to receive your content, you can be more confident that any calls to action that you deploy will be viewed by your target audience.

When offering opt-in content, you should follow three key guidelines:

1. Only contact potential leads who have given you consent to do so.
2. Send content that specifically references your lead. Avoid sending generic content that makes it appear that you simply placed your lead’s name in a pre-existing template.
3. Always offer a way to unsubscribe. (Also, make sure that your email recipients can actually find this unsubscribe option. This means no size 2 text or impossible to read font selection).

Get by with a Little Help from Your Friends

At TrafficForMe.com we understand that you want something more than a bunch of acquaintances from your lead generation efforts. You want true friends who look forward to receiving your content, instead of sending your new messages directly to their spam filters. We go above and beyond any other company when it comes to generating quality leads. Order some traffic today and you can see for yourself.

Sources

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http://s190.photobucket.com/user/royone_bucket/media/Fark%20comments/downstairs3etsn1.gif.html

https://gingernutmedia.co.uk/opt-laws-benefits/

These parasitic entities conceal themselves, avoiding detection, as they drain the life and vitality from their hosts. They hide right in front of your eyes, yet you fail to notice them as they wait for the perfect moment to attack. Is this a plot for the next big budget horror flick or page-turning Stephen King novel? Nope, far from it.

This is actually a description, albeit a rather dramatic one, of one of the most prevalent forms of fraud targeting online business owners. (Here at TrafficForMe.com we have a flair for the dramatic. We have quite a wide variety of skills). Referred to as lead-injection, lead-stuffing, or bot traffic, this practice revolves around the deceptive actions of non-human bots which falsely boost traffic stats. While the fraudulent traffic created by these bots may help to boost your ego, ultimately it will do very little to help your business grow and thrive. Bots make horrible customers.

Bot-Based Deception

One of the most common ways in which bots attack is by placing fraudulent ads on a publisher’s website. These ads appear as if they belong to the publisher’s domain – possibly manifesting as a popup or overlay. Some stealthy bots may even silently run ads in the background while still generating phony ad impressions.

The damage that these bots inflict is twofold, affecting both the site publisher and the advertiser. Publishers falsely believe that they are generating an impressive amount of site traffic. Additionally, these publishers do not receive any income from these ads, as that income is instead routed back to those who are responsible for the bot.

Advertisers falsely believe that their campaigns are more successful than they actually are, a belief which may prompt advertisers to increase spending in an attempt to optimize these ads to continue generating customer interest. Unfortunately, in doing so, they simply further feed those hungry bots.

Premium Publishers Aren’t Immune

It isn’t a stretch to assume that low quality sites are frequently plagued by bot traffic. However, you may be a bit more surprised to discover that top-tier premium publishers are also affected. According to a comprehensive study conducted by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), “traffic from premium publishers consists of almost 20% bots.” Even subscription-based  sites that promise ad-free environments are not immune to these risks. The ANA estimates that fraudulent advertising results in a whoppping $6 billion annual loss.

Minimize Your Risk

One of the best ways to reduce your risk of falling victim to bot-based fraud is by dealing only with reputable publishers and traffic brokers. Even though top level providers aren’t able to provide a 100% guarantee against bot-based fraud, they are far safer than lower level providers who often make promises to generate levels of traffic that appear to be, and actually are, too good to be true.

At TrafficForMe.com, we work only with reputable publishers. We offer exclusive fraud protection to guard against bots, lead-injection, spam traps, and other forms of click fraud. Stop wasting your hard-earned dollars on feeding the bots and instead use those funds to further grow your business.

   

Sources

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/6b/43/a1/6b43a16558c6e3975ebfd9ffac9f22c3.jpg

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http://www.inmarketingwetrust.com.au/paying-ad-fraud-bots/

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http://technorati.com/report-injection-content-duplication-leads-to-lost-ad-revenue-for-top-pubs/

http://technorati.com/ana-study-shows-widespread-bot-fraud-premium-pubs-not-safe/

http://adexchanger.com/online-advertising/the-book-of-fraud/