For the most part social media is pretty hyped up,  and the hype is confusing a lot pf people – it's like chewing gum for a business, a lot of activity with no productivity.  I think that the average business will do better concentrating on proven sales and marketing strategies.

Bert

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Do you know the importance of using a call to action? It’s a critical online marketing strategy to drive traffic back to your site by inviting prospects to get your irresistible free offer (IFO) and join your list. But, do you know what type of call-to-action to use with all the different social networking and online sites out there? Yes, it’s about adding value by contributing relevant and high-content information, but if you don’t have a clear strategy in place by using the right type of call-to-action to bring people back to your site to join your list, it really doesn’t matter.

I share some of the most common places where your prospects hang out – and how to drive them back to your site and join your email list by using the right type of call-to-action that is appropriate to each site.

Now, let’s look at some of the most common places where your prospects hang out online and which type of call-to-action type to use.

Blogs

Let’s first look at YOUR blog. Prospects are hanging out on your blog viewing your content and perhaps already subscribed to your feed but are not yet on your email list. With the posts you create on your blog, end them all with a strong call-to-action to opt-in in order to be notified of new posts or receive whatever your IFO is.

Your prospects also hang out on OTHER blogs relevant to your market or niche. Here you can comment and contribute content in the form of helpful and relevant information – with a light call-to-action back to your blog for more information. Notice the difference between the two call-to-action strategies depending on which blog you are referencing. On other blogs, keep the call-to-action light else it will feel like sales / pushy.

Facebook

There are millions of your prospects and potential leads hanging out on Facebook. I see so many people using Facebook without a clear strategy in place to build their list. In the same way as blogs, you want to add value and contribute to the conversation (social media outlets like Facebook are for engaging in relationships and conversations) by commenting and contributing relevant content and information. You can do this in two places. Facebook profiles and Facebook fanpages. Prospects are hanging out on your profile via your news feed and looking at the content you have to share on your fanpage. Be sure to mix up the content and information you have to share by giving them both a medium call-to-action (not too strong like on your blog and not too light like on other blogs) back to your site to receive more tips and information from your email list.

YouTube

As Facebook is increasingly popular for users as a search engine tool, as is YouTube. People these days are just as likely to search for video content on YouTube as they do search for regular content via Google. When posting your videos on YouTube, be sure to include your URL / website in the description of the video so your subscribers can go back to your site and see more videos or find out more information. I suggest doing this using a strong call-to-action to drive them back to your site.

LinkedIn

You want to give the connections you have on LinkedIn a lot of valuable content and relevant information to position yourself as a subject matter expert in your community. As a result, always provide a medium call-to-action back to your site.

Twitter

If there is one place I would suggest a very light call-to-action, it would be Twitter. Twitter is an online conversation with your marketplace about the value and information you have to offer. You would seem overly pushy if you were constantly giving a strong call-to-action with every “tweet” you provided. As a result, I would recommend only giving a very light call-to-action and only when it will clearly provide a link between the tweet/content you provide and the additional information you have to share back on your site.

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Increasing Sales with Social Media – Facebook, Myspace & Twitter.

There’s no doubt about it – small businesses are beginning to utilize social media tools and tactics with more frequency than ever before. A recent study by eMarketer reports that 260,000 small businesses across the US and Canada are employing social media tactics. 51% of small businesses are using social media for professional social networking using tools like LinkedIn.com and 28% are involved in microblogging using tools like Twitter.

There are several things to think about before just jumping right into using these tools. The most important is your time. Viral marketing through social media really requires a dedicated amount of time each day and you have to understand the value of your time. Many of the available tools are free to use. But that does not mean they don’t come at a cost, because they certainly do. The cost is human capital. Think of it as a pet. While the pet may cost a little or even nothing, caring for it takes a lot of time. The same is true for social media marketing and networking.

Before you start, make sure your strategy is clear! There is a lot of social media hype and peer pressure to use these technologies. Just make sure you clearly understand your key goals and objectives. For example, are you trying to build direct sales with customers, improve positioning of your product or service, or build your authority in a specific area? Answering these critical questions will help you move forward with your strategy.

Your first step should be to verify whether the audience you are trying to reach is already using social media. If your target market isn’t using Twitter or Facebook, then why are you? You also need to do your homework on where the audience you are trying to reach already exists. Are they on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter? Are they joining groups or creating new ones? These are all key questions to understanding your audience and how to best engage them.

What are some of the immediate benefits that small businesses are finding with social media? Well, most small businesses will tell you that social networking can help foster stronger relationships with customers, enable a faster vehicle to answer customer questions, incorporate customer feedback, and build awareness for their expertise. However, many small businesses are still trying to understand how social media can ring the cash register.

A New Orleans-based pizza company called Naked Pizza has used Twitter to successfully ring the register. The company has over 4,700 followers on Twitter. That means every time the company has something to say, 4,700 people will receive the message and could forward it to their friends and so on, potentially reaching way more than Naked Pizza’s 4,700 followers. Jeff Leach, the CEO of Naked Pizza, reported that nearly 69% of sales were generated during a one-day Twitter advertising blitz.

Other companies are also seeing direct-to-customer sales via social media. For example, Barbershops, Spas & Salons is using Twitter to let customers know that walk-in times are available due to cancelled appointments. Before Twitter, this was lost profit.

Another great example of Twitter ringing the register is The Albion bakery. When there’s a fresh batch of bread out of the oven, it notifies Albion customers via Twitter and Facebook. If you are ready to take a dip into social media, Ad Age offers 5 tips for marketing on social media platforms:

1. Track sales made on social media.
2. Don’t use Twitter as Facebook (and vice versa).
3. Create a conversation with friends and followers.
4. Sell last-minute inventory.
5. Alert followers to changes.

As a small business, the way you spend your time is critical. So if you do decide to pursue social media, make sure that you have the proper tools to help you succeed. For example, a smartphone makes it incredibly easy for you to update your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and blog accounts.

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, you don’t have time to get back to the office to engage your customers or react to their online comments. You have to be mobile and equipped at all times or lose that business to your competitors.

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WHAT IS SALES 2.0?

Sales 2.0 is the use of innovative sales practices, focused on creating value for both buyer and seller and enabled by Web 2.0 and next-generation technology.

Sales 2.0 practices combine the science of process-driven operations with the art of collaborative relationships, using the most profitable and most expedient sales resources required to meet customers’ needs. This approach produces superior, predictable, repeatable business results, including increased revenue, decreased sales costs, and sustained competitive advantage.

THE FOUNDATION OF SALES 2.0

The innovations associated with Sales 2.0 practices fit into four interrelated, interdependent categories: strategy, people, process, and technology. Sales 2.0 organizations feature:

1. Strategy which includes alignment of sales resources with customer opportunities and leverages your most expensive professionals while providing coverage for buyers regardless of location, size, or stage in the sales cycle. Sales 2.0 companies also have the right go-to-market plan and integrated, coordinated sales and marketing plans.

2. People who are relationship-focused, open, authentic, and flexible. They create and maintain collaborative interactions with people both inside and outside the company, using the most appropriate medium to engage and maintain relationships. Sales 2.0 professionals are trusted and enjoy support from customers, partners, colleagues, and peers alike, which leads to improved business results for all parties.

3. Process that is customer-focused, measurable, reproducible, and automated, and which can be duplicated across a sales organization to produce predictable sales results from quarter to quarter. The Sales 2.0 process results in optimized sales efficiency and effectiveness, and ultimately high-velocity, high-volume, and high-value transactions. Deals close faster, there are more of them, and they are more profitable.

4. Technology which enables sales process and relationship-building, and which helps your people be more productive and successful. ?

WHY IS SALES 2.0 IMPERATIVE FOR YOUR BUSINESS?

You may be asking, “Is Sales 2.0 really that important? Can my business survive without it?” Forward-thinking companies are leading their industries with Sales 2.0 practices. Your competitors may be considering similar sales approaches—that is, if they haven’t implemented Sales 2.0 already. Wouldn’t you like to beat them to it?

The way we’ve been selling in the past is too expensive, too slow, too unpredictable, and too hazardous to relationships for today’s businesses and their customers. Change is mandatory for those companies that want to outperform the competition. It is much more challenging to sell in today’s world, where sales reps struggle to meet the increasing demands of their customers while keeping sales numbers high and expense dollars low. Sellers often contend with decentralized customer organizations, multiple decision makers, and complex decision-making processes. New competitors seem to enter the market every day, requiring ever-improving differentiation in products and services. Meanwhile buyers are on information overload and face a myriad of product offerings and multiple choices of vendors—not to mention a steady stream of marketing and advertising campaigns coming at them through multiple media.

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Like most website owner, we want to bring targeted traffic to our website.

Listed below are 7 best ways that we have found and tested to drive more traffic to their websites.

1) Write Articles: Writing articles and submitting them to article directories is another splendid way of getting a lot of quality back links and driving traffic to web site for free.

Write useful articles related to your niche and submit them to article directories on regular basis.

Some of the famous article directories to consider are: ezinearticles.com, successtelevision.com, wikipedia.org and don’t forget your own site.

We have found it takes approximately 45-60 articles to really have significant optimization for your keywords.

Articles can be short 400-500 words and the same article can be listed in multiple places.

2) Pinging services – Use the pinging services like ping-o-matic every time you add new content on your website for getting more visibility and links for your website.

3) Forums: Forums can be a great way of driving traffic to web site. Whatever subject your site is about, find forums relevant to your subject and join those forums.

You can locate for relevant forums in your niche by doing a google search. By participating actively in the forums on regular basis – asking questions, providing useful answers to members’ questions and making other useful contributions, you can gain a lot of favorable attention.

Most forums allow you to have a signature attached at the end of each of your forum posts. This signature can contain links to your website. This way you can generate backlinks to your site.

But remember not to spam the forums with blatant advertising of your web site. Make sure you contribute something useful to the community there by making relevant posts.

4) PPC programs – Use pay per click kind of advertising to get more results for your site. When you use such kind of programs, your site will be listing in the sponsored section in search results on a search engine. All major search engines including Google, yahoo, MSN have their advertising programs. Facebook is our top favorite right now.

5) Press release – Press releases are great tools for traffic building and building brand awareness for a website. This can bring lots of traffic and valuable links to a website. So write a press release for your website and submit it to PrWeb.com & Webwire.com as well as posted on your site. There are a few places that distribute your Press Release for free but you get what you pay.

6) Social media marketing – Create strong profiles on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Youtube.com.

7) Video Marketing - Video Marketing refers to the marketing strategy deployed by companies to promote products and services by using short, attractive and educational videos. The main purpose these videos is to spread awareness to the prospective customers about an organization and its products.

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Communication is a key component to living a successful life. Possessing effective communication skills can improve your career, your relationships, and increase your people skills. There are seven stages to basic communication. By knowing and understanding these stages you will be able to better communicate in your personal and professional life.

Sender - Know the message you want to communicate and make sure that message contain useful and correct information.

Encoding – Encoding is the process where the information you would like to communicate gets transferred into a form to be sent and decoded by the receiver. The ability to deliver the message clearly as well as be able to discard any confusing or potentially offensive themes such as cultural issues, or missing information is imperative in this stage.

Channel – Channels are the way you convey your message. These channels include verbal such as telephone, and face-to-face conversations as well as non-verbal such as e-mail and text messaging. Each individual channel has its strengths and weaknesses in terms of communicating. For example, it is better to give instructions non-verbally rather than expecting the person you are communicating with will remember everything you tell them. You would also never critique or criticize anyone through a non-verbal channel at the risk of having a misunderstanding.

Decoding – Decoding is on the receiving end of communication. This stage is just as important as encoding. Communication can go downhill at this stage if the receiver is not practicing active listening skills or if they do not possess enough information to accurately decode the message.

Receiver – Know your audience. Each individual person on the receiving end of your message already has their own ideas and thoughts that will absolutely influence the way they translate your message. By getting to know your audience better you will be able to have a better understanding of how they will react to what you are trying to communicate.

Feedback – As you are communicating your message your audience will provide you with non-verbal and verbal reactions. You will be able to asses while communicating your message if it is being conveyed accurately by paying close attention to non-verbal cues first such as returning eye contact, head nodding etc.

Context -Context is the environment in which your message is being delivered. For example, If you’re making a work presentation chances are you will be speaking more professionally, than if you were conversing casually with a neighbor or friend.

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