I have been involved in Internet marketing since the world-wide-web began and I consider myself to be an Internet marketing expert. From my experience helping clients build successful websites, I have learned what works and what does not work when selling on the Internet. To help you avoid costly mistakes, I have listed what I have found to be the biggest Internet marketing mistakes.

Mistake 1: Using Flash. If your website is one big Flash presentation, you are making a huge mistake! Why? Because consumers go to your website to seek information, not to watch a “I’m so cool” Flash presentation. Ask yourself, when you go to a website, do you sit there and watch their ego-building Flash presentation or do you click the “skip flash” link to get to the real information?

Another major problem with Flash is that it is only “interesting” the first time a visitor goes to your website. If they actually return to your website, they will do everything they can to skip your Flash presentation so they can quickly get to the information they want. In my experience NOTHING kills Internet sales more than Flash. That is why you almost never see the world’s top websites like Google, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo using Flash as the basis for their web pages. If you are making this mistake, get rid of the Flash immediately and make your website a valuable source of information, because that is what consumers want.

Mistake 2: Letting your webmaster write the text for your website. This is another huge mistake that companies make. On nearly a daily basis I get a call from a company that has spent a fortune building a website and they cannot understand why they are not generating any sales. My first question is, who wrote the text for your website? In nearly every case they tell me their webmaster wrote it.

Why is it a mistake to have your webmaster write your website marketing text? Here is a hint– webmasters are programmers, NOT marketing professional who know how to write text that sells. If you want your website to generate sales, you must hire a person who is an excellent copywriter and knows how to write words that make people want to buy! Would you hire your webmaster to write a display advertisement for you? Of course not! Then why on earth would you allow them to write the text for your website? By having your webmaster write the text for your website, you are ensuring your website will be an awful sales tool. To solve this problem, hire a marketing professional to write the text for your website. We at the Geisheker Group specialize in writing powerful marketing text for websites. For a free no-obligation quote, call us at (920) 471-1638 or email us.

Mistake 3: Making your website hard to navigate. Have you ever been to a website where you have to click on various generic graphics or parts of a flash picture to try and find a link to the information you are looking for? Why on earth do companies do this? It is not fun, it is not clever, it is STUPID AND ANNOYING! When designing your website’s navigation (links to information) use the acronym K.I.S.S., which stands for KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID! Simple sells. Complex does not. If your webmaster tries to sell you on using parts of a Flash picture for links or some other complex navigation system, FIRE THEM IMMEDIATELY!

Mistake 4: Not having a telephone number on your website. People rarely trust companies that do not have a telephone number. I certainly don’t. If I am considering buying a product from a website and they do not have a telephone number, I don’t buy. And I know others feel the same way. For example, I have had several clients hire me because I had a telephone number on my website and the other marketing consultant websites they were looking at did not. Therefore, if you want customers to buy from you, make it easy for them to contact you by having a telephone number on your website. In fact, you should have your telephone number on EVERY page of your website.

By following these recommendations, your website will be a far more valuable sales and marketing tool.

If you need help designing or updating your website, The Geisheker Group would love to help you. For a free quote, call us at (920) 471-1638 or email us.

To your success!

Peter Geisheker

Using customer testimonials in all of your marketing materials (sales letters, brochures, website, advertisements, etc.), is one of the most powerful marketing tools available.

The reason why testimonials are so important and valuable in marketing is that prospects are much more likely to believe a customer testimonial that praises your product or service then they are to believe slick sales text written by the company that is advertising.

Another reason why testimonials are such a powerful marketing and sales tools is that they are very similar to a referral. A testimonial is a person telling other people that they can trust your business and that you offer a quality product/service.

Now that you know how valuable customer testimonials are, you are probably wondering how you get testimonials from your customers. Here are four very easy yet highly effective strategies you can use to get customer testimonials immediately:

1. If you are a new business and you have not made any sales, let several of your friends try your product or service for free. If they honestly like it, ask them if they will write a testimonial that you can use in your marketing. This is very easy to do and should instantly get you several testimonials.

2. If you are an established business and you have made sales, call your customers and ask them what they like most about the product or service they purchased from you. As they tell you, make sure that you are writing down what they are saying. After they are finished praising your product/service, tell them, “wow, that was great! Can I use what you just said as a testimonial?” Almost always the customer will give you their permission.

3. Email your customers and say that you are developing new marketing materials and you would love to include a client testimonial from them. Then ask if they would be generous enough to help you by emailing you a brief testimonial. If you have a list of at least 100 customers, you should get at least a couple of good testimonials by doing this.

4. Mail your customers a thank you card for doing business with you. In the card say you would be very thankful if they would be generous enough to give you a testimonial by either emailing it to you, faxing it to you, or simply calling you on the phone.

By executing the above strategies, you should easily get 10+ strong customer testimonials. Then, make sure to take advantage of these testimonials and use them in ALL of your marketing. By doing this, you will instantly see an increase in response rate and sales from your marketing.

To your success!

Peter Geishkeer

In this marketing blog post I want to discuss one of the most important aspects of successful marketing – repetition. Successful companies use marketing repetition. Unsuccessful companies do not.
As a marketing consultant, I speak with many businesses and there is one huge mistake that nearly all of them make in their marketing. They wrongly think it takes only one marketing piece to get a prospect to buy. They will send out one postcard or one sales letter or one email to a list of prospects and wonder why so few people (or zero people) purchase their product or service.

Or, they will place one ad in a trade publication and wonder why they received few or zero sales. The reason is simple. It takes repetitive marketing over time (6-12 months or more) to build trust and desire. It has been proven that most people (and businesses) have to receive a minimum of 7 marketing pieces from a company before they will even consider buying.

Why is this? There are several reasons:

1. They are not interested in what you are selling today. However, that does not mean they won’t be interested in what you are selling 6-12 months from now. A “No” today does not mean a ‘”No” tomorrow.

2. Trust. Many people need to have a feeling of trust toward a company before they will do business with them. Trust is built by receiving regular and consistent marketing messages over time.

3. Mood. The day your prospect received your marketing piece he/she may have been in a lousy mood and threw it away or ignored it.

4. No money. The prospect wants what you are selling but cannot afford it right now. However, in 6 or 12 months, they may have the money and they will buy.

5. Too busy to think about it right now.

6. For one reason or another, your marketing piece never reached them.

When you look at all the reasons prospects have for not buying, you now see why repetitive marketing is so important. To be successful in marketing, you must keep marketing to your prospects over and over.

So what is repetitive marketing? Here a few examples:

1. Sending out a sales letter or a postcard to your list of prospects every 1-2 months.

2. Having an email newsletter (like you are reading now) that goes out to your prospects each month.

3. If you advertise in print publications like trade journals, you need to advertise every issue. It is much smarter and more effective to place a small ad every month instead of one large ad one time.

4. If you advertise on radio, it must be done month after month. As soon as prospects stop hearing your name and sales message, they forget about you.

5. Same thing with TV – for it to be successful, it must be done continuously. Out of site is out of mind.

6. Using Internet retargeting to show your banner ads to people after they leave your website. If you do not know about Internet retargeting, click here. It is amazing technology and every website should be using it.

My marketing tips e-newsletter is a perfect example of marketing success caused by repetition. Many of my clients had been receiving this marketing newsletter for upwards of a year or more before they decided to make first contact with me. What this means is that they received at least 12 marketing pieces from me before they finally decide to take action and purchase my services. If I had only contacted these prospects one time, I would have never gotten them as clients.

If you want to be successful in marketing, the key is repetition.

To your success!

Peter Geisheker

As a marketing consultant and owner of a marketing firm, a big mistake I see businesses make is they do not take into consideration the value of repeat sales when they review if their marketing strategies are profitable.

When determining if your marketing is profitable, you need to look at marketing and advertising as a long-term investment, just like buying stocks, real estate, or mutual funds. When evaluating your marketing you need to take into consideration repeat sales from each new customer your marketing produces. Nearly all businesses earn the majority of their sales and profits on repeat sales, NOT first time sales. Understanding this concept is one of the secrets to building a successful business.

For example, let’s say you run a small quarter page advertisement in your local shopper coupon magazine. This small ad costs you $300. From that single ad you attract three new customers who each buy $50 worth of your merchandise. From that information you would think that you had a loss of $100 on that ad because you paid $300 for it but you only generated $150 in sales. But let’s look at the long-term effect of those three new customers.

Let’s say that each of those three new customers purchases an additional $250 of merchandise from you over the next 11-months. When you take that into consideration, your $300 ad has now generated $900 in sales. And, what if each of those three customers purchases an additional $300 of merchandise from you the following year? Now, your original $300 ad has generated $1,800 in sales over a 24-month period. To put that into perspective, if you bought $300 worth of mutual funds and in 2-years your $300 investment was worth $1,800, you would be jumping for joy! That is why you need to view the profitability of your advertising on a long-term scale, not on a short-term 1-2 month scale. Advertising is an investment to generate long-term customers and repeat sales. Your focus as a business owner must always be on generating faithful long-term customers, NOT one-time sales.

Let’s broaden the picture even more. Let’s say one of your three new customers loved your merchandise (or service) so much that she told two of her friends about you, and her two friends each becomes a long-term customer of your business. And, what if those two friends each buys a few hundred dollars worth of merchandise from you over the next couple of years? Do you now see the tremendous long-term value of that $300 ad you placed?

Now that you have a better understanding of marketing and advertising as an investment, it is vitally important that you track the source of every new customer (i.e., did they find you in the yellow pages, direct mail, radio, Internet, word of mouth, etc.). Whenever you talk to a new customer you must ask the customer, “How did you hear about us?” Then, you need to track the source of that customer in a spreadsheet or a CRM system and track how many sales that customer makes over time. This is the only way you can truly determine if a marketing strategy is working. Yes, this takes time but it is worth it. And, a good CRM software application can make this tracking very easy.

In summary, before you throw in the towel on your marketing strategies because they are not immediately generating a profit, you must first understand that value of a new customer over time. Stop looking at marketing as a short term expense and start viewing marketing as what it really is, a long-term investment to the success of your business.

To your success!

Peter Geisheker

Download the FREE Ebook: The Definitive Guide to Social Marketing”

One of the most powerful marketing strategies you can use to instantly increase sales is a strong guarantee. The reason why a guarantee is such a powerful sales tool is that it eliminates the risk a customer faces when doing business with you. It is like giving your customer an insurance policy to protect them against shoddy products or services.

Think about it. One of the leading reasons why people choose NOT to buy a product or service is they are worried that if the product or service sucks, they are going to lose their money and they will feel like a fool for buying it. And nobody wants to feel like a fool.

Here is an example of the power of a money back guarantee for a product. Let’s say you want to buy a puppy for your kids. Pet store “A” has several very cute puppies and they cost $250 each. Unfortunately, if you buy a puppy from pet store “A” and it turns out the puppy is sick or has a disease, it is your problem. All sales are final. No refunds or exchanges. On the other hand, pet store “B” offer several cute puppies and they offer a full money-back guarantee that states, “Take your new puppy to a veterinarian within the next 14 days and if it is sick or has a disease, you can return it and pick out a different puppy or you can have a full refund.” Now which pet store would you prefer to do business with? Pet store “A” where all sales are final or pet store “B” where you are protected? The obvious choice is pet store “B”. Pet store B is going to get the most business and will easily dominate sales over pet store B, especially if pet store “B” is smart enough to include their strong money-back guarantee in all of their advertising.

A strong money-back guarantee is also an incredibly powerful sales tool in the service industry. For example, let’s say you own a small business and you have several computers. Now computers being computers, from time to time they will have problems and you will need a computer technician to fix them. To find a computer technician, you go to the yellow pages in your phone book. There you see two ads for computer service companies. You read advertisement “A” and the company looks good, they have been in business for 5 years, they have a friendly staff, blah, blah, blah. Then you read advertisement “B”. In this ad you read that all parts and service come with a 90-day guarantee. If your computer has the same problem within 90 days after they fix it, they will come back to your office and fix it for free. Now, which company are you going to call—the company that offers no guarantee or the company that protects you with a strong guarantee? The choice is obvious.

If you want to instantly increase your sales, offer a strong guarantee and display it in all of your advertising. If your competition offers a guarantee, do everything you can to make your guarantee stronger.

To your success!

Peter Geisheker

Download the FREE Ebook: The Definitive Guide to Social Marketing”

Did you notice the title for this article? Of course you did and that is why you clicked to read this article. As legendary advertising guru David Ogilvy said in his book, Confessions of an Advertising Man, “The wickedest of all sins is to run an advertisement without a headline.”

Yes, it is true that the most important tool in print advertising is the headline, be it for a space advertisement, a website, a sales letter, a billboard, or a press release. Headlines are the difference between success and failure in advertising.

In print advertising, the headline is so important that it is considered to be 80% of the power of an ad. The reason for this is that five times as many people read a headline as read the body copy of an ad. Consider how you read a newspaper or a magazine. If you are like most people, you scan headlines and you only read the news stories and advertisements that have a headline that catches your attention and interest. That is why writing an attention grabbing headline is so vitally important in advertising.

So, how do you write a good headline?

Actually, it is not as hard as you think. In fact, decades of research has been done on advertisements to see which headlines generate the most leads and sales and here is a summary of what works.

1. Your headline should flag down readers who have a specific problem. For example, if you are selling cosmetics that help middle age women look younger, your headline should state that benefit. For example, “How women over 40 can look 10 years younger in 10 minutes with XYZ Cosmetics.”

2. There are two words that work like magic in headlines – “How to.” People are drawn to headlines that say “How To” like bees to honey. Why? People are curious and want to learn “how to” solve a problem. Therefore, always try to start your headline with the words “How to”.

3. If possible, use the words “FREE” and/or “New” in your headline. Both words are magnets that draw in readers to read your advertisement.

4. Make your headline sound like news. A great way to learn how to do this is to buy a newspaper and read the headlines, particularly the headlines on the cover page. People want news, so make your headline sounds like a news headline from a newspaper and people will want to read your ad. Words that suggest news are “New”, “Announcing”, and “A Major Breakthrough”.

5. Longer headlines sell more merchandise than short headlines. Try to make your headlines 6-12 words in length.

In summary, the headline is the most powerful tool in advertising. If you want to create successful advertising, become a master at writing attention grabbing headlines.

To your success!

Peter Geisheker

Download the FREE Ebook: The Definitive Guide to Social Marketing”

FREE Report - The Geisheker Group’s Formula for Writing a Winning Sales Letter (pdf)

Free sample sales letter 1 (pdf)
Free sample sales letter 2 (pdf)
Free sample sales letter 3 (pdf)
Free sample sales letter 4 (pdf)

Download the FREE Ebook: The Definitive Guide to Social Marketing”

How to write a killer sales letter

To write a successful sales letter, there are several strategies you should use:

1. At the top of your sales letter, use a strong headline that states the most important benefit you are offering. This headline should be bold and a larger font size than the font size you use for the body text in your sales letter.

2. When writing your sales letter, use a friendly conversational style. Do not try to write “corporate” where you use large words and try to impress your prospects with your command of the English language. All that does is turn people off. Instead, write your sales letter as if you were talking to your best friend.

3. Your sales letter needs to explain the benefits your potential customer will receive. Understand that everybody cares about one thing in life – “What’s in it for me?” Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and ask yourself, “If I was receiving this letter, why would I want to buy the product or service being sold? What’s in it for me?”

4. Ask your prospect to take action such as to call you for more information, to visit your website, to complete and order form and mail you a check, etc. If you do not ask your prospects to take action, they won’t.

5. Include testimonials from customers. Testimonials are one of the most powerful sales tools available, so always include at least one testimonial in your sales letters.

6. Use a P.S. in your letter and restate your most power benefit and sales offer in it. Most people will read a P.S. first before reading the sales letter, so it is important to make your P.S. have a very strong sales message and a call to action.

7. Make sure to include all of your contact information – telephone number, fax number, email address, postal address, and your website address.

8. Make your envelope “lumpy” by enclosing a small, inexpensive free gift. Make sure the gift has your company name and contact information on it and that the gift is something a person would want to keep – such as a nice pen, a good highlighter, etc. And, the promo gift should have your company information on it including your company’s name, phone number, and website address.

To your success!

Peter Geishkeer

In this marketing blog post I am going to discuss the most important element of marketing – turning features into powerful product benefits. If you want to increase sales, you must focus on the benefits of your product, not the features.

So what is a product benefit compared to a product feature?

A product benefit explains how a product or service will help a person. If I buy this product, how will it make my life better? Will it save me money? Will it make me feel better about myself? Will it make my life easier? Benefits are very powerful sales tools because people buy products and services for an end result.

A feature explains a fact about what a product does such as a specification. For example, the new ZMX car has anti-lock brakes. That is a fact about the car – it has anti-lock brakes. The problem with only listing a feature is that a feature does not explain why it is helpful – how it benefits a person. Why would you want a car with anti-lock brakes? The answer to that question is the benefit. Anti-lock brakes are much safer because they keep your tires from locking up and skidding so you do not lose control of your car. Therefore, if you drive a car that has anti-lock brakes, you are less likely to be in an accident. The benefit is the positive end result. In your marketing, it is that positive end result that you want to focus on.

Here is another example. XYZ Car Company has developed a new car that gets 100 miles per gallon. The feature is that the car gets 100 miles per gallon. But what is the benefit? Why would a person want a car that gets 100 miles per gallon? The benefit is that you will save a fortune on buying fuel.

If you want to improve your marketing and increase sales, you absolutely must focus on the benefits of your product or service. Whenever you say what your product does (a feature), ask yourself, “how will that feature help my customer? What is the benefit of that feature?” If you do that, you will immediately see your sales increase.

To your business success!

Peter Geisheker

As a marketing consultant, many companies hire me because they are unable to make sales on their website, or their sales are very low. In this article I am going to show you how to easily increase your website sales with 5 simple marketing tips.

1. If you want to make sales and/or generate inquiries on your website, you must have persuasive and passionate sales text. Strong sales text is the number 1 most important aspect of a successful e-commerce website.

I see so many websites that have either no sales text or very brief sales text and then they wonder why they cannot make a sale. You have to excite people into wanting to buy what you are selling, and to do that you need to write exciting sales text that explains the most important benefits of your product or service. To write great sales text put yourself in the situation of what would you say to a prospective customer if you were in a face-to-face sales meeting with them. Think of what questions they would have about your product or service and create answers to those questions. If you are not sure how to do this, ask a friend or a colleague what would make them want to buy your product or service. What questions would they have about your product or service? If you are still uncomfortable about writing sales text for your website, hire a sales copywriter.

2. Include your telephone number and a link to your contact form on every page of your website. Never make people search to find out how to contact you. Another reason why this is so important is that when you make it easy for people to contact you, they will trust you more. They know you are not hiding from them. How many times have you gone to a website and you were interested in buying something but there was no way to contact the company? When I am interested in buying something online and the website does not include the company’s contact information, especially a telephone number, I do not buy.

3. If you sell products on your website, make it easy for people to buy with a credit card. Both Google and Paypal have made it extremely easy and incredibly inexpensive to add credit card payment processing to your website.

4. Add customer testimonials throughout your website. Few things in marketing work as well as customer testimonials. If you do not have any testimonials, one of the easiest ways to get them is to simply call your customers and ask them what they like most about your product or service. When they tell you, immediately write it down and say, “That was great! May I use that as a testimonial?” Nearly every person will say yes. It works like magic.

5. Offer a money-back guarantee. One of the biggest concerns people have about making a purchase, particularly online, is what happens if the product I buy is junk? Will I get my money back or am I stuck with it? To immediately put your customer’s minds at ease, state your guarantee policy. Let customers know that they have no risk in doing business with you and that you stand behind your product or service. By adding money-back guarantees you will immediately see an increase in sales.

By implementing these 5 simple marketing tips, you will immediately see an increase in sales.

To your business success!

Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group Marketing Firm
“We don’t help you compete, we help you dominate”

http://www.geisheker.com

Main: (920) 471-1638
Fax: (920) 227-2261
Twitter: http://twitter.com/geisheker
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I just saw what I consider to be the most beautiful TV commercial ever written – the 2013 Budweiser Super Bowl Ad The Clydesdales: “Brotherhood”. It brought tears to my eyes. Absolutely brilliant and incredibly powerful.

Enjoy.

Please take a moment to watch it and share your thoughts.

Peter Geisheker