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        <title>Sales Growth Group | Blog RSS</title>
        <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/</link> 
        <description>Sales Growth Group | Blog RSS</description> 
        <language>en-us</language>
        <managingEditor>info@sggmail.com</managingEditor>
        <webMaster>info@sggmail.com</webMaster>
        <image>
            <url>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/App_Themes/Default/Images/logo.png</url> 
            <title>Sales Growth Group | Blog RSS</title> 
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/</link>             
        </image>

        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[Does Your Website Ring?]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=43</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[Imagine that you just bought a new cell phone and it didn&rsquo;t come with any ringtones. Not even a buzzer. Now imagine that all the prospects trying to reach your business were calling you on that phone.]]></description>
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        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[Have You Found It?]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=42</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[If you have installed Google Analytics or any other analytics program on your website recently, you&rsquo;ve probably noticed how impatient your visitors really are. If they can&rsquo;t find what they are looking for, they click off to another website where what they want may be easier to find.]]></description>
        </item>

        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[This Blog Comes To Life]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=41</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[I am happy to extend an invitation to all the readers of this blog to get tips just like these in person. &nbsp;On August 27, 2008, I&rsquo;ll be a featured speaker at The 3rd Annual Entrepreneur Fair at the Disney Entrepreneur Center.]]></description>
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        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[Two Audiences and Only One Website]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=40</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[&nbsp;]]></description>
        </item>

        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[A Picture is Worth a Couple of Visitors]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=39</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[Notice anything different showing up when you do a Google search?]]></description>
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        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[Some People Simply Don’t Count]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=38</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[Remember when you were little and you were teased by some neighborhood kid or classmate and your Mom or Dad said, &ldquo;Why do you let his opinion matter to you???&rdquo;]]></description>
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        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[Passing the Buck in England]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=37</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[The big news coming from England doesn&rsquo;t have anything to do with Prince Harry or Prince Andrew&rsquo;s military adventures. It is that total advertising spending on the internet there will pass advertising spending on television this year.&nbsp;]]></description>
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        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[In Europe, to promote their website they use their head.]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=36</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[I just returned from a sensational 9-day trip in Europe and in addition to sampling more than 26 different types of chocolate, I spent some time thinking about, of course, internet marketing.]]></description>
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        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[How Your Partners Are Stabbing You in the Back]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=35</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[Here&rsquo;s something we see in a lot of websites we analyze that could be severely damaging your website&rsquo;s effectiveness.]]></description>
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        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[It's New! It's New!]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=34</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[There are just some things that in general consumers get really excited about. Things that are &ldquo;Free&rdquo; and things that are &ldquo;New&rdquo; and things that are &ldquo;On Sale.&rdquo;]]></description>
        </item>

        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[Is it Better to Send or Receive?]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=33</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[OK, I admit it. We get a lot of raised eyebrows when we tell a potential customer how much we charge to do their email marketing.]]></description>
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        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[The Dangers Of DIY Emails]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=32</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[Quick quiz: Is getting an email from me to you the same as getting an email from your business to your customers or your prospects?]]></description>
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        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[Seriously, Who Is Your Website??]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=21</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[Your organization succeeds because your employees have defined roles. It is now time to define one for your website.

For some websites we analyze, the site functions merely as the receptionist. &ldquo;Welcome, want to know about our company mission statement? Third link on the left. Have a nice day.&rdquo;

Other websites, the site functions as the customer service representative. 

But I would say for most websites that we analyze, the site function is the PR manager. &ldquo;Our company was founded 30 years ago on the principles of honesty and integrity and customer service. I can supply a lengthy biography on our company&rsquo;s founders right over here.&rdquo;]]></description>
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        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[I Wrote This At The Bar]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=22</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[I just returned home from BarCamp Orlando 2008. BarCamp is an informal conference (very, very informal) for web developers and digital media specialists held at &mdash; you guessed it &mdash; a bar, or in this case several bars in downtown Orlando.

Maybe it was the thought of spending your weekend with 200 or so web techies or maybe the near constant rain dismayed you from attending, but through all the tech speak, there are two things that came out of BarCamp Orlando that every business trying to make its website generate more sales should consider.]]></description>
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        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[You Are Not Welcome At This Website]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=23</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[If you accept the premise that your website now plays a vital role in determining whether or not someone will do business with you, then you have to start looking at your website for what it is at the most basic level &mdash; it is an advertisement.

So that means you have to analyze it like you would analyze an ad. What is one of the most important (if not THE most important part) of any print ad?

The headline.

And what is one of the most important parts of your website front page?

The headline.

Now think about how many websites you visit that have some variation of this headline, &ldquo;Welcome to our website&hellip;.&rdquo;

You would never run a print ad with a headline, &ldquo;Welcome to our print ad,&rdquo; so there&rsquo;s no reason to think that it could be effective as a headline on your website.]]></description>
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        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[News From The Toilet]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=24</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[A couple of months ago we met with a gentleman about his website and his biggest complaint was that few people signed up for his newsletter.

He was a plumber. 

When he said that, I thought, &ldquo;What possible information that could positively impact my life could I ever expect to get from, and seek out from, a plumber?&rdquo;

National television networks and major market newspapers are all suffering because consumers are no longer turning to them for news, and this nice man expected people that went to his website to request some form of news from him.

I had to politely tell him he had to flush any hopes of having a lot of people click on a button that says &ldquo;Sign up for our newsletter&rdquo; on his site. It&rsquo;s not going to happen. 

The unfortunate thing is that this plumber is not alone. We see hundreds of websites with that same simple, unexciting, unbeneficial call to action: &ldquo;sign up for our newsletter.&rdquo;

While cultivating an email list is still one of the smartest things any local business can do, you must realize that for time-conscious internet visitors, you have to give to get. If you want visitors to give up their email address and their name, you have to offer something with a perceived value &ndash; and a generic newsletter isn&rsquo;t it.

Try offering unpublicized specials if they register; people love to be the first to know something. Try sharing some of your expertise with insights they can&rsquo;t find anywhere else. It doesn&rsquo;t need to be repetitive content like a newsletter. It can be just one-time valuable advice. For our plumber, he may offer a special article on &ldquo;The Three Things You Have in Your House that Will Dissolve Any Clog.&rdquo;

As is with anything on the internet, the key is testing. Try different offers. You should have your offers set up as a goal in your Google Analytics so you can easily see which offer motivates the greatest percentage of your website visitors to give up their name and email address.

Getting contact info from a higher percentage of your visitors enables you to get more sales from your site. If you&rsquo;re not doing it effectively, you&rsquo;re letting a lot of potential revenue go down the drain.]]></description>
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        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[Is Your Website Too Wordy?]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=25</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[I have in front of me the Google Analytics reports for 10 of our clients at Sales Growth Group, and as I stare at the reports, I start making some rough calculations. (32)

From those calculations, I think I can predict when you will stop reading this article and when your website visitors will stop reading your website. (57)
&nbsp;]]></description>
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        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[Are You a Website Owner Or a Website Renter??]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=26</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[For the second time this week, we met a wonderful small business and exposed to them to a fact that shocked them.

They did not own their URL.

They thought they did. They were paying for it monthly and simply concluded it was their possession. A look at their domain ownership revealed that the domain re-seller they used had registered the company&rsquo;s URL in the name of the re-seller, and not their company.

I would have to say that over the past four months, perhaps 1 in 7 companies that met with us at SGG regarding their web development did not own their domains and were quite surprised to find that out.

The issue in all cases seems to be confusion over two entities that are involved in your Internet business life: your domain registrar and your website hosting company. 

Many of our new clients have used their website hosting company to secure their domain registration without realizing that the website hosting company had to go through a third-party domain registrar such as godaddy.com or networksolutions.com to secure the URL.

With the exception of trademarked terms, there is no limitation on who can register a domain. I don&rsquo;t have to be the &ldquo;Bob&rdquo; in Bob&rsquo;s Pool Store to register bobspoolstore.com.

Once the domain (or URL or website address) is registered, it stays with the owner as long as they satisfactorily pay the annual renewal fee to the domain registrar. In setting up the domain registration, the registrant indicates what credit card is charged, what email address notifications go to, and whether or not the renewals occur automatically if an active credit card is on file.

That&rsquo;s how someone else could own your domain and you not know it. If the notifications are going to an email address that isn&rsquo;t yours, and if your credit card is not the one being charged, you may never know the status of your domain ownership unless you click here and type in your website address to find out.

But don&rsquo;t stop reading at the first line! Most domain registrars ask for four different contacts on the account: the registrant, the administrative contact, the technical contact, and the billing contact. Even if you, or your business, is listed as the registrant, but your re-seller has listed themselves as the administrative contact, billing contact, and technical contact, the real control of the domain lies with them. If they change the password, most registrars will email any change notification to the admin contact and/or the technical contact &ndash; not the registrant.

If you&rsquo;re a business owner, you simply must own your domain. It is an asset of the business and not owning a domain that has been used in the advertising and promotion of your business could hamper your efforts to sell or transfer your business. 

That means you should be listed as the registrant and the admin contact. If your reseller wants to be the technical contact, fine.

So make sure you are a website owner, not a website renter. Click here and make sure you are the rightful owner.]]></description>
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        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[What Your Website Can Learn From George Foreman]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=27</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[George has sold a lot of grills with late-night infomercials and there are two reasons his infomercials run predominantly on late-night television.

The obvious one is that there are more of what TV people call &ldquo;avails&rdquo; (available time periods for him to buy) late night, but the second reason is one you would do well to think about if you are running a Pay-Per-Click campaign for your website.

Late night TV viewers are typically uninvolved. That means they are not engaged with either the show they are watching or some other activity. Yes, many simply can&rsquo;t sleep. By not being involved or connected to another activity, they are more likely to respond to a direct solicitation to buy a product.

If that same infomercial came on while the viewer was helping the kids with homework or working on a report for work, it would take a much higher level of persuasion for the show to get the viewer to disconnect from that activity and pick up the phone and buy a grill.

What does this have to do with your website? Simple. Look at your Pay-Per-Click results. There are probably clear patterns in the conversion rate of your clicks. At different parts in the day, your prospects may be searching more purposefully than others. With some PPC campaigns we&rsquo;ve seen, the trend is the opposite of the TV infomercial patterns. Late-night searchers can be less serious, less involved in their searches, perhaps because they have more time at hand.

Daytime searchers for some campaigns we&rsquo;ve seen are more purposeful, seemingly more pressed for time. So the clicks in the daytime were converting higher than the late night clicks.

If you are just looking at your overall results, you may be missing a trend such as the one I&rsquo;ve described. Your Google Ad Words account lets you daypart your campaign so your ads only run during those times that are meeting your conversion goals. 

If you are going to daypart though, stay on top of it. Holidays are big opportunities for many Pay-Per-Click campaigns, and search activity (like TV watching) is different on holidays than non-holidays. So you simply can&rsquo;t set it and forget it.

And if the company that handles your PPC isn&rsquo;t up to speed about dayparting, now is a good time to &ldquo;grill&rdquo; them about the practice.]]></description>
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        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[How To Stop Your Website From Bouncing]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=28</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[The most valuable statistic produced by Google Analytics for your website may also be the simplest.

Google Analytics measures your &ldquo;Bounce Rate,&rdquo; which is simply the percentage of visitors that go to your default page (typically your home page) and don&rsquo;t go anywhere else. They simply &ldquo;bounce away.&rdquo;
&nbsp;]]></description>
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        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[When It Is Safe To Play Follow The Leader]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=29</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[In my last entry I wrote about the advantages of having a basic mobile version of your website. The question I received the most was, &ldquo;Do I have to have a .mobi domain to have a mobile website?&rdquo;

The answer simply is &ldquo;No.&rdquo; Having a website with the .mobi domain and having a website that a mobile device can read are two totally different things. A mobile device simply needs a website that uses &ldquo;wap&rdquo; (wireless application protocol) in its programming language. It doesn&rsquo;t matter whether the site is .com, .org, or .edu.

So what does a .mobi extension do for you? ]]></description>
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        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[What Should Drive You To Do a Mobile Site?]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=30</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[If you are devoting a lot of time to what your website looks like on the computer, you may be over-looking an important trend.

Many people are discovering what your website looks like on a mobile phone... and it isn&rsquo;t what you think it looks like.

The statistics are at the point they can no longer be ignored. According to Real Networks more than 25% of all internet use worldwide is through mobile phones. In some countries like Japan and South Korea, the majority of internet use is through a mobile phone, and yes, be very certain, the United States is quickly heading in that direction.

Last week I was picking my daughter up from dance class, and I had a few minutes to kill in the parking lot. There is this local printing company that is trying to get a hold of me to do business with them so I decided to look them up on the internet through my BB Curve.

I could do it. Well, I guess I could have... if I had the patience to scroll around and read broken copy and look past giant logos.

They had a chance to advance the dialogue with me through a mobile version of their website and they didn&rsquo;t do it. They could have gone to the front of the cue, but they ended up going in the &ldquo;when I get to it&rdquo; bucket with the rest of the vendors.

Can you see an executive checking out your company while he is waiting for a flight at the airport? Can you see a mom trying to find a company like yours or a product like yours through her mobile phone while she&rsquo;s waiting for soccer practice to end? And if you can&rsquo;t see a teenager looking for a business on the internet through their phone the same way you and I used the yellow pages, then well, you simply don&rsquo;t hang around a lot of teenagers.

Does this mean you should rush out and spend thousands on a full mobile version of your website? No. It just means you should make sure consumers get the basics through a phone without scrolling around over-sized logos and broken links. They should be able to easily and quickly see your address, your phone number (and it should be a &ldquo;click to call&rdquo; link), an email address, short compelling copy on what you do, and an email form.

The &ldquo;click to call&rdquo; link is really important because that is the first step mobile users can take to store your phone number in their mobile phone, and if you get that, your company gets the keys to the consumers' first impulse in the future.

Getting a basic mobile version is easy and can cost a little more than a thousand dollars. If you&rsquo;re a business owner, and you always felt you were playing catch up in the game of internet marketing, getting a mobile version of your website is an easy and effective way to be at the same place the consumers are.]]></description>
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        <item> 
            <title><![CDATA[The Most Important Question To Ask About Any Website]]></title>
            <link>http://www.salesgrowthgroup.com/web-marketing-blog/Default.aspx?id=31</link>             
            <description><![CDATA[When I meet a potential customer for the first time, I ask them one simple question.

&ldquo;What do you want the person that visits your website to do after they&rsquo;ve been there?&rdquo;

I usually get a lot of stammers, furred brows, and scratched chins. Most of the businesses we work with at Sales Growth Group have not thought that through. Perhaps you haven&rsquo;t either. When I probe further, the most common answer I get is, &ldquo;We want them to call us.&rdquo;

&ldquo;So the single most important thing you&rsquo;d like someone who visits your website to do is contact you,&rdquo; I ask. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; they say, feeling confident in the strong utilitarian value of their website.

&ldquo;Oh, and where is your phone number? Is that it on the &lsquo;contact us&rsquo; page? The one at the very bottom of your left-hand navigation?&quot; 

&quot;How many clicks does it take for a visitor to get to your phone number, email address, or address??&rdquo; 

You see the point. We can make website design very simple or very complicated. To make it simple, you have to identify a clear and specific purpose for your website and design around it. If your real sole objective is to have your website visitors call you, (which is a lofty goal), then I think you can figure out where your company phone number should be. 

Of course, it is a little more complicated because as much as we&rsquo;d like to think the opposite, website visitors really aren&rsquo;t motivated to contact you. They have better things to do. 

So, if generating a phone call is your website&rsquo;s goal, the web design of the site must center around that, including the copy, the architecture, and most importantly &ndash; the offer. Yes, the offer. What specific and compelling reason are you giving the website visitor to contact you? You can&rsquo;t just hope that it will happen.

The key here is to stop thinking of your website as a website. It really is just an ad, and it should be designed and constructed the way any effective marketing element is designed: understand the intended audience, construct a compelling offer, communicate the offer dynamically and persuasively, and give the consumer a specific response mechanism.

With one very powerful question, you are now on your way to making your website more effective for your business.]]></description>
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