by Corte Swearingen

Do you give your prospects anything when they make contact with your business? Many business owners only have a single brochure to attract customers. It’s better to put together an entire communications folder to help educate your prospects and turn them into customers. This article will discuss the best components for your business folder.

Insert #1: Your Story

Why did you start your business? How passionate are you about what you do? Your business story lets prospects know why you started your business and helps to share your passion.

Your compelling story is a simple one-page sheet that explains why it is you created your company. Make it personal and engaging. Don’t be afraid to be more informal when you write your story. It’s important that the prospect enjoys reading it.

Here’s how you can craft the best personal story.

- Be personal – Talk about the people you’ve touched in your business

- Try to create emotion in your story

- Make it fun to read your story

- Tell your story with passion

- Show your human side – talk about mistakes you’ve made and the lessons you’ve learned

A strong company story is a great way to begin your business folder.

Insert #2: Your Competition

The purpose of this insert is to summarize why people should buy from you as opposed to your competition. Summarize all the advantages of doing business with your company. Communicate your unique approach, the value customers get when they do business with you, and why your products and services are the best in your field.

I recommend making this a single sheet and pick just a few critical points to communicate.

Insert #3: The Problem Solver

What’s your past history of solving customer problems in an efficient way? This insert should describe your past success as a problem solver.

I recommend you include the following.

- Define the major issues of your target market

- Describe how your services are able to solve these issues

- Describe the steps needed to solve the problem

Insert #4: Service and Product Summary

This insert should list out the different benefits of your service or products.

Focus on product benefits, not product features. This is important to remember. That extra knob on your product isn’t meaningful unless you can explain how it solves a specific issue.

Insert #5: List of Testimonials

On this insert, list out your best customer testimonials. Here are some ideas.

1. Many customers may feel they don’t have the time to write a testimonial. For customers with an established relationship, write one up on their behalf and present it to them for their approval.

2. Ask customers to write you a testimonial on the spot. Provide them with a pen and a slip of paper. Satisfied customers will rarely refuse your request.

3. Ask the customer to write the testimonial as if they were recommending you to a business friend. This will make it more compelling.

Insert #6: The Informational Article

It is important to find ways to building trust in your prospects. One great way to do this is to summarize an article from your website and then provide the URL so that prospects can view and print out the entire article for themselves.

So there you have it – all the main components of a strong marketing communications folder. You can purchase a pocket folder with your logo and tag line printed on the front from your local print shop or a service such as VistaPrint. I recommend purchasing folders that have slots on one of the inside pockets for your business card.

Make sure you give out your folder to anyone that expresses interest in your products and services. It’s a great marketing strategy that goes a long way in building trust and converting prospects to customers.

by Adeline Rekli

For years we’ve watched individuals try to discover the secrets of search engine optimization, and build their SEO business. Unfortunately most of them fail, which leads to wasted time, money, and a whole lot of frustration. So today we thought we’d share a few basic tips that can help.

These tips are not secrets, but they are things that are often overlooked as people struggle with this concept. Everyone knows the goal is to increase visibility in order to make money online. The only way to do this is to really understand what SEO is all about.

We’re not going to use any tricky language here or complicate matters with technicalities. The bottom is that search engine optimization helps people everywhere find your website. It doesn’t matter which method use to accomplish this, it’s all about keywords.

The upside of knowing the importance of keywords is that is you use them correctly, people will be able to find your website much more easily. The downside is that you can’t just choose any words you like. You have to find and use the right words for the right situation. And in this case there is a secret formula for accomplishing this.

One of the most common rules of thumb with regard to SEO is the 1,000/1,000,000 rule. In other words, if you find a keyword that is searched a minimum of 1,000 times a month with no more than 1,000,000 results, than that’s your optimum keyword or keyword phrase. Now whether or not you want to follow this rule of thumb is up to you.

This basically works towards those marketing strategies where people are looking for helpful information. The other side of search engine optimization is built around your website. If you are selling golf clubs, then it would be a good idea to start out with this as your primary site keyword. If it needs to be shortened, then use “golf” in the page links.

Another thing a lot of people don’t know is that search engine crawlers search a page from left to right as they are looking for terms. So when you’re placing your content on a website page you will want to put the most important keyword information on the top left of the page and then work from left to right. The information that you care least about being picked up by the crawlers should be placed in the bottom right corner.

While this might be somewhat helpful, we’ve only scratched the surface to all the SEO strategies out there. Whether it’s with your website or through content, understanding the process will only give you bigger rewards. If you already have a niche, find a free keyword tool and start looking for good keywords to use. When you have 3-7, then it will be time to learn how to properly implement them.

by Ben Janke

The business image you show to the world determines market success. From this view, web sites mirror companies, and if anyone eager to make money on the world wide web should be concerned self-representation.

Nobody wants one time visitors, all business web marketing strategies aim at the return of the customers. The attempt to turn visitors into relevant customers represents in fact the element shared by all companies with online presence beyond the differences of marketing approach, service/product promotion and the rest.

The business web marketing pattern for round traffic gain may grow on good site design. Believing that the succeeder of online business resides in Java scripting, software tools and marketing strategies alone is a false assumption.

In site design you should include the elements that would make visitors return together with the criteria that target the audience. Each of these factors is related to the others, and defining one necessarily implies an understanding of the rest and of the whole. Therefore, site design should not be entrusted to the first service provider.

All business web marketing development starts with deep market understanding, and good knowledge of the customers you target. People get control over information when they search the world wide web and you have to use this element into your advantage.

The better you know your potential clients, the more you will be able to offer them on the business web site. Customer loyalty will thus become the ultimate goal of business web marketing, beyond the simple page views that cannot be prevented.

Moreover, business reputation grows better on the background of a specific market sector. And the specific market sector or the potential audience is classified by more than just income, education, age, gender and profession. What is the relevant content that they would like to find on your web page?

A good understanding of these aspects provides a smart entrepreneur with the right tools to face and defeat competition. Therefore, the beginning of any business web selling plan should grow out of the understanding of the market and the effort to meet the clients’ needs via the web site.