As in the whole world of business, there are a few simple rules which apply to enticing new channel partners:

1. Before considering anybody as your partner, assess them first – find out who they are, what their connections are, what is their reputation etc. There is nothing worse than discovering that your partner is not a serious player just after you have signed a contract with them.
2. Always aim to create a win-win-win situation – all parties must gain from cooperation – that’s yourself, your partner, and most importantly, your shared customers.
3. When approaching a prospect partner, think what really matters to them, and how you could introduce your cooperation in a way that will enable them see the benefits of working with you.
4. When applicable, sign a contract with your partner before the start of your cooperation, so that it is clear for both parties where are responsibilities of each of you.

A very important point to keep in mind with any marketing is that you must test, test, and test again. A few hours spent ensuring that you are using correct messages can save months of useless promotion, and tons of marketing money.

An essential part of your testing is having a method in place that allows you to track your return on funds invested. Keep in mind that with any successful marketing strategy, it is vital to ensure that you know who your audience is and how to reach customers.

Here is the short explanation of what you should measure in marketing:

• Number of leads for the month – How many people contacted you?
• Value of leads for the month – How much sales can these leads generate, based on your sales conversion rate and average sales value
• Sales made for the month – How much sales did you get in a particular month?
• Number of new sales - How many sales came from new customers who had never bought from you before?
• Value of new sales - What was the value of these new sales?
• Number of outstanding opportunities – How many leads have not turned into sales yet and still look promising?
• Value of outstanding opportunities - What is the value of these outstanding leads?
• Referrals gained - How many referrals did you get in a particular month?
• Testimonials received - How many testimonials did you receive in a particular month?
• Number of sales calls per rep - How many sales calls did an average sales rep make?
• Number of sales calls made – What was the total number of sales calls made by all sales reps?
• Marketing expenditure for the month – How much did you spend on marketing in a particular month?
• Customer complaints – How many customer complaints did you receive in a particular month?

While being able to bring in leads from your marketing is great, in order to earn money for your your business, you need to go even further and convert these leads to real paying customers.

Therefore we need to make sure every enquiry that comes in is handled in a professional manner leading to a face-to-face meeting after which you will get the business.

By having a good sales process, you will be able to ensure that all of your team can repeat best practices to ensure success. You will also have a record of what went wrong with those sales or leads you failed to win.

Sometimes it is good to base your sales process on a proven template. However, it is important to remember that you know your products best. The key elements you need to incorporate are those we have already discussed when creating your marketing messages:

• Who is your target market?
• What problems does your product solve or what needs and desires does it fulfil?
• How do customers generally put a value on these capabilities?
• Who is the final decision maker within your potential customers?
• Who are the influencers of a buying decision within your customers?
• How do customers evaluate your products?
• Do your customers have a budget in place?
• Who is your competition, how do you deal with them?

First enter your keywords list that you have created earlier. Notice that with Google Adwords, you have the possibility to format your keywords with the four types of keyword matching options:

Broad matching: for example => your. Your ad appears each time users search on these keywords, whatever the order or the other search terms.

Phrase matching: for example => “your”. Your ad appears if the keywords are all present in the right order, regardless of other search terms.

Exact matching: for example => [your]. Your ad only appears if the keywords are all present in the right order and no other terms are searched for.

Negative matching: for example => -jobs (use the “minus” character). Your ad for “your” only appears if the word “jobs“ does not appear in the search query together with “your”.

By using these matching options in your Google Adwords campaigns, you should be able to produce well-targeted results.

Google offers a great free tool for measuring your website traffic success – Google Analytics. Go to www.google.com/analytics, set up an account, add a special code to the web pages you want to track and start a great adventure of monitoring your website performance.

Google Analytics gives you handy reports on the following issues:

Content Analysis

Visitors Analysis

Traffic Sources

Goal Conversion

Among these tools you will find an answer to every question regarding your website performance. I would recommend that you create monthly reports in Excel spreadsheets (as described below) which will enable you to compare the results over time.

Specifically, you should keep an eye on these data:

Visits

Page Views

Pages/Visit

Average Time on Site

Bounce Rate – how many people left immediately after they came to the page

% New Visits

Google Page Rank – you can see this on you Google Toolbar

Goal Conversions Total

Keywords – what keywords were our website visitors looking for?

Traffic Sources – where did visitors came from?

However, the ultimate statistics talk about the VALUE all your website optimization efforts and online advertising have brought to your company.

Once you have a few very powerful marketing messages that enable customers to see clearly the value in your products and when they hear what is in it for them, it will feel good to buy from you.

So think about the following when you put the headline on your next flyer:

1. How could you polish the message and is there a way you could improve any word of it?
2. Is there a way you could test individual marketing messages by asking customers how much they value the benefits you used in the messages?
3. Imagine you could transfer each of these messages into powerful testimonials from customers – what would be the best way to do this?

To support and enhance your SEO, the major search engines offer an opportunity of pay-per-click advertising. This is a special form of online campaigns where you pay just when people click on your ad so that they are directed to your website. Your ads will be shown when your campaign keywords are searched for in a particular search engine, however, you do not pay for these impressions, you pay only for the clicks your ads receive.

The beauty of using pay per click campaigns (PPC) is that you can see your link on the first page in Google (sponsored search section) literally within minutes, as opposed to SEO where it can take months to get listed for your main keywords.

Now we will guide you through the process of the main sponsored search provider – Google Adwords.

Make sure that you use your top keywords in your website copy. The text of your pages should contain your keywords in the exact phrasing as you have them in your meta tags and title. To make this even stronger, you can make them bold.

This is a crucial step to get conversions, since when people search for “your [YourTown]”, they want to see a page on your in [YourTown]. A conversion is when a customer contacts you regarding your offering or signs up for a newsletter or takes any action you would like them to take.

When your web page does not include the keyword your customer typed in when looking for your products, it is not very likely that they will keep browsing your website. Moreover, it is recommended that you create a separate page for each of your keyword, or combination of keywords.

The more text, the better for search engine spiders when they index a website; it is strongly recommended that your homepage has at least 200-300 words of “visible” text. Moreover, search engine spiders crawl especially the first 20 words of your website so try to keep an eye on them and make them really relevant to what your website is about.

There are many nearly successful companies, who have great goals and ambitions like you, however encounter many problems. Some of the key issues that they may be facing are as follows;

• The sales team is converting less than 10% of opportunities into sales.
• There is no process for lead qualification and many leads are falling through the cracks.
• The sales team is not following defined sales processes.
• There is a lack of adequate sales management.
• There is no measurement of Key Performance Indicators.
• There is no consistent format for pricing proposals being used.
• There is no process to gauge customer satisfaction levels.
• There is no process to gather customer testimonials.
• There is no process to obtain customer referrals.
• It is not clear what leads are generated by the marketing spend.

Do any of these seem familiar? Could you improve anything and grow your business?

An ebook, or, electronic book, as it is called, is simply a short or longer book you can view on the screen of your laptop, or even on your iPhone.

Don’t feel daunted by any technicalities – it’s a simple document, usually saved as a pdf file, which you can email your clients or prospects, or it can be available on your website for download.

Even if you are an expert on your, it sometimes might be a challenge to know where to start and how to approach writing this masterpiece. Remember, on every single page of the ebook you will put your contact details, so you better make sure it will only enhance your company image – so the quality must be excellent.

You can come up with free tips for your and give them out as a gift when somebody signs up for your newsletter or just use it as an introduction to your company. Make sure you make the use of all content you have already created – you can even put together your newsletter articles etc.

It is very important to make sure that your ebook has these items:

• Value adding content
• Contact details to your company
• Call to action – eg. “if you need more advice, call us now”

To promote your ebook, here are a few hints:

• Mention your ebook on your website and your blog
• Submit it to ebook directories
• Email your related websites about it and ask them to promote it
• Offer it as a free gift to your customers or prospects