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Leadership Inspirations – Why We Succeed
“Some succeed because they are destined to, but most succeed because they are determined to.”
Henry Van Dyke
(1852 – 1933)
American author, educator, and clergyman
Archive for month: January, 2015
Foolproof Your Online Marketing Strategy
The main reason you build a website is because you want people to see it. If your site has no visitors, developing it is a waste of time. The sad truth is many people struggle to learn the best ways of getting people going on their websites.
If you’re one of those people, you can take comfort in the fact that you’re not alone. The good news is that today’s handy guide will give you examples of what you need to do to make your site popular! Intrigued? Check out these dynamite online marketing methods. You’ll wish you had found this page sooner!
Photo courtesy of Mattias Frenne
Tune up your website
The first step to marketing success is to start with your website. You might think it looks good but does it work well for the masses?
Often, site owners forget about usability and accessibility when designing their online homes. Even some so-called web designers tasked with creating your site forget those core requirements!
Some of the questions you need to ask yourself are:
- Can visitors get to the pages they want with ease?
- Does the site function well in a mobile web browser?
- Is it quick to load?
- Is the content on each page relevant?
The last point in the list above is of particular importance. Humans and search engines will not rate a web page well if the content on it is of no relevance to the topic. For example, a web page on fishing isn’t relevant to a website whose primary subject is computers. After all; fish can’t use computers. And you can’t use a PC to catch some fish!
There is a plethora of tools on the Web that can help you to tune up your website. For instance, the Pingdom Website Speed Test tool will analyze your site and tell you what to fix. The kinds of things it will check include page loading times, broken links, and script optimization.
The W3C website has a ‘markup validation’ service. It can verify that your web pages adhere to the Web standards you are using (i.e. HTML 4.01, XHTML and so forth).
Make sure your Web host is reliable
Another consideration to make is where you host your website. It’s a well-known fact that cheap hosts run unreliable and slow web servers. That means the performance of your site will get affected and result in a loss of visitors due to downtime.
When choosing a Web host, you should find out what their service levels are. Do they boast 99.9% uptime, for example? Location is also another important factor.
If you live in the United States, you don’t want your website hosted on some far-flung corner of the globe. In an ideal world, your Web host should be in the same country as you for optimal performance.
Optimize your website for humans and search engines
SEO or ‘search engine optimization’ is an important part of the online marketing process. Your marketing strategy will doubtless have a particular demographic in mind. It’s your job to make sure that your website only targets that group of people.
When I was an intern working at Today’s Growth Consultant, one thing I learned was the importance of SEO in any marketing campaign. DIY marketers make the mistake of diluting the content on their sites with irrelevant keywords and phrases.
Photo courtesy of Florian Simeth
Luckily the Internet is home to a plethora of sites telling you how best to optimize your site for SEO purposes. Even the mighty Google released a helpful PDF on the basics of search engine optimization!
The main points to bear in mind about SEO are as follows:
- Keep your content relevant and straight to the point;
- Don’t stuff your pages full of spammy keywords and phrases;
- Don’t ‘cloak’ your web pages. In other words, don’t fool people into thinking they visited a page about one topic. When, in fact, the content is about something different.
Make good use of landing pages
A proven online marketing technique is to use landing pages. In a nutshell, landing pages are ones created with the purpose of getting a visitor to do something. You might want them to fill in a form, for instance. Or, perhaps, you’d like them to buy something online instead.
Landing pages are usually associated with PPC (pay-per-click) ads. They are the ads you might see on the sides of search engine results pages. Although you can sometimes see them on other websites too.
When launching a new website, landing pages and PPC ad campaigns offer a good way to drive traffic to it. That’s because organic (natural) SEO campaigns can take a long time to offer results.
Set up social media profiles
It’s no secret that the world has gone social media crazy! I challenge you to find someone that doesn’t use one of the many social networking services online!
Because of the popularity of social media, it makes sense to set up profiles for your organization. With links to your website as well, of course! Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn are a few social network services you can sign up to.
The content on each profile should get updated on a regular basis. You can also use this platform to answer any pre and post-sales questions from your customers. Tools like HootSuite make it easy to manage a plethora of profiles from one useful application.
Start a blog
It doesn’t matter whether you run a business or non-profit organization. You will want to share news with your customers and followers. Social media is a great way of doing that. But don’t forget that your website is also a useful tool to communicate news with others.
The way to do that is to start a blog on your website. WordPress is a popular open-source platform you can use to begin blogging on your site. One thing I love about WordPress is how you can set it up to auto-post links to new blog posts on your social media profiles.
Just make sure the contents of your posts are relevant to what you do as an organization. By following these top tips, you’ll be able to form a decent marketing strategy in no time at all!
Corrective Action Program Best Practice 7 – Document Reasons for Condition Report Cancellation or Closure
Condition reports requiring no processing past the Identification Phase are either cancelled or closed so to prevent the unnecessary expenditure of the organization’s resources. Reasons for the termination of condition report processing, however, should be well documented so to enable later evaluation of the appropriateness of this action. Furthermore, this documentation enables the initiator feedback necessary to ensure a high level of employee engagement with the corrective action program. (See StrategyDriven Corrective Action Program best practice article, Initiator Feedback)
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About the Author
Nathan Ives is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.
To ensure promptness. An old and new tradition.
Ever leave a tip?
Sure you have. And most of the time, the amount of the tip is based on the perceived service or quality. Sometimes it’s a combination of qualities: food plus server’s performance.
But these days, tipping has changed. Everyone seems to have his or her hand out, asking – no, begging – for more money. If you go into a Starbucks, there’s the familiar plastic bin by the cash register that’s always filled to some varying degree with change and a few bucks. Sometimes it’s a jar. Sometimes it’s a fish bowl, but it’s ever present where you see a counter and some servers.
What these people are really saying is, “My company doesn’t pay me enough, so I need to beg you for more.”
Now I know this seems a bit harsh. But the bottom line is, the company that employs them is making huge profits while their front-line people are predominantly the lowest paid people. Seems backwards.
People on the front lines are always the lowest paid. I wish I understood it, but I don’t. No, I’m not a socialist, but I am a pragmatist.
That’s one way of looking at tipping. Let’s take a look at another way. Suppose everybody NOT on the front lines of service, who still serve customers face-to-face or on the phone, had to EARN tips.
Ever go to an airport? If you’re like me, and you check a bag (or two), you go to a skycap or stand in line inside the airport. Skycaps work for tips. Ticket counter people don’t.
I tip skycaps liberally. The skycaps at the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina, my home airport, are the best in the United States. They’re friendly. They’re helpful. And they don’t have a jar out. They do the same excellent job whether they’re tipped or not.
Ticket counter people are inconsistent. Sometimes they’re great. Sometimes they’re rude and less than helpful.
Suppose everybody in the airport had to work for tips.
Ever been in an airport and had a rude person at a ticket counter? At a gate? As a flight attendant? In baggage claim?
Can you imagine if those people HAD to work for tips? At the end of a work day, rude people would go home with no money and be griping to their significant other about what lousy tippers there are at the airport. Never for one second thinking that maybe their lousy service, and poor attitude contributed to their negligible income.
But wait! There’s more! Think of all the other rude people in the world. What about the administrative people in a doctor’s office? Would you tip them? What about gatekeepers when you’re making a cold call? Would you tip them? What about sales clerks who ignore you when you’re shopping? Would you tip them?
At the root of a tip is friendliness, helpfulness and service. But there’s a secret. In order to perform this, you have to have the desire to serve. You have to display the pride that goes along with giving great service.
No great server is ever going to say, “I’m doing the best I can,” or “they don’t pay me enough to do that.”
The point here is that service has nothing to do with companies. Service has everything to do with people who work at the companies.
The doorman is friendly because he works on tips. The bellman is friendly because he works on tips. So, why doesn’t the front desk clerk work on tips?
It’s interesting to note that many bellman work at hotels for years, while front desk clerks turn over in their position sometimes as much as 400% in a year.
Tips on tipping: (And getting tipped, even if it’s not in the form of money)
1. Start with a smile.
2. Engage in a friendly manner.
3. Offer to help others sincerely and without expectation.
4. Tell them how nice it was to serve them.
4.5 Thank them for being your customer.
If you feel like giving someone a tip (even though they don’t accept them) you know you’ve gotten good service.
Tips don’t always have to be money. For example, I often give a signed copy of my book to people I feel went above and beyond their duty. For you, if you haven’t written your book yet, it might be dried flowers from your garden, something that you made, or a keepsake that cost a buck or two. You can find tons of them at little gift stores. A small gift is most often better than a monetary tip because it’s from the heart.
But the best tip you can give to others is a kind word of thanks, and a compliment like, “WOW, you really did a great job” or “I really appreciate your great service.” People love hearing compliments from customers, because they rarely, if ever, hear them from their boss.
One last tip: Rate yourself after every transaction with a customer. Did you serve well enough to get tipped? IDEA: Perform all interactions with customers as though your income depended on it.
Reprinted with permission from Jeffrey H. Gitomer and Buy Gitomer.
About the Author
Jeffrey Gitomer is the author of The Sales Bible, Customer Satisfaction is Worthless Customer Loyalty is Priceless, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Little Red Book of Sales Answers, The Little Black Book of Connections, The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way, The Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching, The Little Teal Book of Trust, The Little Book of Leadership, and Social BOOM! His website, www.gitomer.com, will lead you to more information about training and seminars, or email him personally at [email protected].
Leadership Inspirations – Revealing Character
“Sports do not build character. They reveal it.”
Heywood Broun, Jr
(1888 – 1939)
American sportswriter, newspaper columnist, and editor
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