Yes, extremely. We get just as many leads through our website’s live chat feature as we do from phone calls. It also seems that the visitors who chat with us are further into the buying process for whatever reason.

Live chat offers a number of advantages over the phone for us:

• It’s really nice being able to think through what you are going to say. “Delete” just isn’t possible over the phone and being able to read through a response before hitting “submit” is sometimes priceless.
• You can still multitask. Talking on the phone requires more attention. Prospects on our live chat can ask questions as needed and we are free to work on other things in the meantime.
• We can offer after hours support without being at the office. The particular live chat client we use, Alive Chat, can send chat notifications to our mobile phones. In fact, I’ve had a number of chats on my iPhone. One of the major reasons we went with Alive Chat over its many competitors is that it has a great Mac app.
• The chat history is saved and becomes part of the clients file. We are collecting information that stay with the client throughout the buying process and after. Notes taken during phone calls on paper tend not to make it that far.
• Auto compilation of frequently asked questions. Our chat history gives us data on what information we need to better integrate or highlight on our website.

I recommend putting a live chat on your website to all our clients – especially if your site has a medium to low volume of visitors. You’ll connect with prospects you otherwise wouldn’t.

Related posts:

1. Discover Exactly What Matters to Your Prospects
2. Testing out Squidoo

Each week (or so) I post the creme a la creme from the small business blogosphere.

Identify the Growth Factors in your Business via Go Big Network

This will help you focus in on what matters in your business. As a business owner in a down economy, it’s more important than ever that your time, attention, and energy is spent on those few activities that make a difference to your bottomline. This article helps you do that and is a terrific companion to my own article on removing constraints.

No Burnout Guide to Doubling Your Sales by The Launch Coach

This post generates so many ideas for how to improve your conversion process, it should really be bookmarked and reviewed regularly.

Problogger’s Series on Building a Better Blog bv Problogger

A must read for anyone with a blog. I can’t believe he isn’t charging for this information.

Related posts:

1. Can blogging help your small business? Watch it unfold here.

Camel, the cigarette maker, has been doing some interesting things with their product line lately. They are really pushing the envelope and, dare I say, innovating. Those not addicted to tobacco may not even have noticed but over the last year or so they’ve been shaking things up. Other cigarette makers seem content with the tried and true products – “ultra light,” “light,” “full flavor,” and maybe a “menthol” for variety. For an industry that generally seems content with kicking back and letting the money roll in, Camel is really standing out.

For instance, Camel has created a cigarette that, by squeezing on the filter, switches from a regular cigarette to a menthol. You literally decide at any moment you’d rather be smoking a menthol, and, with an audible “Snap!,” you get instant minty coolness.

Camel has also released a tobacco product that isn’t even a cigarette! Camel is leveraging their brand recognition and branching out into entirely new territory. They are now selling snus, a smokeless tobacco product that is popular in Europe that does not require spitting. Now, tobacco brands don’t do this. Skoal, Copehagen, etc. have their smokeless tobacco and Marlboro, Winston, etc. make their cigarettes. Camel is marketing snus as something to use when you can’t smoke. “Enjoy tobacco anytime.”

No matter how much you dislike the tobacco industry, there are quite a few things to respect in what Camel is doing in terms of their product line (please pay attention to that statement, I am not endorsing the products or company or giving my approval, simply noting that to learn from what they are doing and admire in how they are doing it…. in light of that fact that many companies fail to).

Courage

For one thing, it takes courage to branch out and begin making new products when for almost 100 years you’ve only sold one thing (since 1913 to be exact!). Many, many companies don’t have that audacity. Hell, most companies don’t even have the audacity to seriously consider such a drastic move. It helps that Camel has so much money to toy with… but still… there is something to admire there.

Attentiveness

It takes a high level of attentiveness to listen to your market and then develop a product that seems outlandish. Few companies have their ear low enough to the ground to listen to their market, let alone act on what they are asking for with an idea that seems to be walking a thin line between innovative and silly. A cigarette that changes flavors? Seems silly but some “regular” smokers do smoke the occasional menthol just for variety, or only when drinking, etc. I’m sure this isn’t an idea a high level executive had while puffing away on his yacht, this is something Camel would only learn about by keeping their ears open and really considering the feedback they were getting.

Creativity

They are showing creativity in how they are solving the problems of their market. A smoker not being able to smoke for hours is like having a slowly intensifying itch that you are unable to scratch. Now there is a product that scratches that itch indoors, on planes, at work, etc. Not only is there no smoke, but there is no gross spitting as is required with other smokeless tobacco products such as dip and chew. This is a textbook example of creating a product the market wants: “You have this problem, we have the solution.”

Intelligence

It is smart of them to leverage the brand recognition of one offering to enter new territory. Especially with tobacco, there is brand loyalty. You won’t find too many smokers who change brands willy nilly. Further, this is a smart thing to do during a recession – to offer more products and options, to push into new niches, and give customers solutions to real problems.

While other companies are hunkering down, reducing budgets, trimming fat, and all that other “prepare for the worst” recession knee jerking, Camel is leading an industry. No matter how corrupt and despicable that industry is, we need to give credit where credit is due and emulate them if we can… let’s just hope your product doesn’t kill millions of people.

No related posts.

For small business owners with a lot to do, is blogging worth the time spent? Can a company blog significantly contribute to the bottomline of a small business?

Let me say upfront that I have never had a successful blog or tried to use a blog to market a business. So, I can’t answer that question for you… yet.

But, I’m going to hypothesize that, yes, blogging can significantly contribute to the bottom line of most businesses. I have enough supporting evidence that I will be devoting a significant amount of my time to building a successful blog – and that’s a big risk considering the opportunity costs. One thing I do know, blogging is time-consuming!

The way I see it, a blog can exist:

1. to support itself and it’s contributers (draw and monetize enough traffic to make it worthwhile),
2. as a hobby (doesn’t matter whether it makes money),
3. to bring in more money for a business (somehow redirect traffic from the blog into the company sales funnel resulting in conversions).

I am going to pursue the latter. My intent is to create a terrific productivity blog targeted toward micro and small businesses as this is the target market for my company, LongerDays.com Virtual Assistance. My hope is that such a blog will widen the net of keywords and phrases that can potentially bring someone to our website, that once they here on the blog they will become curious about our company, and finally that they will end up signing up for our virtual assistance service.

I will be building our blog up from nothing and I’m going to do it right before your eyes. Every week I will post an update on our traffic stats, rss subscribers, post frequency, referred sales, and probably some lessons learned along the way.

Where we are now:

Traffic: Less than 100 hits a week

RSS: 6 subscribers

Post frequency: Less than 1 a week

Sales referred: 0

If you have suggestions on other key metrics that I should be paying attention to, or you would find interesting, please let me know.

It may end up never creating a penny for us and if that’s the case, I’ll go back to posting on it only when I’m bored. My understanding is that it can take quite a while to build traffic so I’m not going to throw in the towel unnecessarily early…

UPDATE: 03/10/09

Traffic: Less than 100 hits a week

RSS: 2 subscribers!

Post frequency: About two a week

Sales referred: 0

Notes: I made a serious error this week – I changed my Feedburner URL When I realized this would break all my subscribers feeds and tried to change it back I got an error message that the URL was taken! So, we lost the majority of our subscribers which is frustrating but in the grand scheme of things, 4 is not many.

UPDATE: 11/24/09

Traffic: ~ 150 visitors a week

RSS subscribers: 9

Post frequency: 1 every 3 weeks

Sales referred: 0

Inbound links: 3

Notes: My failure to follow through on my blogging plans is instructive in itself. Blogging is time-consuming and, in the midst of trying to run a company, it is probably the first thing that will get pushed till tomorrow when it is still an unproven and under-performing method of generating leads.

I have noticed that the blog posts that bring in the most traffic are ones that review other services. My refined strategy is to focus on review posts to build traffic and intersperse other content only occasionally.

I don’t foresee the frequency of posts increasing any time soon – other things are just higher priority at the moment but, by not giving up, I hope to see traffic continue to increase gradually over time. After the traffic increases to a certain point – perhaps 100 visitors a day – I can see trying to monetize the traffic.

At the moment, there is no lead capture mechanism on the blog and there are no sales messages for our company. At this point, I just don’t feel the traffic justifies the time expense to set these things up especially when I don’t feel that the traffic we are getting are people interested in the service we offer.

We have gotten a few of deep links out of it and so far I count those as the only major benefit of the blogging I’ve done so far.

Update: 02/20/10:

Traffic: ~ 90 visitors / week

RSS: 14

Post frequency: Once monthly

Sales referred: 0 to company. $200 of affiliate commissions.

Inbound links: 6

Notes: Our traffic was growing steadily and then dropped off suddenly for some reason… probably something I did wrong to the backend of WordPress or perhaps due to a poorly executed server move. It’s coming back, slowly.

Update: 07/13/10

Traffic: ~ 160 visitors / week

RSS: 15

Post frequency: Twice monthly

Sales referred: 0 (directly) to company though one client did mention reading our blog before signing up for our service.

Inbound links: 2

Notes: While our traffic and RSS numbers are kind of discouraging considering our blog is almost two years old now, these pictures show an upward trend in spite of infrequent posts:

Related posts:

1. Using a Virtual Assistant: Social Proof and Blogging
2. Test and Review of PRWeb Press Release (updated)

Every business owner wishes they could get inside the head of their prospect and learn exactly what specific benefits of their product or service their target market is truly interested in. 

Knowing this information, they could tailor their sales copy to center on those benefits and they could improve and build upon those aspects of their product and service creating value where it matters. 

Years ago, when I was still in high school, I hit upon a pretty neat, cheap, low-tech way to do this that I’ve hardly shared with anyone and I haven’t seen anyone really using which is surprising to me given how revealing it can be. It’s pretty simple…

You create 3-5 free reports, each centered around one of the major benefits of your product or service. You offer these free reports to visitors to your website at the same time and keep track of how many times each was downloaded. 

By looking at how often each report was downloaded, you get statistical information about just how interesting and important each of these benefits are to your prospects. 

For example, if you have an internet marketing company your 5 free reports could be:

“How to get more traffic to your website.”

“How to create a blog that generates money for your business.”

“How to increase your rankings on Google.”

“How to convert more visitors to paying customers.”

“How to get more people to opt-in to your list.”

After 30-60 days you can look at the data and extract a lot of useful information. For instance, let’s say your data looked like this:

“How to get more traffic to your website.” 
DOWNLOADS = 352 

“How to create a blog that generates money for your business.”
DOWNLOADS = 230 

“How to increase your rankings on Google.”
DOWNLOADS = 562 

“How to convert more visitors to paying customers.”
DOWNLOADS = 411 

“How to get more people to opt-in to your list.”
DOWNLOADS = 120 

Well, this is a very clear indication that you should be focusing your sales copy around Google rankings, conversion, and getting more traffic in general. You may also want to minimize how much you promote your ability to build an opt-in list as this seems much less important.

In addition, it means you should tailor your product to overdeliver on those promises as those are the ones that seem to be of interest. 

Now, obviously, some people are going to download more than one report but that doesn’t diminish the value of the data in the least. If someone downloads them all, they effectively negate their “vote” and if they download the majority but not all that means the report they didn’t download was of no interest to them at all. In other words, multiple votes are just as good as a single vote. 

What I would suggest is getting rid of the report with the fewest downloads and trying a different one to see how it fairs. 

Personally, I find this data to be of even more use than simply asking your target market “What interests you most about my service?” People generally don’t know what they want. Sure, they’ll make something up and it will sound good but to get truthful information from them, you’ve got to put them in a situation where they don’t know that you are trying to learn about what they want. And this does just that.

No related posts.