What sort of a return would you want to see if you were investing $100m in a project? Personally, for that kind of money I would want to see far more than the 1% growth that Bing has achieved fron April figures to Junes. Up to 8.23 from 7.21 while Yahoo also showed a 0.5% rise.
Is this the start of something big? I think the jury is still out on that one.
There is one thing that I can guarantee that you require, and that is more sales.
It is a universal issue for every business, large and small. There are many areas that you can focus on in order to gain sales. I want to focus on your online activities.
It would be nice to think that all you needed to do is to publish your website and customers will come running. Sadly this rarely happens, you need to not only drive prospects to your website, but once there you need to convince them to buy from you. There are many things that need to occur in order for your site to make a successful sale, we are going to concentrate on the areas that you can change at little or no cost yourself today.
It is very important that you grab your customers when they land on your site, to do this you need a headline that will show them that you understand their problem and that they have found the answer for it. Most companies treat their website like they treat their advertising, half the ad/website is taken up by their name and logo, and the actual product, service or solution is stuck down the bottom almost as an afterthought.
Switch your priorities and write your website from your prospects point of view, you will increase your sales overnight as each visitor will be sure as they land on your site that you can provide the solution that they require.
So go now and re write your opening paragraph on your website, so that it no longer reads ” Hi, thanks for stopping by, we are J Kibble and Sons and have been selling English apples since 1874″ to ” Do you miss gorgeous crunchy English apples? We provide the crunchiest apples grown in the UK today……. see our huge variety selection below…..”
Which would you stick around and read?
Tomorrow my next top tip for increased sales…….
I have spent the last two days trying to fix a freezing up problem with a pc in the office. Ordinarily this wouldn’t present too much of an issue, but this pc runs all my seo reporting software for all my clients. As a consequence I have no month end reports to deliver and little hope of producing them any time soon.
The software creator isn’t the most helpful chap so moving to a different pc is time consuming and fraught with agro. My PC man has assured me that it will be working today…… we will see, as i am not convinced.
I have used the reporting software, Agent Web Ranking for a couple of years, and although it is expensive it has given the most accurate results I have been able to find online. If anyone knows of a better, cheaper way of providing accurate ranking results then please let me know?
Sometimes I wonder why I work with computers, they make my head hurt!
After all his posturing, it looks like the teams association FOTA have won their battle to have Max Mosley removed from the FIA. He will Resign in October, having also agreed to abandon ideas for a financial cap on teams for 2010 and 2011.
The teams have won an important victory and shown their strength to a now weakened FIA . This is the best outcome for the good of the sport in general, now we will at least have one unified championship even if it is running at venues that have to use cardboard cutouts in the stands instead of real fans.
If we could only get Bernie to go back to the proper race tracks that support proper fans, such as Silverstone then we might have a great F1 Championship once more.
Ron Dennis was reported to have said ” Ha bloody Ha” – not really, I made that bit up.
Max Mosley is determined that in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that he is right and the only man who can rescue F1 from the right mess he has made of it.
In much the same way as dear old Gordon believes that as the instigator of our economic malaise he is the only one capable of fixing it, so Max truly believes the same.
He is determined to run the championship next yearm in spite of having no one who wants to race in his series. That to Max is nothing more than a stumbling block which he will probably just ignore anyway. The press release will read something like ” Closest racing ever seen…..” as a couple of non entities battle to come what would have been 18th and 19th on this years grid.
It is undoubtedly almost time for Bernie to jump ship and side with the teams in order to protect his own business which is likely to be worth precisely nothing if Max continues to lead as only max can.
I can see Bernie positioning himself at the head of the teams before long in order to protect his comercial rights. He is under pressure from CVC to whom he sold 50% of his business in 2001. Without the teams he has no business, and he will be far more aware of that than Max clearly is.
The whole F1 fraternity from fans down are now aware that Max needs to go. He should have been happy that he had Ron Dennis’s head, and gave his team Mclaren a realy good spanking financially. It makes you wonder what lengths you have to go to in order to satisfy Max in any way shape or form?
So here we are, on the eve of a possible breakaway Formula 1 series. It has been threatened in various forms for years, but now it is looking like a reality. It is time surely for Max and Bernie to relinquish their strangle hold on the sport and allow it to breathe once more.
I am looking forward to seeing some racing on some of the popular race tracks that Bernie discarded on the grounds of affordability. Silverstone will be a great centerpiece for the new FOTA series, how he must be regretting his fall ont with the BRDC now?
Max and Bernie are it seems, two bitter old men, who are stubbornly refusing to listen to reason and seem determined to ruin the great sport that they have been the caretakers of for so long. They don’t seem to realise that it is the teams and drivers that sell tickets and put bums on seats, not F1 itself, which is merely the umbrella that they race under. Without Ferrari and the existing big teams, Bernie and Max have nothing, they have A1 GP, or GP2 and nothing more. They will be running nothing more than at best a feeder series for the real F1 series.
It isn’t good for the sport to split like this, look at what happened to Indy when they split?
It is time for Max to go, it is time for Bernie to go. We need younger, saner people running the sport or soon we will have no sport at all.
Latest figures out show that in the three months to May 09 unemployment rose by a staggering 250,000, a rise of 12.5% in just three months.
It is estimated that up to 500,000 new school and college leavers will fail to find work this summer adding drastically to the already spiralling jobless total.
All the signs are that this will get worse before it starts to recover.
It is also considered likely that there will be a large contingent of Labour MP’s joining the dole queue shortly.
Back in the sixties, Dr Beeching changed forever the way that we travel in the UK….. or rather he didn’t. We had already changed the way that we travelled, he just did what was necessary and closed loads of train lines that didn’t get used enough.
Now that seems set to be reversed as 300 miles of line and up to 40 new stations are set to be opened, or reopened.
I have long had a problem with Trains. If you are traveling long distance go by air, it is faster, cheaper and as such more rewarding. If you are going short distances then how are you going to make the last part of your journey. Public transport is so poor in most areas of the UK that you are forced to finish your last part of the journey by taxi, or worse of all, to travel by the devil of all motorised transport, the public bus.
The main problem with trains is that they don’t go where we need them to. Fancy doing some shopping? How close will the train get you to your local retail park? And assuming you can get there, are you really going to struggle home on the train when you and your shopping can drive home from door to door?
The reason that Dr Beeching made such huge cuts is that outside of commuting and students going back to University for half price, nobody uses trains because the car will take you where you want to go, whereas a train will take you to the town nearest to where you want to go.
It is said that there is demand for these lines to be reopened, but I doubt it. If you asked the right people you could find a nostalgic bunch prepared to vote for the reinstitution of local rail lines, but not people who will actually use the trains once they are there.
Twenty years ago, we were providing a £1 Billion (inflation adjusted) a year subsidy to the trains, in 2009 it is £5 Billion and has been for a few years.
Is this the price we pay to get traffic off the roads?
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Once upon a time a man decided to sell buckets, so he found a bucket wholesaler, rented premises on a busy high street where he would get lots of business and set about selling his buckets. He placed adverts in the local papers, had a large display out side his shop and his customers loved him. He sold buckets by the ton, and very soon he became a wealthy man.
Thesey were the halcyon days of bucket selling, marketing buckets was simple, he was the only bucket seller in town and so he had the market to himself.
Then one day, he heard that a bucket shop had opened across town in a cheaper area where costs were lower. In the new shop buckets were stacked 50 high in a huge warehouse. They sold their buckets mail order as well as to the public.The new shop was selling buckets for half the cost of his. He started to panic, he couldn’t compete with that, he couldn’t buy his buckets as cheap as the new shop was selling them……..
This picture has replicated itself across every product in every town in the country, the way in which goods are sold has been transformed by several things. Firstly by the ability to market online 24 hours a day, 365 days per year. Secondly by ofshore manufacturing. It is much cheaper to make goods in the far east and ship them to wealthy countries. The cost of manufacture can be slashed to pence on almost everything you can think of.
Effective marketing takes several forms, but in this global economy in which we live, the internet rules business. People consult one portal in their masses……Google.
Google gives lists of websites that it feels will provide the products or services that are related to your search. It has become very good at doing this and has an effective monopoly with 80% of all search traffic. What google created was a super busy high street of highly qualified traffic. Imagine you could pick up your shop and put it anywhere you wanted. I would put my bucket shop in a high street full of people that only wanted to buy buckets.
Can you see why Google is such a powerful tool for driving traffic to your website? You can pick select keywords, and see how much traffic currently exists for them. You then know what website traffic to expect once you get your site into the top ten for that keyword.
By doing this we can take the guess work out of our marketing, because we know how many people will be on our “High Street” tomorrow and the next day. All you then need is to get into the top ten…….. that’s the easy bit………. visit Search Engine Optimization For more details
Gordon Brown must be wondering where all the chaos has gone during the last 24 hours. He has had a whole day without a tragedy of some description or another befalling him. New cabinet collegues struggling with expenses claims is run of the mill good day stuff these days, water off a dead ducks back you might say.
I can’t help but feel that this is indeed the calm before the storm and that shortly he will be under assault once more.
Until that day comes….. happy days for Mr B.
