“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.”

   ~ Sherlock Holmes, “A Study in Scarlett” (Arthur Conan Doyle)

The famous detective makes a good point—it's hard to say exactly how well your business is doing unless you have some numbers. Data is a tricky thing though, since not all of it is relevant. For example, having 2,000 likes on a Facebook page doesn't help you if none of those people have ever made a purchase. So what data should we track? How do we gather that data? What do those metrics mean?

Featured Resource this week - TurboDial

This Personal Communicator brings the Power of Infusionsoft to your Inside Sales Campaigns!

With turboDial you never leave Infusionsoft – place a phone call to any contact at any time right from MyDay, from a saved search or from contact and opportunity records!

Plan your calls in advance or make them spontaneously – turboDial is the only solution effective for both

Check out others who we recommend - solid vendors and products that could benefit your business today.

We have been in an ever-evolving battle against internet bots….it’s almost like like a sci-fi thriller….we put up an anti-bot shield and the bots defeat it, so we put up a better one.

This anti-bot shield is known as CAPTCHA. You have all seen the different things on forms, such as typing in the letters that appear, or doing some arithmetic.

We’re often told that these days marketing is a visual art. You need stunning, dynamic images that will grab your audience’s attention and make your other content really pop. And to produce those images, of course, you’ll need top quality dedicated graphics professionals.

There is some truth to this idea. Quality images can definitely make your content stand out, and potential customers will quickly turn away from large, ungainly blocks of text. But do you actually need to spend a fortune on top quality graphic design? Should you attempt to do some of it yourself?

Featured Resource this week - Digital Product Delivery

Digital Publishing for eBooks and Downloads

DPD is an easy to use digital publishing platform for selling and delivering downloadable content. Upload your products to DPD and start selling in minutes. With DPD, all sales are paid directly to you with no per-sale fees, bandwidth charges, or commissions.

Check out others who we recommend - solid vendors and products that could benefit your business today.

What you don’t know can’t hurt you, so we’re told as kids. When we grow older, we quickly find out that not knowing about something can ruin our day before we can even say our first ‘Good Morning.’ As a small business person, you know the best way to avoid problems is to anticipate them ahead of time, which is why you track your results to stay ahead of the game.

But are you tracking the right results? 

Like it or not, texting has become a communication standard in today’s world. Whether we’re setting up a meeting or simply asking our significant other to pick up a gallon of milk on the way home, texting is often our go-to means. According to a 2015 report by Informate, a mobile tracking firm, U.S. smartphone users are sending and receiving five times as many texts as phone calls, and that trend is even more pronounced among millennials.

So if texting is here to stay, should you be using it in your marketing?

Featured Resource this week - Call Monitoring with Infusionsoft

Call Monitoring Integrated With Infusionsoft!

Novice marketers focus on getting the lead, but experienced marketers know that the job is only done when dollars exchange hands. You can cut the cost of generating a sale by 50% or more when you monitor and track how well incoming calls are being handled.

Check out others who we recommend - solid vendors and products that could benefit your business today.

Do you want to simplify your Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales marketing, make it more effective and serve your customers better? Automated emails to the rescue!

Once October rolls around customers are thinking about holiday shopping and are more apt to open emails that contain gift inspirations and deals. So even if you aren't participating in Black Friday or Cyber Monday, promoting your December holiday specials now makes sense.

You know you need a strong online presence and so you’ve created great content. You also have strong visuals and even some great video to go with it. That’s only part of the equation, however. You still need to upload it to your site in a timely manner, and it needs to look good when it goes live. If there are any formatting issues or long load times, it could blunt the impact of your message, or worse, cause it to be ignored altogether. If that weren’t enough, your content needs to look good on all sorts of different cellphones, tablets and desktops. It also needs to be SEO-friendly, otherwise Google may bury it.

Featured Resource this week - Time Fusion

Automate Your Appointments

Are you using TimeTrade or Full Slate to give your clients online access for setting appointments with you? If not, you should be!

TimeFusion integrates Infusionsoft with TimeTrade and Full Slate to automate your appointment scheduling!

Check out others who we recommend - solid vendors and products that could benefit your business today.

When you get a new lead, how many times do you touch them before you give up? By touch I mean contact, not physical touching obviously… but if you can actually meet them and shake their hand all the better, although that is frequently not an option.

Or worse, do you get a new lead and immediately hard sell them… bad, very bad.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but those words still count. With all the technological toys at our disposal, great copy is still the heart and soul of any great marketing effort. It has to immediately grab a reader’s attention and then hold onto it. In today’s market, you have about 7 seconds to hook a visitor before they decide to move back to their search engine results. Great copy can set your brand apart and make all the difference in your conversion rates.

Featured Resource this week - Grammarly

Grammarly is the world’s most accurate grammar checker. 

Grammarly makes you a better writer by finding and correcting up to 10× more mistakes than your word processor.

Check out others who we recommend - solid vendors and products that could benefit your business today.

If you’re in business, you’re in the marketing business. And you’ve been handed a gift worth $8.4 B (that’s billion!). In fact, this is a gift that repeats annually and has increased in value by 60% in the past 10 years. Run all the way to your bank with it!

Halloween is big business and there’s no reason you can’t cash in on some of it. Think about your audience and how to creatively engage them using Halloween to promote your business, your products, your services, your brand.