Simply put, the sales funnel is a way of looking at the way a business sells its product. It isn’t so much a radical new idea or extreme marketing technique—instead, it’s a tool that allows a business to maximize its selling potential by analyzing the entire sales process, from the first contact with customers to the final sale.

Imagine a funnel: wide at the top, narrow at the bottom. As you progress down through the sales funnel and closer to the final sale at the bottom, prospective buyers will drop out, narrowing the funnel. Remember that this isn’t a bad thing; it’s simply the process of transforming potential buyers into committed clients. Analyzing the flow of prospective customers from one stage to the next can help you identify your weakest steps—helping you make your business plan stronger than ever.

Both major corporations and small businesses have increasingly dedicated a growing percentage of their marketing budget to online campaigns. Most people on the Internet still find websites through major search engines like Google and Yahoo.

In order to achieve high search rankings, websites must master search engine optimization. However, all too often, sites place too much emphasis in building up external links to their web pages. As a result, they neglect the importance of proper onsite SEO.

“Where should we go?” you ask in an email.

“How about that sushi place on the other side of town?” he says. “It’s about thirty minutes.”

“That sounds pretty far. What about Lil’ Saignon?” you ask. "It’s a lot closer…"

“Ah, but this one is brand new – and they have the best squid you’ve ever tasted...” He includes the link to the website, but it’s one of those restaurants where the menu doesn’t list the prices. 

“Hmmm,” you say to yourself. “I don’t know if it’s worth driving all that way and paying who knows what for squid.” But, your mutual friend vouched for him, so you go ahead and agree.

“Great!” he sends back. Then at the bottom of his email you read, “Hey, by the way, you mind picking me up? My car’s on the fritz.”

"Well, fine,” you say. But you’re starting to think twice about this whole thing.

“Ah, thanks!” he says, “Look, it’s right up your alley. The only thing is I’m not sure how long we’re going to have to wait at the restaurant. See there’s no reservations. And there’s always a line.”

You email him back and say, “Look, can you give me some more info about this deal you’ve got, because I’m pretty busy and I want to make sure it’s for me.” You’re getting anxious now.

His response comes back quickly. “There’s nothing to worry about! You’re going to get a lot out of it, I promise. But hey, one last thing – I’m kinda broke, do you mind picking up my tab – just this time? It’ll pay off in the end. I promise.”

This friend of a friend – We’ll call him Jerry – has just put you through the worst sales funnel of all time. You haven’t even gotten to the business proposition yet, and already, he’s asked you to go somewhere unfamiliar to you. He’s giving you vague reasons that it will be worth your while. There will be a wait during which you’ll probably want to leave. Turns out he also needs a ride – for someone with a business deal, he seems awfully needy. And then, when you finally agree based on his good name, he raises the price by asking you to pay for his meal too.

When a customer hears about your product or services, whether it’s via your website, an email campaign, or an advertisement, they’re looking at an open door. If they step through it, they’re inside your sales funnel. Jerry got you this far. You admitted that you were interested in what he’s got to sell. But – the more difficult that sales process is, and the more confusing terms you heap onto the customer as they travel down the funnel – the more likely they are to back up, to click away, and to cancel the purchase.

In this article we’ll take a closer look at how a/b testing can make a significant improvement to the elements critical in driving e-commerce sales. Get the most out of your e-commerce strategy by following the guidelines and tips mentioned here.

Of course, you will want your levels of customer service to be as high as possible for more reasons that good marketing, but how can you use great service to promote your online company?

While it is obviously important for your website to rank highly for relevant, high traffic terms, restricting your efforts to solely a handful of primary keywords can lead to you overlooking one or two easy wins that are available with just a little effort and no expenditure. If you are still waiting to see the fruits of your labour in organic search, let’s see how you can effectively drive traffic towards your site in the meantime.

Now, this article isn't about the history of copywriting or the origin of why we use that term. It's about a handful of ways you can write quick, timely “copy,” with your keywords and terms and keep it coming out on a regular basis to satisfy your throngs of adoring online readers (or, you know, at least your mom).

Luckily, the Internet's come up with some pretty handy tools for bloggers to help take their blog over the edge. From poll creators to interactive thesauruses, here are the top three tools for savvy bloggers.

Well, one, actually – if it worked REALLY well, but stay with me here – you'd probably want a few. Maybe at least three or four? Five even? (Also, who's footing the bill here, because the US closed down our space program and is kind of broke).

Let's say you wanted to supercharge your rocket with five propulsion units – now that's a rocket that's going to get some results. Same thing with your written content when it comes to powering conversions. The more pieces of content you have driving people to a specific page that you want to convert, the better your chances of conversions will be. Also: this article assumes that you already know which of your pages/items are converting well and which need help. If you don't know that, we'll cover it in a later post.

This guide is a quick and dirty “how to” on getting a bunch of content out there to direct traffic at a  low-performing page. It uses a lot of techniques that we've discussed here on Virtuosi Media before. It will not instantly make you a million dollars or drive that page to the top of Google searches. It will, however, get you on the path towards increased sales down the road. Like anything, though, it'll take time.

As a matter of fact, this whole six part series has been a special event. We hope that you've enjoyed it. We had fun doing it. We'll definitely do another one some time in the future. Check back with us every two weeks on Tuesdays for more great ecommerce, SEO, and content marketing articles. You'll be the first to know about special events.

Keeping a website visible amidst the millions of other domains online is a constant and often exhausting challenge. That’s why so many websites look for outside help in fighting the battle for search engine rankings.

As history proves, picking the right ally is everything.  Choosing the right SEO company is a crusade all its own.  There are plenty of companies out there, all offering different services at different prices, making different claims and different promises.  Finding the right one takes time and research, but here are a few good things to keep in mind while you’re shopping for the best SEO company for you. 

Here is a look at the series so far:

• What is Content Marketing And How Can It Benefit Your Business?
• How To Plan Content Marketing Strategies For Your Website
• How To Create A Schedule For Your Content Marketing Plan
• How To Manage Multiple Authors For Your Website

Without further ado, let's get into using other sites and blogs to support your content marketing and SEO efforts.

First off, let's get this out right off the bat: Guest blogs and curated posts/links on other people's blogs/sites are some of the strongest ways that you can promote your website, boost your online visibility, and gain powerful backlinks. Comment links and forum posts have their place – usually to participate in the conversation surrounding your chosen issues (ecommerce, environmental issues, tech sales, whatever). But when you get a guest blog or a shout out from another site that includes a backlink to your site with your preferred anchor text, it sends a very clear message to your readers and to Google (and the other big search engines). It says: “Hey! This person is worth your time and attention!”

So how can you get these guest blogs and how can you best use them to your advantage? Let's find out.

• What is Content Marketing And How Can It Benefit Your Business?
• How To Plan Content Marketing Strategies For Your Website
• How To Create A Schedule For Your Content Marketing Plan

If you've been following us since the beginning, hopefully by now you have a broad idea of how you're going to accelerate your content marketing, improve your online presence, and hopefully drive conversions. But you might also find yourself thinking: “This is a big job! How can I do it all on my own AND run my whole company?”

What Is Good Web Design and Why Do You Need It?

Creating a website is not a big deal at all! You don’t necessarily need a professional PHP or HTML 5 website. There are several platforms out there that offer options that work well on a tight budget (although these, of course, these have limitations). The main thing your website needs is to be clear and easy-to-understand along with being easy on the eye. Make it simple for users to quickly find the information they need. If the visitors can easily connect with your business website, they will start to trust you and begin to develop a relationship with you. Users will definitely want to find out more. Let’s take a look at what factors make a good website and why you should focus on them.

If you're just joining us now, take a minute and familiarize yourself with the first two articles in our series so that you know what we're talking about here.

• What is Content Marketing And How Can It Benefit Your Business?
• How To Plan Content Marketing Strategies For Your Website

Setting Goals

As we discussed last week, if you don't set concrete goals, then you have nothing by which to measure your efforts. This is true of everything, but in content marketing, this takes a few forms: regular, ongoing goals, discrete goals, and long-term goals. They all affect each other in the long run, and we'll see how shortly. A few notes about schedules before we get started. Some of these points may seem like common sense, but you'd be surprised how many sites ignore them.

Here's a checklist of what I recommend you look for when “shopping your own shop”:

1. How do you define success?
2. What's keeping you on track for your eventual goal?
3. Do you have only one goal or do you have various smaller sub-goals?

Hopefully even these few questions have started you thinking about how important it is to have an effective content plan and editorial schedule in place for your website before you start cranking out content (or squeezing it out, or dragging it out). Having a strong, well-defined plan in place before you begin will help keep you on track for your goals and make managing other authors easier (we'll get to that next week!).

This may mean you getting that job position you applied for or further consolidation of a business relationship. That is why it is very important to know how to go about making an effective follow-up letter so you can grab a higher chance of a favorable outcome. Here are some guidelines on how to do just that.

This is the first article in a series of articles about content marketing. Over the next five weeks, you’ll learn how to plan your content marketing strategy, how to get and manage multiple authors for your site, why your strategy should span multiple web properties, and how to drive traffic to your site with content marketing events.

With the help of your lead generation efforts, your small business will benefit from powerful online presence and bolster your credibility as an expert in your field. The only problem is it must be done the right way and there are just so many things that could go wrong with your site.

Whilst a specialist will no doubt help direct the social campaign of a company, the rewards of effective use of social media can only be achieved when said businesses are using social accounts on a daily basis to engage with their audiences. I will now explain further using the example of Twitter to illustrate why this is the case.

With technology, we now have the tools to make marketing much easier. But the downside is that technology also makes it less effective. Think about this, your TV ads may not reach your intended audience who use TiVo to record their favorite programs. Caller ID now blocks calls from marketers. Your e-mail campaigns can easily be blocked by spam filters, while RSS and online media sites can put a serious damper on your newspaper and magazine advertisements.

What's more, traditional advertising and online initiatives to find more customers are very expensive.

So what's a business owner to do?  Turn to inbound marketing!

Many copywriters praise the virtues of the swipe file, a collection of what they consider well-written articles, headlines, offers, etc. When they need an idea, they simply reference this file and "swipe" a headline that will work for them and change a few details. But even more valuable than a swipe file is a ready stock of headline formulas--tried and tested headlines that work every time. There are lots of these, but here are five of the best. Memorize them and you'll always have a powerful headline for any occasion.

Quite seriously though, installing and operating Rank Checker really is a fairly simple process that almost anyone should be able to complete with relative ease, as long as they follow the step-by-step instructions that we're posting below. 

In the simplest terms possible, Rank Checker allows you to keep tabs on where your business is ranking for the keywords that you want to capture in search.

So where do you begin to try to grow the online visibility of your local business?  Here are a few tips to get any business owner headed in the right direction with online marketing.

So, how can local businesses turn a negative review to their advantage?

Strong copywriting on the internet is the same as speaking to a group in an auditorium with a firm, confident voice. When you have a site with good copy on it, people pay attention, listen, and trust you.

Weak copy erodes consumer confidence, is uninformative, and ultimately costs you money. In this list we'll run down five ways you can fire up your ecommerce copywriting, allowing you to draw people in, keep them there, and convert them into sales.

So what can be done?  What steps can you take to make sure that your social network profiles are safe and secure? 

The result is a new emerging shopping trend termed “social shopping”. This is newly coined phrase to explain the common practice of youngsters to seek advice from friends before buying anything, from clothes and shoes to laptops and electronics. Interestingly this does not imply that people go shopping in a group-instead it involves smart use of the smart phone! According to a study conducted by Yahoo! social shopping has revolutionized the way in which people buy clothes now.

Just as the search engines have taken notice and adjusted the way they index and display content, so too must your business develop an online marketing strategy that focuses on the creation of quality content rather than an overreliance on SEO and empty copy.  

In light of the above, now is the time to utilize the services of a professional copywriter who can create compelling and quality content that will advance your brand in the eyes of readers.

Content is king and drives traffic, which, in turn, drives revenue. Below we will discuss ten benefits of using professional freelance copywriters.

How well does your website represent your business? Do you even have a website? What kind of impression does your website make on visitors who could become customers? Do you convey a professional, competent image? Are your visitors able to find the information they need?

As the owner of a Vancouver-based web design company and a heavy user of the web, I’ve seen my fair share of business websites and not all of them have been pretty. In fact, some of them have been downright frustrating to use. And others, dare I say it, have made me cringe to even look at them because of the design.

If your business has an unprofessional website, you’re driving away potential customers and ultimately it means that you’re losing money. There are a few common issues that many unprofessional websites share. As I cover each issue, I’ll also point you towards a solution.

And yet, how many of us approach our businesses, our websites, and our products the exact same way?

1. Danger: Not Knowing Your Audience Can Be Deadly

Writing for the web is different than writing for the printed page. Many techniques will carry over, but there are some subtle differences of which you should take note. The web is an interactive medium and your users are generally looking for specific types of information rather than passively consuming a story or an article.

Audience attention span is much shorter online than it is for printed media and that means that your readers are less likely to make a time commitment if you don't capture their attention immediately and then hold it through out your piece. Readers are also far more likely to skim through any lengthy amount of writing and so your titles and headings have an increased importance online. The stakes are extremely high because if you fail to keep a reader's attention at any point, they will leave and use a search engine to find a more relevant website.

1. Tips for Staying Focused

If you are having trouble staying on task there are several techniques available:

• Do the thing you loathe first. Sometimes by getting your most dreaded task out of the way you will enjoy the rest of your day.
• Break down a big job into sections and attack each section at a time.
• Each day set a timer for 10 minutes and perform as many repetitive tasks as you can in those 10 minutes.
• Reward yourself whenever you complete a task - talk to a co-worker briefly, get a cup of tea, treat yourself to chocolate at lunch or take a short walk.

Try all four methods to find out which method works for you.

1. Renegotiate Contracts

Many vendors will agree to reduce your contract rates especially if you dictate to them that another vendor has offered you a better rate. Below are some specific types of contracts you might be able to renegotiate:

Telephone - I know of someone that was paying $500 on his cell phone alone per month. I urged this individual to renegotiate his contract. I have also renegotiated our business services and saved $2,000 per year on long-distance and regular business services.

Mortgage - With mortgage rates not able to retreat further than low tide now is the time to refinance with a lower rate. Make sure to check that the penalty for ending the higher rate mortgage is not more than the interest rate savings over the term of the mortgage.

But that doesn't mean that your business can't benefit from it if you're able to use it correctly.

A fad? Let me explain. Recent studies have been producing statistics that severely undercut the media hype around Twitter. I'll first present the data and then dissect it in a way that's meaningful to your business. Some of the data will vary depending on the date, the methodology, and the sample size of each study, but it should provide a clear picture in aggregate.

Twitter is growing, with an estimated 44.5 million unique visitors in June 2009, up 19% from the previous month. 45% of those visitors are from the United States. According to Alexa, a web stats company, Twitter is the 20th most popular site on the internet and Compete ranks it as the third most popular social network. It also ranks third behind Facebook and email as a way to share links.

Preparing a bank reconciliation, or a bank rec, at the end of each month is one of the best ways you can check the accuracy of your accounting records. A bank reconciliation statement will confirm that all the transactions in your cash account match those of your bank statement and vice versa. Bank reconciliations not only catch errors and adjustments but they can also discourage fraud.

In this article, you will learn how to prepare a bank reconciliation and I will define all of the related terminology. I'll also give you a simple example that you can use as a bank reconciliation template and answer some of the more common questions people will have about procedures and policy.

All right, you say, that's great advice, but what does it mean? How do you apply it? This isn't one of your normal viral marketing articles. I'm going to break down and dissect techniques that will give your blog articles, your tutorials, and your written content a chance to go viral.

What this article isn't is an article about how to create a viral video of a cat, someone falling down a flight of steps, or a dancing baby. In fact, I'm not going to talk about videos at all. Instead, I'm going to focus on the intentional steps that you can take when writing website copy that will be beneficial to your business and your website.

Will following these tips guarantee you'll instantly be the top site on the internet and everything that you touch will turn to gold? No, no one hits a home run every time and you might have to do some trial and error before you get it right. These aren't tricks; they're solid principles that you should be incorporating into your writing anyway, but they will give your written website content a better and a more consistent opportunity of becoming a talking point around the web.

This is your viral strategy tutorial and you have our permission to vote for it, link to it, submit it, tweet it, share it, and tell your friends about it.

What's different about this SEO guide? We're not a search engine optimization company and I'm not trying to sell you SEO services. I hate buzzwords without meaning or explanation (or value), so I'm going to be specific, not generic. This isn't a guide for how to build links or how to use social media effectively; it focuses solely on on-page optimization techniques.

Best of all? These are simple tips and tricks that you can incorporate into your website without much effort. It should take about 10 minutes to read this SEO tutorial for beginners, but implementing it will begin a process that will make a difference for your search engine rankings - you'll rank higher and convert more effectively.

If you haven't read the previous articles yet, I encourage you to read them first as this article will help solidify the concepts explained in the first two parts of this series.

If you haven't read the first article yet, I encourage you to read it first as this article will build on some of the principles established in the first.

Track Individual Twitter Accounts

First we'll look at ways to track individual accounts. You can look up statistics for your own account, but that's not the only way you can use these services. You can also use them to track your competition or people you'd like to emulate to see how they use Twitter.

Done right, the best employee of any business is its website. The website provides a first impression into the professionalism of your brand. It gives technical support, issues follow-up emails, lists contact information, and offers driving directions. A business website can generate leads, close sales, and create long-term fans.

We've done some research and found 4 niche social bookmarking sites for businesses. These sites aren't for business news, but rather focus on the entrepreneurial side of business and how you can improve all aspects of your company. Whether you're looking to improve your business or have business-related content you want to promote, we've gathered together the information that you really want to know.

Stop! Before you rush to submit all of your content, we ask that you respect these bookmarking sites. Be relevant. Be social. Write good content. Don't spam.

If you sign up for any of these sites, we'd love to be your first friend. Find our profiles and befriend or follow us. And if you have great content, be sure to let us know about it, we just might promote it.

Accounting software such as Quickbooks and Simply Accounting have a built-in Statement of Financial Position (SFP) and the Statement of Profit and Loss (P&L). These accounting packages also have budget modules in order to create a budget that reflects your business plan that can then be compared against your actual results. Either program is good for small business but I favor Quickbooks because of its flexibility.

While I'm not going to go into the specifics of setting up either Quickbooks or Simply Accounting, both have set-up wizards that will guide you through the process. Instead, I'm going to focus on some basic concepts that will enable you to understand the accounting principles used by both programs.

A Quick Overview Of Exchanging Links

A link exchange, also called a link swap or a reciprocal link, is a simple concept from the early days of the web. Bob contacts Mary and offers to link to her website from his site if she will do the same in return. Voila, a link exchange!

The purpose of a link exchange used to be to send traffic from one site to another, but as search engines gained in popularity and usefulness, people discovered that the more links they had pointing to their site, the higher their site would rank in the search engines. Link exchanges multiplied, in some cases even morphing into link farms, pages with nothing but links pointing to other sites.

Of course, the search engines eventually caught on to this tactic. They began to add other factors into their ranking formula and over time, the power of a single backlink became diluted in comparison to what it once was. Links to your web pages are still a major part of getting them to rank well, but the effectiveness of the classic link exchange is dead.

Don't believe me? Let's put link exchanging to the test.

You've paid a company a lot of money to have your site submitted to thousands of directories. You may have taken the time to list yourself in hundreds of search engines. You've tried increasing your PageRank, decreasing your outbound links, and buying incoming links from important sites.

You have (multiple) accounts with many of the social bookmarking sites and you've tried MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and a myriad of other social networking sites. You've tried to build up a network of blogs, Squidoo pages, and other websites in an effort to drive traffic to your site and to get your site higher in the search engine results page for that one vital keyword.

You've done all this to promote your site...and it's not working.

No one's clicking on your ads. You aren't selling as much of your affiliate products as the internet marketers told you that you would. Your sales conversions are abysmal. You just don't get enough traffic and the traffic that you do get doesn't stay on the site and doesn't do what you want it to do. You've poured so much time and energy into your site, but it seems like it's been an absolute waste.

Why?