offshore software development company

Took some time to think about this..
I don’t think I’m the right guy for the job – but I’d like to help you.
I want to point you in the right direction.

Your blog is an awesome lead generator.
It seems like the issue is getting as many people to the “next step” as possible. You need to capture details, or get them to contact you, or get them onto a database.

If I were you, I’d use what’s working well – talking about things that don’t work well with outsourcing – as a starting point.
An eBook – perhaps “Are You Making These 7 Common Outsourcing Mistakes?”.

Get as many people on an email list as possible. Keep communicating with them about outsourcing (in the same way that you communicate in your blog) and at the end of each communication, offer them your services.
Similarly, have a small box at the bottom of each of your blog posts inviting people to trial your outsourcing services.

Driving traffic (visitors) to your site is another issue.
I’m a big fan of Adwords – it costs money, but if you can’t pay for leads, you don’t have a business.
Drive Adwords leads into a brief salesletter promoting your ebook. Here’s an example of a salesletter that does a similar thing: http://www.alliancesoftware.com.au

Blogging gives you some leverage too.
Look for places that you can guest-blog. anywired.com might be a good place. Go through the Technorati top 1000 blogs, and look for anything that’s relevant to you.

On any page that you ask for people’s details, make sure your face is on it.
Not badly, but you have an Indian name – it would be easy for someone to assume (incorrectly) that you were another “Bob from Bangalore”
You need to differentiate yourself.

Once you have a few thousand subscribers to your blog (or people on your email lists), consider putting together a book.
All you will need to do is copy the information from your blog, rework it into a book format, and publish. You can publish yourself through Lulu and be sold in Amazon, or try for a publisher – although it’s much harder to do in America than it is here in Australia.
Books are incredible lead generators. If you can find the right “hook” (like Tim Ferriss did), you can expect to sell tens of thousands of copies. A large percentage of these people will get on your database. If this happens, you’ll never have a problem with leads ever again.

The final point (the book) is how we collected enough leads to do our $570,000 in 37 minutes. We had 7,000 people on a database, published a book. Those 7,000 people bought (plus plenty of others) and the book was an instant best seller.
Once the book was a bestseller, we received massive publicity for it, sold 100,000 copies, and went from 7,000 leads to 21,000, to 47,000 practically overnight.
Those 47,000 told their friends, and pushed the number up to around 60,000.
We ran out of products to sell to them… so we sent out a survey… And asked them what problems they were having, and what they wanted to buy.
They told us… We created a product that specifically addressed their answers… Built some anticipation around the product, giving people “teasers”. When we launched, we took 37 minutes to completely sell out – netting $570,000 in sales.

Pretty cool huh? Now think about how you can apply this advice to your own business.

Technorati Tags: internet marketing, online marketing, web marketing, website marketing

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1. The #1 Rule of Website Marketing
2. When Marketing Consultants Ask for Referrals…

But what always makes me laugh is when I hear of marketing consultants that look for clients through referrals. Logic would dictate that if you’re good at what you do, you wouldn’t need to look for clients… they would come to you. This is even more apparent when you consider internet marketing and website marketing consulting companies. As easy as it is to blog, set up PPC ads, write in industry journals, create authoritative sites, distribute free widgets, answer discussion forum questions, upload YouTube videos, build email lists, and send Tweets, you’d think marketing pro’s would never need to hire outbound sales people or ask for referrals. Let me be clear, if they get business because their clients rave about how good they are to their peers, this is FANTASTIC. There’s nothing wrong with a marketing company asking for referrals per se, but if they get most of their business that way, I’d be a little skeptical.  When a marketing consultant actively asks for referrals, and relies on new business using sales people, cold calls, asking for referrals, I wonder why they don’t just market themselves with the same tactics they advocate to their clients. Think about it, if I want to get clients for my marketing company, I could cold call petstore owners and dazzle them with words like SEO, PPC, and internet marketing. Or, I could brand myself as a pet store marketing authority and have pet store owners find me naturally. I want to do a blend of both, but I’d lean towards the latter. Here’s why…

Wil Schroter wrote a post last year called “If You’re So Smart…” where he said:

Recently I sat down with a financial manager who wanted to pitch me on using his firm to manage my finances. He gave me a laundry list of reasons why his firm should be the group that makes the key financial decisions for my money. I waited quietly for his pitch to finish so that I could ask the one question I’ve never gotten a good answer to.

I simply asked him “If you’re so smart with capital, why would you have time to manage mine?”

Or read this story from Perry Marshall (get on his email list, they are the most inspirational, insightful, and thought provoking business articles I’ve ever read) where he talks about an experience with an accountant:

So let’s understand how I got a bad accountant and a bad financial planner: I originally got referrals from people who were mediocre at best. NON experts. I am not a finance expert by any stretch of the imagination whatsoever; things like accounting and taxes bore me to tears. Thus I have limited ability to judge such people.

The point is this:

If you do not have expertise in something it is extremely hard to identify an expert. You can easily be taken in by someone who talks a great game but really doesn’t know what he’s doing.

It’s true in finance and it’s DOUBLY true in marketing.

You can outsource financial stuff – maybe even most of it. (So long as you don’t ABDICATE responsibility to the pencil pushers – you have to sleep with one eye open. And you never EVER let anyone else sign the checks.)

I do not believe you can outsource marketing. You can only outsource pieces of it.

On Friday one of my close colleagues told me he spent 15 years trying to avoid this reality. Wasn’t interested in marketing, wasn’t his strong suit, didn’t really understand it. Got his but kicked time after time after time until he got the lesson.

He finally accepted this and now he’s not getting his butt kicked anymore.

You CANNOT hire someone else to be the face and voice of your business. Only you can do that.

You can’t hire someone else to understand your customers. Only you can do that.

Amen Perry.

Yes, we are marketing consultants, and yes, we practice what we preach. Paradoxically, we also realize that it is sometimes more profitable to pursue our own projects instead of taking on client projects. That’s exactly why we’re so picky with who we choose to do business with.

If you’re looking for a web marketing consultant, you need to understand the #1 rule of website marketing, your customers, and your competitors. They’ll help you with the tactics (viral marketing campaigns, SEO, etc.) and shake out your marketing strategy, but YOU have to be the one that finds them first.

I mean, what’s the point of hiring a marketer if they can’t market themselves?

Technorati Tags: marketing consultant, marketing consultants, online marketing, web marketing, website marketing

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1. The #1 Rule of Website Marketing
2. How This Guy Made $570k in 37 Minutes

We live in a YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, MySpace, Squidoo, blog, SEO, viral marketing, and RSS feed kind of world. With so many marketing channels at your disposal, it just makes sense to figure out how to make the most noise on all of them and wait for the money to come rolling in… WRONG! So what is the #1 rule in marketing, and how can you utilize it to market your website? It’s advice that has been given by wise men and sages countless times in history: from the ancient Greeks to the Chinese General Sun Tzu. If you’re looking for a marketing consultant, this rule is equally important.

This powerful marketing advice can be summed up in two simple words:

Know thyself…

The #1 rule in marketing is to know who you are. Know your strengths, know your weaknesses, know what your customers love (and hate) about you, know  what people think of you, know what kind of organization you want to be. Sounds simple (because it is), but here’s 5 reasons why it’s so important:

1). Attracts Opportunities: People sense when you know what you’re about. They sense your confidence and are drawn to you because of it. A perfect example is Aaron Wall and his SEOBook membership. He’s not the flashiest of SEO’s out there, and he doesn’t blatantly list his Fortune 500 clients on his site, but he’s solid (Seth Godin endorses him) and is probably the sharpest SEO mind in the industry.  His advice is timeless and doesn’t rely on tricks or flashy gimmicks to get his sites ranked. His no-nonsense style attracts opportunities and clients.

2). Filters Out Bad Customers: You don’t go to McDonald’s expecting filet mignon, and you don’t go to Morton’s Steakhouse expecting a Happy Meal. Decide whether you’re going to sell steak to high rolling execs or burgers to little kids, and build a business around them.

3). Eliminates Competitors: Perry Marshall, the guy who literally wrote the book on Google Pay Per Click marketing said the best way to eliminate your competitors is to nominate yourself the king of a small hill:

For most businesses, the failure rate is 90%. For “anybody can do it” businesses, the failure rate is 99.9%.

Ah, the irony.

The lack of a USP for the individual business owner is why.

Here’s the cure to that:

-Adding a unique twist… something special of your own that nobody else adds. You didn’t have a USP, now you do.

-You niche that uniqueness to a very specific “nano-niche”.

If you’re selling soap, you recognize that being the king of “soap” on the Internet is a nearly impossible task. At least in the short term.

So you appoint yourself the king of “Lemon Scented Hand Soap” instead.

Nobody else has really claimed that hill as their own. It’s poorly guarded. You can storm the barricades and win.

And you build out your empire from there.

4). Establishes Credibility: Customers trust you when you define who you are (and who you aren’t). If you’re the king of lemon scented soap, then you’re the King of Lemon Scented Soap. Now you build a public platform around it by advertising, blogging, and writing articles about the benefits of lemon scented soap. It’s a small niche, but you’re the king, and people looking for lemon scented soap will take notice. Which leads me to my next point…

5). Dictates Marketing Tactics: About the YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, MySpace, Squidoo, blog, SEO, viral marketing, and RSS feed world that we live in… knowing yourself and your target market dictates how you reach out to them. Say your company fixes septic tanks. Do you really think people are looking for Tweets and viral YouTube vids about cleaning up sewage in a backyard? Now, if my septic tank explodes and I have a huge mess in my backyard I’m going straight to Google. Your reputation, speediness, and quality are more important to me than cost at this point (especially if I have a wedding planned in my back yard a la “Meet the Fockers”) In this case you’d be wise to invest time and money in search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) advertising so you catch me when I’m looking for a solution… FAST.

Now if you have a company that sells a product that prevents my septic tank from exploding, you’d invest less in SEO and PPC and focus more on educating me. You could set up a blog with articles and videos about common home care tips, or send Tweets with links to articles about ways to improve the value of your home. This way you become a trusted source of information, making it easier to introduce your septic tank maintenance system. I’m not searching about septic tank maintenance unless it blows up, but I am looking at quick tips to make my house nicer. Give me enough of this info and I’ll be sure to buy your septic tank maintenance system. Afterall, it’ll save me time and money… won’t it?

The point is that you have no shortage ways to market yourself online. Whether you’re working with external marketing consultants, or markeing on your own, your most important job is to define who you are and let the tactics sort themselves out.

Technorati Tags: internet marketing, marketing consultant, marketing consultants, online marketing, search engine marketing, web marketing, website marketing

Related posts:

1. When Marketing Consultants Ask for Referrals…
2. How This Guy Made $570k in 37 Minutes