Mastering The Keyword Sales Pitch

Selling products on your website may sound like an easy task, but is actually quite complicated and difficult. Like traditional sales people, it's your responsibility to target consumers and convert your site visitors into customers; only you won't be using the phone to get your message across.

To generate more sales, you want to try and convert visitors of your site into customers in need of the products you sell. This is difficult to achieve from the perspective of search engines, but your website should be authoritative, organized, credible and encouraging of serious customers so that they'll buy your products. The easiest way to get these potential customers to your site is through keywords, which are entered into search engines by consumers looking for a specific product or service.

It's important to think of all the keywords associated with your products that consumers may enter when searching for a service. For example, if a customer is looking for a backpack, it's likely that they'll begin their search by entering the word "backpack" into a search engine. If your website sells only backpacks, it's obvious that your domain name should include the word "backpack" in order to generate the most traffic possible.

If the domain name of your choice i.e. www.backpack.com is already taken, think of variations of that keyword that will still attract search engines. For the word "backpack" there are several different domain names you could use: back-pack.com, backpacks.com, back_pack.com, back-packs.com, back_packs.com, ect. It's important to use a dot com domain name since it's easiest for customers to remember. A relevant and creative domain name is essential because it is your keyword and will have a great effective on your search engine rank.

After you've come up with a domain name, it's important to make sure that every other link on your page contains that word to reinforce your relevance and create even more keywords that search engines can use. This also applies for the content, titles, tags and descriptions located on your site. The more your keyword appears, the higher you'll be ranked on search engines. Try to think of all the words a consumer could associate with the product your are selling and spread those throughout the site as well. For instance, another word for backpack is book bag and it's likely that consumers will also enter that into a search engine when they're looking for a new backpack to buy.

When visitors located your website for the first time, it's incredibly important that the site have value and content, particularly if you're relying on your products to sell because of authenticity or uniqueness. You should be offering services or products that are useful to customers and at a competitive price, otherwise they'll go to another website. Offer them easy ways to understand your products or services by writing articles and posting them to your site. These articles can also act as a way to incorporate more keywords to bring more visitors to your site in the first place. Getting the visitors to your website can be complicated, but achievable. The hard part is offering a great product, price and service to actually make a sale.

The Relationship Between Marketing And Sales

When comparing marketing and sales and considering how they relate to one another I always think of the medium sized business where I had my first job. The marketing department people were serious and analytical, always busy with statistics and campaigns and meetings. The sales people were breathless, always on the go, always on the phone or going to meet customers, always on the cusp of some enormous deal, some magic sale that would catapult the company’s turnover way over the annual target. As a junior it seemed to me that the marketing people and the sales people were from two different planets. I now know that they were simply two parts of the same continuum.

Marketing can be described as the set of activities that are undertaken in order to generate leads, while selling is the act of turning a prospect a hot lead into a buyer and later a repeat customer. The marketing and sales functions of any organization are glued together by leads. If there are no leads, the two will fall foul of one another. I saw this in that business I was describing earlier. But leads work both ways. The marketing department has to deliver them and the sales department must act upon them to maximum advantage. But leads must first be generated and that is why marketing tends to overwhelm the sales function when the two are discussed.

The various forms that marketing takes are well known because they are so visible. They range from cold canvassing to brand or corporate advertising, through to the more targeted types of marketing such as direct response advertising and referrals, where the particular benefits of the product is explained to the customer. If this is done properly, then qualified prospects will actually approach the sales people for assistance. Sales people love those leads. It is in fact when the sales people take over the communication function that the lead ceases to be a lead and becomes a prospective customer, then a customer and finally a repeat customer.

Actually I have painted a somewhat idealistic picture of the lead relationship between the marketing function and the sales function. It is just not that simple because not all leads are equal. An extremely tiny percentage leads are customers who are ready to buy. Most of them are merely interested in possibly buying at a future date and some are just mildly interested, just browsing. That’s why it is important to have some sort of lead management system so that potential customers can be turned into buyers and buyers can become repeat customers. All follow up communication should be friendly and informative, definitely not hard sell. The company representative should be regarded as a helpful expert rather than a rabid sales person. Fortunately many of the follow up functions can be automated to take the form of email, direct mail, voice broadcast and fax broadcast. Obviously the lead would be encouraged each time to call directly if they have questions or a ready to buy. The follow up effort is usually a function of the marketing and sales departments combined.