This fascination has enabled me to open the Pandora’s box that gives deep insight into the art and the science of selling. Have you ever wondered why companies spend millions and billions of dollars purely on marketing? Some spend up to 60% of their revenue on marketing – those are insane figures.

Related: Change Your Mindset To Achieve Time and Financial Freedom

What Great Sales People Do

The Traditional Way of Selling

The traditional way of selling is focused on the use of logic to convince customers and to develop solutions. In this model, the best solution is the one that offers the most value for money.

Moreover, salespeople were supposed to be superhumans who knew everything and anything. They would rather slit their wrist open than ever admit to not having complete knowledge of what they are selling.

Interesting enough, a lot has changed over the past decade or so, and people no longer buy the superhuman salesperson approach. The dawn of the information age has changed how people make decisions. Consequently, the influence and persuasion tactics need to change, as well.

According to neuroscientists Ben Zoldan and Michael Bosworth, people no longer make decisions solely based on logic. Emotions play a huge part in their decision making. Thus, the new paradigm focuses on appealing to human emotions to make sales.

• Empathetic listeners
• Focus on making emotional connections with their clientele
• Avoid high-pressure manipulative sales pitches.

Outside the corporate world, vulnerability is an efficient tool used to win trust. The new paradigm has now mastered the power vulnerability to gain the trust of new prospects.

Stories – An Effective Way to Communicate and Break Barriers

Just as kids love a bedtime story, so do we like an engaging story. When was the last time you said ‘No’ to a good story? I bet never.

The benefits of using are:

• Engaging
• Good at building rapport
• Break down barriers and generally feel good.
• Highly inclusive regardless of age, education, or any other kind of background.

A good story starts with a balance; then something happens that throws life out of balance, which is restored towards the end of the story.

For instance, when trying to communicate that your organization goes the extra mile to provide excellent services, a good story would go like this.

The Balance:

Out of balance:

We were barely done with this project when another client reached out to us with a plumbing emergency. There was a small problem, though. The supervisor had allowed the technicians to go on leave to compensate for the extra hours they had put in for the past fortnight.

Balance restored:

However, when the technicians got wind that their supervisor problem, they volunteered to cut their leave short to come and deal with the crisis.

This is what I mean when I tell you that we are committed to going the extra mile to serve our clients.

Using Stories to Become a Top Seller

The fundamental rule of marketing is to create trust. When selling to a business or individual, there are specific steps that the customer takes before he/she decides to purchase your product or service.

The goal is to walk the customer through each step, to the point where he/she commits to purchase. Unfortunately, no single story can achieve this.

Thus in each step, you need to tell a story that moves the customer through the sales funnel. The primary goal of stories is to create trust by making an emotional connection.

You will need to tell three stories in this process:

1. The Who Am I Story

2. The Who I have Helped Story

3. The last story is who do you Represent

How to Become a Top Seller: The Wrap Up

The old paradigm focuses on the use of logic to make sales. These salespeople are excellent problem solvers and smooth presenters. The new model, on the other hand, tells authentic stories about the business, products, or services. Through showing vulnerabilities and use of stories, you are not only able to appeal to the buyer’s emotions but also to create trust and familiarity. This translates to lasting relationships and returning customers.

Eric Gichuru

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The post Become a Top Seller: What Great Salespeople Do appeared first on theLocco Magazine.

Also read: Home Improvement Catalog: Have a Million dollar backyard Look At Almost Zero Budget

Statement Jewelry

A thick circle necklace, extravagant rings, big hoop earrings, and other bespoke designs are examples of statement jewelry. Such jewelry shows that you are an open-minded, social and a bubbly person.

A thick dangling necklace adds a seductive allure to your style. Moreover, people who wear large colorful earrings and rings tend to be adventurous.

Statement jewelry depicts that you are confident and are not afraid to express yourself. It takes lots of guts to be cool calm and collected while attracting the attention of strangers who admire and admonish you at equal measure.

Recycled Material Jewelry

If your choice of jewelry gravitates toward earthy tones such as forest green, brown, beige and ocean blue, you are likely to be a down-to-earth person. Those who prefer jewelry made from recycled material such as bangle bracelets and sea glass or shell necklaces are mainly nature lovers and enjoy the outdoors.

Classic Elegance

Are into the classic pearls and designer jewelry? These classic pieces depict etiquette, finesse, taste, and elegance. It is also referred to as the “eternal style” because it is not only classy but also timeless. People who adorn such pieces, tend to have a calm demeanor and an elegant poise that communicates their strong personality in a subtle manner.

Gold Lovers

To these people, all that glitters is gold. Their style communicates that they are the best of the best. They choose every piece with great attention to detail and do not settle for second best. The need to always have the best and the latest also applies to all aspects of their life including lovers, friends, jobs, cars, clothing, etc. Such a person will always choose quality over quantity.

Handmade unique pieces (steal her style)

People who wear this type of jewelry capitalize on its uniqueness to make a bold statement. They mainly entail vintage style jewelry that is timeless and out of this world. Such people are the trendsetters, have strong personalities and are not afraid to express this through what they wear.

Matching sets of jewelry

This person selects matching sets of jewelry with perfect coordination. Their personality is precise, neat, and responsible which is reflected by their jewelry.

Wrap Up

The kind of jewelry you wear does speak volumes about your style and personality. Peoples perception about you are mainly influenced by what and how you wear. Thus, you need to choose your accessories carefully.

Eric Gichuru

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The post What Does Your Jewelry Say About Your Style appeared first on theLocco Magazine.

Also read: Onsite SEO Checklist For Beginners

10 Small Business Website Errors That Drive Customers Away

Study To Action Ratio

The study to action ratio refers to the proportion you put into action after you have studied and made your research. Sadly, you will realize that most individuals struggling with How to learn about internet marketing with good results, do not have or do not utilize the study to action ratio appropriately.

It is estimated that the typical internet marketer has a study to action ratio of 16 to 1. This means for every 16 hours they spend on studying internet marketing and other related issues, they only spend 1 hour acting upon this information.

With such a skewed action ratio, it is clear why it’s hard to succeed in your ventures. The most successful internet marketers with a six figure income have a totally different study to action ratio of at the very least 1 to 1.

In your journey to understand how to learn about internet marketing with great results, this should be you your starting point to the right direction as you work your way towards the 1 is to 12 action ratio which will guarantee you enormous success.

How to learn about internet marketing with killer results tip 1: Start At a Ratio of 1 to 1

A basic principal of getting killer results with internet marketing is that you should never study more than you can put into action, else you will have tough time making money online.

For starters, you should evaluate how much normally you do study and then consciously change the study action ration to 1 is to 1.

To appropriately execute this, plan ahead of time the total amount of time at your disposal to study and act. If you have 3 hours for instance, you can spend the first 30 minutes studying and act for another 30 minutes; and keep doing this till the time is over.

Ensure that each time you spend studying is immediately followed up with an equal or greater amount of time putting what you have learnt to action.

If you maintain the reading and action discipline, you will soon get addicted to taking action which it will not only be beneficial to you but also get to be fun.

How to learn about internet marketing with killer results tip 2: Taking It To The Next Level

For starters, any action is good action as long as you are on the right track to getting into the habit of acting at least as much as you study.

Soon it will absolutely easy for you to “take action at will”; however you will also need to take the best action possible to achieve the optimum results with minimum effort and time.

To achieve this, you first need a decision making strategy to help you know which information will produce the best results when acted upon.

From personal experience, there is that one thing that stands out or gets you interested in every guide. This is the thing that you should act on.

There are two reasons for this: first, being excited about something keeps you motivated and the more you are exited or feel good about something, the easier, fun and better you do it.

Secondly, you use your intuition and not your intelligence to make decisions and with time you will turn out to be a productivity robot. This is because you make decisions in a split of a second by just feeling them, rather than thinking about them. Sometimes making decisions by thinking often invites “paralysis by analysis” situation.

Having honed skilled in a particular field, you will soon find yourself generalizing these skills over to other internet marketing fields. Thus, having a well tuned intuition, you will have the ability to make more appropriate decisions, quicker than ever before.

How to learn about internet marketing with killer results tip 3: Learn To Walk Without Crutches

When we attempt to do anything for the first time, there is a high likelihood that we will not
do it very well. Until you learn to perform a task at the subconscious level i.e. doing it without much thought, you will make numerous mistakes or not execute it perfectly.

So here’s what you should do when you are trying to do something for the first time. After you have established what excites you in a study material or a training program, you should review this one thing until you have completely understood it.

Thus when you start taking action, you will have minimal need to continually make references to the training material.

How to learn about internet marketing with killer results tip 4: Act More and Read Less

After you are convinced that you have proper understanding of the information, minimize on the training or studying and start acting immediately.

Try as much as possible to implement on your own without making references the study. The goal is to immediately implement what you have learnt in a way that makes it live or rather has real world application.

This is often good, because it can immediately make you some cash or at least can give you data that will help you make future decisions.

After you are done acting on that piece of work, you should revisit the training manual and review the aspects that got you excited in the first place. This is where you review your work to make sure didn’t skip anything from the training manual, or made a mistake or misinterpreted a step.

This step is vital because, if you have made a mistake or missed something, you can now immediately correct it and will also enable you to better understand the process. This means that the next time you try to perform a similar task; you will do it effortlessly and get excellent results.

This is how to learn about internet marketing with killer results and immediately take action on any good information you come across to your benefit. With practice, you will realize that, you are acting or implementing far more than you are studying. Such practices will definitely make you a large amount of money within a short time period.

Eric Gichuru

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The post How To Learn About Internet Marketing With Killer Results appeared first on theLocco Magazine.

Why does my website need SEO?

Most of the new website owners do not understand the importance of SEO and how it can generate leads. Some of the website owners might already be actively engaged in social media to generate traffic to their site.

Also see: 10 Small Business Website Errors That Drive Customers Away

First of all, I would like to point out that social media marketing and other traffic generating forms of marketing are effective. However, most Internet users use search engines as the primary method of navigating the web and consequently, the most of web traffic is driven by search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Also see: 5 Reasons Your Brand Should be on Google+

Think of it this way, search engines are the web roadways, while SEO acts as the sign posts on the road to redirect the traffic to your site.

Now that you have things into perspective, I will present you with a checklist for “onsite” SEO for beginners, that you can personally implement on your website for you to reap the maximum benefits from organic web traffic.

1. Is Your Site Mobile Friendly?

Mobile friendliness or rather responsiveness refers to the ability of a website to display properly in handheld devices in terms of ease of use and navigation. Over the recent past, Google has established that more than half of daily web users are currently using mobile devices to surf the internet.

As a result, Google has announced that it will soon be launching a dedicated mobile index that will get priority over the traditional desktop index. This means that the websites that are mobile friendly will be rewarded by getting a higher ranking while, the ones that are not will be penalized by having lower rankings.

Thus, it is imperative for you not to miss out on appealing to mobile users who currently constitute the majority of web users.

Achieving responsiveness at times can be quite challenging, thus you need to consult your developer on how to go about it. However, it is far much easier to accomplish this using content management system (CMS) such as WordPress.

2. Use Google Keyword Planner To find Relevant Keywords

First you need a tool to help you find keywords relevant to your niche. Such a suitable tool is the Google Keyword Planner. This tool will help you establish the most searched for keywords, to help choose the best ones to target.

3. Use Keywords Appropriately

Having found the right keywords, you should ensure that your page URL includes your desired keyword. Ensure that you also use the Keyword at least once in an H1 tag, at least once in the subhead tags and several times within the body.

Also include the keyword in the first paragraph; Google rewards early use of keywords because it reduces the search time. Be careful not to ‘stuff’ the keyword because it might get detected as spam; the article should read naturally, and keyword should be just part of the flow of the article.

4. Are your Images and Videos Optimized?

It is important to add images and videos on your web page to not only make it appealing to the readers but can also be an effective way to drive traffic to your site through image and video search in the search engines.

It is important to note that Google and other search engines cannot visually recognize images or videos; they rely on the text descriptions of the image in the alt tags and file titles.

You need to name and describe your images and video files appropriately, by making the words as descriptive as possible.

Remember to add a descriptive “ALT” tag preferably with the keyword within the description.
The title the image or video file should also reflect what the image is all about, and should be clear and concise.

5. Do you have Relevant Internal and External Links?

For you to have effective on page SEO, it is important to include internal links early in your page because it reduces the bounce rate, thus enabling the visitors to navigate through various pages in your site before leaving your site.

The bounce rate is a critical factor that Google uses to determine your page ranking. Also, include at least 3 internal links in your post which will further help the search engine to crawl and understand your website.

Finally, include outbound links to relevant, authority sites to give your content more credibility; you might also get these sites to link back to your site.

6. Do you have social media distribution?

I had earlier mentioned that social media is a powerful lead generating tool. You should keep sharing links of fresh and informative content across a multiplicity of social networking platforms.

The most recommended social media networks to share your content include, Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Pinterest, Instagram, Linkedin among others.

Whether it is displayed on your company’s Linkedin profile, or re-tweeted, recommended, and re-distributed by someone else, the social media strategy has the capacity to create backlinks that multiplies the possibilities higher traffic to your site.

7. On Page Word Count

This aspect doesn’t often come up in many onsite optimization discussions. It is either people underestimate its capabilities or are not aware of it.

Longer content pieces preferably above 500 words tend to rank much better in the search results because the search engine perceive it a more relevant rich content.

8. Content Quality

Content quality is paramount for you to have a high ranking. Even if you use all the tricks in the book to get people to come to your website, you will have a very high bounce rate if you do not present the viewers with fresh, relevant, original and informative content and consequently poor ranking.

The bottom line is onsite SEO may seem somewhat like rocket science for the beginners. But with the above checklist, it is clear that you just need to understand a few basics of how search engines work and in no time, you will be able to transform your website into a lead generating tool through organic SEO.

References

http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-tutorial/
http://www.businessinsider.com/10-basic-seo-tips-everyone-should-know-2010-1?op=1/#oid-flash-6

Click to access search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

A Guide To A Perfect Onsite SEO Structure

On-Page SEO Checklist: How to Fully Optimize Your Posts

Eric Gichuru

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Some businesses have taken a swift response to adjust to these evolving marketplace demands. They have started redesigning their organization websites in mobile-friendly formats.  However, most of the businesses across the globe are lagging behind in this factor.

It is an almost inconceivable idea that to this day, companies do not to have mobile-optimized websites. Possibly, the decision-makers in these organizations are not aware of the negative impact this has on their bottom-line.

For more details on how unresponsiveness can do harm to your business see: 10 Small Business Website Errors That Drive Customers Away.

What is a responsive website?

Responsiveness goes beyond a website being accessible via handheld devices. It entails designing the site to display properly on smaller screens. It should also facilitate easy, convenient, and intuitive navigation.  This ensures that the visitors have a positive experience while using your website.

Surprising Statistics

It is no longer safe for businesses to assume that their potential clients will visit their website through the traditional laptop or desktop computer browser. In Australia alone, 75% of the population owns a mobile device. Moreover, 84% of this population is highly dependent on their phones for communication and entertainment.

Here is a glimpse of the statistics on mobile phone use from across the globe:

•  4 billion people in the world own mobile phones
• There are 1.08 billion smartphones spread across the globe
• Up to 50% of local searches are made using mobile devices
• 86% of mobile Internet users surf the internet while watching TV
• 50% of 175 million Twitter users use the Twitter Mobile App
• A third of 700 million Facebook users use Facebook Mobile
• In 2015, there were more Google searches via hand-held devices than that of desktop computers in 10 countries, with the US and Japan being among them.

What You Need To Know About Google Mobile Index

Over the recent past, Google launched a dedicated mobile index. It targets to go beyond penalizing sites that are not responsive.

The Google search algorithms have been rewarding sites that are mobile friendly. Such sites get a higher search engine ranking. Moreover, it has been penalizing the ones are not responsive by ranking lower in the mobile search.

While the traditional Google search index has been factoring in both the desktop and mobile-optimized websites, the new algorithm index is aimed at expanding responsiveness as a ranking signal. This will have a significant impact on SEO rankings.

The Google mobile index will become the primary index

It will have a global impact on all mobile searches in all languages. Besides looking at design elements, the mobile index will also consider the mobile page performance. As such, the Google Mobile Index will arguably be more important than its desktop counterpart and eventually, become the primary index.

The desktop index will be maintained, but…

Though Google is yet to reveal more details about these changes, the desktop index will continue to be maintained but will have less frequent refreshes.

The mobile first index will have different effects on the website and mobile app owners. The websites that are not responsive and do not have a mobile version will suffer the most. However, this does not mean that these sites will not be indexed at all. It just means that the search engine will not prioritize them in their rankings and thus will have poor SEO ranking.

For the websites with a separate mobile version, the mobile-friendly section will be indexed. The rest of the content will be crawled by the desktop version. Finally, if the site is responsive, the mobile index will not have a negative impact on the current rankings.  It is likely to improve the site’s rankings further.

Eric Gichuru

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