The Trump Blog

Carol, who owns a successful gardening store, launched a Website last year to sell her garden supplies directly to consumers. She hired a designer to build a good-looking site for her. But after a few weeks, she noticed that only a trickle of people were visiting her site every day.

So Carol signed up with a pay-per-click Internet advertising service and within a few days, dozens of people were coming to her site every day. That seemed positive until a month later, Carol realized that she had just spent $3,354 for pay-for-click advertising that generated only $24 in sales.

"A lady in Illinois bought a garden hose," Carol explains. "I never lost three thousand dollars on a garden hose before."

Stories like Carol's are nearly enough to make you abandon the idea of selling online. But the fact is, you can promote your product or service virtually free over the Internet and drive hundreds of people to your site without having to pay for pay-per-click or banner advertising on other Websites.

The key to getting visitors for free is to revise your site using SEO - an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. With an effective SEO rework of your site, your Website can grab a top-five ranking in any of the major search engines.

An Art and a Science

To put SEO to work for you, you need to get inside your customers' minds and understand how they might use search engines to reach you: which keywords, or two-to-three word phrases, they would be most likely to use when searching on Google or the other search engines for your specific product or service.

You then make sure that you utilize those keywords or phrases extensively in your Website (in the title if possible, in page headers, in your page text and in the hidden codes that create your page) so that when surfers enter them into search engines, your site gets listed near the top.

If you were promoting vacations to China, for example, two very relevant search terms would be:

• "Asia travel," which generates approximately 4,896,429 searches per month
• "China travel," which generates approximately 3,081,393 searches per month

You might need to hire a consultant to improve your site's SEO. However, you can also takes steps on your own to improve it, depending on your knowledge of how Websites are put together. Another idea is simply to have your site designer build the keywords you want to test into your Website, and then see whether they improve your traffic.

Remember, your company name is not a keyword and has no relevance. If consumers know your business name, they will likely know you and your Website.

Showing up in the first position for a highly used search term with a well-written description of your product or service can result in amazing numbers of site visitors - and great sales. But to achieve results like that, you need to spend time to understand your potential customers and the terms they would be mostly likely to use when searching for your product or service.

Once they arrive on your site, you have to make sure it is doing a great job of selling to them. For advice on making that happen, I would encourage you to read my Trump blogpost of August 4, 2006, "If You Build It, Will They Buy?"

Richard F. Guyon is CEO of NEXRUN Technologies and CTO/SEO Advisor to Global TESOL College. Richard also designed the World Trade Center Memorial Tribute site. To thank Richard for his contribution to the World Trade Center Memorial Tribute site, the New York Fire Department invited him to march with them in New York this September 11th. We are proud that Richard is part of the Trump Universitycommunity.

Secrets of Websites that Sell

With tens of millions of users surfing the Web daily for more than simple browsing, there is a good reason for the explosion of business-to-business and business-to-consumer sites. The Internet is simply a great place to sell.

The problem is, you can pay to advertise on high-volume traffic sites or on search engines and attract a lot of visitors to your site - and still have no guarantee of sales.

When people arrive at your site, it should get them to buy something. That's why the effectiveness of your site hinges on its conversion-to-sales ratio:

1. If many of your visitors make a purchase, you have a high visitor-to-sales ratio. (If that is your situation, you can dramatically increase your sales revenue by bringing more visitors to your site, a topic I will cover in a future post.)
2. If on the other hand you have many visitors but few sales, you have a low visitor-to-sales ratio.

If you fall into the second of those categories - many visitors, few sales - you need to do things differently and get your siteto work harder for you after visitors land on it:

• Make it easier for visitors to find what they are looking for. If they find it difficult to find products or information about your service, they will likely leave. The first thing a visitor sees has to be what you are selling.
• Make it speedy. You have about five seconds to grab visitors' attention after they click to enter your site. If after that time they are still staring at a message that says, "Downloading image 15 of 24," expect them to leave. Internet users demand it NOW!
• Keep it balanced. A well-built e-commerce site should blend speed, functionality and eye appeal - all these aspects. But don't overlook the last of those by making your site too plain.
• Make your content engaging. I encourage my clients to build in what I call "touch and feel potential" for their products - site features that allow visitors to "test drive" products or see them in action.
• Gather information about your visitors. Offering your contact information just doesn't cut it, because you get nothing in return. Include a form page where visitors can enter their contact info to request more information or ask to be contacted. Above all, don't require visitors to enter their information before they view your offerings, since that will only drive them away. Remember that although your primary goal is to sell visitors a product or service, you have another goal too: to find out who they are, so you can service their needs and sell to them in the future.

As I close, let me share one secret with you. Using your site to build a list of potential clients can be costly - but it is very key to marketing your new innovations down the road. Even if it costs you as much as $1.00 per valid contact, a list of 5000 consumers who have already shown interest in you can generate huge first-day profits when launching a new product. I've seen it work - and it can work for you.

Trump University member Richard F. Guyon is CEO of NEXRUN Technologiesand CTO/SEO Advisor to Global TESOL College.Richard also designed the World Trade Center Memorial Tribute Site. To thank Richard for his contribution to the World Trade Center Memorial Tribute site, the New York Fire Department has invited him to march with them in New York next September 11th. We're proud that Richard is part of Trump University.

For more insights into marketing strategies that spur sales, enrol in Trump University's new course, Keep Them Coming Back: Customer Retention Strategies that Work.

If you are thinking of starting your own business, your success strongly depends on choosing a field of business you will love. Without a strong passion for your work, your efforts will suffer and so will your new business. Holidays, 9 - 5 workdays and weekends off are for the employed, not for the entrepreneur, so be ready for the initial and continuing work required to make your new business a success.

• Research demands more than looking into new products or innovation. You must also determine if it is possible to provide a better product or service than your competitors do. This is by far the strongest persuasion to customers to test the waters with your company. It is possible to provide a comparable product or service and be successful, but this will require a more aggressive approach to capture your share of the market.
• Pricing your product or service below the competitors may seem like a good idea, however this approach is more detrimental to getting customers that you would think. Approach this question with a consumer's mindset, "If it's that much cheaper, is it any good?" Market price can also vary significantly, depending on your location. Remember too that a product often yields a smaller profit margin than a service does. The real cost of a product includes the costs of the initial product, as well as delivery and packaging costs. In contrast, a service is based greatly on your talent.
• Marketing and presentation are likely the most important aspects to successfully bringing in customers. Failure to approach these areas with the attention to detail required can result in a total loss of revenue. You can well imagine a consumer's response to an advertisement or package that contains a typo - not to mention an incorrect price, Internet URL, address or phone number. Marketing must also be on a narrow target for your customer base, because a shotgun approach seldom works efficiently. Be informed of the type of response expected from your marketing campaign, and weigh out your cost-to-return ratios.

Companies spend millions on market research (marketing and presentation) for a reason. It produces results. And let me share one other success secret. I regularly ask my significant other to proof my work, which is a good idea, taking into consideration the fact that she will see things from a totally different perspective from mine. Plus, she is not about to agree just for the sake of agreeing.

Richard F. Guyon is CEO of NEXRUN Technologiesand an active participant in Trump University.

Editor's note: Have you noticed that a man named Richard F. Guyon writes some of the smartest reader responses on the Trump Blog? Well, we noticed it too. That's why we invited him to contribute this headlined post. Richard is CEO of NEXRUN Technologiesand is involved in many other worthwhile activities too. He's CTO/SEO Advisor to Global TESOL Collegeand the designer of the World Trade Center Memorial Tribute site. To thank Richard for his contribution to the World Trade Center Memorial Tribute site, the New York Fire Department invited him to march with them in New York next September 11th. We're proud that Richard is part of Trump University.

If you are interested in following in Richard's footsteps by launching a business of your own, participate in Trump University's Entrepreneurship Mastery Program. Check it out now and you'll be on your way to startup success.