In under a week, the streets will be filled with fans, emotions will be running high and it’s your chance for your business to make the most of World Cup fever. The great news is, few of your competitors, if any will be thinking in the same way. Riding off the back of big events is essential if you want to stand out from the crowd, so to speak! Also, it will do huge things for building up your relationship with leads and clients.

So, I’ve put together just a few ideas that won’t take you long to implement and your customers and leads will think you’re super cool.

• Run a time based discount or promotion which will run through the World Cup. Whenever you run a promotion, it’s aways essential to have a ‘reason’ why you’re offering a discount or special deal and the World Cup couldn’t be a better reason.
• If you have been running promotion, switch the sales message to World Cup promotion during this period.
• Email your customers and leads and tell them that if England wins (or your country’s team), or gets through to a certain round then they should visit a special page for an even bigger discount. Create a special promotion page on your site with updates.
• Put the flag on the header of your web site and stand out from your competitors.
• Offer World Cup promotional codes for discounts on your products.
• Get into your local paper if you sell a product or service that can be linked with sport or fitness – the newspapers are crying out for unusual story ideas so how could you leverage this towards your business?

Remember though, your business doesn’t have to do anything with football to be able to ride off the back of the World Cup, it’s just the fact that you’re standing out more than your competitors. If my dentist, accountant or solicitor send me out an email telling me of a world cup promotion or the fact they’re supporting the team, that would stick in my head, wouldn’t it with you?

Don’t be normal, ever! Post your comments below with your ideas and if you have a friend in a non rival business, quickly send them this link.

Cheers

Simon

If you’re one of these people who sits back and when someone says ‘have you got a web site’ and you mumble back – ‘yeah… but it doesn’t really do anything for me’, then it’s time for you to sit up and pay attention to this post. Now of course I don’t know whether your web site is bringing you in zero leads or sales, whether it’s used as a reference for clients to find out more information before a sale or whether you’re selling physical or digital goods but whatever position you are in, you need to be testing. What do I mean by that?

One small tweak to your web site could dramatically increase phone calls, generate more sales and set the ball rolling in a completely different direction for your business. This could be a headline, the addition of a video, increasing or changing the size of a font, any number of things.

Unfortunately many business owners I speak to don’t even know how many site visitors they’re getting but once you know these figures it’s time to start getting down to the nitty gritty and figuring out exactly why you aren’t getting more customers and clients. Chances are you’re sending out the wrong king of message to your target audience, maybe you’re focusing on the features of your business rather than the benefits. Again, there are so many variables, but if you want to stand out against the competition and market your self out of their reach you must know about all the options available to you – the good news is you don’t have to be a techie to get the data and start testing relatively cheaply. Let’s start out with a few of the things you might know about, and then the areas of that you probably don’t and really should be aware of. These are tools and tactics that I personally use to help me grow my business.

Google Analytics has been around for a while and is the free way of getting information on who visits your site, how long then spend on a page, what keywords they’re using to reach you and a plethora of other great data to get stuck into. If you’re not on at least a monthly basis looking, or having someone explain to you how your web site is performing then throw that on the top of your to do list – or imagine stacks of £50 notes piled high being thrown off a cliff. If someone regularly visits a page on your web site and they only spend four seconds there, you know you need to go and change something, right? Tweak, move, add, delete and replace.

You may be tracking your web stats yourself, maybe not, but have some kind of system in place so that you’re optimising.

Split Testing isn’t new in Internet marketing terms, but for a lot of business owners they’ve never heard of this technique. Split testing works by offering variations of certain pages your web site and offering different content every time someone lands on it. For example, say you’re selling a bike – someone might land on the sales page with a different shot of the bike, or a different price point. If you’re a selling a product online, it may be a different headline. You can test one page against another, or multiple pages against each other. Now google offers a free basic split testing programme called the Web Site Optimiser . Again, you could sort this out yourself, if not then get someone in your team to start split testing pages on your site or outsource cheaply at Elance. This site is great for outsourcing any kind of work, I use it every week.

Heat Maps and Mouse Tracking are probably one of the most exciting ways of learning about people who visit your web site. Imagine if you could watch a video of someone moving around your web site. You see where they go, how long it takes them, where they stop, which pages they click on and how they exit, just like you’re looking over someone’s shoulder. Well it has arrived and it’s changing businesses internet marketing strategies forever. The great thing is, other businesses simply aren’t using it yet – so you’ll be yet again, ahead of the pack. It puts a smile on your face because you can instantly see changes you need to make to your site to optimise it. You can see trends forming and if they’re negative, quickly change them to get amazing results. What’s more, there’s a company called Clicktale located at www.webclicktale.com that make it incredibly easy. You simply add some code to your web site and you’re ready to go – they have a free trial but it only shows a couple of pages but it’s well worth having a look to see how amazing it is. Yes, I am quite literally watching your mouse movements and clicks right now! Will he/she read to the bottom, where will you go next? I’ll know

So there you go, just a quick reminder that your web site probably holds the key to a lot more profits than you’re thinking about and whatever position you’re in, test, chop change, monitor and track your web site every week and everything will change, I promise.