I am looking for some feedback on a series of workshops aimed at helping small business owners increase sales and margins.

Would you benefit from having:
- More ways to generate leads
- Converting more of your leads into sales
- Having a clearer understanding on who your ideal customer is
- Finding out how to get your customers to choose you over your competition
- Increasing the number of times your customers buy from you and increasing the amount they spend each time
- Having a bigger Gross Margin Percentage?

What else would you like to focus on in a workshop?

Please make suggestions, and I’ll see if I can incorporate them.

Thanks,


Mark

For many small business owners the question is how far will you go to achieve your dreams...

When you are starting out you should spend about 80% of your working time on marketing/new business activities. The importance of marketing during the first few months is underestimated!

I am always suprised with how little my clients are acually doing to attract leads. Most businesses rely on only 1 or 2 channels for attracting leads. Work on getting more!

Then work on converting the leads you get!

Mark

Here it is again:

If you want your website reviewed, follow the link below and click on NEW THREAD.

www.mysmallbusiness.co.za/forum/website-reviews

Nope - I wouldn't pay too much attention to the Alexa ranking...

Junior webmaster might look at a high Alexa rank and be impressed - it's not going to help you get more business in.

Rather focus on writing quality content for your website.

I had a quick look at your websit and I'd recommend that if you are wanting to improve it and drive more traffic to you site, you post in the Websit Reviews section:

www.mysmallbusiness.co.za/forum/website-reviews/

Thanks for the detailed explanation there.

To summarize:

Wordpress is a good option for a basic company website - a basic 5 page site. It's also great if you're publishing articles on your niche.

If you need a website with a diverse range of functionality I'd go for Joomla or Drupal.

If you're focusing only on ecommerce and want a robust solution, then Magento will be a good option.

Bump @Nick

Anybody taken you up on your offer yet?

Ok, so we're talking leads here, not conversions...
My last 3 leads were from:

Lead from Google - natural search rankings (SEO)
Referral from a client
Lead from email marketing campaign

Referrals from cleints clearly have a higher conversion ration than other leads - this stresses the importance of maintaing high service levels and good customer relations.