Most companies are concerned with improving the volume and quality of their business leads and ensuring a predictable flow of qualified new prospects enter their sales lead pipeline. Building the sales pipeline with qualified Internet leads has the advantage of being faster and usually less resource-intense than you can achieve with more conventional tactics.

Business lead generation becomes even more of a challenge when your product or service is highly sophisticated, requiring some levels of customer education to convey value and establish trust in your capabilities.

That’s the challenge that Sarah Kling, founder and CEO of UEVision faced along with a need to do it in an expedient way, mindful of  time constraints.

Sarah’s company works with organizations to enhance the user experience and usability of their software products and websites.  As you can imagine, getting prospects to understand the value that great user experience can deliver for their results has to happen early in the sales buying cycle.

UEVision decided to experiment with Webinars and haven’t turned back… their results are outstanding. When we heard that their results were so strong that they couldn’t keep up with the demand for follow-on in-person meetings (a situation they quickly remedied) we wanted to learn more!

We asked Sarah to tell all – and she was highly informative. Tune in to learn what she has to say about:

• Using webinars for online lead generation
• The role of Live and On Demand webinars
• Webinar marketing promotion tactics
• Competitive advantages gained
• Webinar surprises & advise
• Marketing follow-up
• Results

Many businesses are consumed with the notion of driving targeted traffic to their website through Search Engines and Social Networks as though that was the goal. The goal is not traffic… the goal is conversion. Conversion of the traffic to take the actions you want, that is.

The term “traffic” is marketing jargon — they are people who visit your site. And while we’re thinking about those visitors, let’s acknowledge two facts that often get lost:

1. Most people will only visit once.
2. Almost none of them will take action on the first visit.

Inherent in keeping those two facts in front of you is the need for a plan to entice more visitors to become “regulars” on your site and subsequently convert. I think of it as a Conversion Runway. You need momentum to pull away from the boarding gate and successfully liftoff.

Momentum is achieved by offering visitors fresh, non-promotional content that is useful, engaging or entertaining. Hopefully, your website brings measures of each to the visitor’s experience.

It is also helpful to frame their experience to have as little friction as possible. Friction being any distraction that takes them off message or interrupts action you want them to take. Here are a couple of tips to help with that:

Internet Marketing Tips for a Smooth Conversion Runway:

• First, take a baseline reading on how many visitors come to your site, where they come from, how many return and convert. Google Analytics (GA) is a good tool for this and it’s free.
• Locate the “hot spots” on your website with high Bounce Rates. Improve those pages to make your visitors experience a better one. (Use GA)
• Make sure your site looks as it should in the top browsers — not just Internet Explorer. Try Browser Shots to check this out. Free.
• Is your “housekeeping” in order? No broken links and site maps that work for starters. A useful tool to help with this is Google’s Webmaster Tools This, too, is free.
• Do you offer site search to help your visitors out? It’s also a great tool to learn where you are frustrating them. Google offers a tool that is good — the free version carries adverting, though.
• Do you require visitors to fill out forms to get more information from you? What’s the abandonment rate on those forms?

Frequent updates to your website with well-optimized content will put you in front of a larger audience and build credibility. Reducing friction once they are there will improve the likelihood that they will take the action you want.

Improving your conversion runway with these tips will go a long way toward shortening the sales cycle and improving both the conversion rate and volume of conversions.

Meta tags represent a unique opportunity for website owners to control and shape their destiny beyond simply optimizing for Search Engines. First, a couple of definitions:

Meta Tags – Coding (usually in HTML or XHTML Language)  not directly seen by site visitors  on the visible web page.

On-site Optimization — The use of techniques you control on your site that improve a web page’s ability to rank well in the Search Engines for targeted keyword phrases that can also influence Click Thru rates to your site.

Most businesses recognize the value that Meta Tags deliver in terms of improving their ranking. This is a well-known on-site optimization tactic. Yet ranking well is only half the battle. Every day I see web pages displayed in high ranking positions in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) that no one would visit because the snippet that describes the page is not compelling — in fact, frequently downright awful. Check this one out:

Search Engine Meta Tag "Snippet" - Bad Example

Would you feel compelled to visit this site? Contrast it with this one:

Search Engine Snippet from Meta Tag - Good Example

The value that smart use of Meta Tags contributes to a web page’s ranking can pall in comparison to the value they deliver in terms of motivating searchers to actually visitor the site. Meta Tags control the snippet the Search Engines use to describe your web page; the snippet then performs like a free ad. Better, really, because you are right in front of interested searchers. How good does that get?

There are two ways this can go wrong:

1. Not using the Meta Tags – this means that the Search Engine will grab content from your site and display it. And that content can be anything – and mostly it is not the content you would choose.
2. Improperly Using Meta Tags — not fully capitalizing on the logistics of how you can create a Meta Tag that will present a snippet about your page that motivates searchers to click thru to your web page.

Like so much in life, the secret is in the techniques you use to create these tags. It sounds complicated, yet it is not. In fact, it can be fun. Click here for more detail on how to do this in Internet Marketing Tips: Optimizing Meta Tags and build an advantage over your competitors.

First — in case you don’t know what Meta Tags are — they are discrete pieces of information you add to the behind-the-scenes coding that tells Search Engines about your site and how to display it.

Specifically, I am referring to the title you designate for your web page, the description you assign to it and the keywords that you want to be known for. This Internet Marketing Tip is super-easy, no-cost and highly effective.

Why are Meta Tags So Important to Your Success?

• The vast majority of prospects who learn about your business find out about you (or check you out) via Search Engines. You can control how your site is presented in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) by informed development of your Meta Tags — they therefore function like advertisements for your business.

• Search Engines use Meta Tags in their ranking algorithms. So, when you build those tags using your targeted keyword phrases, you improve the likelihood of obtaining a higher ranking position.

If you don’t develop great Meta Tags for you web page, the Search Engine spider will just grab the first thing it “sees” on your page and use that. That can be really ugly — not compelling, sentences cutoff mid-point, lacking context, etc. You’ll squander a great opportunity to put your best foot forward and make a great impression — and you completely control this.

Meta tags can be a great performance management tool as well. If you are already in a top ranking position for your targeted keyword phrase yet are not seeing a robust volume of prospects come to your site one of the easiest ways to kick that up a notch is to change your Meta tags and make your title and description more compelling.

Adding keyword-rich Meta Tags to your site is super easy as well. If you have a Content Management System (CMS), you can readily add/change your Meta tags without knowing website coding. If you do have to add it directly to your website coding you’ll need a bit of upfront guidance, however, you’ll quickly pick it up and be off and running. Here’s what the Title and Description tags look like for this article to give you an idea of how easy it is:

<title>Internet Marketing Tip: You STILL Need Meta Tags for Your Site</title>
<meta name-"description" content="Don't miss this great Internet Marketing Tip that makes the case why you STILL need great Meta Tags for your website. An easy, no-cost way to influence your success." />

With just a little bit of guidance on how to build the tags (which you can readily find on the Web), you can take charge of your own destiny. Take the time to get guidance, as there are nuances to building powerful Meta Tags that can make a difference in your results.

Do this — Go to Google and put your favorite target keyword phrase in Google’s search box. Now, notice what comes up on the Search Engine Results Page. Do the titles and descriptions of the WebPages presented make you want to click through to the site? What good would it do you to be in a top ranking position if it didn’t drive strong targeted traffic to your site?

I don’t know about you but whenever I can influence ranking for my target keywords and control what people see about my business I think that’s is a good deal.

Last Item: if you’d like to see what the Meta Tags produced for this web page, go to Google’s search box and enter the title of this article. You should then see the title and description that I created with Meta Tags for this article in their SERPs. Neat.

Have you ever had the itch to prove your point? The folks at The Fun Theory (an initiative of Volkswagen) have a point to make: You Can Change People’s Behavior for the Better by Making it FUN. As they say “be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.”

And, to prove their point they have created the Fun Theory Award – winner to be announced in Sweden on December 15th.

Fascinating idea, yet even more interesting for those of us engaged in Internet Marketing is how the combination of Creative Ideas + Fun generates viral marketing momentum. For example, consider the case of the group in Odenplan Sweden that tackled the issue of how to get folks to take the stairs instead of the escalator in this Fun Stairs video.

The video has gone viral — as of the time I’m writing this article it garnered over 8M views on YouTube alone (it’s in other places). Consider this: the topic of the stairs is B-O-R-I-N-G. Boring, boring, boring. The juxtaposition of extremes — taking a boring topic and making it giggly-fun and then loading that into Web 2.0 and social networking channels is a winning combination.

The recipe for going viral in this mini case study:

• Creative Idea
• Creative Execution of the Concept
• Creative Use of Internet Marketing Channels

Internet Marketing Tip: make some of the less sexy aspects of your product or service fun and demonstrate it in Web 2.0/social networking channels.

How will you capture this and leverage emerging Internet marketing channels to give your message “wings?” The gauntlet is down.