Month: September 2018

Recently, I was inspired to rethink my selling strategies as they relate to the art of seduction. Have you ever thought about how these two might be connected? Dr. Hana-Meksem breaks down how leadership and seduction are intrinsically related in her blog post, The Most Concealed and Powerful Lesson of Leadership: Seduction, by explaining, often times both the leaders and their followers are being seduce in some way. But what about sellers and buyers?

Leadership and Seduction definitely have some commonalities, they both derive from the same Latin origin, se ducere, and ducere literally means leadership. Seduction is powerful, but so is leadership. Think about a time when you had a leader who didn’t really lead well (no seduction), what were the effects of this? It most likely caused you to feel less motivated and lead to less than stellar results.

How about in selling, it seems obvious that in a lot of selling, the seller is attempting to seduce the buyer. Do you feel that you seduce your customers or clients? You most likely believe that you lead them, but if you sat back and took a truly analytical look at it, would you say your leadership and selling involve seduction? I am betting they do, but just how much can make all the difference.

Take a car salesman for example. He tells the buyer all the wonderful things about the car, helping him to visualize himself driving this new, fancy car. In a way the salesman is seducing the buyer.

So is seduction a part of your selling process? How do you use it? Are you sure you are using it to the fullest extent possible to get the absolute maximum results you can?

I have 2 Highly Guarded LinkedIn Secrets, which I am, albeit somewhat reluctantly, going to share with you today. These have brought me thousands of new leads, sales, and profits.

Leave them Wanting More

When making new connections you have to dangle the “carrot” per se, but you also have to pull it away from them, in order to get them to follow you. You must seduce them towards you. This may seem obvious or simple, but because of its obvious and simple nature many of us continue using “carrots” that aren’t seducing our target market.

One major area of power, in seducing leads is to have your LinkedIn profile optimized. When you initiate a connection through LinkedIn there is a very high chance that the potential connection will navigate to your profile for a quick look at what you do. This is your opportunity to showcase your talents. Be sure to highlight the results that you have actually achieved for clients.

When they see your result driven profile highlighting your accomplishments, and the problems you solve for your clients, they will want to experience same results. Thus, your profile will help convert/seduce these individuals into wanting to be your customers. In order to stay seductive in your approach, particularly on LinkedIn, you have to reinvent your seduction and it begins with your profile as that is your first impression on this social network.

Reinvent Your Seduction

Now you’ve gotten the connection, what can you say to keep them interested and further seduce them, to the true desired goal, getting them to buy? You know why they should, but how can you make them want to? The power to seduce them, lies within your profile, your content, and your messaging. The key here is what you say and how you say it.

The content you provide on your profile, your messaging (when reaching out to connect and once the connection has been made), and your website all matter significantly to the potential customer. If you are not providing rich and valuable content then you might as well be using Lorem Ipsum to fill your pages. Without superior content your ability to convert and seduce will be greatly reduced.

So what is superior content? In a nutshell it is content that not only educates your prospect which shows your expertise but also discusses the results you get for your clients. At the end of the day, the only reason anyone is going to buy from you is because they have a problem and you are the solution to get them the result they want.

For example, at my company whenever we are talking to a potential LinkedIn client, we always make sure to discuss the successes other clients have had with our services like how we generated $18,000.00 in sales in just 30 days for an event we promoted.

When we are speaking to potential SEO clients we make sure to tell them how one of our CPA clients tripled his business thanks to us driving traffic from Google or how an attorney client of ours brought in $83,000.00 in new business in just 6 months due to our efforts.

Our clients want these results, so they are on my profile, on my website and we discuss these in our phone meetings.

So, once you have connected with them through using your result driven profile and valuable content, you have to seduce them into doing business. You will want to use a value driven message (such as a free consultation or a short conversation to see how you can help each other), to get them into a meeting or on the phone to back up the powerfully seducing content you have already shown them.

Leading with this mindset, that you have value and benefit to offer to these customers, will be the best place to draw from in converting them into actually doing business with you. Make the process seamless and as easy as possible for the customer, that way why would they say no? When providing the rich educational content, an optimized profile, seductive (value driven) messaging in your approach, and the easy onboarding process, you are taking the “no” out of the picture.

So, is seduction harmful? You have to ask yourself, do you intend to harm your customers? Or do you intend to help them realize they need your services in order to better succeed in their business?  If it is the latter then it is your duty to ensure your prospects hire you for their own well-being.

The only thing in your way is 99% mindset. If you can achieve a congruent mindset between you and customers using both leadership and seduction then the desired powerful positive effects will be realized for both of you: you getting a new client and the client getting the services they need to better their business. It is a win win!

For more information about SEO and Marketing click here

Every person with a website knows that feeling – you could get up the next morning, only to discover all that heard-earned search engine traffic you had fought for has disappeared over-night because Google changed a few lines of code in their algorithm. If you are one of the unlucky few who saw their worst search engine nightmare come true, then here is a simple process for helping you get your rankings back in no time.

If you’ve recently been slapped with a Google penalty, you know it can really affect the traffic coming to your site. You can go from being incredibly successful, bringing in a myriad of traffic on a daily basis, to barely getting any visitors when you are slapped with a penalty from Google.

Known as the largest search engine operating system, Google has a lot of pull on your traffic. It is actually accountable for roughly 69.3% of all searches. In just last October alone, it controlled over 12.6 billion searches.

The quality of these Google searches and the traffic that it brings to your site is stellar, because SEO has been known to offer the largest impression on consumer interest. Inbound marketing leads used with Google’s search engines offer a whopping 14.6% conversation rate compared to other common outbound marketing leads like cold calling and pay per click advertising, whose conversion rates are much lower.

But maybe you don’t even know you’ve been penalized. Sometimes the effects are so small at first, it’s hard to tell.

There are quite a few reasons why Google could frown on you, but the long and short of it is – if you are caught violating their guidelines, then you will witness a dramatic fall in your search engine rankings.

The more worrisome issue is, you could follow their guidelines to a t, and still end up being penalized! After all, negative SEO attacks cannot be discounted.

So what can you do?

Before you do anything, educate yourself to help understand what these penalties are and how you got them in the first place. This will allow you to figure out the right plan of action.

To help get you started, here are some key points in dealing with Google penalties:

Which penalties are affecting your site?

If you are experiencing traffic drops to your site, don’t panic. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have been penalized. There are other reasons why traffic has been dropping and a lot of the times it’s a technical problem with your server, improper redirects, crawling challenges or content by blocked by robots.txt.

But technical difficulties aren’t the only thing that can cause your traffic to drop. There are other things to consider, too. If you’re promoting a seasonal vocation, your traffic might not be as high as it was during the time of high season.

There are two main penalties to watch for: manual and algorithmic.

Manual: This type of penalty happens when a manual quality rater finds something suspicious on your site. An easy way to figure out whether you have been penalized with a manual action is by signing into the Google Search Console( https://www.google.com/webmasters/ ) and clicking on your messages. A rater will have written the issue here for you to view.

Algorithmic: Google can detect violations with its various algorithms but unlike a manual penalty, you won’t get a message in your Search Console explaining the issue. You will need to manually figure out when the penalty happened by using Search Console for indexing problems and/or Google Analytics for any traffic-related issues.

Sometimes people even need to use both. You’ll need to do a little digging to understand which algorithm change your site has been slapped with. To do so, you’ll first need to find the date when you noticed the penalty took place, such as when your traffic significantly dropped. After that, you’ll need to pair it with the date when Google performed one of its many algorithms and see if they match up.

You have a penalty. Now what?

Now that you have a penalty, it’s important to understand how you got it. There are several reasons for a manual penalties including unnatural links on your site. These can be from outside sources, or ones that you’ve put in there yourself. Unnatural links can lead to spam sites making your site appear suspicious in Google’s eyes.

Spammy content found on your site is another red flag. There are many reasons why you’re being flagged for spam such as having suspicious comments backlinking to bad sites or filling your site with duplicate content found from outside sources.

As for algorithmic penalties, there are two main ones to keep an eye out for. The Panda algorithm distributes penalties for invaluable, poorly written content, while the Penguin algorithm penalizes for bad backlinks that are found in unusual link systems.

How do you fix the problem?

While some problems can easily be fixed, like deleting unwanted spammy comments on your site or limit the amount of links you use, others can be harder and more time consuming. When fixing unnatural links, you have to get a list of your backlinks to help search for the penalty before you’re able to lift it.

If you need to fix a Penguin or Panda penalty, you’ll have to take the necessary actions such as removing any duplicated content, and then wait for the algorithm to run again to see if your penalty is removed.

Get reconsidered

You are able to submit a reconsideration request to Google if you were hit with a manual action. To find this form, go to the Search Console and click “Manual Actions” under the “Search Traffic” tab.

This detailed request will explain why the penalty happened, how you fixed the issue and how you plant to prevent it from reoccurring in the future.

How do you not get penalized again?

The last thing you want is to get hit with another penalty again. Thankfully, there are a few things you can do to help prevent from future problems to occur.

Stay on top of audits: Remember to conduct SEO and content audits regularly. This can include keeping an eye on links, check your messages in Search Console and never approve any comments that look like spam.

• Monitor all the links that are pointing to your site on a regular basis.
• Never publish duplicate content.
• Monitor blog comments closely, and delete those which do not add any value to the conversation.
• Keep a close watch on Google’s updates, and compare new changes to your implemented SEO strategy. Make changes as you see fit.

Watch SEO sites: Keep up on the news so you’re always clued in on changes that might cause penalties down the road.

Don’t get lost in temptation: There are lot of scams out there that say they can offer you too-good-to-be-true offers. Don’t fall for them. Building traffic to your site and placement on SEO takes time, but well worth it when you do it right.

While you can’t always prevent penalties from happening, you can stay well-informed giving you a better chance at keeping your SEO ranking high and your website thriving.

If you prefer to have a professional company handle your SEO rankings and monitoring, contact us.

Related posts:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-get-massive-seo-effectively-building-links-jimena-cortes

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-makes-huge-change-local-business-search-results-jimena-cortes

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-absolutely-sure-googles-panda-42-actually-launched-jimena-cortes

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/4-seo-tactics-may-lose-your-rankings-jimena-cortes

LinkedIn can sometimes be an intimidating social network to use. However,

once you create your profile, you have access to millions of highly successful

people, working at some of the premier companies around the world.

Maximizing Business Success Rate.

LinkedIn is focused on building relationships in the form of connections.

Most people are not aware that having 500 connections in LinkedIn

establishes them as a networker and influencer on this site.

While 500+ connections are great, know that LinkedIn is not a place to rack

up connections like what most people do on other social media platforms. It’s

important to know that these need to be quality connections — not only just

connecting with present and past colleagues but, more importantly,

prospective clients.

Yes, it can feel like a daunting task to create an engaging profile that leads

others to want to connect with you. You may also feel that growing your

LinkedIn connections can be difficult, with the biggest obstacle being not

enough time. It’s easy to ignore or avoid devoting time to working with

LinkedIn, when you don’t know how to maximize LinkedIn’s capabilities to

attract business opportunities. It’s the reason why most people limit their

LinkedIn profile to just a resume of skills and achievements.

Go beyond and attract prospective clients and business opportunities the

right way

The goal is to have your prospects buy into you and then buy from you.

Before you connect with anyone on LinkedIn for business opportunities, it’s

extremely important to have a profile that draws prospective clients to you.

Your current LinkedIn profile is a resume of skills and achievements, and

there is plenty of room to improve it—to effectively target or attract

prospective clients. It’s often a one-time chance with prospects. If they don’t

see why they should connect with you, then they are less likely to engage

with you—and may not ever connect with you for business opportunities.

Here is my article with some extremely useful tips—including how to write a

profile to attract prospective clients:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-your- linkedin-headline- can-improve-

sales-success- jimena-cortes

After your profile is written in a way to draw and engage prospects,

what next?

Next, you must be proactive about connecting with professionals whom you

see as potential clients, partners or affiliates, etc.

The key here is to hone in very specifically as to who you want to reach and

how. The “who” is very important. While your product or service could work

for several audiences, who are the clients you prefer working with? What

types of professionals are worth more to your business than others? Who do

you help the most?

LinkedIn allows you to search prospects by industry, location, job title that is

current or past, company size and many other parameters you can use to hone

in on your ideal clients.

Once you have defined your target audience, the next thing you want to

do is connect and engage with your potential prospects.

Now, it’s all about being consistent in connecting with your ideal prospects,

and also saying the right things in the right sequence. Check out this article where I discuss this process in more detail: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/4-ways-monetize-your-linkedin-connections-jimena-cortes/

For example, most people try to sell right away, if they are connecting with a

prospect. This is no way to engage. It’s best to provide value, ask questions

and create a conversation that leads to a meeting.

As long as you are consistent with your lead generation process, and you are

not being overly salesy, you can have success and connect with potential

clients you would otherwise never have had the chance to meet.

Want help with your LinkedIn Strategy? Schedule a meeting with me here:

jimena.biz

What Have Others Experienced Who Have Followed this Advice?

“Just completed and I’m pleased to say my understanding of LinkedIn

has improved massively! My connections have grown, my daily views

and interactions have increased and more importantly I’m getting

better client leads. Now that my profile has a face lift, my next steps are

to activate more of Jimena’s strategies and get clients! Recommended.”

— Donovan Grant

“Generated $12K in new business, in the first 60 days. Cut prospecting

time from 4 hrs., daily, to 30 minutes. Cut sales cycle from 3 months to

less than 1 month.”

– Shayne Hall, Alpha Dog Digital

“I spent almost a year floundering around with LinkedIn with

absolutely nothing to show for it. One day I came across “LinkedIn

Blueprint”. I had just recently purchased 2 other LinkedIn “how to”

courses back-to- back that were (sort of) helpful but neither lived up to

the expectations and hype their marketing created.

After viewing the LinkedIn Blueprint system on several webinars, I

decided to give it a try. The early results have been nothing short of

stunning.

Using the implementation strategies, group engagement, and response

templates they provide, I’m finding that our most qualified prospects

will respond at alarming rates if you connect and engage exactly the

way the course teaches.

It’s well-organized, clear, concise, and right to the point. No fluff and no

hype. I’ve been in web marketing for over 14 years and this system is

proving to be a game-changer for us!

I highly recommend LinkedIn Blueprint!”

– Michael Hines, Triple Your Clicks

Let’s be honest, if you own a business, you want to make money. You probably also have a great product or service that genuinely helps people, but you also have a desire to make an income. As a business owner, you’re probably also extremely busy. Therefore, anything you do needs to contribute to your bottom line. Networking on LinkedIn is no different.

LinkedIn is not just another social network. It’s the the world’s largest Business to Business network with over 450 million users. Having a LinkedIn profile and being connected with former colleagues and friends is simply not enough. If you want to generate new business, which leads to future earnings, you have to monetize your LinkedIn connections. Here are 4 tips on how to do so:

1. Connect to Your Ideal Prospects

One of the first things you need to do when you want to use LinkedIn to generate new business is to connect with the right people. If you’re just getting started on LinkedIn, it’s perfectly acceptable to connect with former colleagues, current clients and friends. In fact, you want to be connected with these people because they can endorse your skills and leave you recommendations, which are valuable for future prospects.

When you’re ready to connect with your ideal prospects, the first step is to determine who they are. You can do this by creating an ideal prospect profile based on the Advanced search features LinkedIn provides or better yet Sales Navigator. The key is to be specific in narrowing down your ideal prospect.

If you already have a client base, look at who your best, most profitable clients are. This will help you identify who you want to target for future business. However, it’s also important to be open to new audiences and new targets.

What’s great about LinkedIn is that it will help you identify who to target. When you go to LinkedIn, go to the Advanced Search tab. This will allow you to target individuals based on Keywords, Title, Company and Location, and so on. If you’re a premium LinkedIn member, you will have access to additional filters such as Company Size, which can be very valuable.

Once you’ve filed in the information, you hit search and a list of potential prospects comes up. You can then begin sending these prospects connection requests. Be sure to send a personal message with each request stating why you want to connect. Also, LinkedIn only allows you to send requests to a certain number of people each day so be sure to save your searches for the future.

2. Send Messages Once a Month to Stay Top of Mind

When you first connect with someone, you’ll want to send them a message. After that, you’ll want to strategically message them to stay on the top of their mind. The key is not to bombard your prospects with information, but to send them useful blogs, articles and webinars that pertain to their business.

These messages don’t have to be extremely long or detailed. The key is to provide value while staying top of mind. You can simply say you’re reaching out to share some valuable information, and then explain what you’re sharing and why it’s beneficial to them.

Remember, the goal is not to sell them a hard pitch. You want to provide value and become the go-to expert in your industry. They may not need your service now, but if you stay top of mind, you’ll be the first person they think of when they do.

3. Manage your LinkedIn with a CRM or other Tracking System

One of the biggest mistakes you can make with LinkedIn Marketing is not properly documenting your progress and results. Once you start getting connected with hundreds of people and sending several messages, it’s easy to get disorganized. The best thing you can do is manage your LinkedIn with a CRM or other tracking system from the beginning.

You may not have the money to invest in a CRM system and that’s okay. You can create your own using Excel.

Get Started!

As a fellow business owner, I know you’re busy. LinkedIn is a great source for generating new business, and you want to make sure you’re getting the most out of the time spent on LinkedIn. If you’re interested in using LinkedIn for marketing purposes, I’d love to connect.

Click this link to schedule a meeting with me: jimena.biz

When used correctly, LinkedIn can be one of the most powerful tools for converting prospects to clients. I say “when used correctly” because unfortunately, I see so many people using LinkedIn incorrectly all the time, and then getting discouraged when they don’t see results. If you want to get business results with LinkedIn, it starts with your profile. Too often, I see profiles written exactly like a resume. Here’s a fact: your prospects care less about you and more about what you can do for them. So today, I’m sharing the secret to using the experience section of your profile as a convertion tool.

Write Compelling Copy

If you want to attract prospects and convert them, you have to write your LinkedIn profile using compelling copy. The key is to create copy that is intriguing and enticing without being too sales-y. You never want to pitch yourself too hard on LinkedIn. Rather, you want to share what it is you do and the results you can achieve. One of the ways to do this is through the experience section.

The way LinkedIn is set-up, it’s easy to think the experience section is a place to list past work experiences, and most people do. It asks for your title, company, the time frame you worked at that company and a description. This is the place so many people go wrong. They fill in this section just like their resume and make it about themselves. As I previously stated, potential clients don’t want to know about you. They want to know what you can do for them, and the experience section is a great place to discuss that.

The Title

The secret to getting prospects to convert on LinkedIn is to use your experience section as a case study. Start with your title and create it as a headline. Instead of a basic description such as CEO or V.P. of Marketing, make your headline descriptive and value driven. Additionally, use your title as a place to optimize keywords. You will be ranked on LinkedIn based on your keywords so it’s important to incorporate them into your profile copy.

For example, one of the titles on my LinkedIn is: SEO Lead Generation Expert Helps CPAs, Attorneys and Small Businesses Gain a 300% ROI

The Description

The next part of your experience section is your description. This is where the compelling copy becomes extremely important. You’ll want to write your description like a sales letter but you’ll want to avoid being too sales-y. Always keep in mind the end-goal in mind: you’re writing this to attract new clients.

You’ll want to first peak the interest of your prospects. One way I recommend doing this is by discussing the pain or problem they are experiencing. This draws the prospect in because they can relate to the problem and they want to find a solution to. On my LinkedIn, I discuss the various changes to Google’s algorithm, and how because of these changes, so many people lost their ranking and stopped receiving organic traffic. Again, this directly speaks to the problem many business owners face, and the pain they experience doing SEO.

Next, I recommend discussing what is it you do. Focus specifically on what it is you do rather than how you do it. On my LinkedIn, I discuss how the strategies I use to align with Google’s efforts, which allow me to keep my clients on top of search rankings, even when Google makes changes. Make this section brief, yet specific. Remember, it’s not about you, it’s about results.

Which bring me to the next part of your description: client results. Results are what your prospects are looking for. This a great place to use real client examples and discuss the results you’ve achieved for your clients. This part of the experience section doesn’t need to be lengthy but it should be specific.

For example, on my LinkedIn I simply, yet specifically discuss the results I’ve been able to achieve for one of my CPA clients.

“One of my clients a CPA, saw results in as little as 45 days. In just 3 months this client has received a large increase in phone calls that resulted in new business he would not have received otherwise.

In less than 2 months the client was able to stop their Google Adwords campaign as he increased the number of calls he received. This is in part due to as much as 95% of the people doing a search on Google, Yahoo and Bing will click on a link within the organic search – while only 5% will click on an ad.”

After you’ve discussed the results of one or two clients, you finally end your description with a call to action. This could be sending people to your website or encouraging people to sign up for your email list.

I encourage you to create 3 to 5 case studies using the method above: Pain First, What You Do Not How, Client Results and Call to Action.

Tidbits

Your experience section can also feature your past work experience. If you’ve worked at well-known companies or you feel your past work experience greatly contributed to where you are today, you can feel free to leave that experience on your profile. I would suggest listing your case studies first and then your actual work experience.

Additionally, if you’ve had experience speaking at conferences or leading large group facilitations, and it’s something you’re interested in doing again, list it as an experience. Talk about the success you’ve had speaking in the past and the benefit to audience members when you speak at events.

When you organize your profile using compelling copy and focus on the value you provide to the client, your prospects are half-way sold. They’re able to see what you’ve done for other people and they’ve warmed up to you based on the marketing copy used within your profile. When they do contact you, it shortens the selling cycle because you don’t have to prove yourself. They can read your profile and see exactly what you’ve done for others like them.

If you would like to speak with me on how I can help you with your LinkedIn strategy, please visit jimena.biz and fill out the questionnaire on the page.

I discovered this marketing method, truly by accident and from my ow necessity to get clients. It all started back in 2012, when I launched my SEO company. The first 6 months were very difficult. I attended networking events tirelessly, and I met a lot of people who either wanted to barter services, or wanted me to do their SEO for such a little investment, that I would be losing money on the deal.

So I wasn’t meeting the right prospects. Prospects who not only needed my services and understood the value, but could also afford them.

Attending networking events took so much energy and time! I then became exhausted and started to look to other strategies to get clients. One such strategy was reading through Craigslist posts from companies looking to hire an SEO person. The people I came across here wanted the world for a dollar, so needless to say this did not work too well either.

Next I tried direct mail, this was beyond my budget at the time because I was a new business and had no clients, so I was living purely off savings, without adding much of anything to my nest egg and while still having to pay all the regular bills plus business expenses.

I did one campaign because that’s all I could afford and got no calls. So after all of this, I finally got 1 client from a referral from someone I met at a networking event. Still, 6 months later and 1 client wasn’t going to cover the bills, so I started to look for a job. I decided to use LinkedIn as one of the places to try to find work.

As I was looking for a job, I realized that the people who I wished were my clients were right there on LinkedIn.

At this point I had nothing to lose while I waited for a job offer to come in, so I decided to figure out a way to get the attention of these perfect prospects I was coming across on LinkedIn.

2 weeks later, I got my next SEO client (who by the way is still with me today). Once I discovered how much easier it was to generate targeted and high value leads on LinkedIn, I stopped everything else that was wasting time and money, and decided to “perfect” my LinkedIn strategy.

Long story short, I did not have to go back to “working for the man” and instead grew my business to 6 figures in just 12 months, just from the clients I got through LinkedIn.

Since then, I have helped several other companies add 6 and in some cases even 7 figures to their bottom line from our LinkedIn lead generation campaigns.

So are you curious to find out how we have been doing this?

Well, you can book a meeting with me to see if we are a good fit to work together here:

www.jimena.biz