I had a conversation with an individual who wanted to use call tracking numbers but we ran into an issue.  This individual has two numbers he uses for his business.  One is a land line that goes into his office and the other is his cell phone.  The land line is a number that is established into the community and this is the number he would like to use as the tracking number.  We do have the ability to port the number into our system but in doing so caused a problem.  Tracking numbers are virtual numbers that do not produce a dial tone.  They rely on the numbers they are forwarded to for the connection.  He would have needed to order a whole new number from a local provider for this business land line if we ported the number over.  While all these things are possible it just takes time.  The plan is this: we will port over his main number and forward it to his cell phone while the local carrier gets him a new number for his office.

If you are in the marketing business then you want to know that your customers are getting the best information on your product.  Call tracking or advertising tracking is one of the best ways to find out what your customers think about your product. Ad tracking is market research that lets you know at once, or every week or can be widely spaced to give you feed-back on how your product is being received.  Don’t you need to know if your product is selling and what advertisement is the most effective.  “Know your product ” is an important slogan in advertising.

When you are paying the big bucks for advertising your product, you really need to know how it is working.  Call tracking or ad tracking is one way to check the effectiveness of your advertising tracking.  Researchers find out the information on the ads that are being launched and keep track of the money spent and track the consumers to see how effectively the ad is working to save you money.  There are several companies that will work for you to provide fully-featured call centers even if you are a small business.  These centers are innovative and flexible that help you stay organized.

Call tracking is great for tracking advertising results. There are quite a few companies that are reliable in this field.  In the past, making automated calls required organization and capital expenditures to make on-premise hardware or software, and it was very expensive.  Now there are alternatives that are better and easier even for the small business.  Ad tracking is now at your fingertips. Using a small subscription fee a company in the Advertising tracking business will fill your needs.  Their operations are cost saving and promise a commitment based on advertising skills that will help your business succeed.

For a low subscription fee you can have Ad tracking.  Call tracking is a whole new marketing strategy for your company.  It will let you reach more people and get their feedback on your product so you can improve your customer relations.  Even Fortune 500 companies use advertising tracking to improve their business.  Call tracking is great for tracking advertising results.  When you launch a product the need to follow up on how you are doing is very important. Advertising tracking helps in monitoring a brand’s performance and the attitudes of your customers.  Tracking can be done weekly or spaced three months or more what ever your needs.

I would love to hear about what people are planning on doing for earth day this year.  I’ve heard of one local company who prints fliers that on earth day they will plant 1 tree for every 8 orders they get that day.  Tell me what you are doing to help on Earth Day. 

Statistically consumers are more likely to pick up the phone and call the company if the number listed is toll-free. What does a toll free number tell potential clientele? It represents a superior level of ambition, growth and professionalism which in turn promotes confidence and loyalty.

Toll-free numbers are becoming more readily available and increasingly common as businesses witness proven success amongst their competitors in the areas of customer service and telemarketing.

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We here at ACI Call Tracking wish you and yours a safe and happy holiday season. Remember, ACI Call Tracking can help you with all your call and advertising tracking needs.

Our government has given us Truth In Lending laws to help protect us as we borrow money, to make sure there is full disclosure and that we are informed about the total cost of the borrowed funds. The federal government borrows money on our behalf everyday, with little or no disclosure of any kind. The government should disclose in total and on a per capita basis any spending that requires borrowing. The government should disclose the terms of the borrowed money, including the total cost of the borrowed money on a per capita basis. These disclosures could be mailed or emailed to citizens on a quarterly basis. Citizens feel too detached from our government, and it’s spending. It’s just not real, it’s not personal. If we received a quarterly financial financial statement from our government as stockholders do from a public corporation, citizens would be better informed and take a personal interest or ownership. Short of doing this I fear the same trends will continue. Citizens need to feel ownership for our country and our government.

Amazing how even in this modern day and age of people becoming more and more familiar with technology how we can still be fooled by scammers and bots. (A “bot”, for those that are not technologically savvy, is an automated program designed to spam you till you cry pretty much.) Sure, we know how to tell whether or not somebody that’s sending us an email is legitimate, and most sites that you go to these days have a “captcha”, which is designed by nature to determine man from machine.

However, it’s funny how we still fall for the old trick to this day. Of course now, bots are using social networking sites like <a href=”http://facebook.com”>Facebook</a> to get their message across.

And if this starts sounding like a public service announcement, trust me, it is.

<a href=”http://facebook.com”>Facebook</a> has been seeing a lot of this going on lately, where someone will come on board, and start sending out friend requests like nobody’s business. And then, once they reach a certain amount of friend requests sent within a certain timeframe, Facebook will ask for that particular user to slow down the friend requests or the account will be suspended. But yet, somehow, Facebook’s initial efforts don’t seem to work as well as I’m sure they’d hoped, because the bots continue to send out requests after waiting a certain time length.

Once these bots have enough friends, that’s when they start sending nasty messages to the user via wall, instant message, or P2P message. Mission accomplished.

While this may seem like a nuisance, it’s a security breach that could end up getting a lot worse. Who’s to say that the friend requests stop at spam bots? Next thing you know, your <a href=”http://facebook.com”>Facebook</a> account is hacked into, your password is changed, and goodbye Facebook account.

So if you receive a friend request from somebody, do what I do and make sure it’s legit. If there are mutual friends, ask the friends that you do know if that person is legit before accepting that person’s friend request. If you know the person who’s sending you the friend request, even better.

Because while a blind leap of faith can sometimes land you on your feet, 90% of the time, you’re just jumping right into a bottomless ravine.

One Way Backlink building is something that’s becoming a lot more important to the success of your search engine marketing plan. The times involving website link trades are coming to an end. They are a poor use of your time and efforts and if this is still your primary linking technique, you might be almost certainly getting left behind. With search changing at a drastic speed, the need for a fresh link building way of thinking has never been so important. Obtaining back-links is more complex as compared to e-mailing out hundreds of pleading email messages to webmasters within your market, requesting backlinks for your web site. You need to start thinking about information and how this enables you to drive specific back links to target web pages. Here are some link building ideas to help you build one way links:

1. Competition Analysis / Acquisition

It’s still one of the best places to begin prior to deciding to create your link building method. The advantages of performing competition analysis isn’t just in generating a list of website link targets, but in putting together a landscape for your marketplace, that highlights areas from which you can get hyperlinks. A few of the best tools on the market are MajesticSEO, SEOSpyglass, LinkResearchTools from CEMPER.com, SEO X Ray (Firefox plugin) as well as the plugin SEO for Firefox. Still one of the best ways of performing link research is to use Yahoo Site Explorer. Pay attention to which kind of back-links your competitors are getting. Are they one way links from content areas (within a website page) or are they all navigation based, i.e. footers, weblog side bars etc.

2. Content Ideas

Once you’ve completed competitive analysis. You need to develop an index of content and articles ideas to surround your target keyword. Among the best ways of rank for your given search phrase is always to make your site an expert for the subject matter. Work with Google Insights to research thoughts regarding relevant content and articles about your search term. This gives you fantastic information on relevant matters that individuals are actively searching for.

3. Produce a Marketing List

Once you’ve a list of content to generate, you can investigate the top places to market that content. This will make sure you have an immediate list of people to market your content to. By way of example, if you’re offering content based on “LandScaping Software”, you can run a few commands like:

“landingscaping software”   “review”   blog

“landscaping software”   blog

intitle:”landscaping software”   top   list

The options are endless. Try to get bloggers whose content gets republished by other websites. This is definitely an extremely effective way of building lots of one way links for your content. Content marketing is something that should be in your link building arsenal in 2010 and can generate a lot more links than an outdated article marketing strategy.

As a website manager or owner  you’ve likely determined that DRIVING TRAFFIC to your site is a critical first step to getting  the success that is so important  to your business . But if your site has  reached a reasonable level of success with this first step, then you will certainly be keenly aware that TRAFFIC alone is not the secret to your websites success.  It’s equally critical that you convert your traffic into leads or actually sales .  Let’s briefly discuss some ideas that YOU can implement to find success in both of these steps.

First let’s look at how you can get  more traffic to your site.  What is it that would cause someone to really WANT to come to your site in the first place ?  The answer is INFORMATION!  Regardless of whether you are a car dealership, a non-profit, an art gallery, or a pet store , the reason why people will end up on your site is because they are searching for information.  But it’s not JUST information that they seek .  The Internet is FULL of information!  More than that, they are seeking a source of information that is trustworthy  !  It’s just like any other business or personal interaction.  We desire  to work with people that are trustworthy  .  So in order to draw  traffic to  your site you must first fill it with good  content  that your targeted customers are looking  for.  Then you must present that information in a way that helps your site visitors to begin to trust you .  

Wouldn’t it be nice if that’s ALL there was to it !  Unfortunately this, ‘Build it and they will come” strategy  is NOT enough anymore for most websites.  The Internet is simply TOO full (and growing exponentially) of information for your prospects to find you and learn to trust you without some help.   For this to happen,  you need  to grow your own  network of online ‘references’ that serve to authenticate your site as a trustworthy authority .  These ‘references’ are much like job references that you give to a prospective boss who  wants to authenticate your experience before hiring you  .   On the Internet,  these references take the shape of ‘links’, from other relevant and trustworthy sites back to your website  .  Notice the sites must be relevant, trustworthy and respectable.    This is very important as it helps the search engines and each of your prospective site visitors to prove that you are   a website they want to do business with .

So as you work on step #1 of DRIVING TRAFFIC to your site, consider  all of your efforts in this way.   Consider  what you do on all of the  social networking sites.  Make sure that your content and  your activity on those sites is legitimately helping to authenticate your business and helping  people trust you and your information enough to purchase from you.

Next, as your site picks up traffic  , it is important  that you convert those visitors into REAL BUSINESS. The  aspect of website conversions is often overlooked in favor of focusing on driving traffic.  But this is often a fatal flaw .  If you think about  this strictly from a financial perspective, it often costs 10-20x more time and money to GET visitors to your site than it takes to convert your existing traffic into actual customers.  In other words , the time and tools needed to improve your website conversion ratios is often FAR LESS expensive than those needed to get the traffic on  your site in the first place.  So focusing on your website conversions is often a great place for you to gain  some substantial ROI very quickly if you have not previously focused much attention on it . Track everything, track your calls, track your leads and your sales.

Just like ‘driving traffic’, there are also MANY things that you can do to improve your website conversions.  The two most critical elements that will give you the greatest initial improvement on website conversions are the ‘First’ and the ‘Last’ impressions that you give  your site visitors. This time during their visit is when  your site visitors are most impressionable and when you have the greatest opportunity to help  them to become customers or ‘take action’ in some specific  way. You don’t want to  be pushy, but make sure that your landing pages and your contact pages have specific language  of what benefits you are offering to each of your site visitors.  And finally, be certain  that you make it easy for them to take advantage of those specific benefits. As you fine-tune these efforts you may also find it helpful to use some website conversion tools to embed in your site that have proven success with increasing your website conversions and creating  more leads and business  for your organization.

Author: Roland Graham, Founder, Leadcrafters