One of the ways I gauge entrepreneurs or business executives’ effectiveness and efficiency is how they respond to their emails. Without requiring ‘instant responses’, within one week of correspondence I can identify the ‘top 10%’ from the bottom ‘90%’.

This is 2012. We are in the 21^st century with email at the nucleus of our communication paradigm. Business people who struggle with technology and especially emails are ‘dinosaurs’.

Now that’s a bold statement to make, but it really is THAT important.

Allow me to contrast the top 10% versus the bottom 90%.

The top 10% respond within a reasonable time frame. It can be within the hour, the day, but rarely ever more than 48 hours (unless they are on leave or otherwise occupied with a project/event). One thing is for sure – you’re never wondering if they got or lost the email.

The bottom 90%…

• Claim to ‘lose’ or not receive emails
• Ask for emails to be re-sent because they accidentally deleted them
• Actually do have problems receiving emails because of their spam folder settings that are too strict
• Are challenged with their spam and junk mail folders – reviewing them only ‘every once in a while’ even though many important emails end up there
• Have hundreds or thousands of emails in their inbox
• Respond to emails erratically sometimes immediately and then are ‘offline’ for days with no communication
• Don’t use meaningful subject lines
• Don’t maintain message threads that are important – creating new emails with each new response
• Use TXT acronyms trying to be “hip or groovy” instead of clear in their explanations – creating the need for additional threads to find out what they meant to say
• Subscribe to every free email list available fearful that they will miss something.
• Don’t read their emails – instead skimming and overlooking the most important and time sensitive information
• Have multiple emails that they don’t monitor appropriately
• Share emails with others so everyone gets the email and multiple people responding with conflicting suggestions
• Don’t have folders for their emails – so can’t quickly locate what they need when they need it. Even though emails are now indexed, not having folders is like not having a filing cabinet for your physical documents.

Poor email management is one of my strongest pet peeves, but the reason I mention it here is because it’s also symptomatic of poor business management.

Without needing to become a Productivity Powerhouse – lack of effective email management skills (and tools) can be an important obstacle to your overall business success.

Anecdotally, over the past 10 to 15 years, I have noticed that the top business people don’t just manage their emails – the MASTER and CONTROL them with an adeptness that is remarkable.

If you’re struggling to grow your business – just look at your inbox and the list above. It’s a quick and easy problem to solve.

If it isn’t – you now have the SOURCE of the real problem!

I recently published this 2-minute link optimisation tip to avoid a common mistake a lot of people make.

I’ve blogged about long tail niche marketing before with a YouTube video that has become a classic amongst the exponential marketing community. Just click on the hyperlink to view it.

Even though as a small business, Internet advertising is not something you’re probably engaged in, a recent report by CONTEXTWEB reveals something that I have known all along, albeit anecdotally -

Average click-through rates (CTRs) for ads placed
on long-tail websites are 24% higher than
those placed on short-tail sites.

Long tail versus short tail marketing refers to specialised niches versus broad mass markets respectively. What’s of particular interest is that the MORE specialised and targeted you are with your web strategies, the greater the returns you’ll produce.

Our clients have known this for years – often out-performing their much larger, national competitors with very deep pockets.

Long tail websites—the millions of smaller websites with niche audiences—offer significant ad performance advantages across a wide number of verticals.

Among all 20 categories studied, long tail ads registered increased CTRs over short-tail ads, led by alcohol beverages (50%), B2B (48%) and charities (48%). The lowest long-tail lift observed was for auto advertisers, but still had (12%) better CTRs.

The trade off remains between quantity and quality of the communication. This is something we cover in depth in our Killer Kopywriting Konversations™ workshops as we help our clients design Killer Kampaigns That Konvert Klients™.

As shown below, among 21 publisher categories, 16 categories registered increased CTRs on long tail sites whereas in five content categories, ads on short tail sites underperformed long tail ads.

Data Source: CONTEXTWEB‘s Intelligence Report: Using Long Tail Sites to Optimize Media Spend was published in March 2011. It analysed digital media performance from roughly 18,000 publisher sites across 1,000 campaigns in the second half of 2010.

This is 2011. Forget the Information Age, we’re in the Information Overload Age. I see it every day. People just can’t keep up with it all (even though many waste more than an hour a day on Facebook, but that’s a rant for another day).

As a business person, you need you to read the emails that are important – you are losing a lot more than you know by not reading them.

The problem or challenge is that you have too much junk or spam in your inbox. This is 2011 – DEAL WITH IT.

But let’s face it, it’s not really spam is it?

You’re on everyone’s opt-in list and you don’t want to miss anything that’s FREE…

Well guess what?

It’s not FREE – it’s costing you, dearly.

Each time you or someone who needs to reach you has to re-send an email, it DOUBLES the communication effort. It’s not trivial – with many people sending/receiving more than 100 emails/day, that’s a lot of wasted time and effort ON BOTH SIDES.

In some cases, I stopped dealing with people who can’t respond fast enough. In one supplier’s case it was worth more than $1,000. Gone. Not to mention additional on-going sales or referrals…

You need to find the SOURCE of the problem and get rid of it (excess emails).

For the emails you do need to receive -

Are you skimming them?

Are you distracted when you read them?

In this day and age, I can tell you (anecdotally) that I can gauge someone’s success (or lack thereof) by the efficiency of their email communication.

Simple as that – I know what a ‘reasonable amount of time is to respond’ and when that extends beyond the ‘acceptable’ I know it’s symptomatic.

Symptomatic of a lack of discipline.

A lack of organisation.

A lack of responsiveness.

Lack, lack, lack.

As a business coach, mentor and Exponential Growth Strategist, I figure if you can’t deal with emails you’re not anywhere close to being ready to grow your business.

During my recent Business Blogging For Sales Lead Generation event tour in Adelaide, the Gold Coast, Melbourne and Sydney, participants heard a preview of my rant on Privacy Pirates which I’ve been proselytising about for quite some time. Karen Bonanno, a 2011 Exponential Entrepreneur Of The Year Award Winner, sent me the infographic below that I just had to share with you.

I will expand on this in an upcoming Do It Yourself Google Sales Lead Generation For Small Business series of workshops… But in the meantime have a good read of this infographic. You’ll start to get a sense of where I’m coming from and how I am guiding my clients to avoid being victims of the Privacy Pirates.

Imagine being able to SEE the flow of visitors as they navigate your site – how cool and VALUABLE would that be?!?! Well, Google’s done it again – they are releasing this new functionality in their signature Analytics platform – WOW!

Click on this image to read more about this new release!

It was bound to happen… Real Time Google Analytics! If you’re an exponential Internet marketer who adheres to Management By Metrics™, this is BIG!

Just thought you should know!

Psst! Thanks to Ray Keefe of Successful Endeavours for forwarding it to me in real time!

I have an event coming up called Business Blogging For Sales Lead Generation that will reveal how quick, easy and fun strategies can help you improve your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and acquire new leads for free by blogging.

Here is an example using an Infographic. Karen Bonanno posted an interesting infographic (shown below) on what happens on the Internet in 60 seconds on her School Management Library Blog.

Along with these amazing stats:

• Search engine Google serves more that 694,445 queries
• 6,600+ pictures are uploaded on Flickr
• 600 videos are uploaded on YouTube videos, amounting to 25+ hours of content
• 695,000 status updates, 79,364 wall posts and 510,040 comments are published on Social Networking site Facebook
• 70 New domains are registered
• 168,000,000+ emails are sent
• 320 new accounts and 98,000 tweets are generated on Social Networking site Twitter
• iPhone applications are downloaded more than13,000 times
• 20,000 new posts are published on Micro-blogging platform tumbler
• Popular web browser FireFox is downloaded more than 1700 times
• Popular blogging platform WordPress is downloaded more than 50 times
• WordPress Plugins aredownloaded more than 125 times
• 100 accounts are created on professional networking site LinkedIn
• 40 new Questions are asked on YahooAnswers.com
• 100+ questions are asked on Answers.com
• 1 new article is published on Associated Content, the world’s largest source of community-created content
• 1 new definition is added on UrbanDictionary.com
• 1,200 new ads are created on Craigslist
• 370,000+ minutes of voice calls done by Skype users
• 13,000+ hours of music streaming is done by personalized Internet radio provider Pandora
• 1,600+ reads are made on Scribd, the largest social reading publishing company

This blog post alone has 6 embedded strategies to help Karen and me attract new sales leads.

If you want to know what they are and how other business owners are leveraging their blogs to generate free sales leads, you’ll have to attend the Business Blogging For Sales Lead Generation event!

According to a recent survey, personalised emails generated 42.7% more click-throughs on average to the web copy than non-personalised email.

Personalised emails generated 403% more sales on average than non-personalised emails.

Personalised emails generated 42.8% fewer un-subscribes on average than non-personalised emails.

Email Personalisation is not new, the question is does it still work?

Should you expend the effort to personalize your emails?

You should TEST to see what happens. Surveys and reports are great to give you ideas, but you need to test the findings with YOUR suspects, prospects and clients.

Don’t just believe everything you read.

Ever wonder how a credit card number is verified? A fascinating article, Making Sense of your Credit Card Number published by Digital Inspiration Technology Blog.

You credit card number may look like a random string of 16 digits that’s unique in the world but those digits reveal a little more than you think. For instance, the first digit of the card represents the category of industry which issued your credit card.

American Express is in the travel category and cards issued by them have 3 as the first digit. If you have VISA or MasterCard, your card’s first digit should be either 4 or 5 as they are from the banking and financial industry.

The first six digits of your credit card number identify the institution that issued the card to you. VISA cards follow the series 4xx while MasterCard uses 51-55 as the prefix.

You may even verify if a given credit card number is valid or not using simple addition. The following visual illustration courtesy of Mint.com will help you understand more about the anatomy of your credit card.

I’ve already blogged about Linked In Polls,but since it’s quick, easy and free – it’s worth reminding you to consider polling your clients and asking them questions that your other clients might be interested in. This poll for example is interesting because I am not a user of Google Chrome and didn’t think that many people were using it. Of course this is a VERY small sample, but still surprising. What I really like about the Linked In Polls is their outstanding graphics… Don’t you agree?

Whitelisting your email is something that many Internet beginners still struggle with. With the proliferation of spam and junk emails, it’s still something that’s important to do.

Having people whitelist your email will improve your email delivery and conversion rates.

That’s why this explanation really stood out as a great value-creation tool for clients. I thought would share it with you.

You’re welcome!

A lot of people debate the pros and cons of Social Media, what I have come to call Social NOTworking – where people waste countless hours exchanging posts, chats, pokes, photos and other electronic elements with people they wouldn’t be caught dead with face-to-face. But that’s my personal bias AND I am not saying that Social Media is not worth doing – it is, but not for the reasons MOST people think…

That’s a discussion for another day and one I reserve for my paying clients to help them out-perform their peers by doing out-of-the-ordinary things that create extra-ordinary results.

Results that baffle their competitors – BECAUSE they (the competitors) have no clue…. Shhh! It’s called Stealth Marketing and means they can’t copy what you’re doing!

In support of my bias, I came across recent reports that continue to show that website traffic from social media networks is still pretty low.

SeeWhy studied 60,000 ecommerce transactions across a variety of sites in February 2011. Since running an online store is about selling things, they looked at only the people who actually loaded items into their shopping cart. Here’s one of the summary results:

Email Marketing Generates More Buyer Traffic Than Social Media

Email Marketing Still Outperforms Social Media

As you can see, email brought in the most traffic, with direct and search significantly less. Social media came in at only 4.3%, not great, but better than display advertising, so that’s something to think about.

Next they took that info and charted the percentage of people from each source who completed their transaction. In other words, the people who handed over their credit card number and hit submit.

Email Marketing Converts To More Sales Than Social Media

If you want more sales, send more emails!

In the above pie chart you can clearly see that email and direct hits to the site still resulted in the best sales conversions, social media picked up a dismal 2.11% of the overall, but look at display advertising. Yikes, only 0.53% conversion rate? Maybe you should be spending money on your Facebook page rather than on display ads, but once again that’s a discussion for another day. Social NOTworking does have its place, but not where or how you might think. We explain this in our Killer Konversations™ Workshops if you’re interested…

At the end of all of this, SeeWhy does put in the usual disclaimer. Your mileage may vary and different types of ecommerce sites will have different results. While I understand that this is a study of ONLY 60,000 transactions, it supports my bias that email marketing still is the primary source for online sales.

There’s a fundamental reason – it’s a privileged conversation that people still value – as long as it’s not violated.

If you’re asking yourself why email marketing isn’t in the news more often, it’s because it simply isn’t as new and trendy as social media marketing.

The news “media” are always searching for new trends and buzzwords to fill their empty pages.

My clients don’t care about the buzz and hype – all they want is more people buying their products and services.

If that’s what you want – send them more emails – but not just any emails… That’s considered spam. You need to know what to send to whom.

That’s what we teach our clients to do – become a client today. Contact us now and we’ll help you avoid making mistakes that cost money and lost sales.

Google Instant is not new, but it is having a dramatic influence on how people search….

As you can see when you use Google, the search results change dynamically AS YOU TYPE. The suggestions DO influence what people will type in – this is having a dramatic effect on Google Adwords…

Ray Keefe of Successful Endeavours sent this Google Warning article link to me several months ago. I shared this with my clients giving them hints and suggestions, but those are beyond the scope of a blog post.

If you’d like ‘instant’ access to tip and tricks to make sure you avoid mistakes and are kept informed in ‘real time’ – contact us to join one of our many programs.

If you have the need to translate text or documents, Google has a great translation tool. This is handy when you do a lot of blogging or have a lot of YouTube videos and someone posts a comment in a foreign language… It still has difficulty with vernacular, but it’s always improving!

Google has made recent changes that significantly affect your SEO effectiveness. One of them I discussed recently, called Google Previews. Today’s post is regarding Google Places – another attempt by Google to fend off Facebook’s domination by forcing you to put additional information into Google to increase Google’s ranking – not necessarily improve your own SEO results. In fact this complicates the process in a zero sum game. More work, effort and cost for the same or WORST outcome than you previously had.

Contrary to what they want you to believe, Google is in business for themselves and Google Places I am sure you’ll agree is yet another task that you have to undertake to not lose whatever presence you previously had.

As a blog reader and subscriber, I want you to know about these shifts. If you want to know what to do about them, you’ll need to become a client. We have a wide variety of Internet programs and products to choose from. Contact us and we’ll discuss the various available options.

I don’t want to leave you completely in the dark so here is a link that explains the potential negative impact of Google Places. Ray Keefe of Successful Endeavours originally sent it to me.

(Psst! Thanks Ray!)

Earlier this week, I blogged about how Vaseline and radioactivity are related to make a point – well actually, to illustrate how William Tucker has been able to reduce the fear mongering propaganda of the mass media to simple, easy-to-understand metaphors and analogies that any 5th grader can understand.

Mt Tucker recently added another article to his on-going explanation regarding Infant formula made from Tokyo tap water.

His brilliance is simplifying the otherwise complex into something easy for the layperson to grasp.

One of the key strategies that I will be teaching our elite VIP and Platinum Members this weekend is how to do this systematically.

How to leverage tools like the one below that Mr Tucker shared with us in one of his recent articles.

Every business has hidden assets like this – the key is to know how to use them effectively within an automated approach.

We’ll miss you this weekend.

Japanese Earthquake - Radiation Dose Chart

Psst! If you’d like to give your business results a non-radioactive boost, contact us to discuss our business coaching options and we’ll have a chat about how we can GUARANTEE RESULTS in writing…

I am sure you’ve come across Google Previews (as shown below), but what’s important about it is it’s going to change the SEO and web design concepts as it becomes more popular. Google’s done this to keep you on its page longer, in an attempt to regain it’s #1 status on the web, which it lost to Facebook in 2010. Facebook has more views and the visits are 10 times longer (22 minutes versus just over 2 minutes on Google per day).

I’ll talk about other strategies Google is using which are going to make your SEO strategies even harder and more cumbersome, but for today, I wanted to focus on Google Previews.

We’re all going to need to design our pages according to this new feature. Hopefully Google will explain how it selects the summary text, at this stage it all seems quite random even though it’s not. As soon as Google reveals anything worth reporting – I’ll let you know.

Google Preview Example

This second example of a Google Preview shows how complex this is because the preview is page-by-page depending on the listing, keyword search, etc…

Google Preview Example

In a previous post, I explained the benefit of using a great illustration or photo to explain a step-by-step process. Sometimes the image can be a page of text – like this one for mobile phone recycling… One page says it all in a very attractive layout, with the necessary links.

This is a great example of how to explain something, step-by-step. A picture is worth a thousand words. Always, always Keep It Simple Stupid (K.I.S.S.) especially when it comes to instructions and explanations.