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The Difference Between Novices and Experts

How do you know if you’ve reached expert status?
It can be as simple as looking at the kind of feedback you are most likely to seek out and respond to.

According to a recent study from the Journal of Consumer Research, they found that the transition from novice to expert happens when we begin focusing on negative feedback.

The study suggests that when people are new at something, in an effort to stay committed, they seek positive feedback (e.g., “good job!”). On the other hand, experts are more focused on making progress and therefore look for and respond to negative feedback (e.g., what’s going wrong?).

So, whether you make your living as a personal injury attorney, lasik surgeon or live chat operator, if you find yourself looking more closely for negative feedback like how you can improve, then consider that a good sign, you may be an Expert.

It’s Cool to Chat with Acronyms & Shorthand.

Texting is all the rage.

It’s used by teens, tweens, mids and max’s. For pleasure, for work. By Nerds, Dweebs, Jocks, Cool Kids, Celebrities, Mom & Dads, Doctors, Lawyers, Teachers… even the President Tweets every so often.

With close to 100 million people texting at any given time it’s no wonder a new, short-hand-like language is being created.  These abbreviations are used by people to quickly communicate with each other while IMing, Chatting, Texting, SMSing, Tweeting etc.

So what do all of these symbols and acronyms mean?

Here are the Top 50 Popular Text & Chat Acronyms (as listed on Netlingo.com):

2moro – Tomorrow
2nite – Tonight
BRB – Be Right Back
BTW – By The Way
B4N – Bye For Now
BCNU – Be Seeing You
BFF – Best Friends Forever
CYA – Cover Your Ass -or- See Ya
DBEYR – Don’t Believe Everything You Read
DILLIGAS – Do I Look Like I Give A Sh**
FUD – Fear, Uncertainty, and Disinformation
FWIW – For What It’s Worth
GR8 – Great
ILY – I Love You
IMHO – In My Humble Opinion
IRL – In Real Life
ISO – In Search Of
J/K – Just Kidding
L8R – Later
LMAO – Laughing My Ass Off
LOL – Laughing Out Loud -or- Lots Of Love
LYLAS – Love You Like A Sister
MHOTY – My Hat’s Off To You
NIMBY – Not In My Back Yard
NP – No Problem -or- Nosy Parents
NUB – New person to a site or game
OIC – Oh, I See
OMG – Oh My God
OT – Off Topic
POV – Point Of View
RBTL – Read Between The Lines
ROTFLMAO – Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off
RT – Real Time
THX or TX or THKS – Thanks
SH – Sh** Happens

So, next time your chatting it up with a friend send them this:

“BTW, DBEYR because FWIW IMHO we all just need to RBTL and understand other peoples POV and if you can do that then MHOTY…J/K, LMAO, L8R!”

Huh?

Ngage Live Chat Surpasses 700 Sites

Ngage, the Live Chat division of Cloud 8 Sixteen, Inc recently announced that it has hit yet another milestone by adding it’s 700th web site. The data shows that the rate of adoption of Ngage’s Live Chat Service has more than tripled compared to the previous year.

Kim Curtis, Co-founder of  Ngage & COO of Cloud 8 Sixteen Inc, attributes the increase to a basic awareness of legal firms towards the importance of delivering 24/7 support to their clients and prospects. What once seemed like an optional feature or a gadget for high tech law firms is now becoming an essential strategic advantage for converting prospects and helping law firms adapt to the high-paced, information-now culture.

“These numbers show a fundamental shift in how lawyers view live chat support,” Curtis said. “The increased use of live chat has helped to turn Ngage live chat from a nice addition to an essential tool for attracting new prospects, providing client support, and being available around the clock.”

For more information on Ngage Live Chat Support visit: http://www.ngagelive.com

Leads: How Soon Should I Call Them?

I’m often asked the question: “How fast do I need to call a lead back after we get the live chat lead transcript”? My answer is always: “As fast as possible”. My theory is that the quicker you get back to someone the better your chances are that:

  • You’ll catch them
  • They’ll be “in the moment”, increasing your chances of closing them or setting an appointment.

To me, my assumptions make sense, but rather than just assume that I am correct, I recently went looking for further evidence. A Kellogg study on Lead Response Management (LRM) revealed some very interesting statistics, which (lucky for me) also validated my prior assumptions:

  • The odds of connecting with a lead increases by 100 times if attempted to contact them within 5 minutes (versus 30 minutes).
  • The odds of converting a lead if called within 5 minutes versus 30 minutes increases by 21 times.

In another study by the Harvard Business Review, I found this compelling statement:

“Companies that try to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving queries are nearly 7 times as likely to have meaningful conversations with key decision makers as firms that try to contact prospects even an hour later. Yet only 37% of companies respond to queries within an hour.”

Wow! Only 37% of companies respond to inquiries within an hour? That is absolutely astounding to me… talk about a missed opportunity! So how do you make sure that your staff is responding to prospects within that rapidly closing window (besides investing in an espresso machine)?

The best long-term approach to maximize your online lead opportunities is to create a system or game plan. When a new lead comes in, do you have a plan? Who gets the lead? What do they do with it? Is there a script for follow and what do they do if they don’t catch them on the first call?

Creating a proper course-of-action may take you several hours to construct but once it is in place you should quickly see an increase in lead conversion. You’ve heard it a million times, “failing to plan, is planning to fail.”

So in summary: have a plan, and when it comes to lead conversion, “time is money!”

Live Chat for your Blog

Many people have seen the benefits of live chat on their main website, but have not considered the results that could also come from their blog.  The traffic from your blog is inherently going to be very similar to that of your main site, and therefore similar potential clients could be waiting to be engaged in a conversation.  Blog visitors are often in the preliminary stages of educating themselves and researching whether or not they want to contact your office.  Live chat is a non-threatening option to begin the conversation because the potential client can remain anonymous for as long as they like.  These readers are usually looking for specific and unique information which means they are going to be very relevant to the topic of the blog.  This means that when they are converted into a contact, there is a high chance that they will be a good match for the services your business provides.

Ngage is now offering chat in Spanish!

We are excited to announce the launch of our Spanish-speaking operating team. We can now support your sites that are targeted to the Spanish-speaking marketplace. As we all know, this demographic is the fastest growing segment of the population. Feel free to contact us @ 877-912-8668 if you would like to discuss how to turn more of your Spanish-speaking visitors into clients.

P.S. If you have not yet moved to targeting the Spanish-speaking market on the web, you may want to visit http://www.thesearchengineguys.com to begin these endeavors.

Facebook Marketing Tips For Serious Business Only

The internet has gone through a lot of changes in the last few year by going from web 1.0 to web 2.0 which is a major transformation.

This change occurred for many reasons, but the one of them was social networking. This caused social media to grow like crazy over the internet. More people begin communicating with their friends via social media, which caused the internet to be used ten times as much. Currently, Facebook leads the way in the social networking websites. This social networking site is very popular and has a half a million users with tons of interests. How is this used for internet marketers? It just shows that the site has huge potential when it comes to marketing and can be easily leveraged for that purpose. This why a lot of people are choosing to utilize Facebook for advertising purposes. If you do it correctly, there are many methods for marketing the right products to your targeted market. In this article, we will discuss a few of the Facebook things that can get you noticed more.

A Facebook fan page is an incredible tool, and it gives your the ability to meet with your target audience on a daily basis. But what’s more important is that you make this fan page give you the results you want. So when you’re planning out your fan page, you’ll really need to make it interesting because you naturally want it to be popular in your market. What is it about a popular fan page? You want people to see that other people have been there, that plus putting great content on your page frequently. Just find ways to get people to open up and write something in your fan page. Dare people to tell you what is on their minds, and you can do standard things like opinion polls and such. If you are successful with talking to your market, then you will be in a great position to know exactly what they like and don’t like, etc. If you play your cards right you will know what makes your market tick, and in the process creating great business relationships with people.

You should be sure to create a business profile because you will want to keep it separate from your personal profile. There are a lot of good reasons for doing so, but mainly you want to keep a professional appearance on your business activities. But there is nothing wrong with injecting a little light-heartedness into your business profile. Do something to spice up your business profile and page. But keep things in balance, and never create the appearance that you’re not serious, etc.

Have a solid idea of what you want to accomplish, and the organize everything and build a business and marketing plan. So take a look at what you’ll be marketing and promoting, and then build all the materials you will need to accomplish your goal. It’s very important to actually work towards growing your marketing efforts on Facebook by being crystal clear in your approach. If you put everything into a Word document, or anythng similar, then you can look at your plan and see more.

You can quickly get up to speed with Facebook marketing and do absolute wonders for your business bottom line. If you choose to ignore the enormous potential at Facebook, then that is your great loss.

Getting Better Search Engine Placement

Optimizing the capabilities of search engines is an integral part of online life. Since it’s a complicated process, it may be better to hire a professional. But there are still things to be careful of while improving ones search engine placement.

Its possible to damage a websites reputation on services that guarantees you are included on a huge number of search engines. Larger search engine websites are not sympathetic with people who frequently put in their website to attain a higher rank. Many new companies create websites and present it to a few search engines; they think their work is done and just wait for traffic to arrive– not true. Achieving a top search engine spot doesn’t happen by chance.

Choose keywords carefully and build a website in a way that it is important to the search engines. Make sure to incorporate the keywords and key phrases into the site whenever possible – but not overly obvious. Website profitability resides with one key factor: the placement of a site in search engine results. Search engines are just computers – they don’t have a vested interest in how good or bad site ranking are. All it does is makes search results as relevant as possible. Design a website around keywords and relevant topics.

Get started by picking out a few keywords and key phrases. The chosen keywords should appear often as part of the content on the Web site. Use the keywords frequently enough so that the search engine can identify the site really is relevant to them, but avoid being too liberal with them. If the keywords are too dense then your website will be completely ignored for search engine spamming.

So what is the perfect balance between too much and too little keyword usage? Its hard to say since search engines conceal their procedures and modify them on a regular basis. On top of that, each search engine has a different algorithm or set of rules. A rule of thumb dictates that the keywords you choose should make up about 5% of the words on a page, You will get a higher ranking for your pages when they have somewhere between 250 to 500 words.

Don’t focus on only a single keyword. It’s better to select several keywords and work on the optimization of one or two on each page of the site. Search engines search for the theme of a website, a website that focuses on just one thing is likely to get a higher ranking than a single page on the same subject. Optimizing each page with several keywords help make sure that they also occur throughout the website. Don’t overwhelm pages with keywords and have a friend read through the pages. Ask them to see if the text sounds odd because of your use of keywords – that’s a great meter to determine if you are using them too much within your content.

Always put keywords in the title of the page. This is the most crucial place for keywords to appear, although there are other places in the HTML code where keywords are important. By follow these simple guidelines you will get a better ranking than many sites on the Internet.

5 Key Marketing Tips

There are many ways to keep your business in the public’s mind. The follow tips are five key legal marketing ideas to help keep your business thriving. Many of these tips are related to one another.

#5 — Writing Interesting Articles: This is an important marketing tool because it allows clients to see what subjects your business addresses and what you can do for new customers. When writing any type of article, whether published or a blog its important to keep it topical to your business and interesting to the client. Make sure the article is easy to read and is not bogged down by length. Shorter articles with relevant subject matter will help keep clients interest in what you have to say.

#4 — Communicate Often: Communication is the most important part of marketing. Communication with clients keeps you aware of what is important to your clients. Follow up with phone calls and make sure clients are happy with the services they are receiving. This will keep you aware of possible improvements and will show your customers you care.

#3 — Seek Client Feed Back: This is related to communicating often, by speaking to your clients you will be able to find out how your services rank in your consumers mind. Feed back helps locate areas that can be improved and areas that are doing well. Positive customer feed back also can be used to promote your business.

#2 — Listen to Clients: After customers provide insight about improvements a company can make take heed of what they say and follow through with their suggestions. Show clients your listening and are willing to change for the better. Remember the old adage, actions speak louder than words.

#1 — Visit your Clients: Face to face interaction helps show clients your a real person interested in their concerns. Electronic interaction are important but live interactions allow for comradery and improved relationships between you and your customer.

Video Marketing — How To Leverage The Power

The Internet is huge, with billions of websites on every topic imaginable. Videos are huge, too, but it’s still quite young and only getting more massive each year. Fewer people are reading books than there are who watch videos on sharing sites. Most people enjoy the entertainment value of videos, plus they’re just easier to deal with and learn from. People don’t have a lot of patience, so they prefer to ‘watch and learn’ rather than go through any other type of content. Videos are an extension of TV, and we all know that medium is used as a means of transmitting information and content. A lot of marketers put their videos on Youtube, or other sites, and then simply embed them on their own sites to dcrease bandwidth. If executed by someone who is knowledgable, videos can be outperform many other marketing mediums. We want to share some more ideas about video, and how you can use it in your IM business.

One of the key advantages of video marketing is that you’re able to reach your target audience very easily. The people who are watching your video are interested in what you’re offering, and that’s the best part. Your video traffic will always be targeted, and that’s what you’re looking for. If you make a really great video, then you may experience having your video picked up and put on other sites. Something like that will really help your cause in your marketing. You only want to receive targeted traffic to your site. Video can get the job done with targeted traffic, it’s up to you to convert it.
Everyone knows about blogging and its many uses and benefits. As you know, you can embed videos in your blogs, but you can also create Vlogs – video blogs. You will not find many niche vlogs around the net, and they can be marketed very well if you know how.
You can always find people who like video so much they’ll visit your vlogs. Your regular updates will catch the attention of your target market and thus, increasing repeat visitors. With videos, you could add several each week which shouldn’t be hard to do. There are tons of ways you can leverage vlogging as it is the next generation of blogging.

One other unique aspect of using video is that it can easily become viral, and it’s in the best format for spreading. In other words, if your video becomes popular, people start spreading it around the web virally, and your video will get a huge amount of traffic. Viral marketing is a really effective way to get visitors because it doesn’t cost anything and all the traffic is free.
Video is not being completely exploited by online marketers, so this is a great time to begin using it. Youtube and a few other sites will be the main places where you’ll be doing your video marketing.
Just keep testing and experiment with new videos to get long term results.

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