Back in 2005 I had this great idea to write a book or blog someday called Flip the Funnel.  Since then I've been collecting ideas/thoughts/suggestions based on the experiences at InterAct Websites, Inc..

Wouldn't you know it that someone beat me to the punch with the book, but I've still got the website and have republished the blog.  I'll get the older articles and some newer stuff as well there soon.

Flip the Funnel is an idea/concept based on taking the sales funnel and flipping it upside down to keep more customers in your funnel vs having them escape to a competitor.  Exciting stuff and I've learned alot through our own trials and errors over the past 5 years.

If you are looking for customer rentention best practices and ideas then flipthefunnel.com may be for you.  Check it out!

Nearly every week we have conversations with RV Dealers around the country that have Search Engine Optimization top of mind and want to get to the top of the rankings like now! Frankly, spending a bunch of time and money all at once on SEO is very similar to a crash diet. Over 90% of the time you might look good for a very short period of time but long term you might look worse than you did when you started.

Getting great results with SEO should be a continual improvement ... let's call it Lifestyle SEO. Just think about the results you can achieve with putting consistent monthly effort into optimization. You can more easily monitor the results and then the improvements you make on your improvements can generate compounded results!

So, stop thinking about getting SEO rich quick and put a plan together to continually make improvements to get where you want to be.

Until next time...

If you've been around technology at all you've seen the verbage Web 2.0. What does it actually mean and where does it come from? Kamla does a great job in her interview with Tim O'Reilly (psst ... the guy who actually coined the term).

Check out the Web 2.0 Podcast here.

To listen you'll want to click the > button.

If you are online at all you've probably heard about sites like ... facebook.com, myspace.com, squidoo.com, twitter.com, and a gazillion others. Maybe you have a page on one of them, maybe you don't, maybe you don't care, but should you?

That is the real question ... should any of us spend our valuable time on any of these websites? What purpose do they really serve? Ok, maybe for the short run they are cool and give 'social butterfly's' and introverts a way to express themselves and reach out to the world. I've recently begun to wonder myself how many 'pretend drinks' you can send to someone on facebook.com and have it really mean something.

People in general crave acceptance of others and want to let others know what they are up to. Take twitter.com for example ... the whole site is designed so you can let people know what you are up to, what you are doing throughout your day, week, month...

At the end of the day my thoughts on these sites are that they are truly in the infancy stages of online social development. Currently, these sites are pretty much glorified pesonal journals of a sort and how many different journals can one really be proficient at?

And if you are really bord you can check out one of my squidoo lenses that references stuff about selling rvs.

Until next time...

This conversation could go in a number of different directions, but I've chosen to talk about business vendor partnership's or alliances.

In the past couple of weeks we were notified that a product/service we've been reselling is going away, the company just decided to no longer offer the service. Not because it wasn't profitable, but rather because they had other products/services that were more profitable. Good for them I say ... makes sense from an economics standpoint.

However, that leaves us in a situation we've never been before. Lost service offering and lost profit. The service/product we resell from them is a valuable service to our RV Dealerships and also profitable for us. Bummer.

More than likely we'll find a similar provider and go from there, but the experience puts a another notch on my business knowledge stick. Watch the vendor partnerships and alliances you commit to and make sure there is a plan B should that relationship or service go south.

All the marketing dollars/effort/energy investment we put into the product/service offering would be lost along with the profit should a similar service provider be unavailable. No worries ... just plan better!

Until next time...