Linkcrafter.com – Blog

“I can still remember the day. It was February 11, 2009, and I had just returned home from a trip to see my wife’s family. Sitting in front of my computer, I read the e-mail that would change the course of my life. It was from Elizabeth, a member of my local leads group, writing to say that the majority of my members had left to join another group.

Elizabeth said that he wanted to maintain a working relationship, but unfortunately, she would be leaving the group as well.

Needless to say, I was devastated. I had put five long, hard years into my group, scrambling to schedule meetings, arrange sponsors, and share leads. I suddenly realized that I needed to accept the fact that things had changed.

My old tried-and-true methods were no longer effective.

I knew it was time for something new.“

John Fitz, a leads group manager in Aberdeen, South Dakota, experienced first-hand what is happening with most leads group around the nation.

The world of leads groups is changing fast. Most interactions are taking place online through social media. Old fashioned leads groups are losing ground, and more and more members are quietly questioning the benefit of annual membership fees and the value for time and money of the monthly meetings.

Why are more and more members of old-style leads groups joining online leads groups in droves? Because they have the opportunity to obtain more sales leads and business opportunities with less effort, less expense, and less time wasted in social networking that has no immediate impact on their business.

As a leads group manager, you need to innovate. Linkcrafter sits on the nose of this revolution. In less than 3 months, Linkcrafter became the #1 leads groups and referral networks utility in the USA and in Europe.

We urge you to join Linkcrafter today and secure your group name and category before your members join groups created by competitors. The Linkcrafter utility will help you create value for your members, while keeping the local ground and social gathering a useful place to build relationships and reinforce trust.

If you join today, we guarantee you can promote your products for free with all the powerful tools on Linkcrafter!

On February 11, 2009, John Fitz, a leads group manager in Aberdeen, South Dakota, experienced first-hand what is happening with most leads group around the nation. He had just returned home from a trip to Yankton, SD, to see his wife’s family. Sitting in front of his computer, he read the e-mail that would change the course of his life forever.

It was from Elizabeth, a member of his local leads group, writing to say that the majority of his group members had left to join another group! Elizabeth said that she wanted to maintain a working relationship, but unfortunately, she would be joining the other group as well.

Needless to say, John was devastated. He had worked day in and day out for five long, hard years, scrambling to schedule meetings, arrange sponsors, and share leads. He quickly found himself lost and floundering, wondering where to go from there.

The world of leads groups is changing fast. Most interactions are taking place online through social media. Old fashioned leads groups are losing ground, and more and more members are quietly questioning the benefit of annual membership fees and the value for time and money of the monthly meetings.

Why are more and more members of old-style leads groups joining online leads groups in droves? Because they have the opportunity to obtain more sales leads and business opportunities with less effort, less expense, and less time wasted in social networking that has no immediate impact on their business.

As a leads group manager, you need to innovate. Linkcrafter sits on the nose of this revolution. In less than 3 months, Linkcrafter became the #1 leads groups and referral networks utility in the USA and in Europe.

We urge you to join Linkcrafter today and secure your group name and category before your members join groups created by competitors. The Linkcrafter utility will help you create value for your members, while keeping the local ground and social gathering a useful place to build relationships and reinforce trust.

If you join today, we guarantee you can promote your products for free with all the powerful tools on Linkcrafter!

The world of leads groups is changing fast. Most interactions are taking place online through social media. Old fashioned leads groups are losing ground, and more and more members are quietly questioning the benefit of annual membership fees and the value for time and money of the monthly meetings.

• More and more members of old-style leads groups are joining Online leads groups. The main reasons are:
  they have the opportunity to obtain more sales leads and business opportunities with less effort, less expense, and less time wasted in social networking that has no immediate impact on their business.
• leads and opportunities transactions could be done online more easily, more frequently, more conveniently while keeping the social gatherings for building relationship, and reinforcing connections started online.
• members could join much more groups and broaden their horizon, without losing the local focus.

Leads group managers need to innovate. Linkcrafter has understood this need of evolution to offer value for time and money to leads groups members. Linkcrafter leads groups utility help referral network managers create value for their members, while keeping local connections and gatherings. If you are already members of leads groups, go on Linkcrafter to join.

Leads Groups and Referral networks are marketing initiatives taken by local small business owners with the purpose to share sales leads, business opportunities and provide support to each other with testimonials, cross-selling, joint-bid, insider information and knowledge sharing.

Sometime leads groups are referred to as Leads clubs, Trusted Networks, Leads sharing Groups, Leads exchange Groups. Chamber of commerce mixers could be referred to as leads groups too.

Traditional leads groups and referral networks are made of 10 to 30 businesses owners or representatives.

Each member of a leads group act as an Opportunity Reporters™ for other members. Wherever they hear about a business opportunity, they immediately report it their leads groups members to consider.

Well managed leads groups meet regularly (minimum 2 times a month) to review the group’s performance in passing qualified leads, strengthen peer to peer  relationship, and furthermore give opportunity to each member to present his business in front of the group. As members learn more about each other  business, they will gain trust and be more eager to give referrals.

Leads groups and referral networks are very powerful tool to receive free qualified leads and business opportunities from peers. Additionally, members  share marketing and sales ideas as well as professional advice with fellow participants

2 kinds of leads are shared in a leads group or Referral network:

• Direct Leads or referrals -”A friend is looking for a SEO company”, or “I need a new car”
• Transferred leads or Referrals – “I’ve heard AcMe is looking for a new supplier of office equipment. Call John for more information” or “Ive found this need posted on craiglist.com”

Let see how a graphic designer, James Dean, acts as an Opportunity Reporters ™ for his leads group:

James Dean is a graphic designer in Los Angeles. He loves his job and clients. He knows deep down that when a client comes to him for a graphic work it’s because the client has a much bigger project. James knows well how difficult is it to find good services providers. So, He is always trying to help, asking his clients about their needs for services other than what he could provide directly to them. He asks about their business purposes and challenges. In this way, he collects precious information and send his customers to a network of trusted providers.

James send his customers who need website search engine optimization to SEO experts, his customers who need content edition to copywriters, etc.

The system works the same way for the Seo experts who send his customers to copywriters, copywriters who send their clients to graphic designer and so on.

The world of leads groups is changing fast. Most interactions are taking place online through social media. Old fashioned leads groups are losing ground, and more and more members are quietly questioning the benefit of annual membership fees and the value for time and money of the monthly meetings.

Members of old-style leads groups are joining online leads groups in droves.  The main reason is that they have the opportunity to obtain more sales leads and business opportunities with less effort, less expense, and less time wasted in social networking that has no immediate impact on their business.

Linkcrafter sits on the nose of this revolution. In less than 3 months, Linkcrafter became the #1 leads groups and referral networks utility in the USA and in Europe.

Linkcrafter is the first company to offer such a wide range of services without requiring additional advertising or social networking efforts. It is currently hailed as the fastest, easiest, and most reliable system for getting noticed and attracting more clients.

Because I want one for myself, and because I’ll buy one for  grandma.

Apple iPad

Linkcrafter’s mission is to search, find and drive customers to your business.

We do this in 3 ways.

1. Opportunities Reporters ™

Each agent of Linkcrafter is an active Opportunity Reporter for the whole community. Opportunities are everywhere: during formal or casual conversation with customers, friends, or from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). Our agents are always where opportunities arise and they will immediately post them on the community wall for other members to consider.

Hundreds of opportunities are reported daily.

Linkcrafter makes available Unique survey scripts and widgets that help professionals capture consumers Self-Generated leads through more than one thousand websites, blogs, and email.

2. Solution-feed.com

Leads Generation

Solution-feed.com is an answer portal created by Linkcrafter and open to consumers at large. Solution-feed.com encourages people to post questions, express their burning needs or requests with the assurance that they will be provided, in a short period, with free and personalized answers from business professionals.

This system is a great source of business leads because behind every question remain multiple Needs to uncover. The vast majority of questions -up to 80%- involve purchase decision or service need.

You just cannot miss these Free leads.

With Solution-feed.com You go from chasing customers to be the one customers will be coming to, because they will look for you for any questions and needs they may have.

3. Campaign recommendations

An event, a product launch, a promotion, with Linkcrafter’s 12 campaign channels and recommendation tools, your business will be simultaneously recommended by several partners with hundreds of contacts. Your profile quickly reaches a threshold huge enough for your event to be a success.

Consider this: 15 of your partners accepted to recommend your new campaign, and each has about 200 contacts, you will then reach 3,000 people through your partners for Free.

Or, imagine you belong to 5 leads groups, each with 30 members. If each of the 150 partners has about 200 contacts, this is a total of 30,000 people you’ll reach through your partners for FREE.

With Linkcrafter you can see and track whom you can really Rely on for your business. You can:

• keep track of who is bringing you business (not just a nice chatting guy over a social media)
• monitor to whom you are bringing business, and the impact this holds for you or for the community.

Most people struggle with making choice. They can’t even decide what drink to have in the pub, what to eat, where to take a walk. They’d rather like someone to make the decision for them; to tell them what to do. They will feel relieved.

The end of the scarcity age in developed countries comes with consumers being overwhelmed by the huge number and variety of goods and services.

“Am I buying the right digital camera? Am I getting the best treatment for my chronic ulcer? Am I signing up for the right serve?”  is the inner voice each consumer is hearing when he face this hell of choice.

There are indeed amounts of information to respond to these questions and there are several channels to access more and more information, “But who has the leisure and the proficiency needed to sort through and evaluate all these products and services? [And] The burgeoning complexity of offerings, as well as the associate risks and reward, confounds and frustrates most time starved consumers. Product variety has not necessary resulted in better consumer experiences” C.K. Prahalad

Consumers are lost. Information comes to them as noise.

THE NOISE BELT SYSTEM

Every consumer today surrounded by a “Noise Belt”. The noise belt is getting thicker and thicker and putting a lot of strain on consumers.

To find relevant, trustful information, consumer needs to filter all the noise noise himself. For doing this, consumers need to filter amounts of information, “Most of it isn’t very good. When you need answers, you may end up sifting through contradicting advice, opinionated content and a lot of pretty crappy material. You’ll waste plenty of time” – James Chartrand, from http://menwithpens.ca

No one takes the noise fatigue as his problem, but everyone comes to add his own noise.

The unheard voice of the consumer behind the amount of data sounds like this:

“I need less data, not more data. I need to know what is important, and I don’t have time to sift through thousands of Tweets and Friendfeed messages and blog posts and emails and IMs a day to find the five things that I really need to know. People like Mike and Robert can do that, but they are weird, and even they have their limits.
So where is the startup that is going to be my information filter? I am aware of a few companies working on this problem, but I have yet to see one that has solved it in a compelling way. Can someone please do this for me? Please? I need help.» Erick Schonfeld, Editor at Techcrunch.com

We are now in the attention economy, in which the new scarcest resource isn’t ideas, capital or talent, but attention itself. Today’s businesses are headed for disaster-unless they learn to manage this critical yet finite resource, or fail!- Thomas H. Davenport, John C. Beck

Businesses which will succeed in this attention economy are the one that take customers attention as a loan or manage it as an investment” NOT something they “paid for“. Companies that fully understand and appreciate those distinctions will be the winners in the future. – Michael Schrage

Challenged cartoon by Stuart McMillen – Recombinant Records (via http://saint.ghost.lt/)

The best New year resolution - Challenge myself

Linkcrafter is marketing company that helps small business owners who are struggling to attract clients but don’t have money to invest in advertising nor have time to spend in networking.

Our solutions work for marketing professionals, sales people, home-based businesses, small business owners, Freelancers, services providers, etc.

Some months ago we have started something new for our customers. We build a system like Yahoo Answers for business purpose: to capture business opportunities by answering consumers questions.

It’s a small widget our customers put on their websites or blogs that encourage their visitors and customers to send them their burning questions, needs or requests, even if they are not related to their business. They promise to provide them in a short period, if not minutes, free professionals answers, ALL for Free.

When we have started, we were not sure how things will work out. Some people doubted the foundation of the promise to put a widget on a website that promise to help anyone with answers, even if their questions or requests are not related to your business.

After several months of test now, we can say this is a really powerful marketing solution. It’s working remarkably well because the vast majority of questions involve purchase decision or service need.

For Linkcrafter company, Since we have put the Answers widget on this blog, we are collecting daily 10 to 25 requests from our visitors, readers and customers. Up to 78% of requests collected through this widget are directly related to our business. 15% are opportunities that we route to partners. We receive a small percentage of crappy requests and questions.

For the community as a whole, 36% of opportunities are collected through members Answers widgets, 13% through direct opportunity report by members, and the other 51% come from solution-feed.com ( a public Answers portal focused on before purchase questions from consumers) .

Abe’s of Maine has used Q&A marketing strategy to boost  revenue and loyalty.  Here is Sarah Mishan, Director Marketing of Abe’s of Maine testimonial:

“When we first started, we didn’t really expect it to take off the way it did,” Mishan says.

Within the first seven months, the team approved more than 5,200 questions to their site, 97% of which were answered. The team has seen a significant decline in customer service inquiries since the effort launched in March.

The notification email messages were strong performers:

- Answer emails average about a 70% CTR.

“For every 100 questions that I answer [for which I] have email addresses, I get 70 people back to my site. And that’s 70 customers that I would have otherwise not gotten.”

- 7.5% of questioners who receive an emailed answer made a purchase.

This is compared to the team’s email newsletter campaigns, which see about a 25% open rate and a 3.5% conversion rate.

Also, the team calculates an average cost-per-acquisition of customers through the answer notification emails at $23.81. That’s better than the team’s approximately $40 CPA and 2.5% to 2% conversion rate on shopping engines, although shopping engines deliver more volume”.

How to start?

Create your account on Linkcrafter.com, and pick your Answers Widget. It’s a unique link, badge or form you can use in your email signature, Newsletter, on Twitter, Facebook, or on your blog, website, etc.

It’s in this way that hundreds of small are actually market their business without wasting money on expensive advertising or wasting time on countless networking websites, clubs or events.

The main benefit for small business owners is the shift from chasing customers to customers coming to you, because consumers  first come to you with their questions and needs.

In the present economic conditions, Linkcrafter is a Good solution.

Start today, follow this link: Linkcrafter.com

Look now at the right side of this article. Did you notice the badge with the red star titled “Ask Experts”? It’s a Linkcrafter Answers widget. Since we have put this Answers widget there, we are collecting daily 10 to 25 requests from our visitors, readers and customers.

As a small marketing company this small widget became quickly one of our major leads source.

up to 78% of requests collected through this widget are directly related to our business.  15% are opportunities  that we route to partners. We receive a small percentage of crappy requests and questions.

When we have started Linkcrafter solution, we were not sure things will work out so well. Some people doubted the foundation of  the promise to put a widget on a website that promise to help anyone questions and requests with professional answers, even if these questions or requests are not related to your business.

After several months of test now, we can say this is a really powerful marketing solution for home-based businesses, small business owners, Freelancers, management consultants, services professionals, sales people, etc.

What is it?

Linkcrafter is a system like Yahoo Answers but for business purpose: to capture business opportunities by answering consumers questions.

36% of opportunities are collected through Linkcrafter members widgets. 2% is through direct opportunity report by members, and the other 62% come from solution-feed.com.

Linkcrafter has created solution-feed.com, an answers website that’s opened to consumers at large.  It encourages people to post their burning questions, needs or requests, and they will be provided in a short period, if not minutes, free personalized answers from experts and business professionals.

Once a customer’s question is received, Linkcrafter’s proprietary application searches the network of experts and routes the question to the small business professional most knowledgeable about the topic.

The system works because the vast majority of questions involve purchase decision or service need.

How to start?

Create your account on Linkcrafter.com, and pick your Answers Widget. It’s a unique link, badge or form you can use in your email signature, Newsletter, on Twitter, Facebook, or on your blog, website, etc.

Here are some samples you could select from:

Linkcrafter Answers Widgets

Some professionals receive 150 requests a month, some other up to 800.

It’s in this way that hundreds of small are actually market their business without wasting money on expensive advertising or wasting time on countless networking websites, clubs or events.

The main benefit for small business owners is the shift from chasing customers to customers coming to you, because consumers  first come to you with their questions and needs.

In the present economic conditions, Linkcrafter is a Good solution.

Start today, follow this link: Linkcrafter.com