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As a self-employed marketer, I find myself wading through new terrain to assist clients in new angles on old problems revolving around business development, aka sales. While most of us in marketing, sales and public relations may not realize it, we end up having to wear the hat of a sales team member at some point. I find that before you spend too much energy posting or linking to sites for free publicity, a quick check on Alexa can be fruitful. Just how much traffic is the site really getting, and is that site going up or down in its traffic? On April 11, 2006, Alexa added top sites by country, in addition to Top Sites by Language, and Top Sites by Subject. For example, a business partner in my new venture Knowledge Force Seminars posted us to a number of free publicity sites, such as Click Press, PR.com; Powerhomebiz, and PR Free. Alexa describes the traffic rank—“based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach).” Click Press, shows a spike up for January 2006 in traffic and then a drop to its normal levels. PR.com has gone up in the last three months in traffic volume. Powerhomebiz shows 269 similar links. And, PR Free has seen a drop in the number of page views per user. If you’d like to review 5 sites with traffic charts, at once, then try Alexaholic. Of course, you cannot evaluate a site posting strictly on traffic levels, and the basic information on user behavior regarding that site, but it can give you a clue to site activity.

Yet, traffic from referral sites is not always going to give you direct sales. Sometimes you have to be very targeted in who you are going to go after as a prospective client. Take the advice of the recent post (April12) by Sales Coach C Paul Tindall, and begin to formulate your targets and a plan. While your contact list may be useful, at times it can be woefully inadequate. Why not join Jigsaw? The best part is that you can try it for free for 30 days, and this is the time you will get customer support. They call you. Now, getting back to them later, once they’ve called, it not that easy. But, basically you can figure their leads out on your own. A recent search by a video production company was to look for someone that could get them into the Google Video side. You go in with a large corporation you need a contact in—and you find there are over 300 Google staff positions listed for you to choose from. As a user, you have the option of adding your own contact lists and getting points to gather more data, or pay outright monthly fees for the contact search privileges.

If you simply cannot find a contact you seek in Jigsaw, you can turn to one of their younger partners, Email Retriever, a business to business prospecting tool which lets you pay for a service where you type in the person’s name and they will deliver it to that person’s email address, without you having to do the work. The owner, Andrew Paulsen, has patent-pending status, and has only begun to market the company. The free trial gives you 10 successful cold emailing opportunities in 15 days. 

Cold emailing will not help you close a sale, but it may assist you in opening the door. 
According to D.E.I. Management Group in NY, a recent study indicates that your success is going to be measured by how much work you do before meeting your prospective customer. Sometimes a quick Google, is all you have time for. When are interested in digging a bit more you may well want to visit, the newer www.prefound.com search engine. Prefound gives you a chance to see what others have already found out about your topic. 
About the author: Dawn Marie Yankeelov is president of ASPectx, a marketing and business strategy firm serving Fortune 1000 clients in the B-to-B sector, based in Louisville, Ky. She is also a partner in Knowledge Force Seminars, instructing businesses on how to leverage their productivity. The next event is “Taming the Mighty Marketing, PR, and TradeShow Tiger,” coming to a market near you; the Miami area on May 15-16, 2006.