Press Direct International

Everyone knows that it takes time to recover from a car accident. There is the nerve-jangling emotional distress, the potential physical injuries, and the sheer hassle of dealing with the insurance paperwork and vehicle repairs. “What most people don’t realize is that the value of your car never fully recovers,” says Omar Quddus, President and Co-Founder of Advocate Auto Claims, LLC (www.advocateautoclaims.com). “Moreover, if you’re not at fault, you’re entitled to compensation for this diminished value.”

The concept of diminished value is easily understood with this hypothetical scenario: You’re in the market for a used car and can choose between two identical vehicles, one that has been repaired after being in an accident and one that has never been in a crash. Would you pay as much for the repaired vehicle as you would the car that has never been in an accident? “Diminished value is the difference between the prices that the two cars can fetch in the marketplace,” says Quddus.

In the event of an accident, the insurance company of the at-fault driver is usually liable for the diminished value of the vehicle not at fault. That doesn’t mean, however, that insurance companies are eager to pay out diminished value claims. Indeed, carriers place the responsibility of proving diminished value on the consumer – something that most people are ill equipped to handle. “It’s like burdening the victim of a car accident with the part-time job of substantiating their claim,” says Quddus.

As a result, consumers often turn to online companies that – for fees ranging from $29 to $500 – will generate a report stating the vehicle’s diminished value or perform a full vehicle inspection. But the onus is still on the consumer to convince the insurance company to pay the claim. The result? “People spend their time, energy, and money fighting insurance companies that are determined to refuse or deny a claim,” says Quddus. “Even if a company agrees to settle, chances are that the consumer will accept a lowball offer.”

In contrast, Advocate Auto Claims uses its industry expertise to negotiate on behalf of its diminished value claim clients – and does so on a contingency basis. “When consumers use our services, they know that we will initiate the claim, substantiate the claim, process the claim, negotiate the claim, and settle the claim – and that they won’t have to pay a dime until we achieve a settlement,” says Quddus. “That’s a far cry from paying top dollar for a report and then never seeing a dime from the insurance company.”

Quddus attributes Advocate Auto Claims’ success to the ten years of experience their affiliate company has in settling diminished value claims for fleet owners and car rental agencies. “We have licensed public adjusters who understand that every insurance company in every state handles claims differently,” says Quddus. “They know the loopholes and the need for substantiation, but more importantly, they have answers for every type of request, requirement, and denial that an insurance company can throw at them.” In addition, with access to past cases where a given insurance company has paid a claim, Advocate Auto Claim’s adjusters are well positioned to cite previous settlements in order to pave the way for successful negotiations.

The bottom line? When it comes to diminished value claims, it simply doesn’t pay to do it yourself. “There’s no sense in paying out of pocket for an online report when the insurance industry is set up to avoid paying you,” says Quddus. “Instead, you can leave it to the experts and be assured that you’ll receive the best settlement possible.”

In response to consumer demand, on June 2, 2008, Advocate Auto Claims ramped up personnel and expanded its daily hours of operation. The company, which opened its doors to the public in April 2008, can now be reached Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. EDT, and around the clock at www.advocateautoclaims.com. “Through our affiliate company, we had been providing services exclusively to fleet owners and car rental companies, but we recognized the need to educate consumers about their rights and expand our operations,” said Omar Quddus, President and Co-Founder of Advocate Auto Claims, LLC. “Consumer response to this service has been phenomenal.”
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Technorati Tags: diminished value, insurance claims

Managing Funds, Family and Charities

If you passed him walking down the street you wouldn’t guess this man had set up what was at one time one of the largest hedge funds in the US which peaked at over a billion dollars. Sitting in a Florida office wearing shorts and a t-shirt, Ron Pollack (http://www.ronpollack.net) talked about his career as a hedge fund manger and short seller, his family, the charity groups he’s helped and why he’s decided to return to fund management after a six-year hiatus. “Short selling is what I do and I need to get back to doing it.”

Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: fund manager, harvard business school, ron pollack, short seller, yale

Hi Everyone,

In talking to a lot of people who have their own businesses I often hear I know everything about my business, but the phone isn’t ringing. What’s wrong?

It’s a problem that almost everyone in business that isn’t a marketing expert faces. You can be the best plumber, tax accountant, or doctor in the world, but if you don’t know how to get the word out–how to market your product or service–there’s no way you can get the customers you need.

Here are six essential steps to follow to get great marketing that doesn’t cost a fortune.

Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: marketing, promotion, sales

Hi Everyone,

Web Statistics — Are they for geeks only? Nope, they are essential if you are going to market your product successfully.

Which ones are important? Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: conversions, marketing, sales, statistics

Hi Everyone,

Hope you are all doing well.

I thought I’d spend a few minutes going over an interesting discovery with regarding website conversions.

As you probably know, we almost always suggest putting a lead form on all websites. We also suggest that a phone number is prominently displayed on the site.

In addition, we add statistic tracking to the site so we can see what specific keywords brought the person to the site and which of those keywords were the most effective for gaining a lead or sale.

Now, most of you know how paid search works. You do some research on how people are searching and what competitors are doing, place some ads and if your research and ad are done right, you will get a percentage of the people clicking on to the target website.

That is the first threshold of what needs to be cracked so to speak in order to get an efficient campaign.

Now, what if you’re getting traffic and you are not getting leads or sales?

Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: marketing, promotion, sales

What am I going to do?

In 1992, after eleven years in my dental practice, I was asking myself this very question. My practice was in a strip mall and the supermarket moved out. The foot traffic left with it. New patients crashed to fewer than 10 per month and collections were down by 25%. Over the eleven years prior to this I spent tens of thousands of dollars on consultants to teach me how to have a great staff meeting, run my schedule, etc. But, after all of this consulting, I was still left with no solution to my lowered income and new patients. I was frustrated. I began investigating PPO and HMO plans as a solution.

Perhaps you to are or have look at managed care (HMOs and PPOs) either as a source of new patients or how to get out of it. As the topic of managed care is one that I get asked about on a regular basis, I thought it would be a good idea to look at A) why people join up and B) What it really takes to get out. If you are involved with any HMOs, PPOs, discount plans or just want to know how to stay out of them, this article is for you.

In looking at an exit strategy, we should first examine what prompts dentists to join these plans. Common answers I hear from colleagues are:

Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: dental practice, greg winteregg, mge

Hi Everyone,

First of all, a word of thanks to all of you who filled out my survey last week. I found out quite a few things, including your dislike for the courier font I was using in our last few newsletters. I hope this one is better for all concerned. I personally liked the courier font; it felt a bit old school, like the manual typewriters I learned to type on in the year of the flood (the 1970’s for those who don’t remember the good old days), but being a marketing professional and knowing this newsletter is designed for what you need and want, have changed it to this nifty Arial font. I guess I should have known better. I don’t wear polyester anymore either. Let me know if this is better for you.

As far as the newsletter goes, some of you wanted more basic information; some of you wanted more in depth information.   At this point I’m going to keep the newsletter somewhat basic, but those of you who are interested in a more technical newsletter, please e-mail me and if there is enough of a need, I will start writing one. I also found out that you guys are interested in marketing thru video, mobile devices and blogs as well as any insider tips I can give you to do better. I plan on doing that in the coming weeks, but today, I want to go over what I found out from the research we did last week and my personal realizations from analyzing the information.

Now, I hope you do get a bit excited about that information, maybe not as much as I did, because I’m not only a marketing Goddess, but a geek deep down.

First of all, I don’t know if you realize this or not, but I had a tough time getting more than 30 responses when I was doing this at In Touch. I knew if I was really going to get a real understanding for my own marketing needs, I needed to get more than 30 responses.

So, I used my linkedin.com network as well as posting it to the questions area of linkedin.com. What I got was almost 200 responses between you guys and them. The information was great, especially since we had responses from all types of businesses and budget categories. One of the things I found most surprising, was the various ways people were marketing and their relative success.

Here you can see a sampling of people with budgets of $2,500.00 a month or less

Now, here are the results for those with a monthly budget of more than $5,000.00.

I found a few things surprising, one of which is that businesses are still finding e-mail marketing successful. You should take a look at what other people are doing and find successful as I’m finding things like traditional direct marketing might be right for some of you.

Additionally, I found out that 82% of all people looking to hire someone like me, would first go to a friend or associate for a referral before looking on the Internet. That makes sense to me as I’ve found that about 80% my business comes from referrals.

So, why this exercise?    Well, I’ll tell you, I have to apply to myself that which I suggest to you readers.

Market research works. It gives you the blueprint needed to market anything. I’m going to end with a success story of one of our clients, who did what we recommended. Market research, and then design and copy based on that. Here’s what happened:

Advocate Auto Claims
Advocate Auto Claims had experience in their industry of recovering money from insurance companies when a vehicle had diminished in value as a result of an accident. However, their experience was exclusively through businesses and fleet owners and had not offered this directly to consumers.

When they contacted us, they had very tight timelines in which to get a new company that was geared directly to consumers up and operational.

We did extensive online competition research, set up a Google Adwords campaign including keywords and ads, created a corporate website and a lead generation page. Additionally, we did a survey of general consumers and found information that was critical but not known by AAC as they had never worked directly with consumers. All of this was done in under three weeks.

With survey results in hand, copy changes were done so that consumer objections were directly handled at the start. After completing a final quality control process for both the site and the lead page, we turned on the campaign and started driving traffic to the lead generation page using Google Adwords.

The campaign went live on April 18 in a few, local test markets. By April 21, the campaign had already generated $20K in contracts and more in the pipeline. They are experiencing a 10.8% conversion rate of clicks to leads with a cost per conversion less than $35.

Needless to say, the client is overjoyed with the results and is opening up the marketing area as well as increasing the budget.

Anyway, that’s it for this week.

Thanks for reading.

Best,

Laura Betterly

President

Yada Yada Marketing, Inc.

www.yadayadamarketing.com

727-442-5888

Technorati Tags: marketing, results, sales, survey

Why do some sales go bad? You know what I mean, seems like it’s going great and then no communication, no calls back. It can be the cause of a real sales slump.

Now why would a prospect start out adversarial? Well, as much as they might need and want or have some interest they don’t want to be sold. How do you sell without selling?? It has to do with how the salesperson actually cares about his prospect. I’ll tell you this, I never sold anything to someone I didn’t like and who didn’t like me. It needs to be genuine and not hype.

How do you do this? Well, you got to listen. Some sales people are so intent on talking to the prospect about what they can do for them, they forget to ask, what do you do? How can I be of service? Asking that, and not doing this as an exercise, but really caring for the prospect will make the difference in getting a prospect interested.

Now, what if you’ve done all that and the prospect just vanishes off the side of the earth?

Well, here are a few things I’ve found out:

1.   The prospect is not really qualified in the first place. They act like they can afford to buy, but then get too embarrassed to tell the truth.

2.   The prospect is not really the decision maker and is unwilling to tell you so.

3.   There is something about you personally that reminds the prospect of someone else they don’t like, and as such, won’t buy.

4.   There was some sort of personal emergency that occurred and the prospect gets back in touch when the emergency is over.

5.   The prospect was a competitor and was calling to get information from you.

6.   The prospect is from an alien race of beings that never buy anything anyway.

Regardless, keep this in mind for your own sales and let’s make an agreement not to do this to anyone who is selling anything to you. From a karma standpoint, it will work to your advantage.

Best,

Laura Betterly
President
Yada Yada Marketing, Inc.
727-442-5888
www.yadayadamarketing.com

Shameless self promotion:

One of our dentists had their highest ever new patients into their clinics during the month of March during their first month of their program.

What Clients are saying about the Yada Yada Team:

I started using Laura’s services when I launched the business side of my web site. Her recommendations have always produced a huge return on my investment and I truly trust her judgment and expertise when it comes to Internet marketing.” March 20, 2008
Dr. Gary Farr-Become Healthy Now
________________________________________
Laura is a highly experienced and enthusiastic marketer and exec. She is a master networker with excellent follow through. I enjoyed my time with her immensely and still count on her for advice to this day.” March 6, 2008 “
Bruce Prokopets
________________________________________

“Laura and I have worked on a business level on a couple projects that are of long duration. My experience with people in general has been very good but, you really do have to make sure to understand the people you work the closest with especially in a project such as we are involved in. My experience and Laura’s actions have shown that her and her partner Steve have been above the cut in all our business dealings and I recommend that, if you are looking to find someone who can get the job done and be trusted with it, her and Steve are the ones.” April 3, 2008
Larry Hall, Standard Internet Marketing

Technorati Tags: marketing, sales

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to go over with you the research I’ve been doing on Social Networks, namely LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com and Facebook (www.facebook.com). I started this in January and now in April wanted to share this with you.

As I’ve mentioned before, an analysis of my income over the last several years made me realize that word of mouth marketing has been my most successful action.

For whatever reason, I have greater success with referrals than with gaining new customers from scratch so to speak.

Now, that doesn’t mean that I don’t use the services I sell to others to gain leads, just that half the job is done when we are referred.

About three weeks ago, I picked up this book called Jeffrey Gitomer’s Little Black book of Connections—6.5 Assets for Networking Your Way to RICH relationships and it actually was applicable to what I was endeavoring. (It’s an easy and interesting read, and I suggest it for you.)

Keeping that in mind, I joined Linked In and Facebook. First of all, Facebook is a blast. I did get back in touch with friends and old business associates I hadn’t been in touch with in years.

Facebook is much more personal. You post your own picture, bio, interests, and can interact by sending messages, playing a game, or giving virtual drinks, gifts and my personal favorite, throwing a sheep at someone…

Now, you’d think this wouldn’t have much of a business application, but I found out differently.

Thru my associations on Facebook, I gained the following:
A connection to old business associates,
A connection to three extremely influential marketers that I previously read their books, but never met,
Two clients and
I was booked as the moderator of the online retailing panel at Winter Music Conference http://www.wintermusicconference.com/events/schedule/index.php .

I just spent the week in Miami at the conference and then personally met over 100 people.

As far as Linked In goes, I again, found some business associates I hadn’t been in touch with in a while. I noticed that there is a function where you can answer questions in an area that you are expert and decided to answer some of these questions.

Well, as far as I can tell, this is the Holy Grail for business development. I have people e-mailing me, joining my network and I was asked to be a guest speaker on a webinar on Social Networking on April 17 not to mention the EVP for Marketing and Sales for a large corporation that I wouldn’t have been able to connect with without it.

If you are interested in attending this seminar, please go to Conference Call University and register using this link:
http://www.myeasyonlinestore.com/app/?Clk=2341074 . There is a nominal cost to attend, but the subject matter is about social networking for business.

Now, this is the kind of networking you can’t outsource. You need to be in the trenches yourself spending an hour or so a day developing these relationships. The other thing to note, (and info I got from Mr. Gitomer’s book) is that you need to add value to your connections and not approach this medium with what can they do for me. Now, I know we are looking for new business, but the fact is, you’ll get new business by being helpful in your chosen field. As a result you’ll start to be considered an expert and then you’ll get more business.

In addition to all that I have two blogs that are about business, life, etc. and people get a sense of who I am. People are much more likely to do business with someone they know. You might want to check out my blogs at www.laurabetterly.blogspot.com or www.laurabetterly.com to see what I’m talking about.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve discovered and wanted you to be able to do this too.

Best,

Laura Betterly
President
Yada Yada Marketing, Inc.
www.yadayadamarketing.com
727-442-5888

Shameless self promotion below:

PS. Do keep us in mind for all your marketing needs. We’ll give you a consultation on your current marketing strategy and in most cases we improve results dramatically. On one recent client we cut their lead cost in half, doubled their traffic and increased their conversion rate between 100-300% (e-mail me to get the case study.)

What Clients are saying about the Yada Yada Team:

Basically [the] service far exceeded what I expected and I am please to tell others.
“I found out about [you] by seeing another one of your clients work. I was so enthralled with it, that I called this individual to find out who did it. She highly recommended your services. I contacted the sales department and was given excellent service. I told him what I wanted and I got just that. I’ve worked with many marketing companies and they say one thing and do another. This was not the case with you! I felt like everything I said was duplicated and much of it you were able to glean from our site. The copy that was written for us was truly amazing. You understood our product and it showed. Basically [the] service far exceeded what I expected and I am pleased to tell others.”
Sincerely, R. R.
________________________________________
Our registration went up 200% and 300% with Google….
“The last campaign went really well. Our registration went up 200% and 300% with GOOGLE. We are now in our second exciting campaign….”
B. C.
________________________________________
You hit a home run and I can now rival [my largest competitor]!
“I was up late this evening and figured I would check back into the site. I did not expect to see any changes but rather I wanted to just evaluate where we were…. To my surprise there were changes and I am absolutely impressed!!!! …you hit a home run and I can now rival [my largest competitor]. Thank You for all your hard work!!!”
Brian
________________________________________
I got the data I needed and I’m going to run with it….
“[The survey] led to some ideas for additional income. So we did another survey specifically targeting those income ideas. I got the data I needed and I’m going to run with it, probably increasing the monthly income by a nice amount with a service that will be quick to implement. Thanks … for the help in getting this data from my members.”
D.R.
________________________________________
“You guys are hitting a “home run” on this one! Tell all the team I am blown away!”
T.Y.
________________________________________
I love the leads, and I really like the quality.
“The leads have worked great for me. Out of 24 people I actually spoke to, I signed up 9 people. I was able to leverage my time and make it more effective. In my 20 years experience these are some of the best leads I have ever used. They are far superior to the leads elsewhere.”
V. P.
________________________________________
It’s exciting and financially rewarding to have the opportunity to receive such high quality leads….
“I found the staff and services…to be as polished and professional as it gets! It’s exciting and financially rewarding to have the opportunity to receive such high quality leads from your state of the art GOOGLE Adwords Campaign and research team. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the wonderful staff … for everything they did in bringing it off to create the exact final end product that was absolutely needed for the ultimate success of our campaign here at [oil company.] The Search Engine Advertising and National & Regional Online Promotional Broadcasts really made the difference in the quality of the leads.”
B.C., Director of Sales
[oil company]
________________________________________
I started using Laura’s services when I launched the business side of my web site. Her recommendations have always produced a huge return on my investment and I truly trust her judgment and expertise when it comes to Internet marketing.” March 20, 2008
Dr. Gary Farr-Become Healthy Now
________________________________________
Laura is a highly experienced and enthusiastic marketer and exec. She is a master networker with excellent follow through. I enjoyed my time with her immensely and still count on her for advice to this day.” March 6, 2008 “
Bruce Prokopets
________________________________________

“Laura and I have worked on a business level on a couple projects that are of long duration. My experience with people in general has been very good but, you really do have to make sure to understand the people you work the closest with especially in a project such as we are involved in. My experience and Laura’s actions have shown that her and her partner Steve have been above the cut in all our business dealings and I recommend that, if you are looking to find someone who can get the job done and be trusted with it, her and Steve are the ones.” April 3, 2008
Larry Hall, Standard Internet Marketing

Technorati Tags: marketing, sales, social networking