7. Business History Articles: they include information about your business. Examples: years in business, goals your business has accomplished, community affairs, financial information.

8. Product Articles: they include information about your product or services. Examples: new products, improvements to existing products, new accessories.

9. Visual Content: they include visual helpers that help explains, shows or supports an example. Examples: charts, photos, graphics, graphs.

10. Entertaining Content: they include humorous and off beat information. Examples: contests; quizzes, trivia, puzzles, games, cartoons.

11. Excerpts: they include information used from other resources for different purposes, but can also support your business. Examples: journal articles, transcripts of seminars, reprints, speeches, press releases.

12. Technology Content: they are new technologies you can use to present your content. Examples: audio clips, streaming video, MP3 files.

Now that everything’s in place, what next?

PROSPECT LISTS AND SCRIPTS

So now you have everything in place, right? What’s next? What you need now to compliment your workstation is a good reliable prospect list. Or, as it is sometimes called, a suspect/prospect list.

Everyone on list is a suspect that, based on your findings and conversations can turn into a sales prospect and then hopefully a client/customer. This list includes people who are possible candidates for whatever you are selling or marketing. It could be just a survey that you’re doing that could turn into sales in future.

Depending on you needs these list are available at various costs to you or your company. Even with your online business you will eventually talk to one of your clients or a possible prospect to your business. No matter how many emails you send back and forth, to be successful you must talk to someone eventually.

O.k., so now you have a list that should contain contact information. What do you do now? It doesn’t make any difference if your doing tm for local screen or garage door company within your local home geographical area or nationally. And, if contacting corporations to sell services or products is your thing, premise is same.

You need a good accurate list! Make sure that list you have has right contact information and is not outdated. What good is a contact list if people listed have moved, changed companies or have phone numbers that are not accurate or no longer listed? More about prospect/contact lists later in this book.

Now comes a very important part. What are you going to say and ask when you speak to contacts? What you need before you start is a good tm script. Of course, knowledge of your product or service whether it’s online or off is most important aspect of any tm program.

How can you ask your suspect/prospect right questions or more importantly, answer their questions correctly without detailed knowledge of your product or service? So, before you start sit down and write out what you are going to ask and at same time develop some key prompt notes as part of your script that will enhance your ability and knowledge on phone.

It is very difficult and next to impossible to conduct a detailed successful program without a script. Many telemarketers have contact lists that require hundreds of calls over a certain period of time. Time is money and most companies running tm programs have time constraints placed on tm program so that they get prospect information in a timely and efficient manner.