Why do you need a website friendly website?

….because that’s where your audience is. They are on their smart phones and tablets and you need to have a mobile friendly website to attract their attention.

Mobile is how we are all starting to work and play in our new digitally connected world, and this mobile lifestyle is growing by leaps and bounds. If you are not already planning your online marketing strategy around mobile devices you will be left in the dust very quickly.

How important is a Mobile Friendly website to your business?

• Mobile users are 3 times more likely to purchase, sign up for an offer or make a phone call to inquire than a PC user.
• More than half of all Internet connections today are through smart phones.
• 88 % of those who look for local information on their smart phones respond to a call to action within a day.
  
• Most websites won’t work on a mobile phone, they’re hard to read and navigate.
  
• Business is lost by denying customers a good mobile experience.
• 61% won’t come back and 40% will go to a competitor site!

What you need to get in the game is one mobile friendly website, that will automatically display itself in multiple versions of smart phones, tablets, laptops and desktops.

Your website must be available in a form that is readable, easy to navigate, and where call to actions can easily be found on all sized monitors and lead the visitor to your landing pages in order to close the sale or for your phone to ring.

What is a Mobile Friendly Design?

When a website is mobile friendly, the layout and/or content adapts to the size of screen they are presented on. A mobile friendly website automatically changes to fit the device you’re reading it on.

Typically there have been four general screen sizes that mobile friendly design has been aimed at:

• the wide screen desktop monitor
• the smaller desktop (or laptop)
• the tablet
• the mobile phone.

How to build a mobile friendly website.

The marriage of online content and mobile friendly web design isn’t optional anymore, because a larger part of your audience is visiting your website from a mobile device.

The good news is, you don’t need to invest in multiple versions of your website to automatically deliver the best possible experience to your audience … across all devices.

You can finally meet your audience on any digital device they choose to use, exactly when and where they need/want you most with the one website with a mobile friendly design.

If you are a small business owner looking for an edge in the online market…a mobile friendly website IS A MUST!!

You don’t have to spend a fortune to achieve a conversion to a mobile friendly website or build one from scratch. They are so affordable you may want to create a website specific to more than one target audience or niche business.

If you’re ready to harness the power of a mobile friendly website right now using a WordPress platform give me a call: 480-586-7381.

Click Here to see how your website
looks on Mobile Devices
Call Me for a Free Consultation: 480-586-7381.

It’s a good time to take a look at who you have been working with and ask yourself if this is the Client you want to be working with?

So much of our business grows through referrals. Do you want a Client database filled with Clients you don’t necessarily want to work with and their friends, relatives and colleagues?  Not working with your Ideal Client will bring more of the same…the wrong Client.

The Consequences of Ignoring Your Ideal Client Profile

Most of the problems you experience EVERY DAY are a direct result of NOT formulating an Ideal Client Profile.  It’s a domino effect. Can you relate to the following?

• You’re constantly looking for new Clients
• You have less time for Clients you enjoy spending time with including high-end Clients
• You aren’t getting enough quality referrals
• You’re distracted by high-maintenance, low-return Clients
• Business is tough, a chore, and you’re not reaching that number in your head
• Your marketing and networking efforts bring in a low ROI (Plus, you hate doing it, and who has time to follow-up the right way?)

Bottom line: You spend too much time trying to find new Clients and not enough time providing top-notch, personal service that shows off your expertise.

Ask yourself who are your trying to reach? 

• Have you figured out exactly what your Ideal Client wants and needs?
• Why would your Ideal Client choose to work with you and not the next guy?
• Do you understand how you Ideal Client thinks?

Invest your time and effort to figure this out and you have completed the first strategic step in working with your Ideal Client.

You want to ATTRACT Ideal Clients, not Customers

Attracting Ideal Clients starts with Listening. Listen to understand, truly understand.

You see, when you listen, dig deep, you uncover and begin to understand the problems that your Ideal Clients are tossing and turning over in their heads…and you can figure out how to get them what they want.

Your Ideal Client is looking to you to help get their problems solved. If you want to be successful attracting more Ideal Clients in your Target market, make sure you are solving big problems for them.

• What problems are keeping your Target market, your future Ideal Clients, awake at night?
• What are their typical problems?
• What are they stressing out over?

Ways to Discover the Problems of Your Ideal Clients

Brainstorm all the problems you think your Ideal Client has and make a list and keep adding to it as ideas come to you.

• Ask your current and past Ideal Clients. Call ‘em, email ‘em, or take ‘em to lunch and pick their brains. People love to talk about their problems. You’ll be surprised at the response.
• Ask your eMail and Newsletter readers. Do a survey. There are free resources for this, such as surveymonkey.com. (You do have a newsletter, don’t you?)
• Look at your successful competitors’websites.  Read their web copy. Read their sales letters. Subscribe to their newsletters. What problems are they highlighting?

Listen and notice the wording used to describe the problems of your Target market. To connect with and Attract Your Ideal Clients, you’ll need to use their language, not yours.

By doing this research, you will not only find out what problems your Target market is having but you will start to think like your Target market. You will start to understand them. People want to work with someone who understands their needs.

Is Your Marketing Attracting Your Ideal Client?

• Will the copy on your website attract your Ideal Client?
• Do you have strong Call to Actions?
• Do you have an Email Campaign directed at your Target Audience?
• Are you creating Free Give-Aways that will get you noticed by your Target Audience?
• Are you keeping in touch with Past Ideal Clients to elicit referral business?
• Are you making the time for all of the above?

If not, you will continue to work with the Wrong Client!

Getting more traffic to your website is a simple as learning how to use Youtube in your Internet Marketing Strategy.

A question I get asked all the time is “how can I increase the visibility of my website on the web?”.  I want to become known as the expert Realtor with my target audience. 

The answer may be simpler than you think, but may be a marketing strategy that will intimidate you….. market yourself using Youtube videos and in a very short time you can become known to your target audience as the expert Realtor to go to.

The 5 Best Reasons to use Youtube in your Marketing Strategy?

It’s Free

Let me state first what may be the best reason to build a marketing strategy on YouTube: IT DOESN’T COST YOU ANYTHING. Why do you think so many people upload so much stuff in it? It’s for free, so why not make the best use of this immensely good thing right now?

It’s Owned by Google

Why is this important?  Simply put,  being owned by the most-used search engine in the world has its perks. How fast do you think YouTube gets crawled compared to other video-sharing sites?  YouTube has the massive resources that Google commands, so it’s pretty much a fact it will definitely see more up-time than down-time.

It’s Viral

YouTube receives more than 120 million US viewers a day.  You want to be where your potential clients are hanging out. Where else can you get this kind of exposure for free?  It the fastest way to become known on the web and needs to be part of your marketing strategy…it’s time.

YouTube marketing for Realtors is fast becoming standard practice, and if you do not have a marketing strategy that includes Youtube videos you are already trailing behind your competitors.

It’s Sticky

Add your videos to your website and encourage visitors to “stick” around longer on your website.   A Website is sticky if a visitor tends to stay for a long time and to return.

If you can make your visitor spend more time on your site, they will view more of your content, and therefore be more likely be to click on your call-to-actions that lead to a phone call to you or an opt-in to your email list.

The most common stickiness approaches is providing content that the user really wants, and this content can be presented in the form of a video.

Content is King

Content is king and on YouTube, the only true way to be successful is to have content that is worth sharing with others.

Learning how to become “known as the expert” using YouTube isn’t difficult at all, and in fact is quite simple. The major problem with people trying to get noticed on YouTube is deciding what it is they would really like to share with people.

No matter what it is you are sharing, you will need to make sure that people will be interested in what you are saying. People simply love watching videos, but if the video leads nowhere, they will leave disappointed.

YouTube has the potential to take someone from a-nobody, to an expert in no-time flat. It can also be a tool that deflates a person in many ways when people find the videos you are sharing are less than interesting and quite boring.

What would your target audience be interested in?

• Videos about  their community, including restaurants, events, local business openings.
• Virtual Tours of your listings
• Market Analysis updates
• Comments on Mortgage rates
• Comments on breaking news in the housing community
• Why to use a Realtor when buying a new home,/span>
• Buyers Tips
• Sellers Tips
• Why buy instead of rent

Get the idea?

Build Your Personal Brand

Aside from the popularity of YouTube, it exploits the most powerful personal branding medium of them all, video.

The reason why video is so effective in communicating your personal brand is because your audience will already feel like they’ve met you by the time the video is over.  With video, you get a sense of who someone really is based on their voice, their face and their body motions.  Video can support your branding efforts like no other medium on the web.

In order to build your personal brand on YouTube, you have to decide how you want to position yourself.  If you already have a brand (such as “Best Realtor in Northeast Valley”), then carry it over onto your YouTube channel to make it consistent with your Facebook fan page, ActiveRain Blog, Twitter and LinkedIn.  

Now that have presented your audience or future audience with a legitimate profile on YouTube, you’re ready to start developing videos that will put your personal brand in the spotlight, while helping you build your business.

Your YouTube channel can become a very important asset to your personal brand., one that provides your authentic voice and appearance like nothing else can.

Promote Your Youtube Videos

Embed your videos on your website.  You can embed one or more videos from YouTube on your website.  YouTube embedded videos give you options, such as a border, different size arrangements and a variety of colors.

Use the YouTube Video Box Application on Facebook, you can add your videos automatically on your profile page or your Facebook Fan Page.  This is a great way to give each of your videos additional visibility without additional labor.

Add Videos to your blog. Youtube allows you to turn on a feature that will enable you to post your videos on your blog directly in just a few simple clicks.

Link to your Youtube channel or videos in your email newsletter.

The more links you have to a video, the higher it will rank when keywords are searching in YouTube or in Google.  Also, more links typically means more traffic to your videos, which helps build your personal brand.  

YouTube isn’t going anywhere.  It’s one of the most trafficked websites in the world and it’s a great online marketing strategy to get the visibility your are wanting to achieve.  Even though many of your videos might not get 100,000 views, the important thing is that you can leverage that video content and share it on all of your online platforms. 

So there you have it, now you have the secret marketing strategy you have been looking for to increase your visibility on the web.

If you are saying to yourself, that sounds great but I don’t have the time or know-how…think about all the videos you have watched or that have become popular, how many people on those videos were polished videographers or professional speakers? 

Get over the fear and intimidation. Do your research and I guarantee that once you have made your first few videos you will find it easier, less time consuming and much more effective than any other Internet Marketing Strategy you are using to increase your visibility on the web.

If you approach Internet Marketing without a Strategy you will be fighting an uphill battle to get new Leads.

Sustaining a steady, increasing flow of income from Online Leads cannot be achieved by a shot gun approach to Online Marketing.

If you are planning to grow your business, then your time and money will be well spent taking the time to design the Online Marketing strategy you are going to use to build a “client-for-life” database. If done right the majority of your clients will purchase homes and list their homes through you and send their family and friends your way.

Get yourself a cup of coffee and settle in for a good read.

Here’s 3 basic, effective Internet marketing strategies you can put in place now….

PUSH INTERNET MARKETING STRATEGY FOR REALTORS -
Blog, E-Newsletter, Drip Campaigns, YouTube Campaigns.

If you are a serious about building your list from Internet Leads, then you must get the word out about who you are and what services you offer. You can build traffic to your website using Blogs, Newsletters, Drip Campaigns and Youtube Campaigns to PUSH leads to your website.  This is an essential strategy.

Blog.

Do you have one? If not, get one and Blog as often as possible.  Publish quality content in your own words on topics that speak to your target audience. Answer their pressing questions. Draw in your Ideal Client.  As recently as 10 years ago it was good enough just to have a website.  That is not the case today… it is too easy and affordable to have a Real Estate Blog that allows you to reach a broader audience and capture more online leads.

Email marketing is designed to send something of *VALUE* to your target audience who have requested information from you by filling in your Opt-In form on your website. By entering their email address into your Opt-In the visitors to your website have given you permission to email them about your services.  Use this opportunity to provide valuable information to your subscriber list on a regular schedule. Impress them with your knowledge and experience in your niche market. Use your email campaigns to drive traffic back to your website for a better look at what you have to offer.

Don’t overwhelm the subscriber with too frequent emails that offer little or no value and are filled with hype.  They have enough of that coming into their email inbox. You want to stand out as the professional with the know-how to get them what they want.

The emails can be in the form of a newsletter, email tips broadcasts, drip campaign or a YouTube video. The topics and themes you choose for your emails and videos will be something of interest to your target audience. Some ideas you can use; answer their most frequently asked questions, send them monthly market updates, share your views on topics related to market trends, or perhaps send them Buyers and Sellers Tips.

If your blogs, emails and videos are consistent in holding the interest of your target audience, then over time your subscriber base will build. Your subscribers will begin to notice your name and look forward to hearing from you. They will come to trust you to deliver something of value and familiarity will begin to grow.

PULL INTERNET MARKETING STRATEGY FOR REALTORS -
Build Traffic to Your Website.

This topic would require volumes to do it justice. However, for the purpose of this Online Marketing blog let’s touch on the essentials of building traffic to you website.

Contrary to what a good majority of people think, “If you build it they will come” is a great line from a great movie, and has nothing to do with the number of visitors who will visit your website uninvited.

It goes without saying that once you manage to get your *TARGET AUDIENCE* to visit your website you will not keep them there unless you have a well designed actionable website.

Know Your “Target Audience”. You have to know who your Ideal Client is before you design a website or Online Marketing Strategy, in some cases even before you choose a domain name.

Website Content. Your website is the first view of you many of your future clients will have of you. When they find your website, will they be impressed enough to stick around to see what you have to offer?   The purpose of your website is to capture leads to grow your list and offer useful, timely information that is valuable to your target audience.

Your website is the cornerstone of your Internet marketing success.  In short, deliver great content. Then keep delivering great content, but in a strategic and focused way.

Your Website Design. Is it simple?  Have you made good use of the real estate on your homepage and prominently placed your Opt-in form and call-to-actions above the fold? If your website is too busy your visitors will lose their way and you will lose the opportunity to direct them to your call-to-actions, landing pages where they can sign up to receive your offer.

SEO.  All of your website content must be written for Search Engine Optimization.  Every Blog, every page of content, every image, every photo, every video must have descriptions, tags and titles that are written to attract your target audience.  If you want to gain a top ranking, you have to work for it, and invest, and really dedicate yourself to it.

DANGLE INTERNET MARKETING STRATEGY FOR REALTORS -
Offer something that is Free and of Value in exchange for the visitor’s email address.

Your Call to Actions (CTA’s). Create a give-away that is valuable, so much so that visitors to your website will give you their email address in return for what you are offering. This must be something that is not found on every other Realtor’s website. Personalize the give-away.  Make it unique. Create call-to-action buttons that compel your visitors to click on them. Call-to-Actions will drive your ideal website visitors to your Landing Pages where, if designed correctly the copy will compel them to sign up for what you are giving away.

Landing Pages. A landing page is any page on a website where a web visitor is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result. Think of capturing email addresses of website visitors who are Buyers and Sellers, and thereby build your list. The goal of the copy and design of a landing page is to get the website visitor to subscribe to your mailing list by offering them an incentive to do so. Make your offer unique and relevant to your target audience, and make it an offer they will not click away from.

Lastly, increase your presence with Social Media. Develop a Facebook business page, open a Twitter and LinkedIn account. Use the profile and description areas on these social media platforms as part of your Online Marketing Strategy to increase your branding.

Integrate all of the above with your website and draw in more web traffic which in turn will grow your list.

And as always, I must stress, these Internet Marketing Strategies take time to work their magic. But they are proven strategies that will ensure you will grow your business for years to come.

The money is in Your List – correct?

Do you know how to get the money out of the list?

Build a relationship with your subscribers, and when they are ready they will call you to list their home or choose you to represent them in the purchase of their next home. If you haven’t begun building a list or have been ineffective with generating income from your list,  then now is as good a time as any to start.  Any successful seasoned business person will tell you the list is where the money is!  If you think you have heard this before and it doesn’t work, you are doing something wrong…my guess is you are probably not consistent in your marketing efforts.

According to most marketing experts, you’ll be struggling to sell much of anything until you build a list and begin contacting that list regularly with information and offers that help them to get what they want.  

How do you build a list? Make sure your website has a prominent sign up box on every page. Although it sounds simple enough, few people actually have enough sign up boxes on their site. The home page is not always the first page website visitors land on so you need to be able to capture subscribers to your list from anywhere on your website. The most common place for the sign up form is in the right column of your website.  As long as you have good content on your website, you won’t have a problem getting people to subscribe to your newsletter.

Bait your website visitors.  Create a free item that will tempt your ideal client to give up their email address for what you are offering. Whether that’s a buyer incentive or a seller incentive. Make sure there’s a brief description of what you do and what you sell. Website visitors need to provide their email address and join your list to receive the giveaway item.

Now that you have a list….it’s time to market your services to your list.

Provide your list with valuable, relevant and timely content on a regular basis through an email newsletter, blogs, videos, and Social Media. As long as you are providing quality content and ask your list to forward the information on to others you will grow your list and cultivate a relationship with your subscribers.

Keeping track of your list. There is no point in marketing to your list without tracking the effectiveness of your email campaigns, blogs, and Facebook postings. If you don’t know how many on your list are reading what you publish and post, you will not know if what you are writing about is appealing to your target audience. If you know what topic is read by more people you will know what to write about to keep your readers coming back to your blog, opening your emails and posting on your Facebook fan page.

Get Your Message Out to Your List

Email Marketing

Use an email marketing service to generate sign up forms, send out newsletters and email blasts and maintain your subscribers lists. Find out who is opening your emails and who is forwarding them to others using the campaign analysis offered by the email service. If your email service does not offer this feature, move on to another one that does.

FaceBook Business Page

If you are cultivating subscribers and fans on Facebook, utilize Facebook’s Insights feature to see how many people have seen your posts, how many are talking about the post and how many clicks on your posts were unique.

 Blogs

Sign up for Google Analytics to track your website visitors and how many visitors are reading your blogs, which blogs are read by more people, where they are from, and how many reading are unique visitors to your website.

 .

Getting It Done

• Did you think it would be easy?
• Do you think it will take too much time?
• Maybe you don’t have the know-how.

None of the above are good enough reasons to ignore your online marketing efforts and have your competitors leave you in the dust. You don’t have to do it all yourself…..Get Help and Get it Done.

Right about now you are probably re-reading the title of this email?  What is this all about? Isn’t email marketing over and done?

Hardly, email marketing in essential to growing your client and prospect list.

Even after all these years, email marketing is still one of the top two ways to drive traffic to your site and landing pages. (Search is the other.) Before you put time into less critical campaigns, why not spend more time and effort optimizing your email campaigns first?

When implemented correctly, a strategic email marketing campaign can expand your sales conversation to a broader audience while building loyalty with your existing client base.

Knowing how and when to communicate with your clients and prospects is key to your success. Implementing smart email marketing strategies will bring in more leads and keep the lines of communication open with your valuable past clients.

Create a steady, predictable schedule with your email messages, whether it’s your follow up drip campaign, or your e-newsletter. Keep giving high-quality free content. Show up on time and with great useful content, and your readers will get a sense that you are reliable and look forward to reading your emails.

Unlike Blogs and Social Media, email marketing allows you to become more personal with your list subscribers and remains an important and cost-effective solution to drive lead generation efforts and build long-lasting relationships with clients.

A well-crafted email campaign can initiate a sales conversation with valuable leads and help you stay connected to your past clients and gain their future sales and referral business.

Let’s look at some email marketing guidelines.

Build your list of Clients and Prospects.

In order to grow your lists you need to drive traffic to your website. Yes, you all know about SEO and how it helps build traffic to your site. However having loads of traffic to your website will do nothing for your bottom line, unless they join your mailing list.

What will grow opt-in traffic to your website is good relevant content published consistently by you in many formats; blogs, email campaigns, newsletters, free reports, video blogs. Traffic generated by great content is more likely to gain you more opt-ins and grow your list.

How you deliver your email content is essential. Sign up for a reliable email marketing service such as Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Aweber or icontact. It is not a good idea to email your clients from your Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail email. You appear to be less of a professional and lose credibility and will have fewer opens.

In addition, most email marketing services will allow you to track the number of opens, what pages your readers are linking to from your email message and how many times.  Other statistics are available depending on the service to help you track your email marketing efforts.  Statistics like these are valuable in helping you to constantly tweak your message until you are reaching your ideal target audience and they are not only opening your email messages, but clicking through to your website for more information.

What do the clients and prospects on your list consider great content?

•    Be interesting
•    Be relevant
•    Be consistent
•    Be accurate
•    Be informative
•    Be timely
•    Be an expert but not a know-it-all
•    Be generous with tips and resources
•    Be YOU

Do not use your content to promote yourself over and over again. Promote your services in a strategic way that does not intrude on the value of the content you are delivering to your readers.

Use the power of an Autoresponder.

The autoresponder is a mighty tool that efficiently reaches out to your readers for you, whether you’re around or not.

Tailor your autoresponders for each of your lists or segments of your list. You don’t want to send the same email messages to your past clients that you will send to your leads and prospects.

Offer a FREE Gift.

Reward your readers for their loyalty. Offer a free digital gift in the form of a video or .pdf  or white paper on tips to help them.

A FREE gift is your way of rewarding your readers for opening your email or opting in to your mailing list.  Create special materials that will appeal to different segments of your list.  Create content that will send your readers to a landing page on your website where they can download your FREE gift….just be sure the landing page content reminds the reader that you have what they need to solve their problem.

Get up close and personal.

Email marketing is permission marketing. The subscriber to your email list has given you entrée to their inbox and invited you to have a conversation with them.  Accept the invitation graciously and bring the gift of your knowledge each time you pay a visit to your subscriber’s inbox.

Don’t treat this as a chore. Instead think of it a sitting down to a cup of coffee with your reader to answer their questions….remember you have been invited to do so.

Choosing a Domain Name is the biggest SEO decision you will make – and you can’t afford to mess it up. Your domain name plays a enormous part in your Internet Marketing Strategy.

First, to avoid any confusion, your site domain name is generally the name and extension following “www.” in a Web address. For example, in the URL www.Google.com the domain name is “Google.com”.

I have had so many Agents come to me to either redesign, optimize, or create their websites, and many of them are using or want to use their name for a domain name.

Let me explain why this is a very bad idea.

A name plays a prominent role when people discover, remember, think about, talk about, search for, or navigate to a website. It establishes a theme for the branding of a website before people even visit it for the first time.

Domain name strategy should be the foundation for building your online brand. A good domain strategy should factor in these fundamentals:

• Concise – shorter is better (under 12 characters if possible)
• Easy to pronounce and spell
• Not similar to another Domain
• No trademark violations
• Passes phone test – grasp spelling and wording quickly

You can’t have a website without a web address. When people open a web browser, they need an address to type that will lead them to your site. The most important part of this address is the domain name.

Even your email address should be one that contains your domain name…not @gmail, or @cox.net, or @yahoo.com. Your email address is distributed to people daily, many times:

• The “From” field on all emails you send
• Your signature at the bottom of your email messages
• Your E-newsletters
• Your Contact Me Ppage on the website
• Your Social Media profiles
• Your Email campaigns and autoresponders
• Your Business card
• Your Listing Flyers

Your domain name will represent a big part of who you are on the web, and a custom name will help build your brand. It will serve as the very first touch point between you and your customers.

Buyers and Sellers will be looking for specific real estate services when searching the web. If they are looking for a Realtor in Northeast Scottsdale, the search engines will turn up a list of Realtors who have Northeast Scottsdale in their domain name. Buyers and Sellers will not be looking for John A. Smith, Realtor Extraordinaire!

If you choose your domain name well, Buyers and Sellers will be able to find you and your services a lot easier! Keep your domain name and your company name consistent. Ideally, if you tell me your company name, I should be able to figure out your web address by simply adding “.com”.

Be aware of how you’re going to tell people about your website.

If you’re going to be telling people verbally you want something pronounceable that is spelled phonetically, that doesn’t have hyphens or too many abbreviations.

Even if you find something that looks great, make sure you know what it sounds like, that it’s intelligible, and that you don’t have to explain it 10 times over to people.

Can you tell someone how to get to your website, without resorting to spelling words out or explaining what abbreviations mean?

In summary, the one big thing to remember here is that domain name optimization is only one facet of your SEO strategy. It won’t get you to the top of Google’s Rankings on its own, but getting your name right from the start can save you a lot of time and energy in the long run.

So choose wisely.