Archives for January 2016

Easy Start Up Realtor Marketing

marciacatlin · January 12, 2016 ·

1) Use WordPress for Your Real Estate Website
First, a blog IS a website, so don’t continue to think of them differently. There are differences in how they store and display content, but you can make a blog-based site look like the websites you’re used to, but it will be easier for you to maintain yourself, saving a huge amount of money. Blogs also do better with the search engines, so you’ll be accomplishing multiple Internet marketing goals by using a blog for your site. And, there is no better platform than the WordPress blogging software.
2) Become the “Area Expert” with Content Marketing
“Neighborhood Expert” is something that every realtor wants to be known for … in his or her marketplace. So how are some ways to show people, “What’s in it for them”? It’s simple. Write blog posts using LOCAL content that matches your marketplace’s interests. Learn about your marketplace and accurately determine what is most important to the people who live there. For example:

Sometimes, it’s all about the children. Do you market to a suburban area that has lots of families living throughout the neighborhood? Why not pick occasional and timely seasonal pieces to grab their attention?
Or it’s an active area with lots of local events and activities? Do you service a downtown area, or an area that has lots of community events and residents that are active and come out in droves to enjoy them? Why not give them customized events schedules that they will keep for months to come?

3) Republish Your Blog Posts with A MailChimp Newsletter
Once you’re blogging, you have some great current content on your site. But, how do you get more people to read it? You need to set up an automated e-newsletter that is delivered on your schedule to email subscribers. It will look good, and do away with the need for drip email to stay in touch.
4) Find Influential People with Twitter

A fantastic real estate marketing tool, Twitter helps you maintain and build your sphere of influence. Not all tweeters are equal. Some have huge followings and get lots of retweets. Some don’t. Part of your Twitter strategy should be to engage those who are already influential with your target audience. A couple of retweets from an influencer can really help you grow your following and get your content to a wider audience.
5) Connect With Facebook and LinkedIn
Two different platforms, Facebook is personal and social, while LinkedIn is networking and your online resume. Both can help to grow your business. Best of all, you can automatically feed your blog posts to these networks as well as Twitter. Get Twitterfeed. This re-publishing of what you’re posting in your blog is another way to amplify your web presence without doing more work.
6) Share Your Story with Video
Creative use of video is a concept that is just starting to take off as more and more agents begin to feel comfortable stepping away from the herd. Agents incorporate video marketing in several ways: Agent branding videos or “meet-the-agent” videos, using various innovative video techniques. Most important: whether you are branding your sense of humor or your down-to-basics method of doing business, videos should be polished to perfection.

Video increases the chance of a front-page Google result by 53x. — Forrester

– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia, Genesis WordPress Web Designer, at 561.906.3436.
Follow @jmgroupdesign

The Secret to Google Search

marciacatlin · January 12, 2016 ·

Become an expert. Satisfy your target audience.
That simple.
Or do we make it complicated?
There are many distractions (like Google’s new Hummingbird algorithm) and the uphill battle to reside on the first page of Google … a lifelong obsession.
I should know. It is THE FIRST how-to question clients pose.
As a small business owner with limited time and budget, where do you start?
Start with A Plan:
1) Define your audience. Who are they? Why do they need your services? What’s their problem they are trying to solve? And why? When they call you on the phone, what are their primary questions and concerns? Spend some time on this. Get to know your ideal customer inside and out. It’s critical for the steps that follow.
2) Build your niched keyword phrases list, based on the answers to the above audience interests and location for a local business.
Say you’re a local General Dentist with cosmetic flare and an older clientele. Your all-important Title needs to start with benefit keywords, probably end with location keywords – example: “Implant Dentistry, Veneers, 24/7 Emergency Care, Aesthetic Dentistry of Jupiter
3) Create a professional WordPress website/blog that serves as the content engine for all of your social platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter etc.
4) Establish your expertise and brand by creating top-notch blog articles and other content. Such as …

Testimonials from your bigger, more reputable customers who have brand recognition.
How-to articles based on listening to your customers. What do they ask about in their support requests? If there’s a common question that you can answer with a how-to, then that’s what you’ll write about.
Guest blog posts from other local business owners in a complementary industry. Make the pitch about them and how it will benefit their business.

5) Isolate the social platforms best suited to your business. They are free, time-eating monsters so you must concentrate on the important ones for YOU.

Facebook is conversational and ideal if you want to interact directly with customers.
Pinterest is a visual platform only and a great traffic generator.
Twitter in its own twitterverse has endless possibilities – the perfect mobile tool, great for researching your industry and competition; today’s PR release uniquely suited to last minute, 140-character shoutouts/tweets.
LinkedIn, your online resume, is a necessity for all serious business people.
Google+ spans all businesses and is the automatic method to penetrate the enormous world of Google Search across all its platforms.

WHOA, this is a lot of work. How am I going to do this?
Answer: Think Quality and Consistency.
You will focus on creating high quality content only that will build your authority and reputation with your online community. You will do this within your own time frame (say as few as two blog posts per month) on a CONSISTENT basis.

Tenacity is not the same as persistence. Persistence is doing something again and again until it works. It sounds like ‘pestering’ for a reason. Tenacity is using new data to make new decisions to find new pathways to find new ways to achieve a goal when the old ways didn’t work. Telemarketers are persistent, Nike is tenacious.” – Seth Godin

– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia, Genesis WordPress Web Designer, at 561.906.3436.
Follow @jmgroupdesign

Web Design. Tale Of The Window Dresser

marciacatlin · January 12, 2016 ·

For many years I would walk down Fifth Avenue and get stopped in my tracks by the remarkable characters dressed or undressed in the windows at Saks Fifth Avenue, the stunning juxtaposition of jewelry displays in Tiffany’s windows, the luxe shadow box displays of antique Faberge eggs at A La Vielle Russie.
Window dressing, like web design, does not require a degree. It is “part production, part fantasy, part art, part fashion” as described by Erin Cunningham in her quite fascinating Daily Beast article -> Tales of a Bergdorf Goodman Window Dresser.
But, for those of us in the web design business, there is something to learn from this little known, quasi show biz medium.
Reaching your target audience
“You have to do all sorts of things to make a stream of pedestrians into an audience. It’s extremely ephemeral. It’s very of the moment, ” notes Bergdorf’s resident window dresser.
How well we know about such things when it comes to designing a homepage that is a victim of instant technology and impatient behaviors. How little time we have to put on a show to grab people’s attention. But showtime we must have …
In our case, it must be design elements like fonts, colors, photos that tell a story or paint a concept. Our homepage show also must look bigger than it is even though we lack beautiful mannequins and real-time texture, fabric and objects.
Enter social media widgets such as a Twitter feed that can provide content from a respected source, an Instagram widget that can constantly be updated with whatever highlights your product and services in people’s lives, and a newsletter subscription box so that visitors know you’re an expert with a lot to say.
Remember the element of surprise
The magic of getting something for nothing keeps the attention span. Do this with a CTA button and a free download of inside information for your audience.
And tell a story.
Now even your content can have the WOW factor because of the latest web design trend called parallax scrolling. This involves the background moving at a slower rate to the foreground, creating a 3D effect as you scroll down the page and giving you a simple vertical design for easy visual eye movement and flow.
Check out the new Parallax Pro Theme by Studio Press to see what I mean.
– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia, Genesis WordPress Web Designer, at 561.906.3436.
Follow @jmgroupdesign

The New Marketing

marciacatlin · January 11, 2016 ·

Here’s what marketing looks like today:
You determine your ideal customer.
You create a message that will resonate with him or her.
You build visual marketing that communicates your message.
You use content — blog posts, ebooks, guest posting, interviews, podcasts — to get your message out.
You drive everyone who finds you back to your website, which is your marketing hub.
You’re in control. It’s called Inbound Marketing.
Did you know?
62% of marketers have a blog.
The average company that blogs generates 55% more website visitors.
43% of marketers generate customers from their blog.
Companies that blog generate 126% more leads than those that don’t.
Inbound marketing delivers 54% more leads into the marketing funnel than traditional outbound leads.
61% of U.S. consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post.
81% of consumers trust information and advice from blogs.
70% of consumers prefer getting to know a company via articles (not ads).
84% of B2B marketers use social media in some form.
Facebook is the top social channel for generating leads.
43% of all marketers found a customer via LinkedIn in 2013.
Source: Hubspot

Ten Tips To Getting Noticed Online

marciacatlin · January 11, 2016 ·

Tip 1. Do you know your target market? Who are they?
It all starts with defining your audience.
Who are they?
What is their most pressing issue, problem, or desire?
What benefit of your product solves their problem?
Who do they trust?
Tip 2. What am I offering?
A digital download?
Are you selling a physical product?
Do you provide a service? Training? Education?
Are you a retail business with a physical location?
Tip 3. Remember how to use your keywords
Embed relevant keywords in your content. This is an easy way to make it more visible to the search engines. At the very least, your site’s <title> tag should include those keywords that best describe your skills . Work them into your categories, URLs, post titles and subheadings where appropriate.
Tip 4. Create unique content
Having content that no other site has is the first step to drawing a crowd. Strive to be original. By writing original content (something that’s useful, informative, funny, free, beneficial or helpful, for instance), you’ll encourage people to link to what you’ve created. All SEO techniques start with good content creation.
Tip 5. Use images creatively
Images have the potential to make or break a site’s effectiveness.
Websites that use images well can sell a lifestyle, an ideal, an idea of whatever the product needs to sell more. They can sell the features in an instant and provide clear and accurate information on the product. Replace iStock photos with original photos from your smartphone and sites with free high resolution downloads such as unsplash.com.
Tip 6. How does your site look on your smartphone?
You need a responsive design website that has been constructed so that all of the content, images and structure of the site remains the same on any device.
Reason? Users get a better experience, they don’t have to fool around with zooming and shrinking the text or images on screen. Instead, all of the content automatically adjusts to the screen of the device. Plus you get an edge over your competition!
Tip 7. Revisit your About page
Your About page is a primary connection point for customers. It’s a place where they can find out more about what makes you, your business, or product tick and, most important, what you can do for them. Use your About page copy to tell visitors how your product or service will be able to benefit them.
Tip 8. Do you have to squint to read your copy?
Maybe you’re using a lot of fonts, colors and sizes. Keep it simple – two fonts and 2-3 sizes.
Make it easy for your user to read your copy and make the font large enough that people can read it. Keep your font styles consistent.
Tip 9. Are you using a slider on your homepage?
Sliders can be interesting, but also problematic. Mostly they are distracting.
It all comes down to focus. Basically, what you’re saying with a slider is: “I really don’t know which product or picture I should put on display on my homepage, so I’ll just grab 10 of them!” Consider killing your slider.
Tip 10. Do you have a call-to-action button?
Drive customers to become leads with a button or link so visitors can download a free ebook, start a free trial, make an appointment, get a free consultation.
Add a CTA button to your homepage.
– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia at 561.906.3436.