The 3 ways are as follow:

1) Get more customers

Most business spend most or all of there time on this activity. There are many ways to acquire new customers, we know of at least 34 different ways but most we use only 3 or 4 depending on the business we work with.

2) Upsell to your existing customers

When you close a sale how often do you sell them something in addition?

McDonalds does this really well “Do You Want Fries with that!”, this boosts there profit from 0.18 per sale to 1.32 per sale.

How about cross selling something, people who buy your product or service might also need a complementary service or product.

Or how about bundling services/products together. The cable company does this with Phone,Cable and Internet.

3) Increase the frequency with which your customers buy from you

Keep in constant contact with your customers and clients via email,txt messaging,newsletters,Phone call,Social Media and paid retargetting.

Introduce a loyalty programs and award discounts and prizes to frequent buyers. Also offer incentivized referrals programs

Put your customers on monthly auto pay

When we work our clients we devise systems that can help them implement all 3 methods of business growth.

The info graphic below may help you decide which is best for you.

I think you will enjoy this video, I did.

I was at “The Real Estate Marketing Summit” this past week and there was a lot of talk about what makes an effective marketing strategy for Real Estate in 2012. Web marketing was the main topic and included what your website should look and feel like,social media and mobile.

Real Estate Website 2012

Do not put your head shot in the header as it really hurts conversion.

Quote ” You face on the page is just old bullshit you have been using way to long”. This has been used for Realtor’s for many years and it  has been recommended  for year that you put your face on your business card. The cold hard truth is that the client/customer does not care.

My thoughts: I think there are still cases where your face can help when you are trying to build a brand around you or you are trying to build trust, I leave it up to the reader to decide what is best for you.

Content

The content on your site needs to be educational and engaging. Google reward you for having great content on your site, in the past your where told to write 250 or 500 work articles with a keyword density of 3-5% etc etc. Now after the Google Panda Update you have to write for humans not the search engine. The Panda introduced some called “Machine Learning” into the Google Algorithm, it tries to determine the quality of your article and it test it ideas by comparing it results with human test cases. So now you need to write much better articles with lower keyword density, test from many in the industry indicate that 1000 word plus with a keyword density of 0.5% or less seem to rank better than anything else. Link to your articles are important(very important) but the quality of your content is more important than it once was to get a high ranking. Good writing is important for engagement and conversion, you may need to study copy writing or maybe its time to hire a professional writer.

3 Types of Content

There are 3 main types of content.

1. Classical Original content
2. Curated Content – This is where you gather articles/video etc from around the web and filter out the wheat from the chaff and maybe provide some commentary on these articles or videos.
3. Content as Conversation – This is content put out through the social media channel such as Facebook or Twitter

Don’t label your Blog “Blog”

Call you blog something else “Useful Real Estate Articles” or something, this can help increase readership of your blog, this info can from Jay Thomson – The Phoenix Real Estate Guy who does huge amounts of conversion testing.

Increase the size of your font.

Make it easier for your readers to read your site, try going to font size 16 instead of 12. Make it easier to read on mobile devices.

Make your Website Design Clean and Simple

Get rid of the clutter on your website, less ( a lot less) is more. A good design philosophy  is to design your site for mobile first and work backward to your full site. Mobile website is starting to pick up, I am seeing 8 -15 % mobile traffic across multiple sitesa nd has steadily increased in 2011.

Social Media Icons

Don’t have the social media icons right at the top of your site, you want social media to bring traffic to your website not away from your website.Use a social share button rather than take the visitor to your Facebook,twitter or you tube channel and put it at the bottom of the page.

Video

Video is becoming more and more important for real estate marketing but people have ADD. The good life team team did a lot of testing in 2011 with video length they discovered that less than 60 seconds works best for them. Conventional wisdom say your video should be 1 1/2 to 2 minutes long but the good life team was having much better luck with 59 seconds or less.

Calls to Action

Make sure every page has a clear call to action. Make the tel big and obvious, don’t use the work “submit” on your forms use something more useful “Get Useful Info” or something.

People Only Read 20% of your page

In tests is has been found that people only read about 20% of the text on a page, so bold and bullet point the main ideas you want to get across.

Aspect Ration 16:9 rather than 4:3

We live in a HD world 16:9, make your videos,photo’s and forms a 16:9 aspect ratio.

Do you want people to stay on your site longer?

Use a video library to educate and engage the client. Talk about the neighborhood, the schools, the restaurants and the local amenities, interview locals and get them to talk about the neighborhood.  In a recent study people where asked what is more important the neighborhood or the property: 28% said the neighborhood, 18% said the property and 54% said both.

 Using Facebook to drive traffic to your site

If you are going to drive traffic to your website via facebook, updating your facebook posts 1-2 times per day seems to get into 99% of your fans news feeds (this is where you want to be, if you did no know).

Using auto posting software (hoot suite etc) is frowned upon by Facebook and is said to hurt your EDGE rank. EDGE rank is a factor that determines if you post will show up in a fans news feed.

That’s it for now folks, what out for my post on mobile website for 2012.

I highly suggest you read the post to see how Admiral Nimitz saw the silver lining in one of America’s darkest hours.

Sunday, December 7th, 1941–Admiral Chester Nimitz was attending a concert in Washington D.C. He was paged and told there was a phone call for him. When he answered the phone, it was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the phone. He told Admiral Nimitz that he (Nimitz) would now be the Commander of the Pacific Fleet. Admiral Nimitz flew to Hawaii to assume command of the Pacific Fleet. He landed at Pearl Harbor on Christmas Eve, 1941. There was such a spirit of despair, dejection and defeat–you would have thought the Japanese had already won the war.

Pearl Harbor Dec 7 1941

On Christmas Day, 1941, Adm. Nimitz was given a boat tour of the destruction wrought on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. Big sunken battleships and navy vessels cluttered the waters every where you looked. As the tour boat returned to dock, the young helmsman of the boat asked, “Well Admiral, what do you think after seeing all this destruction?” Admiral Nimitz’s reply shocked everyone within the sound of his voice. Admiral Nimitz said, “The Japanese made three of the biggest mistakes an attack force could ever make or God was taking care of America. Which do you think it was?”  Shocked and surprised, the young helmsman asked, “What do mean by saying the Japanese made the three biggest mistakes an attack force ever made?”  Nimitz explained. :

Mistake number one: the Japanese attacked on Sunday morning. Nine out of every ten crewmen of those ships were ashore on leave. If those same ships had been lured to sea and been sunk–we would have lost 38,000 men instead of 3,800.

Mistake number two: when the Japanese saw all those battleships lined in a row, they got so carried away sinking those battleships, they never once bombed our dry docks opposite those ships. If they had destroyed our dry docks, we would have had to tow everyone of those ships to America to be repaired. As it is now, the ships are in shallow water and can be raised. One tug can pull them over to the dry docks, and we can have them repaired and at sea by the time we could have towed them to America. And I already have crews ashore anxious to man those ships.

Mistake number three: every drop of fuel in the Pacific theater of war is in top of the ground storage tanks five miles away over that hill. One attack plane could have strafed those tanks and destroyed our fuel supply. That’s why I say the Japanese made three of the biggest mistakes an attack force could make or God was taking care of America.

Admiral Nimitz was able to see a silver lining in a situation and circumstance where everyone else saw only despair and defeatism. President Roosevelt had chosen the right man for the right job.  We desperately needed a leader that could see silver linings in the midst of the clouds of dejection, despair and defeat.

Ten items to consider when designing a good landing page.

So you want to make a post or page for the keyword “short sale san diego” how do you do that?
You need to make sure your On Site SEO is optimized in the correct manner.

Your Keyword: “short sale San Diego” should be in your:

1. Title tag
2. Your URL
3. Meta Description tag
4. H1,H2 and H3 tags
5. Image Alt Tag
6. Keyword density of 2-5% (Maybe!!)

There are several other on site optimization you can do, but master these first and you will be well on your way.

The three ways you can get you website onto the first page of google are as follows:

1) You can pay to be on page 1 -  Google Pay Per Click.

2) You can place you business into google places of the city your business is located in. You do need to have a physical location as they will send you a postcard to your business location to verify that you actaully do have a real location.

3) You can get your site on to page 1 with  organic SEO. To rank well with organic SEO you need good content that is written in an SEO friendly way that has the correct formatting of title tags,keywords,meta description,H1 and H2 tags and all so has a good number of backlinks from other sites. The number of backlinks you need to your site will depend on what market/niche you are in and how many links your competitors have and how good the quality of the links your competitor has.

Here is a quick video that describes the 3 opportunities for Page 1 ranking.

So everyone has claimed there Google Places page for there business haven’t they? If not go to Google.com/place.

It is probable one of the most important things you can do to help your business grow in your local marketplace. If you have a lot of competition in the local marketplace it maybe difficult to get a position in first 7 positions of the Google places results.

Twelve months ago one of the most important ranking factors to getting into the 7 Box was the actual physical location of the business. This went away last year  and reviews seemed to be the most important aspect together with a well optimized google places page and citations on multiple websites.

Well around the begining of June, I and many other SEO people started to notice a change in local google places results. It now seems that the location of the business is important again, this makes sense. In San Diego before the recent change we had businesses that where 30+ miles away from San Diego ranking for local San Diego results.

So the current best practices for best google places ranking are as follows:

1. Complete and Optimized Google Places page
2. On Page SEO of your main site (not google places page) – having a real website is now more important.
3. Off page SEO of your site i.e. The backlinks from other sites to you main page
4. Reviews less important but still important for trust by your clients
5. Citattions – These are websites that list your site with full name,address and tel number. Yelp appears to be the most important citation source.