Archive for the ‘MR. INTERNET TIP’ Category
The Secret to Online Lead Conversions
Monday, March 8th, 2010
For most sales professionals, converting online leads is the bane of their Internet world. Online consumers just don’t behave anything like those you meet face-to-face or on-the-phone. Now imagine if there was just one thing you could do that would suddenly convert cold online inquiries into serious clients.
Small Steps to Solve Big Problems
In their new book: “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard” authors Dan & Chip Heath explore how big problems don’t always require big solutions or worse, big changes in behavior. Big problems can often be solved by leveraging just one simple, small change in behavior. For example, real estate companies and their agents have been struggling with how to boost online lead conversion since the inception of the commercial Internet. They often approach this with massive training programs and/or constantly introducing even more complicated strategies (like social networking) when agents haven’t even mastered the basics of speaking the language of online consumers.
If companies and agents would use just one thing consistently, they would see their online lead conversions soar. That one thing is what I call the Critical First Response Email script. This is an email script engineered to be used specifically as the first response to online inquiries. I crafted this script and have been teaching it since the 1990’s and always receive email from incredulous agents who are astounded at how well it works. Here’s one that I just received a few days ago:
Last week I had used the email lead response script that was provided in the course. I had been going back and forth with the prospect and finally met to show her the rental property this week. Very nice, professional gal and we hit off very well.
She thanked me profusely for my quick replies to her emails AND said, the first email I sent to her was the reason why she trusted me!!! It was non-threatening and she felt I totally understood where she was coming from making an internet inquiry. It was EXACTLY as you and Michael said!!! Amazing…
RuthAnne Salvatore, REALTOR/Broker Associate
C.R.S. Certified Residential Specialist
ERA Goodfellow Homes
203.994.4860 (Mobile)
Just One Thing…
Remember the movie “City Slickers”? Billy Crystal’s character asks “Curly” the trail boss (played with dead-eye aplomb by Jack Palance) “What’s the secret to life?” And Curly responds by holding up his finger and says “Just one thing…” Well, I don’t know about the secret to life, but I sure as hell know the secret to boosting online lead conversions and it’s just one thing —consistently using the Critical First Response Script for every initial inquiry that comes your way via the Net.
Here’s Where You Find It
If you’ve read this far then you deserve to have access to this incredibly powerful, yet simple tool. Just go to www.FaceBook.com/OnlineDominance and click on the “Cool Tools” tab at the top (you will need to be a fan of Online Dominance to get access to this tab’s contents.) You will be able to immediately download this script right from there.
Remember, big problems can often be solved by very small changes in behavior. Here’s your chance to find out just how powerful this thinking really is…
Google Makes Your Active Fan Page Even More Valuable
Sunday, February 28th, 2010
Google is busy serving up real-time updates from Twitter, Myspace, blogs and so on for hot search topics or trends. It just added Facebook Fan Page updates to this mix and here is why it’s important to you.
The world of search results and relevancy is going more real-time (you can largely thank Twitter for that). Since Google is all about providing relevant search results for a particular search, it is now striving to provide these real-time yet ephemeral results right at the top of the non-sponsored results of each search. If you have an active Facebook Fan page focusing say on your primary neighborhoods, and fans are actively posting comments, then you are going to see more search engine traffic. First to your Fan Page, then (by extension) to your site. This also means that your Fan Page is likely to rank higher in the search results over all as a result.
For this to work in your favor however, two things need to be in place regarding your Facebook Fan page:
- Its focus needs to be relevant – a Fan page is NOT about you (at least not if you want to succeed)! For most real estate sales professionals this means it needs to be about your particular niche and/or neighborhoods you service.
- Fans need to be active – this means you must keep the content fresh and worthy of comment.
I truly believe that appropriately maintained social media will be the new “Google Juice” for driving Web traffic and hence most online business. Static content, even if comprehensive, is no longer enough. So if you are not connecting with clients and prospects this way (i.e. via an active Facebook Fan page), now is a good time to start!
* Special thanks to Brad Carroll of Dakno Marketing for this tip :0)
Your Ultimate Logo Creation Machine
Monday, February 22nd, 2010
Why take a chance on having just one designer create and capture the logo you want when you can have dozens competing to win the right to create it for you. Here’s a revolutionary online service that let’s you do just that!
As Simple As 1-2-3
LogoTournament is one of the coolest online services I’ve seen in a long while. It essentially allows you to create a contest for money (minimum prize is $250) to see who can create the logo that best fits the design, look and feel you want to capture. And it couldn’t be easier as there are only three steps:
- Fill out a logo questionnaire and set the prize amount – this is where you briefly describe your company and the style of logo you want by moving 12 different style sliders to help you describe precisely the look and feel of your company or service branding;
- Designers submit their logo ideas – almost immediately, talented designers from around the world will start submitting finished logo ideas. You can also provide additional feedback to further tweak the ones you feel are the closest to what you are looking for;
- Select a winner and download your logo file – payment is made via Paypal or credit card.
Melinda Estridge is one of my ULTRA eTEAM members and a mega-producer with very discriminating design tastes. She needed a logo for her new targeted Chevy Chase Living Website and was thrilled with the final design she received and how quickly and painlessly the process was completed.
LogoTournament is a form of “crowdsourcing” at its highest level. As I’ve said for over 15 years, there is an incredible (and growing) pool of talent available to all of us for very reasonable prices and the Internet is our gateway to those resources. If you are not using them, some of your competitors most assuredly are…
Explode Your Facebook Fan Page Base For No Cost
Sunday, February 7th, 2010
Douglas Newby is one of my long-time students who had zero (0) fans for his FaceBook fan page last September (2009). As of the date of this post he has well over 48,000 fans, each of which contributes to his search engine rankings. Here’s how he did it and how you can explode your fan base without spending a dime. NOTE: if you already have a fan page and want to learn the secret of explosively growing your fan base for no cost without having to read this whole article, just go to www.FaceBook.com/OnlineDominance and click the “Cool Tools!” tab.
Personal Profile vs. Fan Page
There are two primary ways you can represent yourself on FaceBook:
- Personal Profile – everyone who has a FaceBook account has a profile page. This is your “home base” for all your friends and family to connect with you in a personal way on personal (i.e. not business) matters. While how you grow and manage your “friend base” is a topic for another post, suffice it to say it doesn’t even come close to helping your business as the next way.
- Fan Page – sometimes also referred to as your business page. This is where you try to attract and interact with people who are part of your target market or at least connected to it in some way. Now this next part is very important: The more targeted fans you have, the more Google will see you as being relevant and important in your field of real estate expertise. And this translates to significant gains for your search engine rankings. For example, Douglas Newby is essentially a one-man shop in Dallas, yet his site consistently out-ranks those of companies in his area with 1,000 or more agents.
To create a Fan page in FaceBook simply go to www.facebook.com/pages/create.php and follow the simple steps. Now there are some things you might want to do jazz it up so it looks attractive and engaging. There are plenty of articles written about this that go into more depth (just Google “How do you create a fan page on FaceBook”).
Once created, Facebook will give your fan page an innocuous looking URL that no one would ever remember. However, once you have at least 25 fans, you can get your own URL that is tied to your brand. This is crucial that you do this ASAP!! Get your friends and family to become fans so you hit your 25 fan threshold as quickly as possible. Then go to NameChk.com to see if your intended name (i.e. brand name) is still available on nearly every social media portal on the Net. If so, grab it immediately on FaceBook, Twitter and YouTube at the very least.
Growing Your Fan Base
Douglas Newby did something rather clever to build his fan base from 25 to about 2,000 in a short period of time. He simply created a FaceBook ad targeted to people on FaceBook who are interested in modern architecture. His ads were set up as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) which means if they clicked on his ad, they automatically became a fan. Keep in mind however, this method is not free and each fan you bring in this way costs you money. Once he hit the 2,000 mark, his fan page went wildly viral and started growing exponentially by word of mouth from his initial base. The reason his fan base grew so quickly after that is a) his content is extremely interesting to his target market, and b) there are millions of people all over the world that are interested in fine modern architecture.
Here are several ways you can grow your fan base without spending money:
- Send emails to your clients and prospects suggesting that they become a fan;
- Place a “Become a Fan!” widget on your Websites and blogs.
While these methods may add marginally to your fan base, don’t expect rapid growth this way. The key to explosively growing your fan base consists of two parts: 1) make sure you have something of extreme value in the eyes of your target market, and 2) well, it will have more impact if I demonstrate it for you —just go to www.FaceBook.com/OnlineDominance and click the “Cool Tools!” tab and you will instantly see how this second part works :0)
You will find that taking the time to aggressively grow your targeted fan base will have a dramatically positive impact on your online bottom line. There is simply nothing more powerful in marketing than having a bunch of raving fans…
Finding Photos & Videos the Cool Way…
Monday, January 25th, 2010
If you are like me and do any amount of blogging, you are constantly looking for images and videos that visually support the theme of your post. This usually means searching for images on Google which frankly can be cumbersome and time consuming (sometime I have to click through 10 or more pages to find the image I want.)
Now there is a much faster, cooler and yes, even funner way to find these visual resources. It’s called Cooliris and it’s a free browser plugin for IE8, FireFox and the latest version of Chrome. When the plugin is loaded, just enter your image / video search term and it will almost instantly start displaying a seemingly infinite moving wall of results that you can scroll through super fast. And it pulls them from multiple sources including Google, Bing, Google Video, etc.
You really can’t fully appreciate how this works until you see it demonstrated. Just go to Cooliris and watch the 20 second video, you will see for yourself…
Okay, even if you don’t search for images that often you will definitely see some jaws drop when you show your office mates just how cool you are when it comes to finding that “just right” image or video. After all, being cool will never become uncool :0)
VA Saves 17 Year Old Real Estate Firm
Monday, January 18th, 2010I’ve been preaching (yes, preaching) about the benefits of using VA’s since the mid-1990’s. It seems to have taken a major down-turn for the industry to wake up to Virtual Outsourcing.
The following is an excerpt from an article posted on the National Association for the Self Employed Website. If you ever questioned whether VA’s are right for you, this should convince you…
Get More Bang for Your Labor Buck.
Independent Contractors Can Save You Time and Money
By Phillip M. Perry
For Laura MacDonald, running a successful real estate agency always meant maintaining a full-time staff. And why not? Her two office workers responded efficiently to a flood of housing inquiries from buyers and sellers.
Then the recession hit the real estate industry with the force of a freight train hitting a wall. Her profits threatened, MacDonald knew she had to do something to preserve the viability of her 17-year-old St. Louis-based firm. <continued…>
Google Now Has a Need For Speed
Friday, January 8th, 2010
Just when you thought all that Google cared about was fresh, relevant content, they go and throw another wrench into the works. A few days ago Google announced that their page-ranking algorithms are now going to take page loading speed into account. This means all those sites that have really cool revolving banner images have just been knocked down a notch in the page-ranking wars. It also means that if you site is slow for *any* reason, it suddenly becomes a disadvantage to your search term rankings.
Google is all about delivering relevant results and a good user experience during the search process. Apparently the Meisters in charge of tweaking their sacred ranking algorithms feel that a slow site inherently detracts from the user experience. Even in our current world of ubiquitous broadband Internet connections, this is still an issue. Now it used to be that all you had to do was optimize your images to improve page loading speed, not any more…
Google Page Speed
Google provides a free tool call Page Speed that Web developers can use to test your site’s loading speed and then optimize it for the best possible performance. The issues it addresses are quite technical and go way beyond the scope of this kind of post. So what do you do if you don’t happen to have a second career as a geek? Contact your current Web developer and tell them you have, in the immortal words of Tom Cruise in Top Gun, “a need for speed!” and let them figure it out.
Send Files Up to 2GB For Free
Sunday, December 13th, 2009
There are lots of services (some free, some not) that help you send big files over the Net. This is the only drop-dead easy service I know of that lets you send files up to 2GBs for free.
WeTransfer is a big file transfer service that doesn’t require you or your recipients to register, log in or anything. Just upload the file you want to send (up to 2GBs) and then enter the email addresses for up to 20 recipients and click the “Transfer” button. It’s as simple as that!
Apparently the way they make money is by displaying background branding images for companies who want to advertise on WeTransfer. Not sure how well that will work out for them, but until it no longer does it’s a great deal for all of us.
How to Make Your Web Browser Faster – For FREE!
Monday, December 7th, 2009
Even if you have a high-speed Internet connection, your Web browsing experience can end up being less than quick. Here is a simple way to speed up your browser for no cost and without adding any software.
Faster “Phone Book”
When you enter an address into your Web browser, the first thing it does is check with a Domain Name Server (DNS) to match up the URL with the IP address that is associated with it. Computers on the Internet really only understand IP addresses (for example the IP address for Google.com is 74.125.45.100). The DNS system allows us humans to use more easily remembered and recognized addresses (i.e. Google.com) rather than putting in those very boring looking numbers. So in essence, a DNS is the equivalent to an Internet “phone book”.
There are DNS computers strategically placed all over the Internet, and your Internet provider typically set you up with at least two specific Domain Name Servers to point all your browser requests to. However, not all Domain Name Servers are equal in terms of speed of converting URLs into IP addresses. In fact Google recently announced that they are allowing everyone to use their DNS servers which they claim are much faster than your typical DNS. Since switching over I have to say that it does seem to make the browser rendering time noticeably quicker.
Just go to http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/ to view the details of how this works and what you need to do to switch over your default Domain Name Servers. Keep in mind a couple of things:’
- If you connect to the Internet directly – then these settings can be made right on your computer
- If you connect to the Internet via a network – then these settings must be made on your network router
- If neither a. nor b. above make sense – contact your friendly local Geek to help you make the changes
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DISCLAIMER: Always investigate any third-party products or services to your satisfaction prior to using them. RUSSER Communications, its officers, staff and consultants do not receive any compensation whatsoever from third party vendors and are not responsible for any damage or liability you may incur as a result of using products or services mentioned herein. If you do not agree to these terms do not use the product or service mentioned.
Win a Flip Minio HD Camcorder!
Monday, November 30th, 2009
The folks at SlideRocket are at it again! They have announced a special contest just for Mr. Internet subscribers to see who can create the best virtual tour using their innovative SlideRocket online presentation system.
You can review a more complete description of SlideRocket via my October 19th, 2009 post How to Super Charge Your Marketing For No Cost! It costs nothing to enter and you can open a free account to SlideRocket (that stays free forever, BTW) to complete your virtual tour submission.
Here’s How to Enter…
- Go to SlideRocket.com and register for a free trial account (if you haven’t already)
- Build your Virtual Tour presentation
- Submit your final presentation by December 8th, 2009 by sending your SlideRocket presentation link to min@sliderocket.com
The winner of the contest will be announced on December 9th, 2009.
Even if you don’t win the Flip, you still win because you get to see first hand how SlideRocket can be such a powerful online presentation tool and differentiator for your business!
DISCLAIMER: Always investigate any third-party products or services to your satisfaction prior to using them. RUSSER Communications, its officers, staff and consultants do not receive any compensation whatsoever from third party vendors and are not responsible for any damage or liability you may incur as a result of using products or services mentioned herein. If you do not agree to these terms do not use the product or service mentioned.
