Real Estate professional's online strategies vary, but one rule remains constant: If you only offer a blog and/or social media websites, your online credibility suffers.
Branding yourself as an individual is important, and offering valuable information to viewers helps, but the final step in gaining a true follower is directing visitors from your blog to your professional website, where there's valuable professional information they are searching for and web tools they want to use.
Don't get me wrong, your blog, glimpses of your personal life, and pics of you with your family are important parts of the equation, but in the end, online searchers want to trust that you are THE true professional they should choose to handle one of their largest purchases of their lifetime.
Let's say Vicky and Roy are first time home buyers. They are savvy online, so their first step is to Google for professionals in their area. They type in: "Sacramento Homes" start looking for their dream home and decide it's time to find their Real Estate professional or their loan officer. They will most likely type into their search engine "Sacramento Realtor" , "Sacramento mortgage company", well you get the picture. If you're lucky, they search your name and find your Facebook and ActiveRain. They feel like they've researched you pretty well, but where to go from here? Surely there's a professional website to go to and apply online, complete a form about what they're interested in, perhaps see today's interest rates, or see what homes you have listed...
Onto the best case scenario: They've found you online, visited your ActiveRain, read some of your blogs, saw some of your Facebook posts and photos of you at the lake with your family and oh what a cute dog that is~! They see that your blog and social sites link to your professional website, so they're directed there. The light bulb goes off. They feel confident that they've done their due diligence in researching you and deciding you are the one who can pull off the biggest purchase of their life. Boom! Phone call, email, application, whatever it is, they've decided together in their family room, it's you.
Marry your blog, social media and professional website together, link them up because the combination is much stronger than any one by itself. The combination is what gains you ultimate online credibility!
PS The more links TO your website, the better it will show up in searches.
If Your Email Were A Novel by Mike May
Writers embarking on a new work do not just sit down at a keyboard and start pecking out the great American novel. Storytelling is a craft, and the act of actually writing a novel is usually preceded by months of researching, planning, sketching and vetting. And after the writing the editing begins, a task as onerous and essential as the initial pen to paper -- er, pixel to screen.
There is a lot of process and training required to elevate writing to art. Yes writers have a gift, but it's a gift akin to a runner's ability to tap out a marathon in just over 2 hours -- years of training go into recognizing that gift's true potential. William Faulkner famously claimed that short stories were much more difficult to write than novels, because of how much restraint the author must exercise over what to include in such a restrictive form. Where does that leave email writers? Kids have to read sonnets to pass high school English. We have about the same real estate to work with ,but have to earn every word of attention.
If any writing craft needs process, training and discipline, surely it's ours. In fact, there is a lot we can learn from the novelist's craft when approaching our own, not the least of which is to think of email as a craft, and not some form of e-manual labor. If we think like writers instead of marketers, we may enjoy a wider audience for our work. Who knows? We may even find ourselves with a bestseller on our hands. So dust off your Hermes 3000, crack your knuckles, and let's create a real page-turner:
Genre: Novels are romances, mysteries, psychological thrillers or comedies. Emails also have a genre, ranging from newsletter to promotional message to announcement. The important thing about a genre is choosing one. You don't hear a novelist say, "Gotta get a book out" (OK, Stephen King probably says that, but he's an exception who proves the rule), but we say it about emails all the time. The emails we send also need to have a clear purpose, which their genre defines.
Plot: This is the story your email tells, whether it's about a 20%-off sale, or recommended products based on what you've bought in the past, or a webinar next week. But plot is also a narrative that can span through multiple installments, like the Harry Potter series or "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest." Your story doesn't begin and end with each email. How does each installment in your ongoing series draw your audience in deeper, and further develop your relationship with subscribers?
Theme: "The author is not trying to say anything, Mr. May," my 10th grade English teacher said to me once. "He is saying something. You evidently just can't hear it." A layer deeper than the story about your spring sale or registration deadline, theme is the underlying message and carries the impact each email has on your brand development. Anyone can send an email. But if your company makes a point of sending only messages that it is uniquely qualified to send, then the theme starts to emerge and every message helps strengthen the brand. For example, "60% off - today only" is a message that defines Gilt Groupe and Haute Look and The Clymb, but would positively ruin Neiman Marcus or the TED Conference. When the theme of emails is ignored, the messages start to compromise the rest of the work done to build a brand. There may be short-term gains, but the expenses hit the balance sheet later on.
Tone: Like genre, an email's tone should be a deliberate choice. An email that relies on humor or levity can be very successful for a brand similarly aligned, like Old Navy or The Onion. But a brand that trades on authority should have a very different tone in its emails: messages from The Economist or BMW should probably never include an exclamation point. A brand whose positioning is approachable and conversational might use a first-person voice to forge a personal connection.
Very often, I see messages where each of these elements is determined more by the individual message's objective than by brand positioning and continuity. Individual emails can enjoy some success by going maverick on the brand and focusing on the immediate business need and environment. But I believe that an email program is more successful when approached as a craft with a long view. Email artisans do not need a writer's gift, but could enjoy better results through some of a writer's process and discipline.
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This article was worth sharing because it opens up the idea of emails having a long-term story, not only the individual email's message for that day. When you send your clients/prospects/referral partners e-newsletters, and even status updates, tell the story, build your individual brand to develop the relationship, and take every email seriously because your brand is being built with each email you send.
Mind Your Business: Does This Website Make Me Look Fat? APRIL 4, 2011 |
By Jeanette Mulvey, BusinessNewsDaily Managing Editor
There are certain questions you already know the answer to before you even ask. Do these pants make me look fat? Is my new haircut too short? What do you think of our new website?
Oh, the tangled web we weave. If you could answer honestly, how often would you actually say, “Who designed that? Your third-grade intern?” While mobile and tablet advertising and social media engagement are all the rage, many small firms still haven’t mastered the art of creating a simple and useful website.
Here are a few things to consider.
Font-ain of you. Let me say this as kindly as possible. If your website contains even one word in Comic Sans font, you look like an amateur. This font, and many like it, should be the exclusive domain of PTA moms and cookie-peddling Girl Scouts. It sends the message that you don’t have enough dollars or sense to hire a professional Web designer who would never, ever use this font.
Un-justified While we’re on the subject of fonts, let’s also talk about how the text on your website is laid out. Is it center justified, rather than justified to the left? Unless you’re a professional poet, your text should not be laid out like a rhyming couplet. What do I mean?
This is what I mean.
When you text is uneven on both sides of the paragraph
Your website looks unprofessional Don’t believe me? Start paying attention.
Check out the sites of Microsoft, Apple, Target, Kodak, HP, Michael Kors, Donna Karan or Nordstorm. None of these companies’ websites contain centered text. Neither should yours. It sends a subtle message to your customers that you’re running a rinky-dink operation.
Blogs-I-Fear Your customers are very busy. If they decide to take the time to read your blog, there’d better be something interesting to read. And, it’d better be current. If your last blog entry is from 2008, it sends the message that you’re no longer in business. Or, that you’re too lazy to remove the blog from your site altogether. Blogs are not a necessity. If you don’t have enough content to fill one, then don’t have one. Better to skip the blog than to create the expectation of having one and then not keeping up with it.
Audio-dacity Believe it or not, some people will be looking at your website at work or on a train or while watching TV. Nothing makes me navigate away from a website faster than an unexpected aural assault from my laptop speakers. It’s hard to imagine a situation in which your audio could be necessary. Unless, of course, you’re a musician. In that case, rock on.
Linked out Having links on your site that don’t work is like inviting customers into to your business and then locking the door when they get there. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to go through once in a while and make sure your links are still working. If they’re not, fix them. Or take them out. A simplified, but functional site is preferable to one filled with useful links that don’t go anywhere.
Making contact If you are Oprah Winfrey or Lady Gaga, you can stop reading now. I understand why you don’t have your phone number or email address on your website. For the rest of you, what’s the problem? Is someone stalking you? Are you really so important that you can’t give out your contact information? If your site has no method of contacting you other than a “contact us” form, you’re creating a wall between you and your customers and it’s not good for business. It creates the impression that you don’t want to hear from your customers. And that doesn’t make me want to be one.
Flash forward Yes, I know. It’s 2011. But, truth be told, some of us still don’t have Flash installed on our computers (which many Web designers feel is an outdated technology that's on its way out anyway). Nor do we want it. No matter how delightful your little animated intro is, odds are, half the visitors to your site aren’t seeing it. Not only that — they’re annoyed by the fact that your site isn’t functioning properly (even if the so-called "problem" is on their end). You know that handy little “skip intro” feature? Do it. Don't put up an intro in the first place.
Un-pop-ular If 90 percent of Web users had a feature on their browser that automatically blocked your website, you would try to find a way around it, right? So, why are you using pop-ups? Your pop-ups require an extra step, sometimes two extra steps, on the part of the user. No one has that kind of time or, in most cases, the desire to work that hard to see what you’re selling. Make it easy for your customers and they’ll keep coming back.
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I've been saying for years that audio is childish.
Flash blocks SEO and makes an extra step for people JUST to enter your site after they've already gone through the trouble to type in your web address. No good.
And really, the Making Contact section couldn't be more right on. When's the last time you completed a Contact Us form when you just wanted to send a quick email to a person? Make it easy for people to find valuable info on your website and to contact you to get more value out of your website people!
Shelly Whitworth
www.MorSystems.com
Mortgage Web Sites
Your website is your new first impression.
Your prospects will judge your professionalism and trustworthiness based on your website. Most mortgage websites today are outdated and unprofessional. Prospects abandon an unprofessional website in search of a more credible one!
Outdated, unprofessional designs include flash intros, website music, shallow content, and requiring them to complete a form at every turn. These elements all discourage visitors and bring down your credibility as a professional. Even worse, flash intros actually act like a locked door to search engines trying to index your website. The flash intros make it hard for google and others to know what your keywords are for searches!
Most prospects visit your website before contacting you to learn about your services and do their "due diligence" in researching you. In this highly skeptical market, an outdated website all but guarantees that these prospects will abandon your site to seek a “more professional looking” mortgage broker or loan officer.
Don't waste your marketing dollars by directing prospects to a bad website. Your offline advertising and campaigns such as direct mail, radio, TV and word of mouth referrals are negatively impacted by an outdated, unprofessional website as well. If you're spending money on advertising, you may be losing them once they go to your website!
It's time to go with a credible website provider who will keep your website professional, credible and help get you found online.
Take our website for a free spin:
Individual Loan Officer website
Company website for multiple los
With all that is currently happening to mortgage brokers, loan officers, lenders, and legislation, you must take a few steps now to possibly save your client base in the future.
I see a trend with loan officers where they have to switch mortgage brokers, change companies, or join a branch. What happens to their clients after that can be devastating.
You see, they've been using the company email address, and directing clients to the company website. What now? They've moved, gotten a new company website and a new email address. How will their clients find them now?
My suggestions for individual loan officers:
With your own website address, your own website and your own email, you are more ready for the future and you can make big moves if needed without losing your own personal branding, or starting from scratch. Be ready, be flexible, be resilient! Brand yourself.
Shelly Whitworth
www.MorSystems.com
www.MMGCustomSites.com
MorSystems is a family company offering mortgage websites to mortgage companies & individual loan officers. Ask me about mortgage websites, mortgage marketing, referral partners etc.
ActiveRain Corp. is not responsible for the accuracy of the site's content (which is written by members of the ActiveRain Real Estate Network) and does not endorse the views of the real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and others listed here.
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