Sit Next to a Granola Bar

     

I went to my local grocery store for square orange cheese crackers. In particular I was looking for Cheese Nips because they were on insane sale.

Cracker aisle. Found the Cheez-Its but where are the Cheese Nips????? Can’t find them anywhere. But they’re on sale. They must be around.

Cruise down the aisle to the granola snack bars. Lo and Behold – there are the Cheese Nips. Why here???

This immediately gets my attention. Why in the world would Nabisco choose to put their square cheese cracker so far away from the other square cheese cracker? Why would they choose to put their cracker where the other crackers are not?

Now, this was like five days ago and I can’t let it go. Something is significant here. Today, I think I figured it out.

Location, Location, Location!

You’ve heard it said before in real estate but it really is the best thing to consider in much of marketing, listings and otherwise. I don’t like Cheese Nips as well as I like Cheez-Its. My guess is that most people agree with me or at least they recognize the red Cheez-Its box much faster than they recognize the orange Cheese Nips box. My guess is that Nabisco purposefully moved their product out of their competition’s reach. Move it where there is no competition besides granola bars. The guilty indulgence may get the best of some people and they’ll reach for the cheese crackers instead of the granola bars.

That’s my theory.

What does it mean to you?

This can be applied to both listing marketing and agent marketing. If you can’t get a house sold, what is the first thing you recommend to the seller? Price reduction. If you can’t beat the competition, move away from it. Move away in price. Set yourself up with new competition. Sit next to a granola bar.

Same goes for agent marketing. Get out of Homes & Lifestyles and put yourself where the saturation is much more in your favor of getting seen. Where is that you say? Right now, it’s in people. It’s in social media. It’s in getting yourself out there where the people are. It’s about walking your neighborhood and talking to your neighbors. Ask for a referral. If you don’t have the guts, get some. (psssst….you’re in sales).Don’t be afraid to move out of the cracker isle. (No, I didn’t just call you a cracker). Hang out with some granola bars and you might find yourself with better exposure. At the very least, someone might start talking about you on some blog.

Google and Page Rank

Google’s page rank system is virtually dead. Google is producing more sophisticated methods or ranking websites and are becoming better and better at weeding out dead sites. Sites that don’t offer fresh content, sites that don’t bring and retain visitors are going to suffer page rank. Google used to crawl sites by looking at the keywords in your website, finding other sites that linked to yours and ranking those sites as well in order to help determine the quality of your website. Now Google wants to see how others see your website.

Google is now going to be focusing on a deeper algorithm. It is no longer going to just track your hits each month but is going to take into account how long each visitor stays at your site. Say someone did a search and your site came up in the results. They click on your site and then quickly realize it’s not what they were looking for of they just don’t like your site and leave rather quickly. A person can bounce by:

• clicking on a link to another site
• typing in a new website
• closing the browser window
• remaining idle for too long, causing the analytics session to timeout
• hitting the ‘back’ button

Basically, Google wants to see that people like your site and want to stay there and look around.

How do you get people to stay on your site???

• Videos
  Record a video, upload it to YouTube, embed on your website. You want to try to keep your visitors around for a few minutes and have them check out other spots on your site while they are there.
• Downloadable forms
• Make clickable urls open in a new window, not in the same window
• Sidebar widgets to entice visitors to look around your site (maybe Featured Listings if you’re a Point2 member or real estate agent)
• Blogs

Be prepared to revamp your website and to really take a leap onto the social networking bandwagon if you haven’t already. It’s a great way to share your website with the world, gain traffic, and make friends. If you don’t have the time to blog, consider hiring a Virtual Assistant to help write your articles. Or, you could write them and your Virtual Assistant could post them all over the internet, driving traffic back to your site. Either way, now is the time to really consider getting involved before you lose your search engine placement to those who are.

Add Social Media to your Marketing Plan

Are you rolling in marketing dollars this year? If you’re like a lot of companies you are forced to give a hard look to your marketing plan and rule out what is working and what is not. Here’s what I’m hearing.

Not working:

• Newspapers
• Homes & Lifestyles
• Open Houses

Working (in our area and across the country)

• Websites
• Postcards
• Twilight Open Houses
• Social Media Marketing

Social Media is the NEW internet. Have you heard of Web 2.0? That’s what it refers to – social networking online. While we’re in winter, let’s not hibernate but amp up our marketing plans and pull new ideas into them.

Not sure how to get started with Social Media Marketing? It can be a bit overwhelming if you’re just starting out. Here’s an intro to a couple of the major social media sites. You will also want to check out this article by David Wilson, owner of Braveheart Design on why you need a social media presence. I’ll work on pulling together more information on ActiveRain and Broker Social Network. Those are both real estate specific networking sites.

Twitter– a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real time. Basically, you create a profile, find people to ‘follow’. You get updates from them about what they are doing/thinking and vice versa. I’ve made 5 real life friends from Twitter and received quite a bit of paying business. I’ve also connected with other VAs and learned valuable tips. View my Twitter profile.

 Facebook – Facebook gives people the power to share and makes the world more open and connected. Millions of people use Facebook everyday to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet. You can also connect your outside blog (short for web log) to Facebook and your Facebook profile will automatically be updated with your new posts (are you blogging your listings yet? If not, winter is a great time to learn how). Visit my Facebook profile.

I offer training and profile set up for those who want to get started but don’t want to do the set up.