I admit it...I am A STATS JUNKIE...

No, I'm not addicted to Active Rain...I'm not addicted to Hittail.com, I'm not even addicted to Google Analytics...

I am addicted to Google Webmaster Tools...

If my wife thought that I had a mistress, her name would be Webmaster Tools...

Many of you never even heard of it...

Thinking of that, I have to ask you...Why haven't you?

I check it weekly...Without it, I wouldn't know that this week my website ranked #14 for the search term VA Home Loan, up from #45 two weeks ago or the fact that I went from #4 to #7 for Texas Vet Loan three weeks ago.

Do you know this information? Do you track your results? Do you know your future? 

Wow, I've been gone for awhile...I really don't have an excuse...

If you've been following the media, every mortgage company in the US is going out of business and there is a 30yr supply of homes for sale. To be honest, I don't watch the news...I stopped watching it when I started to think that the media is the tail of the country and it is wagging the dog.

For the last two months, I have been concentrating on my family first and working on my business and VA Home Loan website second. I've also been networking more and sharing more of my personal information with people I work with.

This last week, I was discussing real estate with a Dallas agent...He was telling me how bad his business was and how depressed he was.

I decided that I would pick his spirits up and let him on a little secret...A secret that only ONE other person on AR knows about...

How I, John Parker, almost became a TV star...

Most of you don't know this (except for one person on AR) but I am a HUGE motorcycle fan...I have eaten, breathed and talked about Harley Davidson motorcycles for most of my life...My parents tried to squash my motorcycle fetish when I was young by not buying one for me. I did what most 12 yr olds would do and got a paper route to save up money to buy my own motorcycle...Of course, once I saved up enough money they wouldn't let me actually buy one...So, I bought my first BMX racing bike in 1978...I road it, raced it and eventually ended up racing road bikes in Europe while in the military from 1988-1992...

Oh, wait...that doesn't have much to do with my motorcycle fetish except for the fact that I love riding on two wheels (I still love to ride my bicycle though)...

This whole post has to do with how I was almost a TV star...For that, you will have to watch a video that my family and I made a few years ago...

Here it is...WAIT, you need to know the story behind the video before that! A few years ago American Chopper decided they wanted to give out 4 bikes to people with the best 3 minute video...

Shortly after I sent this video in, it was judged against 10,000 other entries...I was 1 of TEN other people that were flown to Burbank to be interviewed for a weekend...After that weekend and about THREE months of waiting, 4 people were chosen to be the recipient of a custom motorcyce and to be the star of an episode of American Chopper on the Discovery Channel. I have become friends with all of the winners and we still email to this day.

The weekend that we were notified that we were notified that we didn't win, my wife cried for about two hours...I was seriously depressed for the next few hours...

Until...

Later that day, we were also notified that her sons father died in France AND the next day, my wifes brother also passed away.

In retrospect, I would like to say that you need to keep your life in perspective and don't get upset by things that may not be so important...

Remember, family comes first! 

I just received something interesting in my email inbox from the president of our mortgage company.

It seems that the senate just passed a bill that will lower the amount of funds required from the buyer of a home when using an FHA loan, so instead of 3% it will be 1.5%.

On top of that, it also will raise the maximum loan amount on FHA loans to $417,000.

The reason I feel this is important besides that fact that borrowers will need lower down payments is because both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have both imposed recent adjustments that will cause the rates on some loans to go up.

This will be huge for the industry if it happens especially if you are lucky enough to be an FHA lender.

I just received something interesting in my email inbox from the president of our mortgage company.

It seems that the senate just passed a bill that will lower the amount of funds required from the buyer of a home when using an FHA loan, so instead of 3% it will be 1.5%.

On top of that, it also will raise the maximum loan amount on FHA loans to $417,000.

The reason I feel this is important besides that fact that borrowers will need lower down payments is because both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have both imposed recent adjustments that will cause the rates on some loans to go up.

This will be huge for the industry if it happens especially if you are lucky enough to be an FHA lender.

I was looking at the traffic logs of my website today and I found the search query

"refinancing while in an active bankruptcy"

The article on my Dallas Home Loan was relevant when I wrote it a couple years ago but since times have changed I decided to look at this article and determine whether it was still useful.

After reading this old post, I realized that it was still pretty much true except for the fact that I suggested to readers that they may have to use a 2 or 3 yr ARM, which is kind of strange since I have always used FHA loans which I also suggested in the article.

This website has over 500 pages indexed on Google and almost 600 on Yahoo so it is hard for me to rewrite all of the pages. There are around 600 total pages

After looking at my traffic logs more,  I realized that I was receiving search terms such as:

100% NINA rate

sub prime home loans with no down payment for credit scores above 500 in texas (thats a long one) 

and

If I file bankruptcy Chap 7 can I get a mortgage.

Plus many more normal search query's...

That's when I realized that this old site of mine has a terrible design!

It was an experiment a few years ago that actually worked to get potential customers to inquire but three years later has a lot of traffic, many top 10 results but few loans lately.

It has paid for itself a thousand times over (I only spend money on hosting)

So, what are my options?

The first one is to put Adsense on all of the pages (with over 600 pages, that doesn't sound fun).

The second option is to design a new site similar to my VA Home Loan website based on the Joomla CMS which would probably take me out of the search engines because the URL's wouldn't match.

The third would be to design a new template with usability and transfer and rewrite all of the articles to the new design with matching URL's.

OR

I could just leave it like it is...Old and ugly...

It's such an embarrassment since I have been marketing via the internet so long...

What would you do? 

Before you read this, please understand that that PPC is a science that take years to master. 

I have been marketing on the internet since 1993 and I have worked with PPC campaigns for about 8 years.

There are MANY more reasons (I could write a book on it) that you can fail at PPC but these are what I think are the Top 5.

I have been running my current campaign for almost a year, it has been so successful that I have had to hire another loan officer to handle all of the leads for me (I take all of the phone calls).

It keeps us so busy that we only run the campaign for two weeks a months.

In fact I turned it off three weeks ago, and don't plan on starting up again until after New Years because we have enough leads to keep us busy until then.

1. Not researching keyword terms correctly

The #1 mistake that I see many mortgage and real estate professionals make is that they only use the keywords that they think will be searched for. When I started the PPC campaign for my current website, I had 20 keywords...After the proper research, the list soon expanded to over 700. I like Wordze but there are many others that provide similar results.

2. Using one ad and not split testing

While there is quite a bit of discussion about what types of ads work best, the truth is that you always need to have two of them running against each other at all times and keeping the best producer after a couple weeks, then adding another one and start testing all over again.

3. Sending visitors to the home page

This is a HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE mistake, whatever you do, NEVER send your PPC visitors to the home page. The page they land on needs to be relative to the ad they clicked on and it also needs to ask or the visitors contact information. You are trying to generate potential clients, you are not paying to provide information to them. 

Here are two examples from my website. Which one do you think will convert better? Home Page or the Landing Page ?

4. Broadcasting your ad to the whole country

Did you know that most PPC networks allow you to choose which part of the country your ad will appear in?  So, if you are a Realtor in Reno, don't show your ads in Denver!

5. Not using conversion tracking

If you don't use conversion tracking then you will go broke! 

While it's great to get a lot of traffic to your website, you need to know what keywords are converting and which ones aren't.

I have a low traffic .07 cent keyword that converts at a rate of 50% while I used to have numerous high traffic $5.00 keywords that converted at 1%.

Conversion tracking lets you know which combination of keywords and ads give the best conversion rate and keep more of your money in your pocket!

I just had to share my excitement with everybody

My VA Home Loan website was added to the DMOZ directory, the only reason I found out was because I was checking my Hittail stats and noticed a DMOZ editor had visited my website.

I ended up submitting my website to DMOZ twice, once about eight months ago and about two weeks ago. 

The first time it was declined and I kept working on the site and decided to resubmit after I started receiving more search engine trafffic and my PR had went from 0 to 2...

In the Texas category, there are only 82 listings for mortgage companies...not very many for such a large state...

It makes me wonder what the editors at DMOZ are really looking for...

Do you hate people that 'game' the Active Rain system?

Their bogs are nothing more than copy and paste sections of their websites or actually plagiarisms from other websites?

I do!

Really, I don't care about the points system here on AR but I do think that it does reward those who contribute unlike some of the other networking sites on the web...

What I truly despise are members that try to take advantage of the system...nothing makes me more angry (except for loan officers that try to bait and switch borrowers)...

If you read my post Why do you cheat on Active Rain?, then you would understand my frustration with the system...

I had a rogue loan officer that was copying and pasting bogus content on his bog in an attempt to help his main account gain points...

I emailed him on two occasions and asked him to remove duplicate material to make it fair to other members...he never responded...

You see, I am a newer member of AR, been here a month and I'm not sure how things work...However, I've started speaking with some of the AR members in my area that have been here for awhile and networking with them...

Finally, I asked one of the members what should be done about this rogue blogger...This member emailed another member who knew somebody, who knew somebody at AR...one of those "I know a guy who know's a guy who know's a guy" type things...lots of layers involved...

What did they do for me?

Well, they gave me an email address... and I sent an email...and a couple hours later a received a response...

What did the email say?

Well, to paraphrase...it said... We do not allow this and he will be given a choice to delete all of his accounts and blogs except for one...or they will all be deleted... 

It's Veterans Day!

The banks are closed, schools are open and for the most part nobody thinks of it...it takes a back seat to Memorial Day because most people feel that they honor the same thing when in fact they don't...

Before I get into the difference, I would like to explain what I typically do the night before Veterans Day...well, I do almost the same thing the night before Memorial day...

What is that?

Well, what I typically do is find two or three military themed movies that I have in my DVD collection...In my collection, my wife and I have just about everything that you can think of...everything from The Deer Hunter to Full Metal Jacket...I have watched most of them hundreds of times because they all remind me of some experience that I had sometime in my military career...

This year, I decided to watch one movie that I hadn't watched in a year or so (Gardens of Stone) and a new movie that we picked up from Blockbuster (Home of the Brave).

The reason I picked these two movies is because they are about two totally different wars (Vietnam and Iraq) and they both deal mostly with life stateside during and after the characters war experience...Both of these films are not highly acclaimed but they are both realistic.

"Gardens of Stone"'s main character is a member of the Old Guard, they guard the tomb of the Unknown Soldier and bury war dead at Arlington cemetry...I relate to this movie because I was an Honor Guard member (they also conduct funeral details). This film deals with the main character's stateside life while in the Army before he goes to Vietnam and the events that take place after he is assigned there.

The next movie I picked was "Home of the Brave", it has some war scenes but it mainly deals with how the characters deal with blending back into civilian society after the Iraq war...I really liked this movie because it really deals with the personality changes that many veterans experience after being subjected to that environment and the how the adapt.

Even though I am a military Veteran, I am not a veteran of either of these wars...In fact, I am not a veteran of any war...The closest I came was working in the command post underground a few hundred miles away from Kuwait during Desert Shield and Desert Storm...yes, I got a medal for supporting it and others did too...

I also had some friends perish in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan...I remember them on Memorial Day...and Veterans Day too...

In fact, I remember all of my military friends and all veterans on Veterans Day because that's what this day is about!

This is the day that we remember all veterans, whether they are living or not. Whether they have served in a war zone or not...