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.

 

As a partner of Mortgage Success Source, we get to offer you $150 off your Mastery Business Plan! Discount code is MORSYSTEMS Don't miss out this year, be armed with YOUR business plan for 2012 and act on it! The MorSystems Team Mastery Business Plan:

Create lasting memories and gain new ideas at MBP

A special offer just for you... As a proud partner of Mortgage Success Source, I am so excited to bring you a special rate for their annual life-changing event! Mastery Business Plan is an industry event like no other. Attending will transform you to meet the challenges ahead, reach new horizons and be the professional mortgage loan originator who thrives in this new environment. It's for winners...just like you. I'm sending you this note because I would like to see you attend Mastery Business Plan. This is an important time to get together with other winners, who want to do everything they can to be top-performing mortgage professionals. And best yet I negotiated a special discount just for you. Use my personal DISCOUNT CODE MORSYSTEMS to save $150 off the regular price! What's in store at the event? Check out the video below to discover more about what is planned! Sue Woodard, President, Content & Publishing, Mortgage Success Source Highlights include: This year's Business Planning Workshop is all new, with an exciting format designed to foster greater networking with your peers is guaranteed to drive your success in 2012. A special two-part session with Tim Braheem on what it takes to succeed, the shift you MUST make, and the psychological mindset that ensures your success. How to transform yourself and your business with real life, hard-hitting, actionable insights and guidance from master salesman Jeffrey Gitomer. Revolutionary networking concepts to accomplish your biggest dreams in ways you never thought possible with Bob Beaudine. Sessions ranging from Presentation & Selling, Social Media, Hall of Fame Roundtable, Faculty Mash-up, an IDEA slam, and plenty of networking opportunities to add to your experience. To learn more about Mastery Business Plan and to register, please visit www.MasteryBusinessPlan.com or call Ryan at 1-800-963-1900...and don't forget to use my personal discount code, MORSYSTEMS. See you there!! P.S. Register for Mastery Business Plan today and use my Personal Discount Code MORSYSTEMS to get $150 off the regular price. Or use my Personal Discount Code MORSYSTEMS when you call Ryan at (800) 963-1900.

Skin cancer is the most common of all cancers, and 90 percent of all skin cancers are caused by sun overexposure. Put your hats on in the sun along with uva/uvb sunscreen over 30 spf, and re-apply every 2 hours no matter what the bottle says. See if the headwear association will be near you tomorrow!

The headwear assoc. is distributing free Sun Protection Hats in cities across the U.S.
http://www.theheadwearassociation.org/Hat_Day.html

They say to choose hats with at least a 2 1/2-inch brim and always wear sunscreen and a hat when outside.

A benefitting trend: Hats with oversize brims have been dominating the 2011 fashion runways, so staying safe from the sun has never looked better. Think "more skin, more brim." Women's hats with brims larger than five inches also offer shoulder and décolletage protection from the sun.

Remember to see your dermatologist yearly too, and check yourself for changing moles/sunspots often. You can find free skin cancer screenings by dermatologists here:
http://www.aad.org/skin-conditions/skin-cancer-detection/free-skin-cancer-screenings

Knowing the details of your website traffic is a must, especially to track the results of a marketing campaign. As a mortgage website provider, I must say that we too use this amazing tool to track our website traffic, and recommend it to our clients.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. We use this tool to see how many visitors come to our website on what days, where they came from, (if they directly typed in our website address, if they came from activerain, facebook, twitter, directory, email campaign, etc. on what date). If we send out a postcard or advertise in a magazine we can track to see if it brought in more visitors or not. If you take out a newspaper ad, create ads on craigslist, exchange links with a referral partner etc. you can see exactly how many people found your website from specific sources.

Here's a few snapshots of a client's google analytics account:

 

Direct Traffic - visitors that knew the website address and typed it into their address bar.
Referring Sites - other websites that had a link to your site such as activerain, linkedin, twitter etc.
Search Engines - self explanatory ~ visitors coming from searching for your website in google, yahoo, bing, etc.

From there you can see more detail of what referring sites sent visitors to you, what search engines people used to search for you, and the keywords they typed into the search engine to find you. It's helpful to know what people type in a search engine to find you so you can work on your search engine ranking for those keywords and you can get an idea of what other keywords may be important to get a better ranking on:

 

 

You can see what keywords people typed in search engines to find this client's website, and what webpages they visited within the site:

 

You can even see worldwide, nationally, state wide and city wide how many people visited your site over a time period!

These are just a couple things that Google Analytics shows you, you can see how very powerful this information can be for you to improve your keyword rankings, track your marketing efforts, and see what webpages people are most interested in.

 

Sign up here for your free Google Analytics account: http://www.google.com/analytics/

 

So if you're on activerain there's a good chance you've thought about email marketing but maybe you just didn't know the benefits. I'm here to tell you, email marketing brings me more roi than any postcard, magazine ad or tradeshow I've ever done. 

Companies like iContact and Constant Contact make it easy to email your clients/prospects/referral partners with quality visually stunning emails. I personally have used Constant Contact for years to send our clients newsletters and our prospects updates. They now have competition with iContacts new offering: 

A free version of their services if you send to a list of 500 emails or fewer. They offer financial templates so i tried them out. Fairly easily, I created a nice email in about 18 minutes with my logo, pictures, and sections of text, creating a professional e-newsletter!

If you have more than 500 email addresses to send to, their basic package starts at $10/mo rivaling their competitor Constant Contact who starts at $15/mo. 

I'm more familiar with Constant Contact, but so far I'm liking iContact. If FREE is a motivation for you to try out iContact email marketing, here you go!

Remember to use your emails to direct people back to your website, your activerain page, your facebook business page, your twitter page, your linkedin etc. Together, they are the most powerful!

Hint: Offer tools like these to your referral partners, they love it, they are so gateful and you will help solidify the relationship.

 

Check it out here:

https://www.icontact.com/affordable-email-marketing/

 

 

 

 

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.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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

 

 

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 change mortgage brokers, switch companies, or join a branch.

What happens to their clients after that move 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, their website is down, and their email doesn't work. Their old clients now think the worst.

My suggestions for individual loan officers:

1. Get your own website address. It's easy to purchase one that will always be branded to you no matter what changes you make in the future. Go to www.GoDaddy.com to purchase a domain for about $10/year. Here's a hint: Do a google search for "godaddy promo codes" to get your domain on sale. All you need to purchase is the domain, no hosting, privacy protection, none of that other stuff is necessary, just your domain.

2. Purchase your own website that brands you as an individual. Of course we offer mortgage websites, and I biasely think we're the best for you, here's more info: MorSystems mortgage websites for individual loan officers we offer a website of your own that brands you as the loan officer to go to, with tools like online loan apps, auto rates, referral partner webpages etc. on the Gold version.

3. Get an email address that matches your website address and use that instead of your company email address on your marketing (as long as your company allows this) Your website provider like MorSystems offers this option, it's called Webmail and it can connect to your outlook, your phone, or forward to another email address. Lets say you purchased www.johndoeloans.com you could have an email address that is anything@johndoeloans.com like info@ or apply@ or john@.

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.

Companies know that it costs less to retain a current client than it is to obtain a new client.The same goes for referral partners! How do you help retain your current referral partner relationships? No really, I want to know! Here are some of my suggestions:

Your referral partners need to feel reciprocated, if you don't refer to them, why should they refer to you? Refer to your partners who refer to you.

They want to feel appreciated and thought of, so be sure to actively keep in contact with them, be genuinely interrested in their lives and offer them ways to grow their business that they may not have thought of.

Sue Woodard has suggested in the past that loan officers even suggest a tech upgrade if a Real Estate Agent is using an old phone, get them to switch to a smart phone and physically help them set the new phone up with their email etc. They will remember that kind gesture and will be so thankful for the hand holding. They will become more efficient, and able to refer you more loans.

I believe you need to reach out to your referral partners and meet with them on growing their business. If you help them grow their business, guess who has earned more referrals.

Another suggestion is checking out their website. Does their site look like it belongs in 1998? Does it rank high in browser searches? Of course, your website better be good too, before you start evaluating other's ;) My past blogs talk about search engine help, and referral partners on your website if you're interrested.

My point is, go above and beyond the monthly automated newsletter, the "just checking in to see if you have anything I can help with" email or the bi-monthly lunch. Actively think about, be concerned with, and help with growing your partner's business and it in turn will grow yours.

 

 

Social media is a must, but where do you direct prospects from there?

Do you generate leads straight from social media? Do you direct them to your professional website?

YES you absolutely need to direct prospects from your social media, whether it is activerain, facebook, linkedin etc. etc. TO your professional website where all the fluff is stripped away, and your credibility in your industry can increase in the minds of your prospects. Social media is great for getting found in google searches, getting in front of the faces you normally may not have access to, and for prospects to do a lot of research on you.

Your website is where you seal the deal. Your website is where prospects finally feel that they've done their due diligence in researching you online to feel comfortable with choosing YOU. Your website is where prospects feel that you are a true professional and can learn pertinent info they've been searching for and can get their initial burning questions answered.

If you are offering a credible website that offers pertinent info and tools they are looking for, they are more likely to choose you, email you, call you, and apply online with you.

 

Social Medias > Professional Website!!

 

 

Shelly Whitworth
www.MorSystems.com
Mortgage Websites