Too busy to post on my own blog. See the posts below to discover why…
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Too busy to post on my own blog. See the posts below to discover why…
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When people ask, “What do you do?” I could answer with a less-than-accurate response, “Build websites and internet marketing.” Yes, I do these things but saying that lumps me in with the rest of the “VendorSluts” who hawk their own “products.”
What I really do is constantly scan the universe for technology or systems that can help business owners live happier lives by earning more money more easily. If these technologies can’t be put in a Comprehensive System to do the following, then we don’t use them:
(1) Attract Visitors,
(2) Capture Leads,
(3) Educate Prospects,
(4) Sell Products/Close Clients, and
(5) Work easily and efficiently
Sometimes my key guys (Hitesh, Ajmal, Laura, Niraj, Fernando, and Enric) do the work. Other times, we hire other people. Whatever is best for the client. To my wife’s chagrin I’m a lot more interested in helping people solve problems than in earning a buck. : )
I suppose I’m a business model developer and business consultant that does a lot of the internet marketing and technology work. Because my stuff works, I often end up partnering with people who start as potential clients. (Frankly, any internet marketer worth his salt will not bang their head against the corporate contract wall for long until he or she realizes that they can pick a product and sell it for themselves or JV with a business owner and get 10-50% of the net profit.)
At any rate, I was supposed to slow down when the baby arrived but now find myself busier than ever with the following projects:
#1. Kendra Todd Group (Real Estate)Under development, these 4 main website sare designed to build her personal brand including dominating the first page of Google, Yahoo, and Bing search engines on keywords related to her name. This also involved creating hundreds of accounts on social networking and social media sites for SEO content distribution. We also dropped the cost of SEO content page creation to about $5 rather than the $100 or more charged by many SEO firms.
#3. GrowRichGodsWay.com (Religious)Kendra appears on the Christian Broadcasting Network and wants to share stories of God working in the workplace so we created a simple blog designed to build a large mailing list through strategic placement of registration forms. Very pretty, simple graphic design by Lisa of UrbanLifeDesigns.com
For these sites we’ve integrated IDX listings into several of the most popular Wordpress Themes including StudioPress, AgentPress, Frugal, and DIYThemes Thesis. Because the listings are integrated into Wordpress and we have re-written the URL structure, they SEO perfectly. The designs are notable for their use of large photos, Google Street view, and a VERY focused and flexible approach to Lead Capture. Lise Howe, James Harner, Fernando, Carlos Rodrigeuz, and Tim/Ed have been very patient as we work through a lot of technical challenges and tweaking for the highest possible lead capture rates.
#9. ListingBlog (IDX Company)We are standardizing these designs and working on an awesome application of WordpressMU that will allow agents to instantly an unlimited amount of SEO niche market blogs that are automatically filled up with content. A key 2nd part of this project is to integrate a CRM for wordpress that tracks visitors’ site activity and provides instant notification capabilities. The simple thing we do is create a great website with full IDX capability and manage the PPC and SEO strategies to guarantee a specific number of visitors and leads per month for clients. I am working with a new partner who left one of the top IDX firms to basically handle Sales. Thank God!
#10. HOAHelpDesk.com (Home Owners Association Website system and Social Network)This is a wide-open niche market with very poor competition. Can’t say much more, but this could turn out to be the most profitable project of all.
I consider most of the stock market and investing universe the unproductive shifting of paper. However, this company got people out of variable 401k and stock market investing and into much better Equity Indexed Universal Life polices, Annuities,and other safer, tax advantaged investment options that saved their customers millions of dollars during the crash. This is a agent website and lead capture system but built on WordpressMU which gives the company the best security and control features of Replicated Website systems but with the blogging, flexibility, and SEO capabilities of Wordpress.
#12. PhoodClub & PhillyPhoodClubFirst rule of Phood Club – always talk about Phood Club. This website and internet marketing system will bring together 5 – 20 people weekly to review the food of 48 Philadelphia area restaurants per year. While these folks are together the Philly Phamilies i.e. the spouses/others get together with their kids and cook. The original idea was to simply get Yale alumni together once per week but the concept has the potential to become the #1 on-line destination for food and restaurant reviews in Philly. it could go nationwide. Finally! An internet project my Wife will Love, especially since I am working on it with her best friend (a hot, single Physician who loves beer and sports in case you do/are too.)
#13. The Local ExpertWe started this project by providing niche marketing websites and super-inexpensive Book ghostwriting services to real estate agents but pulled it off-line to restructure it for several industries. The key is that people want to hire experts. If you write a book or “publish” you are an expert. Big companies like Bob Proctor’s charge $40,000 to help you do this kind of thing. We’ve figured out how to do this for $1,000 – $5,000 – but that’s our secret.
This is my own corporate site – conceptually based on Stephen Coveys “Quadrant 2″ statement regarding “important but non-urgent” tasks like – Comprehensive Internet Marketing systems : ) which is what we do for businesses. I have to do for myself what I tell other clients to do regarding the automation of ALL my lead capture, prospect education, client conversion, project management, billing, etc…systems…otherwise, as you can see, I can’t possibly handle any more work.
#15. OctagonTactical.comThis is just a quick website for a friend who provides Personal Self-Defense, Firearms, and law enforcement training. Chris Springfield is the best combination of law enforcement, military, organizational systems, and teacher that I’ve ever met.
Another project for a friend Sean McCullough. This is a simple lead capture website that – when finished – should steal ALL the traffic from those companies say they “give quotes” but really just capture your information and sell the leads. Can’t give-a-way the strategy, but if it works, the system could dominate any Financial Services or Insurance market we go into — and these are really competitive markets.
Albuquerque and an interesting Denver Vacation Rentals project should begin soon. I’m also working on a website f
This allows us to turn a Wordpress website into a perfect corporate or networking marketing Replicated Website system
There is nothing like what we are doing which should really help extend wordpress into a full featured business solution.
Wordpress theme/frameworks like StudioPress, AgentPress, Frugal (my current favorite), and Thesis allow website/blog owners a lot of customization capability. The problem is that most website owners do NOT understand color, spacing, typography selection, copywriting, or – much less – how to select and place lead capture, contact, and interactive elements (usually wordpress plugins) for maximum increase in their sales. Soooo….we are developing add-on graphic design, copywriting, and plugin packages based on Best Practices that they can buy and integrate very easily.
Since we do so much on WordpressMU we hired one of the best cloud server guys in the world. He’s an engineer (not a software guy) who can expound for hours on what big companies like Twitter screwed up. People ignore this stuff until their hosting becomes inadequate and costs them tons of money. My challenge is documenting and communicating why clients need to pay for this kind of stuff they do not “see.”
Wow. Ok, I’m tired and am taking the baby off to nap.
Happy Holidays!
Sam
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This is a comment I posted on a real estate technology blog. It has to do with sales methods and social media strategies.
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Blatant sales pitches stopped working because the pitch-ers had nothing of quality to sell or lied about the quality of their products. This is true in the Real Estate industry where very few agents could actually claim and prove that they could sell homes for more or help clients buy for less better than other agents.
So instead of helping agents to focus on their Unique Value Proposition which has to do with Product Selection, Quality, Service, Price, Likability/Trust and reflecting that via a good copywriter and a little work collecting statistics and testimonials – vendors first sold people on lousy technology gizmos.
Now vendors are selling agents on Social Media strategies.
Most of what I see is not “respect” for the consumer – that should be about improving the quality of your product/service – but rather fooling the consumer by focusing on the “Likability” part of the UVP and/or communicating things that have nothing to do with why an Agent’s service is better.
For example, Agents are told to post about local market statistics. That’s fine for generating traffic, but doesn’t say a thing (usually) about how the agent will use those statistics to help, for example, a seller realistically price their houses, or proof that the agent knows how to do this better than her competition. It used to be that your friends were your friends and the sales guys were sales guys and you could tell the difference. Now courses are being taught on “how to pretend to be friendly and helpful so you can sell your junk.”
I understand it and even have advised on people how to do it when I couldn’t get them to improve their product/service…but it’s a little distasteful. (BTW, my last home sale after 1.5 years of being an “agent” was a 1.25 million home but I soon quit working as an agent because I thought my taking business away from really experienced/great agents was a crappy deal for consumers i..e my product wasn’t the BEST and I didn’t have time to improve it, so I Stopped Selling It.)
If you are not doing at least 6 transactions per month – stop worrying about Wuffie and Twitter and Blogging. Learn how to improve what you offer so it is better than your competition, how to succinctly communicate that (hire a copywriter), and get yourself a Home Search site “that captures leads,” and then follow-up instantly and constantly.
I’ll get off IDX sites for a moment, and recommend Matt Jones Favorite Agent “Listing Presentation” and a few of his Calculators that can help you show Sellers why other agents are lying about the effectiveness of their marketing strategies and when they say the home will sell.
Ari Galper, who is not a real estate guy, has the best way to offer a service or product in a straight-forward way without either False-Relationship Building or coming off as a sleazy salesman.
And yes, pick up a book or too on Usability in website design like “Keep it Simple”, subscribe to Marketing Experiments, hire a $15 php programmer out of India, and download the ListingPress plugin and design your own search website.
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Our 3rd child, Ethan, was born at 4:47 pm EST on Tuesday, August 25th.
Weighing in at 7 lbs 10 ounces the big boy screamed his head off for about 10 minutes, prompting me to threaten him with a time-out just seconds into his just started life. The Charge nurse confirmed that I am the first person ever to immediately post Facebook photos from the Operating Room : ) Meet Ethan…
The HD version taken with TheFlip video camera. Thank you Joe Ross from TheFlip for helping us violate the privacy of our son before he’s a teenager : )
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If you are a Real Estate Agent or Programmer that is interested in using or working with the ListingPress Plugin, please contact me at 484-842-0062. You can see our latest work at www.TheLocalExpert.com.
The ListingPress Wordpress Plugin is an easy-to-use application that lets real estate agents display the information on thousands of homes for sale in their Wordpress website or Wordpress blog. This solves two problems real estate agents face:
#1. Attracting Visitors to Real Estate Websites via Search Engine Optimization Using ListingPress
Almost all Real Estate technology companies that provide a similar service – display the photos and information on homes in an “iframe.” This means that Google Search engine spiders do not index the data. The ListingPress Plugin fully integrates the data into the Wordpress website or blog.
#2. Generating Leads by Giving Visitors What They Want Using ListingPress
Most of these iFrame solutions come in a one-design-fits-all-agents i.e. the photos are one size, the font is one size, and the IDX company owners (programmers) have no clue how normal people use websites.
Simply put – Big Photos and Google Street View and Big Font sizes get visitors to stay on the real estate website longer. Big Lead Capture buttons get more clicks and generate more leads.
That’s the easy way to understand this stuff.
FOR THE EXPERTS:
The really cool thing about the ListingPress Plugin is also how we can combine the functionality of ListingPress with the many functionalities of other Wordpress Plugins.
#1. We can Automatically create thousands of self-updating, non-dupicated, keyword rich Search Engine Friendly content pages. (There’s a trick to doing this that only we know.)
#2. We can Automatically create thousands of individual SEO Niche Market websites for specific towns or even Keywords with this automatically updating content.
Put ListingPress Plugin and Wordpress together with our “Book Cover” design and Ghostwriting services found at www.TheLocalExpert.com, and we can just about Guarantee any real estate agent can double the number of monthly transactions he or she does – within 6 months.
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