Listen to this Audio Post on Why People Aren’t calling you to stage their homes.

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Last week, internet marketing expert Frank Kern launched a new product that sold for $2,000 each. In less than 24 hours he sold 2,000 units.  That’s $4,000,000 in one day.  Not too shabby.

Who would have thought you could sell such an expensive product to so many people so fast in today’s economy? How did he do it?  Well, that is actually the information Frank was selling.  How to sell goods and services on the internet.

Part of Frank’s success stems from his willingness to share a good deal of valuable information with his prospects before he launches his product, and I am going to share one of the key tidbits he  offered with you today.

Frank would say there are just three reasons people aren’t buying your home staging services today.

• They Don’t Want It
• No Money
• Don’t Trust or Believe you

They Don’t Want It.

Some never will want your services. And while others just need to be educated a little, it’s a mistake according to Frank to be spending too much time on people who don’t want your services.  Instead look for ways to market to people who do.

No Money

Frank makes a more important point here. While no money may mean no money, it usually means that they don’t want it badly enough.  If people are telling you they don’t have the money, you haven’t yet found a way to increase their desire.   You may need to focus more of your marketing efforts on what’s in it for them.

For your home owner, it may be a higher sales price, or a quicker sales, but it also may be just getting help doing everything that needs to be done to get ready for the big move.

Make sure you are clear on the real motivations of those you have already worked with, and then share these with those you hope to work with.

Don’t Trust/Believe You.

Your prospect needs to not only believe that your services will benefit them, they need to trust that you are someone they can work with.  Someone they like.

While credentials may help, social proof is far more effective. A list of past homes staged, testimonials from happy customers are powerful tools to help bridge the trust gap.  These should be part of your standard presentation.

But in addition, you should find ways to reach out to your prospects and share. Provide them with good useful information, and keep in touch over time.

Little gifts in the form of useful information on how to prepare for a move, provided via luncheon talks to a local church group or social group not only give you visibility and credibility, it offers value.

Little gestures along this line, activate a sense of reciprocity, in which the recipient begins to feel a bit of an obligation to return the favor.  This can lead to you at least getting a chance to bid a project.

I recommend that home stagers web sites offer a free gift that viewers can download, and then follow up with over time with a series of additional tips. This helps build that reciprocity response, and more importantly helps build a sense of friendship. And we tend to trust our friends.

Technorati Tags: Home Staging, Home staging marketing tips, Internet marketing, marketing

I’ve been writing about meta tags and keywords and how frequently many of the web sites I review have them all wrong.

I suspect some of you are wondering how it is that I can see your meta tags, when you can’t?

It’s just a matter of knowing how, and it’s very easy to do.

Just right click your mouse somewhere on the main body of your web site or that of virtually any other web site and a box will appear with a set of options. If you use Firefox as a browser, one of the options will be “View Page Source”, if you use Internet Explorer it will read “View Source.” Just click on either and you will see the code that is behind the web page.

Now sometimes people will right click on a part of the web site where an image is displayed, and you will not see the “view page code”. If this happens to you, try another area on the page, usually where there is text for the body of the page. On most web sites you should be able to find the code with out too much trouble.

The meta Tags are at the top of the code, between two “head” tags.  The first is <head> and then bunch of code and it ends with </head> which indicates that the Header information is done. It is almost always followed by the Body code. <body> Then all the stuff that actually appears on your page is listed. it eventually ends with a end body tag, </body>

You only need to look at the stuff on top to see if your meta tags are adequate.

There are a lot of possible Meta Tags, but of those there are two things you want to be sure to check.

You will want to be sure to check out your keywords and also your web site description.  Most meta tags such as the keyword ones are optional as far as getting your site to work.  But they are very important if you want the search engine bots and/or anyone else to find your site.

You should have, but are not required to have the following:

<meta name=”Keywords” content=”keywords,separated,by,commas”>  In the example, I include the words keywords, separated and comma to show what the keywords should look like. There shouldn’t be spaces between the keywords, each keyword or keyword phrase should be separated by a comma.

I have found web sites with no keywords at all, and I have found web sites where the keywords are totally unrelated to the page. In the later case, someone probably “borrowed” someone else’s web site because they liked the layout and replaced all the content without bothering to fix the keywords.  Look at your keywords, are they “geographically based  long tail keywords” as I have been preaching? If not, you want to get them fixed.

The second element that you want to be sure is in your meta tags is:

<meta name=”Description” content=”information about your site”>

The “information about your site should be 100-150 characters long and should include your best keywords.

To learn more about meta tags, you might want to get a copy HTML in Simple Terms by Terry Jett which I have published and sell. You can find a link on my other blog site http://MicroBusinessSpecialist.com/blog or you can use the links below. It’s only $9.97 and does a good job of explaining Meta Tags on pages 16-18.

I keep a copy of it handy by my computer to look up the HTML code I need on occasion to adjust my blogs, web pages and Squidoo lens. I am a marketer, and not a computer tech, so I need HTML help from time to time. If you do as well, you might benefit by downloading a copy, printing it out and keeping it by your computer like I do.

You can always look up things online by doing a search, but I find having a printed reference to be handier and quicker.

http://askearlabout.com/html-in-simple-terms/index.html

Technorati Tags: Meta Tags

Have you ever passed by a blank billboard on a backwater highway with a 1-800 number on it? Or perhaps one saying, “Your message here?” I have, but it’s been a while since the last time. Mostly I suspect, because I seldom venture off the main freeways in my normal travels these days.

In past years, I did a bit more traveling to smaller towns in out-state Minnesota and Wisconsin and I would see a fair number of them. Mostly on roads that used to be the main thoroughfare in the pre-freeway era. I suspect a good many of them still exist.

In those traveling days I used to consult with towns and counties on how to attract businesses to their communities. Today, I consult with businesses on how to attract customers. Same business, different focus.

A billboard is a marketing device some businesses use to attract customers. It’s like a display ad in a newspaper or magazine. It provides a graphic image and perhaps some keywords to people who happen to be passing by. On the highway, in their cars. In the newspaper or magazine as one’s eyes pass from one article or story to the next, one page to the next.

They have a hard job to do. They need to make an impression on your conscious or sub conscious mind quickly. It must be the sub conscious the advertiser is aiming for because there are very few such images that ever really capture my conscious mind’s attention.

Now as a kid, I remember the old Burma Shave signs because they were different and funny. I remember a number of teaser campaigns over the years that had me guessing as to what was coming next, but I can’t remember what any of them were about at the moment. I admit that I do notice some of the new billboard campaigns from time to time when they change along one of my regular routes. But I don’t remember ever buying something because I saw a billboard, do you?

My uncle Urban had a billboard on the highway from the Minneapolis to St. Cloud where he had a butcher shop. The sign read, “Gaida’s Meats” with a sausage on on fork that protruded above the sign. It was a clever enough visual effect, breaking out of the box. I suspect he got at least occasional comments from customers in the store about it. Particularly when it was new. But I doubt it brought in any new customers. It may have, however, brought in a few more existing customers. Not because it made his product any more valuable, but because it created status. A sense of importance because everyone who lived in St Cloud saw it whenever they returned home from a trip to the cities.

In my uncle Urban’s eyes the sign wasn’t meant for people from Minneapolis that happened to be going to St Cloud, it was for people from St Cloud who happened to have traveled to the Twin Cities. They would be coming back on this road. And that’s where he placed his sign.

Now I’m talking about billboards today, because in many ways they are like a business website. The clever ones may catch my attention as I browse through many related sites online. But only if they are on the highway I am traveling. If I am on the freeway, and the web site is on a dusty county road, I will never see it. And no matter how cute, creative or otherwise inspired it may be, it may as well not exist at all. It may as well be blank. In my book, it’s not even worth a toll free call to find out how much someone wants to put my message on it.

When it comes to online advertising, far too many people have spent all their effort coming up with a great image and feel for their sites and not given any thought to whether to put their site on a freeway where it will be seen by thousands or on a dirt road where only the crows and gophers will see it.

On the internet, the way you get in front of the traffic from Minneapolis to St Cloud is to make sure the keywords in your meta tags put you on the right highway. In addition, you need to use those same keywords in your message – in the body of your web pages.

This is particularly easy for local businesses, and a bit more difficult for those who compete on a national scale.

If my uncle still had his butcher shop, I would encourage him to use St Cloud Butcher Shop, St. Cloud Meats, Saint Cloud Butcher Shop, Stearns County Butcher Shop, Benton County Butcher Shop, and Polish Sausage as just a handful of maybe several hundred keywords in his meta tags.

In fact, I would take every conceivable term like meat, sausage, etc., and pair it with every conceivable geographical term that people in the area might use to find what they were looking for in a computer search. I call such terms geographical long tail keywords. And they are designed to mimic the actual phrases people might type into their search engine. While they might type “sausage” the first time, when they see over 20 million responses they will quickly find a geographical term to narrow their search if they are looking for a place like my uncle’s where they can get good Polish sausage.

And yet if you look at most business web pages you will see terms like plumber, attorney, dentist, groceries, resort, bait, or what have you in their meta tags. Such keywords are worthless. But so too is having Minneapolis, or Saint Cloud, or New York.

As my frequent readers know, I have been working with the Home Staging Industry for the past 9 months or so. As I dug deeper into the keywords that people actually use, I have grown a list of 124 terms for the home staging industry. Most were fairly obvious, others less so. I have been offering a service to the industry where I concatenate the various keywords I have researched together with the relevant geographical modifiers for individual home stagers. It gets a bit tedious and time consuming. But the result has been a block of keywords that puts my client’s web pages on the internet freeway, while their competitors are advertising their business on the dusty back roads of the internet where no one goes.

Where do you want your billboard to be? If it’s appropriate for your business, follow my example and create a series of geographical long tail keywords. It will make a difference in how often your potential customers find you. It also will make it far more likely that you get top ranking for a keyword phrase when you are the only person who has taken the time and effort to include in in your keywords.

Don’t forget that you also want to incorporate as many of the major terms into the body of you text as well. So if you are a Homestager in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, make sure to say so in the text of your web page as well as in the meta tags.

Technorati Tags: advertising, geographical long tail keywords, Keywords, marketing, Meta Tags, websites

Within the internet marketing world, people have ten’s and hundreds of web sites. Each with a different URL and each targeted to a specific niche or purpose. That permits each web site to be addressed to a particular audience. And since the site is targeted, so too are the keywords, which means these sites tend to rank higher than if they were attempting to be all things to all people.

Off line businesses and those firms operating online in niche arenas should consider whether or not they too would benefit from multiple web sites.

I will once again use my friends in the Home Staging Industry as an example of a situation where two web sites may make a lot more sense that one.

If you go to most home stagers web sites you will see that they are primarily directed to the home owner. But if you were to survey home stagers as I have done, you will see that most of them market not to home owners but to Realtors, who they hope will refer home sellers to them.

This means the Home Staging company has two different marketing objectives. One is to convince realtors that they can help sell a home faster and for more money, and the second is to convince the home owner that they can help sell a home for more money and faster. While it appears to be the same objective, it’s not.

For the home stager, the sale to the individual home owner is critically important, but represents just one sale. The sale to the Realtor, might not in itself win any direct business, but represents a series of prospective future business.

Home stagers offer two primary benefits to their customers, faster sales and higher price. While both are important to home sellers and to Realtors, the relative ranking between the two vary. A home owner is more likely to be impressed with the prospects of a higher price, as any such higher price will help pay for the services they are being asked to cover. For a Realtor, the higher price may mean a marginal improvement to their commission. More important to them, is the speed with which a home sells, so they can go on to the next.

Now while both share same objectives their motivations differ. To be most efective, the sales pitch to either market should lead off with their primary motivation. That in turn calls for two web pages, and two marketing pitches.

This is going to be true for any business that markets to distributors as well as final customers. And probably many more circumstances as well.

How about your business. Do you have multiple audiences you are marketing to?

If so, you really should be thinking in terms of multiple rifle shots rather than a blunderbust shotgun spread.

Most businesses try to accomplish this with multiple pages on one web sie. And this may be an adequate compromise in some cases, but it is always a compromise, and an opportunity for a competitor to step in and out compete you.

One objection has been the need to buy multiple domain names and hosting accounts. And while this is a pound wise penny foolish objection, the fact is that with the right hosting service there is no need to pay any more to host a second, third, fourth, or even twentieth web site.

It would take me a while to sit down and even count the total number of web sites I have. And they are all on one account. And that account costs me less than $25 a month. I use HostGator

They offer me the opportunity to have an unlimited number of web sites on one account and enough bandwith to cover my needs and that of most small business people. These can be readily stepped up should my increased use of video require a future adjustment.

I mention the hosting problem, as just one barrier to having multiple sites. A second site, probably means reworking the first and then adding the second. This will take some site design work and of course that entails a one time expense. But the final result is a more clearly targeted marketing campaign, and better marketing results.

I would have two “ethical bribes,” one each on each of the two new web sites to build a separte email list of prospective home owners and Realtors. Using my home staging example, I might offer a report on how to de-clutter your home on the web site directed to homeowners, and a different report on how to discuss home staging with your clients on the Realtor Oriented Web Site.

The prepackaged follow-up messages would be distinctly targeted as well.

It’s important to clarify your marketing objectives, and then to develop approriate marketing tools such as web sites and autoresponder porgrams to meet those objectives over time. If you need three web sites, you should have three.

What do you need?