Intelligent Internet Marketing – Part 1

 Think of your internet marketing as a funnel. At the bottom is your website - your website should be the heart of your internet marketing efforts. At the top of the funnel are the least personal tools, the search engines. Next the networks, then partners and finally your content -which we are going to create.
                                                                                                        S e a r c h  E n g i n e s
                                                                                                           Networks-Partners
                                                                                                                C o n t e n t
                                                                                                                   Website
                                                                                                                       You

Passive marketing is just letting all the stuff trickle down to you. That’s not what we are going to talk about; we are going to talk about getting pro-active with your internet marketing efforts and actively market you through each of these tools.

Website:
A couple principals of good website design are: keep it simple, keep it intuitive by making all navigations clear, have clear pathways making it easy for people go from section to section, avoid doublespeak by using everyday talking language, call a home search tool a home search tool, don’t get too fancy with the way you describe things and at the end of the day white space is going to be your friend.

White space allows you to navigate your website with ease and a cluttered website is hard to move through the site.

                                     "29 Tips to Successful Internet Marketing"
#1 Forget The Head Shot.

I think it important business owners wanting to put yourself out there however there is a place for that, the contact page, on a button, or a place where you can share your bio. The best thing you can do upfront is supply your users with what they are looking for.

Content is King: people are looking for information when they come to a website, they are not necessarily looking to hire a person, they are looking for content. And in my opinion, your product line is your best content be it listings or backpacks we know all the users are looking for content.

#2 Give them what they want.

Enhance your listings and product descriptions. You want to have all the information the people are looking for and by that I mean, sizes, shapes, color, square footage, location, etc. but here’s a tip, write like a human and try your hardest to write well for the general public.

#3 Pump Up your Photos.

We know people love photos and that’s why they come to the internet. A way to super charge your photos is called HDR Photography. Some of you may already know about this, it is a way to take three photos of different exposure and combine them to make a single stunning picture that really allows you to see the product in great detail.

It’s pretty simple to do yourself. There’s software out there that allows you to merge those 3 photos together. If you’re not interested in doing it yourself, there’s services  like VICASO that will do High Dynamic Range Photography for you. This is certainly an option to pump up your internet marketing because we know people want to see photos so make sure the photos you have on your website are new and the very best representation you can provide.

I don’t know how many of you are iPhone users, but the iPhone has a half decent camera on it so you may want to use the program called Photogene, it allows you to instantly edit, crop and make small alterations right on your iPhone. Then you can upload the picture right to your website or onto your Flickr account, straight from your device, never having to go back to your computer.

Recommended Listings/Products: Amazon.com is one of my favorite sites because Amazon is very good at recommending things for me to buy. So if I buy a book like home buying for dummy’s it’s automatically recommending a bunch of other books with similar content that other customers have purchased. In other words, what are you doing to keep me on your website rather than letting me bounce back to another search engine to find similar listings of products? Keep the content interactive and interesting allowing the visitor to search deeper on your site.

#4 Make a music video.

Enhance your product guide and listings. There are a number of services out there that allow you to create small web videos for your products/listings. Animoto is one, Real Estate Shows another and for the camera buff Google video is easy to use.

My best piece of advice for you is – use new photos. If all you’re doing is taking the 15 – 16 photo’s that are already on the website and putting them to music, you’re not really doing anything for the viewer that they could’t already see on the website. So I think the music videos can be a very interesting addition or enhancement to your web pages and perhaps incorporate photos of the how it's used, how it looks "on", how it displays, or homes next door, the neighborhood, the street, the shops around the corner, the park down the block, etc. and add on or complimentary products. Use these listing enhancements as a way to create the full picture of the product.

Couple of things I wish websites had are:
collaborative tools – ways to enable multiple people to search together, share information and comments with each other, that’s something I think is going to be really important.  For the housing industry, open house times, current rates and … is all information we know people are looking for online so make sure you have a section that shares that kind of information.

Printable search itineraries, this is a new product – in most cases there is not the ability to download and print maps and directions. Even better, how about a way to download a GPS route or at least way points so I plug them into my GPS and drive away.

These are kind of wish list items but I wanted you guys to have something to think about for the future. Adding things that can really enhance the usurer’s experience.

Keep coming back to learn more internet marketing tips.

Contact us at marcia@minocquamortgage.com or www.minocquamortgage.com and have a great marketing day.