Small Business Internet Marketing Strategies

I’d like to introduce the Arizona Investment Properties website by Road Runner Real Estate Enterprises.

Carmen and Guillermo Perez Vargas have a great idea: Worry-Free Arizona Investment Property. The real estate implosion hit Phoenix very hard and houses that sold for $250,000 are now selling for $70k.

So here’s their program in a nutshell.

• Carmen and Guillermo are identifying great houses for investors. Their target price is around $70k – that’s your investment.
• You buy the house and the title is yours.
• Guillermo immediately signs a 5 year lease with you. He pays you 8% of the purchase price each year, in monthly installments. During the 5 years, he handles keeping the place rented, paying taxes, upkeep, everything. You get a monthly payment of about $470 for 5 years.
• At the end of 5 years, you sell the property and split the profit. Guillermo expects your total return on investment will be about 110% – that’s after splitting the profit.

Not bad!

Guillermo came to us with a mostly finished website. But what he really wanted was a sales letter he could mail to potential investors.

For the letter, McColley Marketing Media:

• Wrote a killer 2-page letter (the home page of the site is based on the letter)
• Found a list of high income Canadians in the Vancouver area.
  
• Printed 1000 copies and hand addressed all the mail for higher opening rates.

We remodeled the website, making it wider and fresher looking.  We created more great content including an easy to update format for the properties pages based on a spreadsheet Guillermo was using to figure all the details on each property.

We also hid some of the details from visitors so we could ask for their email address in exchange.

Our tongue is nearly back to normal after licking all those envelopes and sticking all those stamps.  The second batch of 500 letters is just hitting Vancouver today and tomorrow.  So far, the indicators are great: the average visitor is spending 18 minutes and looking at 13 pages – that’s incredible!

We’re also getting about a 3% response rate on the mailer – very good for such a big ticket product (average direct mail response is about 1%).

If you would like to pump up your marketing so you can buy a couple of homes through Carmen and Guillermo, call McColley Marketing Media. We do small business web site design, email marketing blasts, and Local Internet Marketing for SmallBusiness. Call Lynn at 480-258-4135.

Have you claimed your listings on the Big Three search engines like I suggested in Part One of the Review Strategy for Local Internet Marketing Strategy?
Here’s Part Two of the strategy.
A very big factor in getting higher local rankings is “citations” – mentions of your business on local sites.  In your organic search engine rankings, the key is backlinks, but the search engines aren’t looking for links in Local Listings.  They just want to make sure that you are a true local business.  So they look at sites where local businesses might be mentioned:  The Chamber of Commerce directory, local news sites, and all those review sites that have been popping up in the last few years:  Yelp, MerchantCircle, Kudzu etc.
These review sites let you claim your listings (and provide keyword rich content) like the search engine sites we discussed in Part 1, but more importantly, they let customers tell the world about their experience with you – and even give you rankings on a scale of 1-5 stars.
You’ve heard the cliche: “A happy customer will tell a friend but an unhappy customer will tell 10.”
This should get any business owner thinking about what they can do to:

• Improve customer satisfaction
• Get happy customers to post a review

That’s exactly what my Reviews Strategy for Local Internet Marketing is all about.
But if you simply ask for a review, the most likely thing that will happen is: nothing.
Your customers may love you to death, but most likely they’ll just forget about it…or, since the vast majority of them are not that internet savvy, they won’t know how to do it.
So you have to make it very easy.
Step One. You need to claim your listings.
There are dozens of review sites out there.  You’re likely already listed and there may even be a review or two out there that you didn’t know about.  Claim these listings – just go for the free or basic option to start with – you can always come back later and upgrade if you find them sending you customers.
Here are a couple of review sites to start with I’m sure you can find at least 20 others:

• http://www.merchantcircle.com/corporate/
• http://www.judysbook.com/post/0
• https://biz.yelp.com/
• http://www.insiderpages.com/session/new
• https://register.kudzu.com/packageSelect.do

Note:  These sites often switch these url’s around for some reason so you might have to do a little searching to find the sign-up place for business owners.
Step Two.  Add a page to your website.
Have your web designer add a page to your site like this: McColley Marketing Media Review Page.
You’ll see that we give them some simple directions on what we want them to do.
Each of the logos is a link to my claimed profile on that service, so all a customer needs to do is click on picture, register, and add a great review.
Step Three.  Ask for reviews – especially from your happy customers.
You could send out an email, post a note on your social networks, print up business cards with the link to your page, include a slip in their monthly bill, or…get creative. If you do, be share your idea in the comments section!
Be sure you get the front line people in your business involved in asking for reviews.
And now that you have some reviews and testimonials…let’s leave that for a Part Three.

Lynn McColley owns and operates McColley Marketing Media in Mesa, Arizona.  He does Small Business Web Site Design, Local Internet Marketing and helps business do drop-dead simple Email Marketing Blasts using McMail Email Marketing.  Call him at 480-704-4286.

The Arizona Indian Law website is up!  AZ Indian Law is a second website for Brian Utsey, an Arizona Family Law Attorney.
Brian is an exceptional attorney who enjoys the family law side of his practice, but his true love, legally speaking, is American Indian Law.
In researching the site’s contents, I learned a lot about how the native tribes were mistreated, legally speaking (and otherwise).  Having grown up and spent lots of time in the Midwest and having close Sioux and Chippewa friends, I knew some of the story.  But looking at some of the legal history for this site, showed me how much I didn’t know.
This site doesn’t go into that history, there are a large number of sites that talk about that elsewhere.  However, when the site says “Indian Law is complicated”, you don’t know the half of it.  Normally, the law is relatively cut a dry.  After hundreds of years, somebody, soemwhere has had a similar case and you just have to point out what precedents the judge should look at in deciding the case.  In American Indian Law, for almost any questions you can find two or possibly three precedents – that point in completely opposite directions.  Many of them Supreme Court Decisions!
In addition, for outsiders dealing with Tribal courts, precedents may or may not have any bearing.  Brian tells of having cases against Indian clients summarily dismissed simply because the contracts involved didn’t take into consideration that one side of the argument (his) was subject to tribal protections.
It’s a fascinating and complex area of the law, and since Brian Utsey is one of a very limited number of attorneys who focus on this area, I expect you’ll be hearing his name in connection with some rather high profile cases at some point in the future.
Let me know what you think of it.Lynn McColley focuses on Small Business Web Site Design, Internet Marketing and Email Marketing Blasts at McColley Marketing Media in Mesa, Arizona.  If you would like to improve your results from marketing on the internet, call him at 480-704-4286.