Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Cari,

Normally, I would have plenty to say (as many regulars here will attest to) ... but CookieMonster, Cartess and Craig got the jump on me tonight and I will yeild to them ... and they have provided some EXCELLENT advice so far ... except on one item you mentioned ... as quoted above ... I will comment.

It is clear you have been "swayed" by the SEO "gurus" out there when you speak of "rich text" and "keywords", etc. You`re not the first. And before I get hammered here, I am not knocking SEO and some of the advice from these people. But I find many of these "gurus" lack pratical and real-life experience.

You have SOOOOOOOO many ways to market your site beyond search engines and such. They are part of your plan, but not an end-all, cure-all as SOOOOOO many people seem to believe. Just think of your 3 main audiences and the many, many, many different ways you can drive people to your site. Advice from an old-timer on the Internet (no, I didn`t invent it, Al Gore did that) ... your website is a part of your overall marketing plan ... it is not IT. Use your website as a tool; not a pot at the end of the rainbow. Being that you are trying to serve 3 different audiences anyway from one site and they are B2B and B2C, you already have enough challenges and work ahead of you.

Focus on your passion(s). Sometimes life is easier in small steps. You didn`t run before you walked.

R@

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Richard Arnold · Key Concept Writers · Business Communication: The "Key" To Success· Law of Attraction Blog · Life Ain`t Brain Surgery Blog

Richard has such an excellent point, it deserves repeating as often as the letters SEO, SEM, and so forth. "Rich content" comes AFTER you`ve developed a good site, good sales pitch, and things are moving along.

It`s one thing to build a business. It`s an entirely different thing to make that business "visible."

If you were operating out of a physical store, what would you do? When someone walked in the front door, what would you say immediately following, "Can I help you?"

They would say, "I`m looking for someone to help me sell my house, and someone told me I should come here."

That`s immediate. It`s the crux of your business. AFTER you`ve taken care of that problem, then you can sit back and strategize on how to get more people into the store. That`s the visibility and marketing part.

It`s no different online or brick-and-mortar. Let`s just assume people are coming to your site first. What are they seeing, and is it convincing? "Rich content" is for machines and robots, not for human beans.

Sidebar:

I am one of those people who will freely tell you that "SEO is dead". (I made some funny comments about it on the Yahoo! is dead thread, and I`ll be posting something about it in my blog this Friday.)

Viral marketing. This is the way to go. Find places where people who are looking for your stuff might be, and plant yourself there. And I am a firm believer that "offline marketing" is the new "online marketing". That is, go to events. Make connections. Network. Have a huge stack of cards with your website listed on them and your contact info. Heck, I do web stuff and I have not yet had a single client from internet sources.

I like some before and after shots. But that example that was put up was not at all attractive to me. It looks unprofessional and unpolished.

I am a fan of just having "whitespace" sometimes. Consider Apple`s "Think Different" campaign. Two words and a picture - but how powerful!

You might consider, if you have 2 separate areas of your business, to not put them in the same place. You can make 2 landing pages for the same business - entice one group to one place, and the other to another. You can reference one from another, but it`s perfectly OK to be the same business and have 2 very similar looking websites ... just with different info. At the other extreme, I had one client with about 35 landing pages for the same product. This is a bit out of control ... but I would compare it to sending out email blasts. If you are sending it to a certain group, and pushing a certain service, are you going to send out a generic mailer or will you tailor it to this group?

So, feel free to hit the 2 angles from different directions. Sit down, write some headers on the top of a notebook, one for each type of client: "Homeowners", "Trainees", "REAgents". Then under that, write what each is looking for and why they would be interested in you. Use that for your landing pages. Add on where these kinds of people congregate, and now you know where to do your target marketing.

Go get `em!

When making multiple landing pages, do this:

Make your page. So, say I make one for home owners. And you say blah blah blah sell your house faster and for more money.

And at the very bottom, you put "Interested in learning how to become a home stager?" and link it to the trainee program.

And so on.

Get a life...that sample was thrown up in 2 minutes primarily to show an example using before and after pictures and some content right off the top of my head. It wasn`t a web design project for Christ sakes.

Even you can`t be so naive to think it would be as professional as your work in such so little time...

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Website Startup Coach: Step-by-Step Coaching to Help You Build a Profitable Business Online!

Ya, but I DO like the idea of having two domains, linked with the "Want some training" connection. In fact, given you often find an open domain that includes the .com (commercial), .biz, .net, and .org extensions, why not grab the .biz extension for the training company, and the .com for the services side. 

Thank you all!  I cannot describe how valuable everyone of you have been to me. I have taken what each of you has offered and compiled a list for myself and I need to get to work.

This forum is similar to what we do in Staging... I walk into a client`s home and say move this, remove this, clean that, throw away that and wallah! - we have a home that will "captivate all who enter!" It is easy as a stager to see the home differently because I don`t live there, I didn`t decorate it to my tastes and I don`t have any emotional investment into it.

So thank you for helping me "Stage" my website!

Is it all right to ask for a preview and get some approval after the changes?

Thanks again!

Cari

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Cari Pilon SMART Stagers SMART - Sell More Area Real Estate Today www.SMARTStagers.com

Thanks for the nice message! Feel free to post again when you`re ready for another review.

 

That "connect the dots" strategy on the last page is ingenious. Cool trick.

I copied that down for later use.

Btw, if this topic is still alive, I saw a tv show the other day that mentioned staging, and it had some pretty captivating numbers. They might make for good homepage copy.

They said that you should spend 1% of the price of the house on staging; and if you do, you`ll get double that in return on the final sales price. That would justify the cost of staging a home to me.

Hi Cari, you`ve got an awesome site, first off.  One thing though that I would re-design is the navigation at the top.  I try and look at sites for the first time as a 1st grader... and I couldn`t figure out where the navigation was.  I would suggest making them buttons, or moving them vertically to the left side of the screen.  Right now they look sort of like Google Adwords, and also there`s no rollover effect on them.  Other than that, can`t wait to see the updates!


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Ben Grinnell - 337 Design - Web Design & HD Video Production