The Cutting Edge of Online Marketing

Happy Labor Day!

On this Labor Day, we wanted to reward you for your hard work hanging in there during these difficult times. So we’ve worked out a deal on some of the most popular Video How-to Sets we have available.

In celebration of Labor Day, we’re launching our biggest sale of the year!

Our four best selling Video Tutorial Sets:

• Konquer KompoZer – Build or update web pages without knowing a single bit of HTML. WYSIWYG Web Page Builder is the best free editor out there and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.
• Create a Membership Site Using DLGuard – DL Guard make building a membership site easy and secure. If you need to deliver downloaded files in a secure environment, DLGuard is for you.
• Create Stunning Graphics with theGIMP – the GIMP (Graphic Image Manipulation Program) can do most everything PhotoShop can do and it is Open Source and free to use. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.
• Twitter Success – Learn everything you need to know to build a successful presence for your business on Twitter. These videos will show you how.

Buy any One – Get any other One FREE!

We call it the “Down and Dirty” BOGO Sale

No fancy sales page – no hyperventilating – just a GREAT deal.

But it’s ONLY on from Saturday, September 4, 2010 through Tuesday, September 7, 2010.

And ONLY at VideoBOGO.com!

I love it when simple products do a job extraordinarily well. In a recent blog post, Refreshing Your Manufactured Housing website – why?, we covered some of the reasons why now may be the time to update your online information. If you haven’t read it, of have forgotten it, read it again.

In the July issue of MHMSM.com, Maria Cucchiara of All Seasons Communications wrote Six Reasons to Update Your Current MH Website, which explained why an updated website is a necessity. Again, read it or re-read it – there is wisdom in Maria’s words.

All well and good. All commercial websites need to be refreshed every few years or their effectiveness starts to fade. And that is a job for a web design professional. If that’s where you find yourself, call us.

But what about those little changes that need to be made from time to time? You know the ones… a changed price or phone number. Adding a feature to a bullet list. Adding or deleting a dated sentence…

If your’s is a small to medium operation, you may not want to call your web developer every time one of those pops up. If you hired an amateur – or a part-time developer – you may have to wait a long time to get the change made – if ever. They may have simply disappeared or gone out of business.

What if there was a way to make it easy for anyone in your office who can create a simple Word doc to make those little updates for you? Think that could save you some time and money? You bet it could!

If we had built your website, you probably wouldn’t be facing this problem right now because it would be built on a platform that allows you to make simple updates.

But even if your website was built using static pages, the ability to edit sections of your site can be added even now.

And if you can use Microsoft Word®, you can use the simple WYSIWYG interface that can be installed on your website using the files you use now, and keeping the “look and feel” of your current site – the design.

There is more information on this on the Update Your Own Website page at OrangeCat.net. If you are in the position where you or an employee need to make some updates to your website, this may be the answer.

And we’ve been doing this since 1996, so we’ve never vanished on any client.

Last April, in Google changes name, adds features to Local Business Center,we told you about Google changing the name of their Local Business Center to Googled Places, a geo-location service tied to their Local Business Listings.

The Google Places folks made this short video to give you a brief overview of Places and the Service Area feature.

Essentially, you use Places to define your service area – the area in which you service your customers. You can select your service area by city name, county or zip code.

And once you have defined your service area, you ca hide your business address. This comes in handy if you operate your business out of your home or primarily through a post office box or mail drop.

Retailers might find this useful to define the areas they wish to do business in. Installers and transporters can show the areas they serve. And Google can display your business on Google Maps in search engine results pages (SERPs) for your area(s) and your keywords.

Adding Places service area information to your Local Business Listing is really a “no-brainer” if your business services customers in areas other than just your home city.

Although I’m not big on pushing other’s products in these posts, there are times when a tool is just too good not to share.

My latest MHMSM.com article, Online Marketing 1-2-3, Part 2 – eMail Marketing explains why email is just as important to your marketing efforts now as ever.

In consulting with clients over the years, we’ve gone back and forth discussing the merits and drawbacks of various email deliver software or services. And there are pros and cons with every system. In this video, an AWeber user demonstrates just one reason why AWeber is the email application of choice for anyone who is serious about marketing online.

Would you like to:

• Email your list automatically every time you make a new post to your blog or website?
• Update your Facebook and Twitter accounts every time to send an email to your list?

These are just two of the many features of the AWeber application that will help you build your business.

There are tons of advantages to using AWeber over other providers. To learn what they can do for your business, visit the AWeber website</a>.

As stressed in The Manufactured Housing REVOLUTION, you can’t have a revolution without change. Several times in the past month or so, we have mentioned the necessity to keep your website information fresh.

You may have changed models, prices, options or other important information. Sometimes the website lags behind. That’s not a good thing because according to the National Association of Realtors® (NAR), some 80% of home purchases begin with the buyer doing research online.

Outdated information on your website can cause them to conclude that your business is out of touch with the market and may lead them to eliminate you as a possible source for their new home without further consideration.

Web design that hasn’t been refreshed in a long time (5 years is way beyond the optimal lifespan of a website design), can leave your business looking as outdated as the design itself. But that is a topic for another post.

There a lot of reasons why the information on a retailer’s or community’s website becomes outdated. One of the most common that I hear is that the web designer has disappeared, gone off to college or gone out of business – the recession has taken a lot of good web designers out of the field.

When the person that designed your website becomes unavailable to do updates, for whatever reason, the website tends to recede into the background of company concerns.

Bad move. An out-of-date website’s effectiveness as a marketing tool becomes quickly compromised.

Does your business or community website have current information on homes available right NOW at your location. If not, why not?

Is it because there is no provision for that information on your website? Or is it because there is no one available who knows how to do it? Or is it just too difficult and time-consuming to keep it updated?

Those are all common reasons for not having an updated homes list on your website.

How about your customer or community newsletter. Do you have one? Do you send it by direct mail or physically distribute it in your community? Do you email it? Do you keep a current issue and an archive of past issues on your website?

Again, if not, why not?

If you don’t yet have a website for your business, now would be the time to get one set up as the situation improves both in the general economy and in the Manufactured Housing industry.

What you are looking for is a solution that is easy to update for you or your web designer. An easy to update application will save you both time and money and simplifies keeping your website updated

Adding one or more blogs to your current website or creating a new website with blogging capability is the answer to creating a newsletter or listing single properties in a Search Engine Friendly (SEF) environment.

The Search Engines L-O-V-E blogs – blogs are (or should be) updated on a regular basis and they archive all of the information published to them in an organized archive. Search Engines try to supply searchers with solid, up-to-date information and a well-organized, organically growing website gets their attention.

Your chances of achieving a high search engine ranking in your region is greatly increased by having a blog, and you can have more than one blog attached to your domain.

For instance, MHMarketingSalesManagement.com has the main database-driven website with over 900 items and has blogs like this one that feature individual writers such as myself, Editor L.A. ‘Tony’ Kovach and Tim Connor as well as the Industry Voices and Inspirations blogs.

A blog (or blogs) can be added to any existing website fairly easily. A blog can also be the primary website by using pages more prominently than posts. A good example of this is the website I created for a limousine company in Danville, Kentucky and which now holds the #2, #3 and #4 spots for it’s keywords in Google’s Search Engine Results. It has all pages and no posts at this time and so functions as a traditional website.

The takeaway from this is that whether you have a website or not, you should consider adding a blog to your online marketing toolbelt. Use it to share new homes you have available, keep customers updated on what is happening in your company or community, get that newsletter online or perform any number of other online marketing related tasks.

When planning a campaign to place a business on page one of the search engines for a given set of keywords, one of the criteria used to establish a reasonable ROI to achieve that result is the lifetime value of a customer.

“Successful companies, [Frederick] Reichheld (author of The Loyalty Effect) points out, have three things in common: loyal customers, loyal employees and loyal owners. The customers are often loyal, not so much to a bank, for example, as to employees that they know and trust who work for the bank.”

While we aren’t sure what the future holds, history suggests that the average homeowner will be back in the market in 5-7 years. For our purposes, I will use the higher figure of 7 years. This means a manufactured home retailer may have the possibility of selling a customer two or three homes in a lifetime.

Multiply the average price of a home over the next 25 times the number of homes that customer may buy in that timeframe and you have the expected lifetime value of a customer.

Other factors

When you sell a customer a home, is the quality of their buying experience such that they will be likely to return to your place of business when they want to:

• Upsize
• Downsize
• Re-locate
• Move for Personal Reasons

If it isn’t, you need to ask yourself why?

As an industry, we need stop thinking of our customers as “one-time” buyers. The same retailer can, over a lifetime, move a buyer from an entry level, to a larger more upscale home and beyond.

Much the same as a Chevy owner, having had a good experience might upgrade to a Buick or Cadillac, or a Ford owner might move to a Lincoln, your customer having had a good buying experience will have a tendancy to come back to you when the time comes to move up.

It’s all about establishing loyalty to the product, the manufacturer and the retailer.

There is an excellent article on Frederick Reicheld’s The Loyalty Effect here.

It’s about the quality of the experience – and that page one Google ranking wouldn’t hurt you either.

Website stats. They have all the charm of 12th grade algebra. But they are very important in the world of online marketing. In this post, we’re going to look at a couple of web stats and what they might mean to you.

Annually, monthly, weekly, by the day or hour are the most common ways of looking at them. Any date range can be specified so you can have a look at your websites performance in large chunks or tiny slivers of time.

Two of the most important web stats are “sessions” and “pageviews.” Other very important stats are “bounce rate” and “length of session.” Most web statistics programs such as Google Analytics and the Urchin software it is based on can display web stats in a variety of ways. There are a variety of other web stats analysis applications that may already be on your web server.

A “session” is recorded every time a visitor arrives at your site for the first time since the expiration of their last session. Session expiration occurs when activity ceases for a time specified in your server configuration or when the visitor leaves your site.

The “sessions” graph shows the number of visitors your website had in a given time period. In the example graph below (from the logs of a server I use for testing), you can see I had a range of session numbers from 2 to 13.

A “pageview” occurs when a visitor enters a page on your website. A visitor can visit multiple pages during a single session. Pageviews are often mistakenly called “hits” which are a different stat entirely. Calling a “pageview” a “hit” is a lot like calling a Manufactured Home by the “T” word.

The pageviews stat tells you how many of your web pages are being looked at in the specified time. Now we’re ranging from 2 to 126. I like to see 3 or more pageviews per visit on my site – more is great, but less could simply be the result of having a site with few pages to look at. Here is the pageviews graph from my test server.

“Hits” are the most misleading and worthless stats on a web log. A “hit” is recorded every time a page element is loaded. So if you have a web page with 5 images, a link to a JavaScript and a link to a CSS stylesheet, the log will record 8 hits. Anyone can increase their “hit” count by inserting more graphics, even single pixel transparent images.

When you hear someone describe how many “hits” their website is getting, it’s a good bet you can divide that by a factor of 10 to 25. Ask them how many pageviews their site gets. If they can’t answer that, as Lyndon Johnson used to say, “I put my hand on my wallet.” NEVER give advertising money to a website based on the number of “hits” they get. If they use the improper term, it could be an honest mistake (some manufactured home pros still use ‘trailer’), but they should know the difference and should be willing to share the correct data.

Here is a “hits” graph of my test server for the same period as the other two charts. Notice the difference, especially in the Saturday and Monday stats. Do you see how inflated the “hits” stats are? 1,171 hits for 85 pageviews? That’s a ratio of 14 hits per pageview on a site with minimal graphics.

“Bounce rate” is determined by the number of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. They can “bounce” for any number of reasons (for more, see the blog post What is Bounce Rate? What does it mean to you? on BobStovall.com. A decent bounce rate could be anywhere from 33% to 67%. Some one-page sales sites have a bounce rate of 100% and do OK. But if you have a multi-page informational site and you have an unusually high bounce rate (67%-95%) you need to have a look at your site and see what is driving visitors away so quickly.

“Length of Session” is another “tell-tale” stat. It tells you how long the average visitor is spending looking at your web pages per session. It might seem odd, but 2-3 minutes is a pretty good session length. if 66% of your visitors are leaving immediately, the other 33% are staying for 6-9 minutes and that is quite respectable.

There are a lot of other things your web logs can tell you, such as what percentage of your visitors are using Macs or Windows, how many are visiting using Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari, what pages they are entering on, what pages they are leaving from and more.

We’ll delve into more web stats in the future, but I think you now have a good basic understanding of which stats to keep an eye on and what to look for.

I was sitting in my office, thumbing through MHMSM’s The Manufactured Housing REVOLUTION for about the 5th time when it suddenly occurred to me: Just how many businesses believe that just having a website is the be-all and end-all of a revolutionary marketing process?

It was revolutionary in 1995, but now it is commonplace. How many of you still have the same website you did 5 years ago? Are TV and movies still marketed the same way they were when you built that website?

Is your marketing keeping up with current trends?

A few years ago, having audio or a video on your website placed you among the “early adopters” of a new form of communication. Now, a website without audio/video is sadly out-of-step. Podcasting and videocasting have made themselves essential elements of the online experience.

How many hours per day do you think your customers spend in front of their TV? Radio? Newspaper or magazine? A few hours at most, I’ll bet. Now how many hours of the day do they have their cell phone with them? Every waking minute for most of us.

What do your company’s Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages look like? Don’t have them? You need them. How about your employee’s Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Do they reflect well on your employee and by proxy on your company?

How about new trends? Right now there is a decided move to a service called Tumblr. Sort of a hybrid somewhere between Facebook and Twitter, Fortune 500 companies are starting to reserve their Tumblr presence and many experts believe Tumblr will soon be a force to be reckoned with in the Social Networking arena. Are you ready?

What about your email marketing program? One of the original Internet marketing methods, email still holds it’s own against the newer online marketing methods – IF it is done right. If you’re still using the same old tools and strategies for your email program as you did five years ago, it’s time to take another look.

A new generation of buyers is poised to enter the marketplace. This new generation has never owned a CD or used a VCR or DVR. In a few years, they will be looking for their first homes. Will you be ready?

In the pages of the book, the first steps are outlined for those bold enough to take them. In this Revolution, you don’t need to take to the mountains or jungle and live a life of deprivation to earn your ticket to the promised land.

You just need to read this book, follow the MHMSM.com website and open your mind to change.

The Manufactured Housing REVOLUTION has begun. Will you be a part of it – or will you be on sidelines, watching it unfold?

In the course of my duties here at MHMSM.com, I write the draft copy for our emails and assemble the primary stories that you hear in our News at Noon Podcast.

To select stories of interest to industry members like yourselves, one of the things I do is scan the news feeds and Google Alerts for several keyword sets, with most stories originating in the “manufactured housing” and “modular housing” sets.

Because I scan these every day, I quickly become aware of trends in the types of stories that pop up most often on these feeds. Over the past ten months, there has been a shifting away from negative stories about manufactured housing communities, weather and other “bad news” type stories and a shift toward items of a financial nature and especially “green” building articles.

This is a positive development as the industry moves down the road to recovery and continues to produce affordable housing to met the nations needs.

That doesn’t mean that all the news lately has been positive. In a guest column in the Des Moines Register, the Iowa Manufactured Housing Association replied to charges leveled against Colorado-based Community owner Churchill Group. IaMHA took the position of not not defending Churchill Group and went so far as to say “They, and others who operate in the same fashion, have no defense.”

In spite of how it may appear at first glance, this story was god for our industry as well. IaMHA, in taking a stand against the business practices of a community owner is defending the industry and the vast number of honest, decent community owners who play by the rules.

As IaMHA put it, “Would we have been happier if significant space had been given to highlight the outstanding manufactured housing communities we have in Iowa? Of course we would. Do other housing sectors have problems? Yes, they do. But complaining about these omissions could be viewed as trying to duck the real issue at hand.”

IaMHA’s closing point about the desire for affordable housing and the manufactured housing industry’s ability to provide it ending things on a very positive note.

My point here is that in today’s world of custom delivered news funneled through RSS News Feeds and Google Alerts, we have a pretty good chance of controlling our own destiny.

If the industry generates more positive news items (and Press Releases count here), we have a much better chance of tilting the distribution of positive news to counter the bad.

As I monitor the RSS News Feeds and Alerts, I become aware just how often MHMSM.com stories are picked up. Your Press Release and news articles, included in the feeds and alerts can have a positive impact on the industry and on consumers looking to buy their next home.

Whenever your business, manufacturer, retailer or community, has something positive happen, make sure we hear about it. Put together a Press Release (we have instructions on the MHMSM website. scroll down to #4) an send it to us.

But don’t stop there. Submit it to other MH oriented websites and to the large number of both paid and free Press Release services around the ‘Net.

If you are not willing to blow the horn about our superior product and affordability, who will?

Take a look at the computer generated leads reports below. We’re going to make a few important points for you to consider.

These come from an actual client of our operation. 2 separate MHC properties, used with permission.

First, note that there are a large volume of leads coming in. This is from a combination of sources that come via phone and email, and don’t include walk-in traffic, which would be in addition to the above results. It should also be noted that both of these are ‘all ages’ communities, not the 55+ type of property.

So the first take away is this: if you are not getting this volume of leads at your retail center or community, please give us a call. We can make this happen for your operation too.

The next take away is this. Notice the hours when these lead are coming in:
       • There is lead activity 24 hours a day, literally 365 days a year.
       • The majority of leads come in during working hours!

This is the point we want to dwell on for a moment. Like it or not, one of the issues that the Internet Age has compounded for employers and companies – like your’s – is that people are doing more things that aren’t work related during work hours. Some of these calls, messages and web surfing may be taking place during coffee breaks or lunch time. But this type of personal business is also conducted during work hours.

We bring this to your attention because of this simple point. What do you want your staff members doing with the time they are surfing the web?

We’re going to suggest that your company can gain by instructing your people to spend some time DAILY on MHMSM.com! Why? Because the more they learn about the Industry, the more they read positive, solution oriented thinking by Industry pros and experts who grace our pages, the better off YOU and YOUR Company will be!

Set a good example. Read the news and views here yourself. Ask your team to do the same.

You will be amazed at what will happen in time with the effectiveness of your team.

There’s a commonly held myth that knowledge is power. But knowledge is just knowledge. Imagine if Albert Einstein had discovered relativity but had just whispered to himself “that’s really cool” and died with out ever applying it. The world would certainly be poorer for that unused knowledge.

Knowledge only gains power when it is properly applied. Put the power of properly applied knowledge learned from our writers to work for your team! Make MHMSM.com required reading for yourself and others in your company. No cost training, inspiration and resources. You just can’t beat it.

Carpe diem! Join the Manufactured Housing Revolution!