The Cutting Edge of Online Marketing

It’s been just days since the conclusion of the MHI Summer Meetings in Washington DC and already the Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are being lit up with reports from MHMSM.com taking top positions.

As a result of Teresa Payne‘s “Manufactured Housing Rocks!” exhortation at the MHI event being reported in the Masthead Blog, by MHMSM Editor L.A. ‘Tony’ Kovach, a Google search for “Teresa Payne Manufactured Housing”, the MH Program Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary at HUD holds the #1 and #1b positions. Can’t get much better than that for a first appearance in MHMSM.com.

But the ball has just begun rolling. A search for Elizabeth Cocke using the term “Elizabeth Cocke Manufactured Housing” also yields a #2 result. This article is also Liz’s first mention in the pages of MHMSM.com

George F. Allen is one of the best known and most respected names in Manufactured Housing. George has been mentioned in this ezine before and wrote a two-part article for the July issue of MHMSM.com. George’s appearance in the post Amazingly Allen, The IMHA and the Chairman’s Reception ranks #1 for the search term “George F. Allen Manufactured Housing” and the report on a previous SERP appearance associated with MHMSM.com ranks #1b.

In addition, Greg O’Berry, the COO and President of HometownAmerica, mentioned in the same blog post as Teresa Payne and Liz Cocke, drew a #2 SERP position for that appearance. Greg also wrote a guest post for MHMSM.com’s INdustry Voices blog – GSE’s Duty To Serve – and that post earned Greg the #2 spot in a Google search for “Greg O’Berry Manufactured Housing.”

It’s becoming readily apparent that having your name appear on MHMSM.com, whether as a writer, a guest blogger at INdustry Voices or giving an interview will increase your online visibility in the world of factory built housing.

Have a Press Release, Job Listing or Ad that you want to get noticed? MHMSM.com would be the place. Can you write article or a guest post for INdustry Voices? Have vacant homes or lots? Homes sitting on your sales lot? MHMSM.com is proving to be the absolute BEST place for your company to get the results it wants and needs.

First I want to wish everyone a Happy 4th of July and Happy Birthday to this wonderful country we call home. Too often, we take the blessings we have been born into or chose by immigration for granted. Take a few moments today to express some gratitude (silent or otherwise) for the gift of freedom.

And to everyone in every corner of the manufactured housing industry, I wish you the very best starting right now. Join the Manufactured Housing Revolution (more on this to come).

Independence is great on a national or global scale, but what about the practice and realization of independence in your own life and the lives of those around you?

An often overused (some might say clichéd) expression is “work smarter, not harder.” I recently read a thread in a forum where a member was complaining that the phrase is often used with no explanation of what the user means, making matters worse instead of better.

Taking that complaint to heart, I am going to explain what I mean when using the cliché “work smarter, not harder.”

Even before the Great Recession, many of us were working harder. Many of us were approaching the limits of endurance. This helps to increase production and generate wealth, but leaves us with precious little time to enjoy it.

And when you are working as hard as you possibly can (the ‘work harder’ part), how do you produce more leads and more sales, especially those working in the retailing and community sectors of the industry?

One answer is take advantage of available technologies (the ‘work smarter’ part).

What is the lifetime value of a customer to your business?

Most businesses don’t think of this when it comes to acquiring and retaining new business, but it is very important when budgeting the cost of acquiring leads.

In a retail business, it is likely that the business will only make one sale per lead. If that one sale earns you, say $5,000 – THAT is the lifetime value of that customer. Keeping that lead happy through the process of converting them to a sale and after can result in referrals, but we are not counting that for our purposes.

What is your conversion rate over time? If you convert 20% of your leads to sales, that would make the value of a lead $1,000 in this scenario.

So the absolute maximum you could spend per lead in this case would be $1,000. Ideally, you want to pay much less than that.

Arrowhead Ranch MHC, Campbellsville, KY – StarHomeUSA.com

In the case of community owners a lot rent of $250 per month, 10% net and 5 year average stay per tenant would equal $1,500 as the lifetime value of that one sale.

How much of a difference in your annual bottom line would one or two extra sales per month make? For most retailers, a huge difference! For community owners, it would mean a plummeting vacancy rate and a return month after month, no?

Now what can you do to make that happen, where you are now and starting with the tools you have right now?

We’ve all heard (probably repeatedly) the fact that 82% of all consumer searches for a new place to live originates on the Internet. That fact alone should convince any retailer or community owner who doesn’t have a website to get one – IMMEDIATELY! (we can help)

If you already have a website, congratulations. You have the first part of the puzzle in place.

But do you have any idea how important it is to have your website appear on page 1 of search engine results pages (SERPs) for your keywords?

For my own business, Orange Cat Productions, we have captured the #1, #1b, #2 and #3 positions
on page 1 for this keyword. What is not showing is that we also have #7.

Even in a small market, it can be the difference between getting those two extra sales per month and not getting them.

How do you get your website onto page 1 of the SERPs?

Either through hard work or working smarter. And the working smarter part involved in attaining a page 1 listing will generate secondary sources of leads and can even compound your success rate. Sensing a theme here?

Moving your website from wherever it is now in your local search rankings to page 1 is a time-consuming and laborious process – but carries with it great rewards. And this is one of those tasks that brings to mind the quote from Red Adair that appears in my signature every time I send an email, “If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur!”

Within three (3) days of launching this completely new website and domain,
Premier Limousine had the #3 position on page 1 for their keyword.

The more competitive the local market, the costlier in time and money gaining a page 1 position will be. But the greater the reward of success.

Making the wrong choice here will cost you money – a LOT of money. But far more important, it will cost you a lot of that irreplaceable resource – time. Time where you could be earning, but are still struggling.

The Twisted Sifter’s blog holds the #1 and #2 positions on page 1, and the website is #4. Rounding that out is a directory service entry holding #3 for a clean sweep of the top four positions on page 1 for this keyword.

For those of you who are inclined to take on this type of project yourself, I will be creating a product to help you ‘work harder’. I’ll be announcing it here in this blog – watch for it.

For those of you who choose the ‘work smarter’ option, help is just a phone call or email away.

Independence of this sort is a choice. Make your choice today.

When we think of “multi-tasking”, we usually think of someone doing more than one thing at a time – performing multiple tasks in the same time space. Well, I’m here to tell you that “multi-tasking” is one of the biggest time-wasters in our lives.

It’s impossible to focus on two things at once. In fact, one of the definitions of focus is “an act of concentrating interest or activity on something”. Something, not somethings.

We can only truly focus on one thing at a time, so most “multi-tasking” is actually just jumping from one activity to the next without finishing the first. And each time we do that there is a period of transition as we phase out of one task into another. If you do that twenty times in a day, how much time have you wasted winding down from one thing to ramp up the other?

I’ve always been amazed when praise was heaped on someone who finished two four-hour tasks in ten hours, but worked on them alternately all day. “He’s a great multi-tasker” is often said. But the “people-pleasing” tendency to half-focus on tasks and take longer to finish them (often at a lower quality level) does service to no one.

“OK.” you say. “You believe multi-tasking is a sham, but what does this have to do with online marketing? You DO remember the name of your blog, don’t you?”

Yes, I do. And marketing online is one place where you can put “multi-tasking” to work for you without the downside.

When you create a truly effective online marketing plan, several pieces need to be set in motion. Website, blog, email and social networking all come into play. Building a plan where they supplement each other allows you to have several marketing applications all working for you at the same time. And THAT is truly “multi-tasking.”

So how does this work at it’s simplest form? Let’s say you’re about to have a Ground Hog Day Sale on widgets. (No occasion right now? Make one up!) You post the widget sale to your blog. A plugin on your blog posts the Sale headline and link to your Twitter account. Facebook draws from your Twitter feed and posts it to your Facebook fan page. LinkedIn pulls it from that same Twitter feed. Your email program pick up the original feed from the blog and emails it to your entire mailing list.

You just made one post and used 5 different online methods of reaching your market. How’s that for “multi-tasking”?

So how do you go about assembling the pieces to do this? Same as eating the proverbial elephant – one step at a time. The first thing you need is the blog. If you already have a website, a blog can be added to it. If you don’t have a website, pull yourself out of 1997 and get one. You can use a blog as your website. It’s fairly simple if you know what you are doing. If you don’t have the skill or the time to invest, get someone to do it for you.

To really make this work for you, you need a “self-hosted” blog using WordPress. That means no free WordPress.com or Blogger blogs. They are fine when used for personal blogs or feeders to your real blog, but they lack the flexibility of a self-hosted one.

If you are really interested in learning how to setup your own blog using WordPress there are specialized video sets to help through the process of getting a web hosting account, installing WordPress, configuring it and getting started.

All of the other parts of setting up your own auto-pilot “multi-tasking” machine will be covered in future posts to this blog.

For now, as in all things, getting started is the first step.

If you’re reading this on an RSS feed or republished on another blog, please see the Cutting Edge in Online Marketing Blog at MHMSM.com for more posts like this one.

If you’ve been to Tony Kovach’s Masthead blog post for today, you’ve discovered that we’re going to begin making podcasts of a good bit of the material here at MHMSM.com available in June.

That means that you’ll have the opportunity to listen to our articles and maybe some extra materials as you work or even while you’re in your car. This is part of our ongoing effort to make our materials more useful for you.

Most of you have discovered by now that the audio file you’re listening to is pretty much word-for-word the same as the text part of this post, and if you’re listening to this audio file right now and you’re like 80% of the people who are listening, you are also reading along with me.

This is valuable to you because research says that the more of your reader’s or listener’s senses you engage, the better recall they will have of your message.

And getting your message across is what marketing and advertising are all about. I’m going to make this a very short post because I hope you’ve learned one important thing from it – listening AND reading is better than listening OR reading.

If you’ve grasped just that one idea, this post may prove invaluable for you.

This is just one of the dozens of ideas we have to expand your marketing effectiveness. Jump on over to the MHMSM.com Solutions page when you are ready for more.