Most Effective Internet Marketing Tactics: Your Stories Wanted

**slionais** · 08-11-2010, 07:47 AM

I'd like to share my experience with marketing my wife's website and what's worked and not worked so far. It'd be great if you could share your thoughts as well. Excuse the lack of live links - I'm not allowed to post any yet, but you can copy and paste if you like.

Google AdWords PPC:
So far this has gone really, really well. I have a number of campaigns running targeting phrases in the local market (Geo targeted to my city). I also have campaigns running out of market (the rest of Canada) to target those who are planning to move to the area.

My campaigns are generating about 3.5 pages/visit with an average visit time of 2:27. This is more than 50% more page views and 12% more time than my average site visitor.

I have also been able to land a referral from another agent out of province who's client is moving to Halifax. This agent did find the site from one of my PPC campaigns.

SEO
I have only done a minor amount of work on this front to date and my results show. Search engine traffic is dismal and more or less ineffective. The site is built with WordPress and most pages are properly optimized with unique Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, and Keywords. However, I do have category pages such as: pamlionais.com/category/location/halifax/?submit=view (the category is 'Location') that I cannot optimize without having some custom coding done on the site. My SEO plug-in All-one-SEO doesn't enable me to modify the category Page Title, and Meta information.

The search traffic I'm attracting is related to neighborhoods and property addresses (particularly condos). You'd think this would be good but that traffic is completely ineffective as most of these users bounce off the site.

I am blogging and writing original content, but it has yet to attract any significant traffic. My guess is that I just need to continue producing good content and let it spread organically. This is a slow road, but it will pay off in the long run.

They key thing I am missing is inbound links. I have not spent any time trying to build links to the site and it is difficult to get visitors to share the content on your behalf (at least at this point in time).

Email
I've only sent one newsletter to date, but this is has been generally effective so far. I view Email as a long term strategy for 'cold' leads and influencers in our network. I've already gotten good feedback from those who've received it and the traffic it generated was good (although not as effective as my PPC Advertising). The plan is to prompt any prospects or leads that aren't ready to buy to join the email list to keep us top of mind when it comes time to make a move.

I send my newsletters monthly and it is focused on useful information with just one featured listing. This way it provides value to subscribers without being too 'salesy'. Check out our first newsletter here: us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=4f37f1748eebdcb77a4207075&id=cc9e12945a

Social Media
We're focusing our social media strategy on Twitter, FaceBook, and LinkedIn. At this point in time I can't say that any business has been generated from it yet, but is a great way to expand our network. Since we're already creating content with blog entries, its easy to share this on the social media networks. We're focusing on creating and sharing good content (value) and growing the network.

I think Twitter represents our biggest opportunity for reaching new potential clients. It's very, very easy to grow your network on Twitter (easier than a FB Fan page in my opinion). The hard part is to get used to engaging and participating in the conversation tha happens while not spending too much time schilling your business. Twitter users seem to be much less tolerant of straight up marketing in their feed. If you only ever talk about real estate, you get unfollowed.

A note on Facebook, I did try some Facebook Ads but they did not turn out to be very effective. If anyone has found success with Facebook Ads, I'd love to hear your approach.

Landing Pages
Not all of my ad campaigns point at the home page of the website. In fact, only a few do. I point some ads at internal pages of my site and I've also created a landing page I use to generate sales leads. I've had mixed results with my landing page to date.

Any ads pointing at my landing page are enticing visitors to find out the value of their home. The landing page contains a form that visitors need to fill out so that we can conduct a CMA on their home. Check it out here: pamlionais.com/evaluation/.

Now I know that landing pages are much more effective at converting visits to your website into sales leads than dropping them on the home page of your site, but I've been surprised at how this has gone for us so far. First I created FaceBook ads to promote the form. I generated lots of traffic, but only 1 form submission for a conversion rate of under 1% and very dismal bounce rate of 92% and an average time on the page of just 12 seconds.

I am now trying to drive traffic to the landing page via Google AdWords, but the issue I'm having now is not the performance of the page, but rather getting enough traffic. Surprisingly there are few searches for the keywords I've chosen around home evaluation, how much is my home worth, etc.

I'm now considering a digital ad buy on local newspaper websites to see if a mass marketing approach would work best generating these leads. My marketing experience tells me this landing page/form approach should work to generate some leads but as of yet it has been woefully unproductive.

Share Your Thoughts
Share your success stories with the group and let us know how you did it. Hopefully we can all learn from each other.

**SamHowley** · 08-11-2010, 11:05 AM

Hi,

First off, I have some experience getting good organic traffic for websites, but not in the real estate space, so my advice may be worth what you paid for it

It sounds like you are being methodical and covering all the basics, which puts you ahead of most.

You probably already know this but content + inbound links = success. So you are on the right track.

Looking at your blog I see about 8 posts, assuming I am looking at the right place. (Your website looks great by the way). This is far too few to see much of an organic search response. I would set yourself the goal of reaching 100 posts before you worry too much about whether it's working or not.

In a sense the content is scalable, I mean you could write a short post describing each suburb in your area.

Looking at your blog posts they seem a little too much from your perspective and not enough from the perspective of your target searcher. Titles like "Halifax Housing Market Analysis May 2010" is not the kind of thing someone looking to buy in Halifax is likely to search for.

I would expect to see blog posts titled "Selling a house in Halifax", "Moving to Halifax", "Buying in Halifax", "Where to live in Halifax", "Halifax House Prices", "Moving to Halifax" etc. Similar to what you have but with a subtle refocus to the language that someone looking to move to the are would use.

Getting Links

Getting inbound links is crucial. Having a lot of content and few inbound links is like being a beautifully dressed person standing alone in the corner of the bar. Google thinks you look good but there must be something wrong because no one thinks you're worth talking to.

Don't worry about the 'quality' of the links to start with. Obviously a link from a really popular site related to real estate would be the best outcome but start off trying to get anyone to link to your site without a nofollow on the link.

One good way to get inbound links is to write about other people's content, to review their content and then email them and tell them about your review, they will likely link to your review.

You could write about local businesses, local attractions, local sports teams and then email them and tell them and ask them to link to you from their websites. Don't be shy in actually asking them to link, in fact provide them with the html link in the email, so you can set the link text keywords.

"Hi Dave,

We recently posted a review of XXX on our blog at YYY and though you might be interested in checking it out.

It would be great if you could put a link to the review up on your site, here is a link in case you are interested.

A review of XXX on the <a href=xx">Halifix Real Estate Blog</a>
"

Something like that.

The best way to get inbound links is to be noteworthy / remarkable. What content could you create that other people would want to tell people about.

It looks like your keeping your blog posts very on topic. There is nothing wrong with having posts that are a little off topic on the blog if they are going to attract inbound links. This is 'link baiting'.

Google has done a great job of making people compete in a virtuous way to produce the most interesting content.

There is no short cut, at least almost all the shortcuts are scams. Just pump out useful content regularly, be sending emails to relevant bloggers and site owners telling them about your content weekly, and your organic search traffic is going to go up.

My 2 cents.
Cheers
Sam Howley

**slionais** · 08-11-2010, 11:53 AM

Sam, great advice. You've articulated nicely some great steps to improving the SEO results and I'm definitely going to take your advice on them. First off I'll modify my blog post titles (yeah, there's only 8 at the moment). I'm also going to put together a piece on each of the popular neighborhoods - It was something I planned on doing, but it just fell off the radar.

It sounds like you know your stuff. Do you do much blogging/SEO work yourself?

Steve

**SamHowley** · 08-11-2010, 12:05 PM

I'm glad there was something useful in there.

I have done a reasonable amount of blogging and link building for some IT products.

My current focus is the blog for CustomerCradle, a new web service for recording and reporting on inquiries and conversions. Think google analytics for brick and mortar businesses.

One thing I have noticed is the power of third party endorsements. Someone saying you provide a great service or product on their site/blog is 1000 times more powerful than you saying it, or quoting them on your blog.

Cheers
Sam Howley

**marketguru** · 08-11-2010, 11:47 PM

Hi Steve,

Sam makes some great points and I agree with pretty much all of them. I have not seen your site but your titles are important and since you have the "all in one seo" each post you can create all the meta, kw, description etc..

If you create good kw rich posts in your local area you should get organic ranking pretty quickly, of course depending on competition but generally speaking. I have done very well for myself and clients in local searches.

Its great that your going at it from all angles, Social Media, PPC, Organic, etc..

As far as your point about having a lot of traffic hit your landing page and no conversion, assuming your traffic is good traffic from Facebook and your targeting your demographic correctly, that should tell you something right there.
Create a better offer, make them want to give you there name and email. Create a video explaining the great stuff they will get ALONG with finding out how much there house is worth. To me my home value is not good enough for me to give up my name and email, I want something of more value... but thats me.
You have to think the way the internet is structured today, you have to go over the top to grab some peoples attention.

A comment about the Facebook ads. I personally are using as an affiliate and they work well. But the key here is knowing the demographic. Heres a little method that might help you with that in more detail, it works for me
ie lets say your selling dog biscuits, find the #1 site for dog biscuits and copy and paste that URL into Quantcast.com
from there I find out if the people that are visiting my competition are women, men, educated, age, kids, etc.

There may be better sites to find demographics, if you know of any let me know. But knowing the demographics in FB will increase the quality of the traffic

hope this helps
C

**slionais** · 08-12-2010, 06:02 AM

Good points about the landing page. Before I try something new I want to ensure its not that I was sending 'bad' traffic to it. It is entirely possible its just not compelling for the visitors.

I like the idea of matching demographics, then targeting them on FB. I assume you meant ComScore for your demo data? That's usually where I go to find it. Alexa will give you traffic, and limited demo. Hitwise is awesome, but you have to pay for it.