Social Media Marketing: When The Water Is Low…

July 18, 2008

In logging, there is a saying:

“When the water is low, the stumps will show”

It refers to the cylclicle nature of the industry, and how only the toughest survive when things are hard.

Recently I heard it said another way referring to the real estate industry in last year’s Leadership conference:

“When the water is low, you can see who has been swimming around naked!”

So true! It is the toughest of times that determine the real winners in any industry: success in Real Estate, IT, or any business requires endurance: but not just financial endurance, sometimes it is merely the attitude of the survivors that brings them through.

I once worked for an auto dealership that had six franchises until it started shutting them down one my one then went bankrupt. As salespeople, nobody knew exactly when to bail, or if there would be new opportunities with new ownership. As all the best used car inventory started disappearing off the lot to pay bills, the prospects became more and more bleak as a salesperson. With a family to support, I was one of the first to bail. But I never forgot the fact that those who stayed were so busy that they made a ton of money in the last few weeks, as bargain hunters hit the lot looking for fire sales, and bonuses where paid in cash to retain a sales force.

People who are truly fearless can sometimes benefit from everyone elses panic.

The water is low right now, for many of us, but tomorrow will come.

Scott Lauri Hits Hard With North Brunswick Real Estate Blog

July 3, 2008

Be sure to read this article: 1rst page Organic results: North Brunswick Real Estate, to learn about how a Realtor can definately achieve rankings for city, state, real estate and other competitive key word searches by way of a properly optimized, well sydicated blog: Scott ranks for many searches with his http://homesofnj.com/, here just a few examples: Read more

Link Bait: Blogging For Two Audiences

July 2, 2008

Here is the paradox: you must reach your market with a message that will generate leads to feed your business.

You must also reach the geeks and journalists who may republish and link to your articles, creating traffic and search engine rankings.

For Social Media Marketing purposes, you are really writing for two completely different audiences:

Example:

We are published here at http://WebProNews.com, amongst other ientry publications (http://ientry.com) who reach over 4,000,000 opt-in subscribers.

These are mostly techies and website developers, who are not our target market: some of them are even direct competitors: yet we intentionally write informative articles for this market, not so much to sell our services, but instead to be branded as an authority for our topics, which in turn ranks us for searches like ’social media marketing services’, on Google, Yahoo and MSN in the first page organic results.

This is because the most powerful link to your site for this purpose is for someone inside your industry to link to and consume your content: Google and the other search engines follow the trail back to the source of the information, making you the ‘authority source’ for your topic, and /or Geographic location.

However, this will not necessarily sell product for you. Once someone actually finds your website by way of a key word search as a result of your status as an authority and your relevant rankings, you also need to write content, like this article, which, while it will never be republished by my competitors, nor in any technical authority publication, it does help to explain to you (my target audience) exactly what I do, and how it may benefit you.

Likewise, you must reach consumers, and, one way to do that is to be an authority who is quoted about your profession, and/or location so that you can achieve organic rankings for those words.