Ok, so a few days ago, I posted an update on my Facebook profile stating that I need help. I have so many online inquiries that I cannot keep track of. As a matter of fact, yesterday I spent some time going through my history of emails and fond 10 (TEN) emails from the past 2 months that I had lost track of, and what I mean lost track of is not that I did not reply to them, but that I did not follow up with a reason why they had not responded to my last email. Most had already hired another DJ and 2 were still interested but would get back with me (more following up, IS THERE AN EASIER WAY TO DO THIS?)

Now, that’s not that bad compared to how many inquires I get from my online forms.

1. January 2009           31
2. February 2009        27
3. March 2009              31
4. April 2009                 39

So this year I’ve had a total 128 leads as a result of having an online form as I suggested in a previous article about converting bridal show leads into online clients using the power of the net. Now, since I have not done any bridal shows in over a year, and I only advertise in one magazine, Premiere Bride, and I have only one online ad that I pay for, The Knot, and since keep track of where all my web visitors come from, I know a few things for fact.

1. 90% of those 128 leads come to my website from the search engines.
2. 5% of the leads come from The Knot
3. 5% of the leads come from other thing such as My magazine ad, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, referals, etc…

Now 128 leads may not sound like a lot to you, but take into consideration many limitations on my website…

1. I don’t have my prices online… Major turn off to some people as they feel I may be hiding something or I am too expensive.
2. I proudly am a Bilingual DJ and Master of Ceremonies…. Major turn off to some people as they feel that I may not be able to represent them correctly or I may not know the music.
3. I don’t have the most beautiful DJ website out there… some people may be turned off by how simple it looks.
4. My website is too wordy… Some people are turned off by not enough pictures and having to read my stuff and find out there is no price anywhere to be found.
5. I don’t have the details about my DJ equipment that I use… this is mainly something other dj’s have suggested.
6. I have ads on my website.
7. I am marketing online… Vendors automatically assume that online brides are cheap, they are if yo u consider paying a DJ 1,200+ for a wedding reception cheap.
8. Worrying what people will say about telling their friends and relatives that they ‘found their DJ online.“
9. They never have heard me play before and I don’t allow outsiders to my events… EVER!
10. People worry about giving out their personal information online… This is a huge one, well they are all big
11. Many other limitations, or mental blocks that people place on their heads about putting an online form on the FRONT PAGE OF YOUR WEB SITE.

Keep in mind, these are all leads that used my online form, mainly because when they arrived at my website, they did not want to call me.

Here is something that you may not realize…

When people are online, having to reach for the phone and call you is an extra action that they have to initiate! They really don’t want to call you unless they really have to and they are extremely motivated to do so.  Think about it when you are online doing research, don’t you want to keep researching, whatever you may be researching? Don’t you want to continue without any interruptions? (unless of course they are friends or family members calling to distract you, lol.) Aren’t most of us procrastinators? Don’t we say, ahhh, I’ll get to this later (I’ll call them later)… and how often does later never come?

What I’m getting at, is make it sooo easy for your bride to contact you that the 11 (Eleven) objectives above are not even thought about, or are easily outweighed.

I even go as far as putting on my form, give me your phone number ONLY if you want us to contact you by phone, what that means to me is that they are interested but are too lazy to look for the phone to call me so they would really love you if you called them… So they don’t have to.

I hope you understand that I’m not trying to brag about how many leads I get; but I am just merely giving you a report on how you can INCREASE the number monthly leads. It’s so simple, place a contact form on your website. I have it on all of mine where they can easily fill it out. See for your self, I have it on my Houston DJ Website and My Photo Booth Rental Website.

Happy Bloggin!

–
|o| Simply Frank |o|

Wedding Vendors and Brides at a Bridal Show

I’ve attended several bridal shows here in Houston, and meeting the brides face to face is a great way to get good business from attending a bridal show. Usually you get to meet the bride face to face, discuss some of the elements of your services to them and you are either a good fit together or you don’t offer the right service for that particular bride. If it’s a great match, you have classified the bride and/or the bride has classified you as a potential wedding vendor for their wedding day.

Most of the time, meeting the bride in person is all you need to seal the deal, however, if they are currently interested in 2 or more wedding vendors, then they usually opt to go home and review their notes or the wedding vendors’ marketing material.

Guess what one place they are sure to go? Your website!

There are 8  ways to use the power of your website, to finish convincing your bride that they should chose your service over your competition.

Before I move on to listing these, please read the following warning!

WARNING!!

Although, you collected a whole lot of leads at the bridal show, there is one place of concern that you should be aware of and that is… Spamming the brides’ email addresses.

The spam laws are getting tougher and tougher, more online services are cracking down on email spam and more reports are being placed on illegal use of email.

So what is spam?

According to the web site, SpamLaws.com, Spam is…

The term spam refers to submitting the same message to a large group of individuals in an effort to force the message onto people who would otherwise choose not to receive this message.

You may think that you are saving time by sending a mass email to these brides, and although you did get their email address in a valid manner, you may still get in trouble for sending them a mass email with your services and information if they report you.

So what are the 8 ways to (safely) convert your bridal show leads into clients using the power of your website?

1. Include a Double Opt-in system to get their email addresses.

   The first thing you should do is have a double opt-in system in place so that you can avoid the spam laws. By having a double opt in system in your site, you can guarantee yourself and the bride that they indeed were the ones that submitted their email address on your website. The way a double opt-in system works is like this. A bride visits your website and submits their information, now at this point, it could be anyone, not just her. The double opt-in system sends a confirmation email to the bride’s email address, and since only that bride has access to her email address, she can confirm that it was indeed her that wanted to join your email list. See more information about Double Opt-ins here. A good service to use is Awebber.com.

2. Have a tactically designed, series of emails for  your brides.

   This one require brain power and planning and is a combination of marketing and sales techniques. You’ve already met the bride, you already know they stopped by your booth and are somewhat interested, by this point, you already have her committed to joining your list (Step 1), so use those facts to your advantage. This series of emails should be automated and I would recommend a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 10. The sole purpose of these emails are to compel your bride to make an effort to make an appointment with you or to get them to call you. For example, Email 1 may be a thank you for joining your list and a remainder of what website they signed up from. Email 2 may be a remainder that you met at a recent bridal show and that you want to thank them for stopping by but by this point you want to compel them to reply to your email so that you can engage them in an email conversation. Email 3 may be a remainder that there is a limited amount of time for them to use the ‘discount’ or asking for the best time to call them. Most importantly you want to compel your email user to act or to get into your office. Again, a great tool to use to set up these emails on autopilot is Awebber.com.

3. Set up a Web Page dedicated to that bridal show and place it on your fliers.

   The previous 2 steps work best if you take the time to complete this one. What you want to do here is set up a completely hidden page that the only way they can access it is if they have one of your fliers or literature that you passed out during the bridal show that you attended. For example, in January of 2008, the last time I attended the bridal extravaganza, I tried this out and set up a page at http://www.fhpentertainment.com/be-offer. I put that in all my post cards that I passed out and I was able to track exactly how many brides came to my website from the Bridal Extravaganza Show. In order to get them to join my list, I held a raffle and offered some really good incentives for them to join. This worked like a charm.  Exactly 107 Bridal Extravaganza Brides Visited that website. And to this day there are people that for some reason or another land on that website. It is not indexed by the search engines, it is not linked to by anyone or anything else, in fact this is only the first time I make this information public.

4. Have a Discount Coupon.

   Brides are looking to save money, whether giving coupons are for you or not, this is a great ides to have a coupon that they can print out and take to you. Again, the purpose of these ideas are to get brides to visit you or to call you to make an appointment to visit you. This may work with any or all of the ideas mentioned before.

5. Have a contact form on your page.

   If you use Awebber.com, the generation of a contact for can be made easily for you. But you don’t have to use Awebber.com, you could simply  have your programmer create one for you, however, I find it extremely difficult to keep up with all the different inquiries that may come from your page if you don’t use a service like Awebber.com to manage your list. Not to mention that you can have it to where once they enter their information into your contact form, and they confirm their email address, your tactfully designed series of emails will automatically start for you. It’s all automated.

6. Give them something of value for their information.

   The great internet marketers always say; “Give your best stuff for free.” Well, you can’t give your information for free, but you can give SOME of the knowledge that will help them for free. Create a Free report and publicize it. On your report you want to include information that may aid the bride in planning her wedding. You may not realize it now, but giving away free information is a great way to establish your self as a leader in your field. I believe the biggest success of my website is that my blog is so focused on giving away great, and sometimes not so great, information to my brides.  This starts to instill a sense of trust, a sense of understanding, and a sense of compassion for me as a human being. Besides isn’t one of the most popular laws of humanity is to give?

7. Have a tactfully designed Sales letter (sales copy) in place.

   This is very important. If your material on your web page or website does not do a good enough job to compel the user to take action, you will lose out on a once in a lifetime opportunity to convert a bride to a client. Now sometimes the brides does plan to use your service regardless of what your sales copy is on your page, but most of the time, if you put a lot of effort into creating great sales copy, you will get the brides that were somewhat leaning towards your competition. Writing great sales copy is not easy, it requires effort. If you were going to do 1 out theses 8 steps, this is the one that I would concentrate most of my efforts on. Writing great sales copy on a page requires you to 1. gain the trust of your bride, 2. tell her how you are going to fix her problems, and 3. establish yourself as the best person that can fix her problems.  Now this is hard because you don’t have any contact with the bride during the sales process, you leave it up to your carefully designed sales letter to do all the talking for you. And remember, the bride is probably not coming back if you don’t do a good job of addressing how you will be fixing her problems.

8. Add Media to your Pages.

   Media is relatively new, there are very few to no wedding vendors using media. This is a great thing because there is no established model for ’selling’ your services by the use of video or audio on your website. Also, audio or video is actually easier to do, since you can most of the time just talk about what you want to talk about, where as in writing you have to make sure your spelling is correct, your punctuations is correct and that your grammar is correct. Not to mention that it takes longer to write as opposed to talking about it. Again, your audio has to serve a specific purpose, and that is to inform the bride of your services, thank them for visiting your page after they visited your booth at the bridal show, etc…

These are 8 great ides you can use/combine to make sure that a large part of the brides you meet at a bridal show make their way into your booking calendar.

You don’t have to use all 8 and you can actually combine a few ides with other to get the best use of these ideas. And like I mentioned before, if you decide to just use one idea out of all these, make sure you select idea #7 and put a lot of time, effort, and money into it as it is probably the single best idea that you can use.  Make the front page of your website your sales letter and you will see how much power well written sales copy can convert your visitors into customers.

Happy Bloggin
|o| Simply Frank |o|

Take your blog to the top of the Search Engines

As we all know, the economy is not in the best shape ever, however, if you do any type of marketing or blogging online, you know that your traffic to both your website and your blog has probably increased by about 25% overall this year.

To me it seem that more and more brides are going online to search for their wedding vendors.

Most still rely on the traditional word of mouth. However, I might even dare to say that the wedding vendor with only a website might win the sale over a wedding vendor with only a flier, brochure, or business card.

Online marketing is taking over offline marketing the same way that Google took over Yahoo as the search engine of choice.

If you have an online presence established,  here are 5 tips to keep your website present on the top of the search engines.

1. Post to your blog regularly, Ideally Daily!

   A lot of you have already heard this concept. Post regularly to your blog so that the search engines get into a habit of coming back to you blog and indexing it. The more you post the more the search engine bots come and scoop up your new and great material to share with the rest of the world. It also keeps you current on your readers’ minds. It really sux if you like someone’s blog and they stop posting for a week or two. That just drives readers crazy and may even piss them off. So keep your readers and the search engines happy; post great articles to your blog, and post them often.

2. Update your Main Page Regularly.

   Your main web page should be updated regularly as well. If your main website runs off a bloggin platform then you have no problem as your main page is a blog and it changes every time you write a blog post, however if your website is a static page, then you need to update it regularly, maybe even monthly. It’s a good idea to keep current information in your website. maybe you are planning to attend an upcoming bridal show. It would be a good idea to write a paragraph on your page telling your online visitors where they can go meet you. If a reader reaches your website and it has not changed for over 1 year, don’t you think they would be wondering if there is anyone really on the other side? You want them to gain confidence by your website, not lose it.

3. Check your Web Stats Regularly

   Stats, Stats, and more stats… If you are not tracking your website stats in any way, then you will have a difficult time knowing where to go next. You should have many website goals. For example, my goals are; To rank high on the search engines, To continually grow my website traffic every month, to target more brides in Houston to book my DJ Services or Photo booth Services, To convert more visitors into customers, etc… If you can track how may visitors you have and how they arrived on your website, then you have a better idea of what to do with your website, which pages to tweak, which pages to eliminate, which pages your customers are coming from, why they don’t buy when they land on a specific page, how long a visitor lasts on a page, etc… For example, I use 3 forms of tracking website visitors on my website.
   1. A program called TraceWatch, which is probably the best tool I’ve used to track my website visitors, it’s a little more complicated to use and you do have to know a little bit of programming to get it to work, but it’s by far the best tool. If you’ve read any of my posts where I show you my website traffic stats, that’s the tool that you see.
   2. Google Analytics Tool. This tool is great but it is limited a bit since it uses Javascript and people can opt to turn off javascript, so they don’t get tracked. It is simple to install on your web pages that you want to track and google does all the work for you. All you do is install the script on your pages, and log into your google analytics page and see all the results; how many visitors come to your site, where they come from, what search engine terms they use, what pages they visit most, how long they are on your site, etc..
   3. Wordpress Stats. This requires you to have an account on wordpress.com and is good but it is very limited. Hey, some tracking is better than no tracking. but You need to track, track, track so you can know where you stand.

4. Get new incoming links to your website.

   This is a hard task to do but if you can accomplish this, you will move up the ranks of the search engines fairly quick. What you do is go to the free directories and fill out the information to get listed on those directories. Sometimes they require you to post a link to their website on one of your web pages. Create a links page and host their link on your page; that’s their only requirement. Ask other vendors if  you could trade links with them and tell them exactly how you want your link. A great idea, is to have your targeted keywords on the link text. Instead of saying “Click Here” you might want the link to say “Houston Photographer” or “Houston Coordinator” Or “Houston Wedding DJ.” This is the optimal way to get links to your page as the search engines rank your page for those keywords. The more you have pointing to your site, the more ‘votes’ you get, the higher you rank in the search engines for those keywords.

5. Leverage your Social Medias

   Social media is a great tool to use. I’ve found that Myspace is great to get business from other individuals, for example brides, personal parties, etc.. to where as Facebook I have been able to network myself for other wedding vendors. Twitter, I would also say that you can network better with other wedding vendors. I have not gotten completely into the whole twitter bandwagon, but I have an account. My advice for the social medias is just to be a part of them and find out the best way that you can get something of value out of them. They are a new way of marketing so if you can find a way to leverage them, you will be one step ahead of your competition. Youtube, now there is something most wedding vendors don’t really want to get into. I’ve had great success both from search engine traffic and as a good way to gain my client’s trust. Videos are great for customers who don’t like to read, you can make a video, upload it to youtube and you will have a great representation of you and your services and display it on your site. The best part, if you use your keywords on your video title, you will rank highly on the search engines for those keywords, add a link to your website on your profile or on the video itself and you will have an extra added flow of targeted traffic to your site.

These are the 5 basic steps that I follow to make sure that my websites increase their traffic every month.

Happy Bloggin!

Simply Frank

The best thing that could have EVER happened to my Houston DJ Business

How did my business become successful? Well if you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that online marketing is the bread and butter of my business. The bloodline that keeps my (bad) spending habits alive.

However, it was pretty hard to find the correct formula. A formula that I have worked on and (I think) perfected over the last few years.

When you look at it, it’s pretty simple and easy for anyone to implement. Don’t we all love that word: EASY(sarcasm).

Main Objective: Gain the trust of your brides/website visitors and Convert them into Interested Clients. AKA Website Conversion.

What I am going to dissect or explain in detail here the actual website itself in hopes that you can make some few changes to your website, if it’s not bringing you any more clients, so that you can start capturing those brides/clients you never knew visited or viewed your wedding vendor web page.

What I will ignore here, or not cover, is how to get those brides / clients to your website, that will be covered completely separate. We just want to focus on how to direct your prospects through from the moment they arrive to the moment they become your clients.

So here is the formula of my DJ in Houston Wedding Vendor Websites Success.

1. The first thing you need is an aesthetically pleasing website.

   There is nothing that will kill trust or conversion faster than an ‘ugly’ website. Spend some time, money and energy designing a nice looking website, logo and look for your business. Your website more and more is becoming your centralized point of marketing. Just to clarify, a website is not a business, it’s a marketing tool. Make it look good and make it fit all your your other marketing materials. Jennifer Schafer with Premier Bride Magazine and Brandit Bandits in Houston is an advocate of creating an image, a brand that your clients can buy. Also consider the question, how many clients do I LOSE because of my website?

2. The Second thing you need is Compelling, Creative Content.

   The WEB is known as the “information superhighway.” Realize that brides visit your website looking for specific information that relates to their upcoming wedding. They want to be informed, they want to know what you can do for them, how you can take the worry away and create their beautiful wedding day, you need to gain their trust, they need to be convinced, they want to make the best choice available to them. Arrange your content to gain the trust of the bride and then drive, push them, convince them them to call you or submit their information into your contact form. A lot of wedding vendors with the most beautiful websites fail in achieving this. It is not easy, however, there are techniques and websites devoted to teaching people to create compelling sales copy on your website. Ask yourself, what do I offer the bride, what is the bride looking for, how do I help her find it, what is important; in the mind of the bride, what are some common concerns, etc… Then you set to create content on your website that answers those questions with how YOU or YOUR service can help them. NOTE: A reader pointed out something to me, that I already knew, but ignored for a long, long time (as you probably do too).

   Hi DJ! I have a couple of suggestions for you. First, put some contact information on your blog so readers can contact you privately. Second, use spell checker on your posts. I found typos in both of your first two posts that I read and then I lost interest in reading any more. Typos undermine your credibility as an expert. Good luck!– Tracy

Happy Bloggin!

–
DJ Francisco