As you all know, I love to keep up with all kinds of stats. More than I know what to do with, honestly. Today I was going through my visitor tracking program and I realized that I got traffic for things I never knew I would get traffic for. I got a visitor today for a person who was looking for “Good DJ Websites.” On the results page of Google, I show up as the #8 Result.

Isn’t that pretty neat??

That kinda led into my next idea, well that and the fact that I just revisited my two landing pages on my website: The one for Weddings and the one for Quinceaneras.

On a quick note, a landing page is a page designed to motivate your potential client into giving you his information.  So good Landing Page design is supposed to build confidence on your product or service, informing your potential client completely about what you can do for him, and answer the question what’s in it for me. Accomplish those objectives within your landing page and you will motivate your visitor to take action. After all, as I stated before, if he is not motivated enough to take action the first time, what will motivate him to come back again to your website?

I had not really looked at these pages in a while, and I have to say, they are horrible!!! I can’t believe I let them stay up as long as they have. They look very poorly made, and have absolutely no motivation for brides to contact me. As I stated before on a post, I get an average of 32 leads per month from potential clients that want to know more information about my services.

One thing to take note on, is that this was probably throughout the busiest time of the year. The beginning of the year, brides are looking for wedding vendors online, more than any other time.

So I guess the crappy looking page that is on that page right now is not really stopping them. There are countless errors and things not lining up. Honestly I’m ashamed of my work, so starting tomorrow I’m going to go through and redo these two pages, starting with the Quinceanera page and then on the the Weddings page.

I also would love to redo my DJ Upgrades, Up lighting, Monogram and Interactive DJ options page to match the new landing pages.

Stay tooned as I go through this transformation!

Happy Bloggin!

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|o| Simply Frank |o|

Bloggin Wedding DJ in Houston

Microsoft has released it’s new search engine called Bing (See it at Bing.com). I was curious when I started seeing visitors come to my websites from this new site, so I did a little research and found out what it was.

Bing is designed to be a “decision engine” to help people search the Web more intelligently and to simplify everyday tasks such as getting directions, and said the tool is aimed at giving people more ways to organize search results to their preferences.

Check out the new search engine and see how well you rank on its search engine results…

My search term results seem to match closely what Google has on their front page… But definitely check it out and see how it ranks your website.

Happy Bloggin!

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|o| Simply Frank |o|
Bloggin Wedding DJ in Houston

Ever wonder how to effectively sell to more brides at a Bridal Show?

If you’re like me, you probably have asked yourself this question before or how to increase the number of brides that purchase your services after meeting you at a bridal show.

Sonja van Florestein, of the Houston Wedding Showcase, has put together a seminar for not only her existing clients, but for anyone who exhibits at bridal shows. Best of all it’s free and you don’t even have to sign up for her Bridal Show to get all the great information she has to offer.

I am going to give my honest opinion and review to the best that I can. It is not influenced by anyone nor was I asked to do this.  I was intrigued by the email Sonja sent and I honestly had no intention of attending her show.  I just wanted the free information. After attending the seminar, I was compelled to write this review.

The seminar I attended was held on Wednesday, May 27th at Chateau Crystale. Doors opened at 5:30 pm for networking and the seminar started at 6:00 pm and went until 8:00 pm. She also offers one, today, May 28th, but it did not fit my schedule and besides I wanted to get in early to the information.

The name of the seminar is perfect:

The Secrets of Selling to Brides

If you got her email you could see that she asks a few key questions about Selling to more brides, getting the most out of your marketing dollar, and increasing your sales.

I think she delivered right on target!

The presentation was excellent, very well prepared, and very professional.  Two hours did not feel like two hours, they went by fast.

Without giving away all her secrets, here are a few things that I picked up that could definitely drastically increase my sales as a result of attending a bridal show.

1. I generated 3 key ideas on how I can  stand apart from my competition (no I’m not giving those away)
2. I was able to ’see’ the different components that make up a well organized and effective booth. I could see a booth and say it looks good, but I could never put my finger on why or what made it look good. There are some key components that I had not realized before.
3. The seminar covered in great detail the importance of advertising and really made me understand how and why advertising works. It made me want to advertise, and that is hard to do, since I have all the free traffic in the world from Google and Yahoo and all the search engines.
4. How to figure out how much you are spending per bride, and the importance of knowing that one figure.
5. The #1 secret, in my opinion, to effectively sell to more brides at the show. I almost feel like giving it away, but that would be unfair to Sonja, you have to attend the show yourself in order to completely understand it.

I could go on with 5 more key concepts that I learned, but you will not get the full effect until you attend the seminar.

In my opinion this seminar was worth over $300 dollar if you had to put a price tag for attending, however in benefits, it is up to you on how you implement what you learned but you will definitely increase the number of visitors to your booth if you implement the ideas well.

There were over 17 points well covered in great detail. Any exhibitor (me or any other wedding vendor) could easily understand and implement all or any of them  into their booth.

The only thing I wish I would have seen covered more in detail would have been “Compelling Content.” They threw that word around a couple of times, and in my opinion that is one of the key factors in selling to the brides.  This is just a suggestion that I think could add another dimension to an already great presentation. However, it may increase the length of the presentation a little.

Like I said before, this was a well organized presentation, very professional and inspiring, and many other people would have charged well over $300 to sell that same information. Sonja gave it away for free. In my opinion, she wants to gain your business and your trust by helping you have a better turn out at any bridal show, no matter what bridal show you attend. Who does that? Would you give away your secrets for free, even if your client bought from your competition?

Congratulations Sonja on a great seminar.  you can’t beat the price, the ideas presented were great, and if implemented well, you will definitely;

1. Sell to more brides
2. Get the most out of your marketing dollar
3. Increase sales

If everything works out well, I hope to see you at the  Houston Wedding Showcase on August 29th. For more information visit their website at HoustonWeddingShowcase.com!

Happy Bloggin!

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|o| Simply Frank |o|
Bloggin Wedding DJ in Houston

What’s the #1 Question you should be asking yourself before every post?

Why am I doing this? What is my overall objective?

Most bloggers fail to understand the main reason for bloggin, for me there are only two: To attract readers to my blog(s) or to attract traffic through a targeted keyword or keywords.

If you aren’t bloggin for any of these two reasons, why blog at all.. Just to have something on  your blog?

I guess you could add reason #3 and that’s to add images of work you’ve recently done, but without an audience and without targeted keyword tactics… Who is actually going to look at your imgages?

It’s hard for us wedding vendors to create an a blog and have followers who read it. Most brides read blogs that are in general about the wedding industry, I mean what kind of advice can a DJ or a photographer offer to a bride that would encourage her to share the blog with other brides? Not much, well not on a daily basis at least.

Your tactics for blogging should be to write content that will attract more readers, possibly other phtographers or DJ’s or possibly some wedding coordinators… or to target certain keywords that you want to rank well for as I stated on a previous post about keywords.

Having a clear objective before your blog will not only help you rank well for certain keywords or attract more readers, it will help you feel great about yourself once you complete your blog entry.

Happy Bloggin!

|o| Simply Frank |o|
Bloggin Wedding Dj in Houston

Looking to improve on the number of links pointing to your website or blog?

Wordpress by default adds the “nofollow” attribute to any comment placed in a blog. I’ve gone and found a plug in that that takes away that attribute, so your comments can have some link value added to them.

What is the Nofollow attribute?

According to Wikipedia:

nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.

Pretty much what it means to the search engines is do not follow a link, it has no relevance or importance.

In an effort to increase commenting on this blog, I’ve added the NoFollow Free plug in to my wordpress. It removes the nofollow attribute from all links placed on comments. So please, feel free to place a link to your blog and leave a comment below.

For more information on the pluging, visit the wordpress page; NoFollow Free.

Happy Bloggin!

–
|o| Simply Frank |o|
Bloggin Wedding DJ in Houston