Last month, June 24th 2008, I wrote an article entitled:How POWERFUL can your Blog be?

Pretty much I wanted to show you how powerful blogs are and how much Google loves them.

As a marketer, your objective is to get your logo or your website in front of as many brides/customers as you can, where ever they may be or go. I know that a lot of brides use the internet to find information about whatever they may need at that time.

So I got an idea to get in front of the brides that would attend the Bridal Extravaganza Show in Houston. I knew they would be using key words such as “bridal extravaganza,” “Houston bridal extravaganza,” “Bridal Show July Houston.” So I wrote an article on my DJ in Houston Website and called it: Houston Bridal Extravaganza Show – July 2008.

It immediately ranked extremely high (1st page results in Google.com) in the search engines for terms related to the Bridal Extravaganza Show. I am talking about, hours after the post, I was indexed and ranked on the first page of Google for most of those keywords.

Luckily I use a visitor tracking program on my website and here are the results of the additional traffic and the keywords used to access my website.

# Visitors	Keyword
18	houston bridal extravaganza
7	Houston Bridal Extravaganza Show
5	BRIDAL EXTRAVAGANZA HOUSTON
5	houston bridal show July
3	houston bridal show july 2008
2	houston bridal extraveganza
2	bridal extravaganza houston tx
2	bridal extravaganza in Houston
2	Houston Wedding Extravaganza
2	houston bridal show, july 2008
2	bridal extravaganza july 2008
2	bridal extravaganza show
2	Bridal Extravaganza Show houston tx
1	houston bridal extravaganza vendors July 2008
over 20	Various Kewords with only 1 visitor

For a Complete list of all the Google Tracking Details from my DJ in Houston Website Download the PDF Report Below.
2008_07_30-google-details-fhpentertainment

This report show ALL the traffic that came into my website as a result of Google.com only. In the month of July, Google.com provided me with 52% of my total monthly traffic, Yahoo 18%, and MSN/Live with 6% of my total monthly traffic. At the time of this post, July 30th, 2008 12:00 pm Central time, I’ve had a total of 3,651 visitors to my website this month. Note: This tracking program will count one person as 1 visitor for each day he or she visits the website. EX. if you visit it today, it will count you as 1 for the entire day (no matter how many times you return), if you visit it tomorrow it will count you again, so you become 2 visitors.

Now, I understand, these are just traffic numbers, they really don’t mean nothing to you until I report income as a result of that traffic.

All I can answer to that is that 85% of my DJ Business Income comes as a result of my website. I have one Ad in Premiere Bride Magazine, and that is ALL the advertising I do. Even that traffic is directed to my website.

Happy Bloggin!!

–
DJ Francisco
Blogger and DJ in Houston

Every Post I write has specific objective, whether it’s to inform, to teach, or to prove something to work, I write to create something useful for my readers.

Most people still don’t trust blogs as a form of marketing, or think it’s not worth the time and effort, or whatever excuse they’ve made up in order not to jump into bloggin’. So this post is for those of you…

In my Houston DJ website, I recently published an article promoting the upcoming Houston Bridal Extravaganza Show, the main objective is, of course, to inform my readers and to make them aware of the show and how successful it can be to attend. I think all brides will find it useful, so I promoted it because I believe in it. The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) objective is, of course to rank high for the words Houston Bridal Extravaganza Show, on the search engines and have the brides click on my link and get some free publicity that way.

This can be referred to as white hat SEO, since I am not doing anything illegal or anything that goes against any ethics. I am simply using the power of my blog to put my website in front of where I think the brides will go, by providing valuable information to them… as a result Google.com awards me with a very high ranking for my website.

Want Proof?

Google (without quotes): “Houston Bridal Extravagazna Show”, “Bridal Extravaganza Show”, or “Houston Bridal Extravaganza” and see the results for yourselves. Also notice how you will get different results for each set of keywords.

If you notice, my DJ in Houston Website, FHPEntertainment.com shows up in the top of the search results (in cases over huge corporate websites like the Houston Chronicle: See Picture above), and that’s only because of the length of time that I’ve been bloggin’ consistently. Again, the hardest part is getting started.

So, this is just one of the perks of consistent bloggin’, building up great content for both the search engines and the readers.

Oh, and of course the end results is, more visiting my website, seeing my name and face, and of course getting to trust me because I’m everywhere.

Happy Bloggin!

–
DJ Francisco
Bloggin DJ in Houston

So what exactly are Landing Pages?

You learn something new everyday, that’s the great thing about life, just when you think you’ve got the hang of something, you find out there is a better, faster, more effective way to do it.

Today I am truly inspired by one small change I made to my website that literally, overnight, improved my responses… I am still in shock of happiness for this discovery…

What did I do ???

Well, first let me give you a background story…

I subscribe to a lot of blogs, newsletters, and websites which have great information that helps me on many things; my website, my personal life, my search engine marketing, etc.. Now I don’t read them all everyday, but I do read the headlines and if there is something appealing or eye-catching, I will read the rest of the article. Realize that your customers do the exact same thing.

A few days ago I received an email that Stompernet Going Natural 3.0 was about to be released. Now I’m sure a lot of you have no clue what Stompernet is. Let me give a small explanation.

Stompernet, according to their website is…

It’s a shortcut to making money online. It’s a business-building library of cutting-edge content. And it’s a network of like-minded entrepreneurs who constantly compare notes on how to run a successful online business.

It’s an unfair advantage over your competition.

StomperNet is many things, but it boils down to this. It’s THE program that teaches you everything need to know to start, grow, and explode your online business.

No matter how you make your money online.

And to prove their success, they released a video that will really make you question your website’s design and usability structure.

It made me question mine and I thought I had a pretty successful online presence.

Watch their video and find out for yourself, just a small warning, the video is over 50 minutes long of really good information, stats, specific examples, specific adwords tricks, eye tracking tests, etc.. you can use to improve income.

Watch the videos here: Stompernet Going Natural 3.0

I watched it and did JUST ONE THING as a result of watching the videos and overnight I had 4 inquiries for future business. To put that into perspective, my last method averaged 4-6 inquiries a week, last night I received 4 in just a few hours of implementation. I’m filled with joy!

What did you do?

I improved my landing page…

What is a Landing Page?

Ok, that’s too much info, what the heck is a landing page anyways?

A landing page… are you ready for this… is where people land on your website…

BUT… It’s critical for your online success. WHY?

Because most of your website visitors will NOT visit any other page, so you get just one try… EVER… to convert them into cash…. err customers.

So, again, are landing pages important?

no…

THEY ARE CRITICAL!

What are some different Landing Page Examples?

For starters, your home page is naturally a landing page, it’s probably your most important landing page.

If you have no technique for capturing your visitors, then you are missing out on A LOT of extra income. People who come to your site as a result of your business cards, your search results, your magazine ads, your newspaper ads, your mail outs, they all visit your home page as a default.

Remember, you just have one chance to capture them…

Here are other ideas for landing pages, however they do take a lot more work and brain power, but the results are worth it.

I created a few different landing pages on my website for different occasions, and here they are.

• For Email Marketing
• Trade Show Marketing (Ex. Bridal Extravaganza)
• Adwords Campaigns
• Magazine Ads (Ex. Premier Bride)
• Weddings and Quinceañeras (My Specialties)
• Business Cards (Started it but dropped it)
• Preferred Vendors

The idea behind all this is that I wanted to have a way to track all my marketing dollars and to see what was working the best so that I could spend the bulk of my marketing budget on. As opposed to blindly spending thousands of dollars and not knowing if it worked or not.

How does it work and why?

Now, to make it easier for me, I used the main basic idea for all my landing pages, and in most part the same information…

I Gave them an offer, an incentive, a discount, or any other motive for them to either call me or give me their information so that I could contact them.

That’s it! That’s the magic behind it… well I also added the benefits of selecting my service over my competition… But everyone does that…

Hmm… come to think of it… many people also think of giving away a discount or an incentive… so what’s so different and specail about mine?

THE placement (architecture) of it!!!!

It’s accessible, it’s visible, it’s THE ONLY ACTION they can take at that time…

To be exact here is what I did.

I added a form, right after all the benefits I offer

And at that time, once they get all the great information they want, that is the only action they can take, so they DO!!!

Visit the website so you can see for yourself: DJ in Houston.

Well, this turned out to be a long post, longer than I expected, but I was motivated, what can I say. I just found out something that created a lot of joy in my life.

Happy Bloggin

–
DJ Francisco
Blogger at http://www.FHPEntertainment.com

Here are the top ten reasons you you should begin bloggin’

10. Because you can Promote your Service or Products

This should be done tactfully tastefully. The last thing you want to do is turn you blog into a spam blog or an self advertising posting page. But don’t be afraid to stand up for what you believe and how your service solves certain problems, as an example.

9. Because you love to express yourself

We all have a voice and we all want to be heard. Bloggin’ gives everyone that freedom of expression that the great US of A is known for. By expressing yourself, through your blog, brides can get a feel, a sense of how charming and intelligent you are. After all, brides and any other client buys if you reach their emotions, get them to trust you, and if they feel you are the best choice there is.

8. Because you can establish yourself as an Industry Leader

Leaders Lead. Leaders know where they are going and what they are after. Leaders know how to solve problems. Leaders are trusted. Brides look for the industry leaders. nuf said…

7. Because it’s ZERO-DOLLAR-MARKETING!!!!

Blogs cost nothing but time to keep up with. You don’t have to pay anyone to blog. You can but you don’t have to. You can do it yourself. You don’t have to worry about how much space you have to run an ad. You don’t have to limit the amount of words you can use. You really don’t have any ‘real’ limits. Just the limits you put on yourself. The most popular bloggin programs are FREE. Installation is FREE, if you are technically inclined or if you have a great tech support on your website host.

6. Because you can Network with other bloggers

Bloggers love to network with other bloggers. They will read each other’s blog and make comments on their buddies blogs, add their view about a particular topic, add their insights to the industry, promote other vendors they believe have great service, write a blog post about another blogger, etc… Bloggin’ is the new Secret Society, except it’s all over the internet.

5. Because you will get ‘wider’ search engine exposure

The more you post to your blog, the more content you will have accumulated, the more the search engines will have to chose from, the more traffic you will generate. Typically when you blog about your industry you will cover many words and keywords and search terms that you would never know your brides were looking for.

Here’s a quick summary of how this works. A bride is looking for a particular wedding services, product, or to solve a particular problem. She opens up Google.com; types in a term, search engine phrase, or keyword; gets all the Google.com Results; and clicks on the ones she likes or the ones that seem to do the best at solving her problem. Those keywords are the ‘gold nuggets’ we want to target. How to find them is beyond the scope of this blog post. In my case, I run a DJ company, the ‘gold nuggets’ brides used to get to my website was Wedding DJ in Houston. Now that was an ideal keyword, but in the real world of Google.com, not every bride will use that exact phrase. They will use anywhere from Wedding entertainers, wedding music, dj companies in houston, what’s the best dj in houston, etc… and those, each, return 100% different results from the other. I also posted an article titled “Related Search Engine Terms” where i went into detail on some of the keywords my Wedding DJ Blog attracts form Google.com and Yahoo.com

4. Because you can achieve a Higher Search Engine Ranking

Google and all the search engines, like all the brides that use it, are looking for quality, authoritative websites. As mentioned before, by posting constant, quality posts to your blog, you will soon become the leader in your industry for your service and Google.com will begin to recognize that after some time. As a result, it will bump your website up on the rankings. But you must stay focused on what search engine terms you are trying to rank high for and use them tactfully. How do I know this for a fact? My Wedding DJ Website ranks very high for my targeted keywords.

3. Because you will increase traffic to your website

This is almost a no-brainer, but I still have to put it in here. Higher search engine results, wider search engine tracking will result in increased traffic. If you are on page 10 of the search results and you move up to page 1 then your search engine traffic will increase by an estimate of about 1000%. I was getting about 10 visitors per day to my website before my blog, now I am getting over 100 visitors per day consistently. I got 175 a few days ago.

2. Because you will increase your Lead Generation

Leads are golden. A lead from your website means that you just need to do a few more things and that lead will become a client. After you’ve created some great content, you’ve established yourself as an industry leader, provided great value, solved a problem for your bride, they will gladly give you their contact information so that you can offer your services. Have a way to capture that information by putting a form on your website. Just try to get the basic information: Name, phone number, email address, and wedding date. other than that you can get the rest of the details when you communicate with them.

1. Increased Income

This is why I blog at http://www.fhpentertainment.com/blog/ …. nuf said

Happy Bloggin!

–
DJ Francisco
Wedding DJ Blogger

RSS = Real Simple Syndication, or a really easy way to read this blog, without having to visit it every day.

Summary

RSS is part of the family of XML format, developed specifically for all types of websites that update their content frequently. Using an RSS reader you are able to receive website content, News, Blog Entries, and any other information published in an RSS feed without visiting a website. You just launch your RSS reader and if your favorite website or blog has any new articles, the RSS reader will retrieve them and show them to you. The best part is that you can set it to receive news from many websites that cover topics that you are interested in.

Definitions

RSS - Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0).
XML – It’s basically the formatting language that software and websites use to distribute the content to your feed reader.
Syndication - The Process by which a website is able to share information, such as articles, with other websites… Or other people

Description

RSS is nothing more than a simple format that is used to Syndicate content to subscribers of a website or blog. The format allows for the subscribers to receive the content without the need of opening a web browser, such as Firefox or Internet Explorer, using a program designed to read the RSS feeds. However, recently most web browsers have started to support RSS feeds and you are able to read all your feeds from the web browsers RSS option.

Thanks to the aggregators (programs or websites designed to read RSS feeds) you can obtain a summary of all the websites or blogs that you like from the comfort of your very own desktop, email clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc…), or through web applications specifically designed to read an RSS feed. You don’t have to open up your web browser and go to every website or remember all the website addresses.

The most important part of this format is that it is establishing a new chain of values in the sector of content or information technology (IT) and changing the way that information is accessed both from big companies and corporations and from regular website owners. Many companies are experimenting with the format and to develop new ways to use it to deliver information to the consumer or subscriber.

Syndication is not only a phenomenon designed to aid weblogs, although it has helped their popularity. There has always been syndication and the sharing of information through the XML language, this way we can offer a way to reproduce our own content in other websites in an integrated manner. This helps increase the value of the website that publishes the RSS information and establishes the author of the content as a leading authority. For example if someone reads an article online and that person likes the information and feels that his readers might benefit from that information, he will publish a link, a summary of the article, or the entire article in his website by just pointing to the RSS feed of the article.

Confusing and too technical??

It can be confusing so the best way to understand this is to start using it.

The RSS Feed for this Blog is located at:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/BlogginForWeddingVendors

If you click on that link, it will give you a better idea of what the RSS readers see.

If you copy that link and add it to your RSS Reader you will be able to read this blog from your email program.

What are some RSS Readers?

I personally use the RSS feature built into my email application, Thunderbird, but there are many other programs designed specifically reading RSS feeds. I love Thunderbird because I always have it running and if there is a new article or some news that have recently been published, it will notify me with a sound so I can see if the article is of any relevance to me, if so I will read it either at that time or whenever I get a chance.

Since I don’t use any other RSS reader, your best bet is to visit our friend Google.com and search for “rss readers” or “rss aggregators” and select the one you like most.

Happy Bloggin!

–
DJ Francisco
Wedding Bloggin’ DJ