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!

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

Getting traffic to your blog or website is a tough thing to do when you are starting out. If you have a constant  amount of traffic to your site, increasing your traffic is, yet,  a lot more challenging.

For example, when I first started my website at Elegante Entertainment, my traffic was between the 0 ( zero) to 10 visits per day range for a long time (approximately a month or two). However, This was not the Case for HoustonPartyBooths.com since I already knew what I was doing. I had a rush of over 70 visitors the first day I launched the website… Today it averages 16 unique visits a day (according to Google Analytics), which is better than an average website. Whereas, Elegante Entertainment is averaging 106 Unique Visits each day (according to Google Analytics).  Note: Google analytics is usually a lot lower than the actual number of actual visits. Since Google uses Javascript to track visitors, if a visitor disables Javascritpt on their browser Google cannot track them.

For those of you starting off and even some of you bloggers that are looking to increase your traffic, I am going to give you a great (super secret ninja power) Idea to try…

Before we continue, let me just say that lately, I’ve been looking for blogs to read. Blogs that are part of the whole wedding industry. I think that I can increase the traffic and readership to this blog by finding other great blogs, whether they are photographers, coordinators, cake designers, or any other type of wedding vendor, and placing some great comments on their blogs.

You know what I found out…

The majority of wedding vendors that have a blog, host it on an external domain… WHY?!?!?!?

I can think of 3 reasons; lack of knowledge, a very low self concept, and/or laziness…

Here’s why I think that…

Lack of Knowledge: Most people don’t understand how the search engines work. They don’t understand that when a search engine indexes a blog or a website, they associate a lot of the keywords with the website that it is hosted under. For example, most people get a blog at Blogger.com, typepad.com, blogspot.com, or wordpress.com. When they write good content and targeted keyword content, their host, Blogger.com, wordpress.com, etc…, gets all the credit for it. If you host your blog on your website, then guess what… All the great content and keywords are associated with your site. If you happen to write one article that brings tons of traffic, you will see right away that Google will move your website very high on the search results for many of your key words. It’s gradual and it’s exponential. It’s really amazing to see it happen.

People have a very low self concept: Most people want to try blogging but don’t immediately want it associated with their business website. They do it to ‘get started’ with blogging and to see if it ‘fits their lifestyle.’ I guess that’s a good idea, I am more of the type to say, if you are going to try something new, go at it 100% not just to see if you are going to like it. Right there, you are leaving a door open to fail. Never start something if you think it’s going to fail. Why even do it at all?

Laziness: Ok I am going to combine laziness with cheapness. Some people are too lazy to install a blog on their website host or don’t want to pay someone to do it for them. It’s so easy to just go to one of the free blogging hosts and sign up for an account there and start bloggin. I would avoid that at all costs and invest the money to install it on your own business domian name. The benefits are endless.

Back to the super secret tip I was going to tell you about…

The reason I went off in a tangent was because when you host your blog on an external host, you have so many limitations that you are unaware of and you will have a much harder time increasing traffic to your website and to your blog. It’s almost as if you created an extra job for yourself to do; drive traffic to your website and drive traffic to your blog. Additionally, this super secret tip you cannot perform if you don’t have your blog installed on your own web host or your business website…

Before you proceed, you must have already installed the Google Analytics Tracking code, if you have not already done so, please do so before you can continue. Get an account at google, if you don’t already have one, log into your Google Analytics Account and get the tracking code. This post will not go into detail on how to do that, maybe later I will do a quick step by step process on how to do it, but there are already many articles out there on how you can add the code to your blog.

So here are the steps for this one Idea on how to grow your traffic…

1. Log into your Google Analytics Program.

2. Change the date range to go as far back as you can. I would set it to start at the beginning of the calendar year or to cover one entire year.

3. Select the ‘Traffic Sources’ link on the left hand side and Select to View

4. Select to display the top 100 Keywords

5. Select the Keyword(s) you want to target.

6. Write an article geared around those keywords. People are landing on your website or blog looking for information related to those keywords. Give them what they want… the #1 rule in selling.

7. Watch your traffic grow for those keywords over the next few months.

If you do this one action, over and over you will: 1.) Target traffic that is related to your specific division of the wedding industry, 2.) Get some great ides for writing more articles, 3.) Grow your web traffic, therefore increasign the number of inquiries on your website.

If you notice above, you can see that I’ve targeted 10 new ideas for posts on my blog. All of them have the potential to bring in the traffic that I want… Brides and Quinceaneras.

Happy Bloggin!

–
|0| Simply Frank |0|
Blogger Wedding DJ in Houston

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

A recent poll on Problogger.net, What is the Biggest Source of Traffic to Your Blog?, reveals the current method most bloggers are getting their traffic. It’s no surprise that 46% of the bloggers who participated on this poll get most of their traffic through Google.

See the results to find other ideas to generating traffic to your blog. Social Media (Myspaces, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Digg, etc…) is in second place and those are the easiest ways for beginning bloggers to get traffic to their webstie. The name of the article is Where Bloggers Get Their Biggest Levels of Traffic, and you can find i Here.

Happy Bloggin!

–
DJ Francisco, Houston
Wedding Vendor Blogger

To prove the point of how effective blogs are, let’s do a case study on a website I released a few months ago. It’s ran by a blog.

In January, I was at a wedding reception doing the Master of Ceremonies and DJ duties. They had this one thing I had never seen at a wedding before, and to tell you the truth, at first I was very skeptical about how it would work. Well, to my surprise it was a huge success, people lined up for hours to take their turn in this new phenomenon… Ok, I’m exaggerating, it was not a phenomenon, but it sure seemed like it. What was it?

It was a Photo Booth,

…the same concept as in the malls, but this was portable and was all digital. People lined up for hours to wait their turn at the picture booth.

So being the entrepreneur that I am, I thought, wow that would be a great thing to offer. Especially since this one photo booth came all the way from Dallas Texas to provide their service.

You can find my website by doing a search in Google.com for “Houston Photo Booth” and you will see the website listed as #6 on the first page of the search results.

This was possible for a few reasons.

First, the power of the webstie, FHP Entertainment.com is so strong that if I place a link on my website for any website and add the right content, I can get any page indexed by Google.com. So that’s what I did, I wrote a small launch post for the new Photo Booth Rental Service in Houston I had started.

Second, I decided to use a Wordpress blog and an existing free template. So the design time was NOTHING. It was already done for me. All I had to do was come up with the content and fill up the website with the content that I thought would compel people that visited the website to take an action.

Finally, because of the Blog Content that I added to capture as many keywords as I could think up. Using the same tip I gave out at the Related Search Engine Terms post, I took all the popular keywords for my DJ website and replaced them with photo booth.

What was the result?

The website was launched in February 11th, 2008, exactly 2 months today. I’ve had 23 people fill in the form for more information. A few other decided to call my phone number, and one other emailed me directly at my DJ website looking for pictures, pricing and availability.

A couple booked the service within the first phone call and a few wanted more pics of it being used. I will dare say that about 10 people out of those 23 will book the service. Not bad for 0 advertising.

As it stands, my form sends out one emial at this time. The pricing information.

Hope you can see how powerful bloggin’ is.

Happy Bloggin!

–

Francisco H. Perez
Wedding DJ Blogger