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Dear Friend,

This last part of our 3 week series on Optimising Your Website is about getting visitors to your website.

So we are going to talk about how to get lots of visitors to your website and then, next week as the conclusion of this series, I’m going to post some sample websites that people have submitted. I’m going to go through and look at them through all 3 of the topics that we have talked about the for last 3 weeks.

So I will look at some website, I will post up some examples for you and show you how to optimise those sites for getting visitors, for getting leads and converting those leads.

So here we are, this week we are going to talk about getting more visitors to your website and I have got 4 big ideas for you.

Idea No. 1: Narrow your focus to a single target market.
Now, you know, it’s funny because most of the things that I talk about always revolves around narrowing your focus, and getting visitors to your website is no different.

It’s much, much easier for you to attract people to your website if you are focused on a single target market.  Because the reason is that people who are looking for a home, or looking for a condo, or looking for a lot, whatever they are looking for, is the only thing that they are looking for.

They think only about themselves.  See, we are the ones that tend to think about our big picture whole market.  We are the ones that feel afraid of wanting to not leave anybody out.  We start choosing our area based on geography more than anything, which is an area that we are willing to travel.  We choose an area that our board covers, or that we’ve ever helped somebody one time in that area, and we start making our decisions based on where we are able to help people not on where we ultimately want to find our ideal target market.

So if you narrow your focus to a single target market, it’s much easier for you to speak to the people who you are trying to attract because they are only focused on themselves.  If they are looking for condos, that’s all they are looking for.  That’s all they are interested in, and it’s much easier for you to get in front of them because they are so hyper aware of everything to do with condos in your marketplace.

I’m not saying that you have to limit yourself only and ever to a single target market.  I’m saying that if you want to start trying to attract people to your website, choose one target market at a time.  Those are the key words.  At a time.  You can have multiple target markets.  You can, later on, go and get lots of other target markets of people coming to your website, but you got to look at reality.

You got to look at your current website.  Most of the emails that I am getting from people who are telling me, you know, please take a look at my website.  I’ve had it for years.  I’m not getting any business from it.  What can you do to help?  And I look at them and they are very broad and they don’t want to leave anybody out, and people are terrified of limiting themselves in some way.  But the reality is that they are not doing any business from their website anyway.

So what have you got to lose?  What have you got to lose by narrowing your focus just a little bit, even for a little while to test something that I know, without a shadow of a doubt, is the very best thing for you?  Look at your own website.  Ask yourself this question, am I getting the results that I want from my website?

If you have got a narrow or a broad focused website, you focus on an area like northern California, or you focus on an area like the Tri County area of wherever you are.  You are thinking too broad and it’s limiting you.  It really is.  I have always said that most people would make more money if their real estate license limited them to selling real estate within the city limits of the city where their office is, or where they live.  I think that would be absolutely true for you.

Number one, as I said, people who are looking for a condo are only interested in condos.  People who are looking for a golf course home, are only interested in gold course homes.  We are so self-centred it’s all we think about.  So why not focus all of your attention on trying to attract all the people who are looking for condos, or all the people who are looking for golf course homes.  It’s much easier for you to attract all of the people in a narrow target market, than to attract some of the people from all of the target markets.  You have got to imagine two people at work talking about real estate.

They are talking about their aspirations and they are saying, yeah, we are thinking about buying a house.  Now, when they are talking about that, do you think that they are going to say, oh really, where are you thinking about buying?  You know, northern California.  That’s not the way that people would talk about it.  If they are talking about it, they would say we are thinking about buying a town house in Tracey.  Or we are thinking about buying a house in Walnut Creek.

Whatever it is that they are focused on, that’s the thing that’s going to be at the top of their mind always.  So when you are entering the conversation that’s already going on in their head, you are so much further ahead than anybody else who is trying to focus on the general market. On trying to attract everybody.

You see these ads for thinking of buying or selling?  Very general.  We are talking about being very, very specific.  So, just for this exercise, just for now, just for a little while focus on one single target market.  I think you are going to be so pleased with the results that you end up getting.

Idea No. 2: Choose a super specific benefit oriented .com.
A super specific benefit orientated .com is going to be your ticket to attracting exactly the kinds of people that you want to attract to your website.

A lot of times the big mistake that I see people make with their url is an outcropping, or a result of their mistake in trying to chose a very broad area, or trying to serve a very broad area.  So if they are mistakenly trying to choose northern California as their service area, what that often leads to is wanting to get a domain name, a url, that covers the whole area.  That’s a big enough umbrella to cover everything and every area that they could possibly work.  You want to just have one.

That’s the big mistake that I see.  So it’s like having, well, here’s a story.  If I go into a grocery store and I am looking for chocolate cake.  Let’s say I walk in the grocery store and I open up the door and I am standing there and I am looking around and every aisle is labelled “Food”.  You see it’s accurate, but it’s not very helpful is it?

Chocolate cake is food.  That is true, just like town houses in Tracey are in northern California, but it’s not very helpful.  If I am looking for chocolate cake, if I am looking for something very specific like that, and I walk in to the grocery store and all around me are these aisles labelled Food, but way off in the corner I see one sign that says, Chocolate Cake.  Where do you think I’m going to head?  I’m going to go right to that chocolate cake aisle.  Now, let’s translate that to real estate.

If I’m looking for a townhouse in Tracey, and all I see is this sea of real estate websites that say Northern California Real Estate, or Bay Area Real Estate or Alameda County Real Estate, all these broad things where we are trying to encompass everything, and then among that sea I see a url that says, traceytownhomes.com, or lovelytraceytownhomes.com, or traceytownhomeszerodown.com, or if you listen into Marketing Monday for any length or time, you have heard me talk about our guide system where you can create a guide to all the town house prices in Tracey.

That would be a very interesting thing for somebody who is looking for a specific thing.

Now the reality is that it only costs about $8 or $9 to have a url.  So, why wouldn’t you take this approach, try it out on a very specific target market.  See what kind of results you get, and if you still want to go with a broad one, you have already got that.  Or it’s only going to cost you $8 more to get another one.  Or what if you got 10?  And it cost you $80, the way that you think about this is one target market at a time, and being super specific because that is the way that people think about their own plans.  They are very super specific in what they are looking for.

The other big thing that you want to make sure and avoid is to resist the temptation to be clever about your website.  Where it’s all about you.  It’s often where people talk about choosing a url that announces what you are looking for. So you would say traceyfirsttimebuyers.com where you are looking for, that’s who you want to attract.  That’s not what they want.  They don’t want Tracey First Time Buyers.

They want town homes in Tracey.  Just like if you were trying to attract a mouse you wouldn’t say, callingallmice.com, because that’s not what the mice are attracted to.  The mice are attracted to cheese. So you would say, freecheese.com, that would be much more attractive to a mouse.  So it’s very important that you get into that mindset of thinking about your target market, just like they think about the process.  It’s so valuable for you to be able to think through something from the other person’s perspective, because when you do that, it makes your direction very, very easy.

Idea No. 3: Focus on free traffic first.
Right now, there are lots of things that you are already doing that could be a vehicle to promote your website.  To bring people to your website.  So right now, you are probably running some kind of display ads that you could easily put your url and a little amplifying headline about your url integrate it right into that ad.  Free search over 1,100 town homes for sale in Tracey at lovelytraceytownhomes.com.  Something very simple like that.  If you just had that as your unifying message and your goal now is to get that message out everywhere you possibly can, that’s going to be a very, very valuable thing for your to do.

Along with your display ads, you are probably running classified ads.  You might be running classified ads that you easily put a url right into your classified.  You probably have business cards that you could put your url on.  You might be using info box flyers that you could put your url on.  You are probably using sign writers or For Sale signs. those are very easy to integrate your website into.

But look around you, see all the things that you are doing, or all the things that you could do for virtually no money to promote your url.  To get local visitors coming to your site, and if you are following the things that we talked about in our session on Getting More Leads From Your Website and converting more leads, you know that all you need to do is get people to your website.

Because if you can get them to your website, and when they are there your website is focused on them, it makes them feel like they are in exactly the place that they need to be, action central for Tracey town homes, that’s going to be very, very easy then for them to take the next step and they are going to leave their name and their email address, because remember that’s all we are asking for up front.  Making it easy for them to respond, and if we have got a collection of names and email addresses of people who are looking for town homes in Tracey, we don’t need thousands of people coming to your website.  All we need are hundreds of people and a really good offer so that your website is very, very specifically focused on them.

That’s going to optimise the results that you get.  So, narrow your focus.  Focus on the free traffic first and that’s going to make you go through the process of optimising everything before you start spending money.

Idea No. 4: perfect your conversion system before you start spending money.
Now there are lots of things you can do if you have got money, or if you want to spend money on getting visitors to your site.  You can use the paper click search engines, you could do search engine optimisation, you can run specific display ads, you can send postcards like we do on our Getting Listings program and findingbuyers.com, that you can do those things that spend money, but you don’t want to spend that money to test how everything is going to work.

It’s very important that you have got everything in place from the time that they arrive to you in your website, to the time that you end up actually helping them find a home that all of those ducks are in a row.  That you know, that you can engage people in a dialogue.  That you can have them share the desires of their heart.  That you can bond with them until they are ready to buy.

If you have got all of those things in a row, it’s much, much more predictable for you and much more likely that if you are spending money, that you are going to get a big return on that investment.  That’s really what it is.  You have got to look at it as an investment, but if you are getting free traffic to your website, good thing is, a) you get in the habit of doing the things that get the free traffic to your website and b) you get to test and learn the moves.  You get to learn how to convert people without spending any money. You get to test and make sure that everything you are doing on your website is working, and then once you have got your system up and running, you know that you can convert 10, 15, 20 out of 100 people that come to your website to leave their name and their email address.  That you can engage those people in a dialogue and you can convert 1 or 2 or 3 of those people into a transaction out of your website.  That is when you want to start multiplying the efforts that you are doing and maybe start spending some money.  Because you know what your conversion is and you know how much money you can afford to spend to get somebody to your website, rather than spending the money first, and figuring out how much it costs you to convert.

So there you have it.  Those are 4 big ideas for getting lots of free visitors to your website, and I hope you enjoyed this series here.  Next week, I’m going to wrap it up with the Web Clinic, where I will show you the samples of some of the sites, and I will give you some coaching and I will give you links where you can go and look at those sights to see the coaching that I’m giving people.  So, tune in next week.  We will continue the conversation and we will wrap up with how to get lots of visitors to your website, how to convert those to leads once they come to your website and how to convert those leads into transactions.

So have a great week, and I will talk to you next time.