Branding David

Sea Winds of Sea Isle is a website that focuses on a very particular business in a very particular geo-locality. It’s not your ordinary website, and therefore requires a very unique approach with branding, online marketing and visitor conversion.

A good friend of mine, Ryan Caldwell, has recently been put in charge of their online marketing efforts. His main concern is that despite higher traffic then their competitors, the site seems to be lagging in conversions. He was looking for someone to bounce some thoughts and ideas off of, and contacted me to give him an in-depth overview of where the site stands, and what changes or ideas I would make.

After some great back and forth, here is what I have come up with.

History

The site, being only six months old,has the disadvantage of not being well-aged. The search engines place a lot of value in the age of a site. In fact, most websites start off with a major search handicap for the first 9-12 months of their existence. The young age is definitely an obstacle that requires extensive work in order to compete against other, older websites in the same real estate and online rental market. Don’t be fooled by the fact that this is a relatively small niche. Sometimes small niches in valuable local markets are the toughest nuts to crack and worth the most long term value.

As the web ages and the barrier for entry decreases, the number of people competing in any given market is going to grow with time. This is especially true in the real estate industry since most everyone now realizes that the web is the perfect tool for real estate agents to market their business.

Local Search and Citations

One of the reasons that small, regional niches can be tough online industries to compete in is that search engines like Google use different methodologies for determining geo-relevance. Rather than simply looking at the raw strength of a website, they look for what are called “citations” – references around the web which contain some or all of the following information

A – Business Name
B – Business Address
C – Business Phone
D – Business Website

By tracking “citations” search engines can then group websites together which belong to the same general geo-location. The most important sites for any location are going to be the ones with the most citations in the most relevant places.

So what are the most relevant places? Read on. (more…)

I have always been a planner in that I have had ideas for the big picture and the directions I wanted to take my life in, but when it comes to the finer points, I don’t give them any time or energy; instead, I assume that these things will figure themselves out as I continue to work hard in reaching my overall goals.

The reality is that planning as much and as often as possible will shave off gigantic chunks of time, condensing your timeline towards the success that you want.

So many people tell me that they want more traffic going to their site or blog, but when I ask them how they can do that, they don’t have any ideas. They tell me that they want to build their business, be well known in their market and make money, but they don’t have any ideas on how to sell themselves or their product.

They have lacked a strong focus on the planning aspect of their business and brand, and are struggling to get to that “next level”.

Start With What You Want and Quantify Everything

It is fairly simple to get closer to your goals, as long as you know what they are. Most people say they want more traffic, but they don’t quantify it. How much traffic is “more” to you? Is one more visitor enough to make you happy, or will it take thousands? Having numbers will give you a yardstick to measure things by.

What Do You Need to Do?

Create a list of everything that you think will get you to the next step towards your goals. If you want more sales, then figure out why people aren’t buying and make adjustments. Make sure you can track every detail and change, so that you can revert back to things that were working well, and move away from things that reduce your performance or push you further from what your goals.

How Much Time?

The key to good planning is a time line. If you don’t know how long something should take, how will you ever know if you have arrived at the point where your previous quantifiable metrics should have been met?

Sort and Prioritize

There will always be more than one thing that you need to focus on, and while it might be difficult to figure out which one is more important, I highly recommend that you spend time seriously considering the priority of your tasks, as time is finite and we can’t do everything.

Conclusion: A Great Example

Why do we see Gary Vaynerchuk and Matt Mullenweg everywhere? These people are both strong corporate leaders, with great personalities, and instead of leading their companies every day, they are attending events, conferences and speaking to the public, building up their own brands and by association, the brands of their companies.

In this respect they have prioritized brand building over sales, conferences over other types of marketing and have quickly built up nice little business empires for themselves.

What is stopping you from doing the same?