Today’s real estate market has a lot of sellers asking real estate professionals “can you sell my home fast?”.  Rosen Properties is a Minnesota real estate service that provides home buying, selling and renting services in the Twin Cities area.

An Improved Website Across The Board
Rosen Properties had been using a real estate website solution for some time that lacked in many areas.  While it did provide Rosen a presence online it didn’t have enough value to bring in new customers.  Five’s web design and Internet marketing skills went to work on:

• Web redesign to improve consumer trust and 1st impression
• Improve navigation and usability
• Improve search engine optimization and ongoing SEO
• Easy to update website powered by the SMC
• Added a blog to improve SEO and communication
• Stronger tools to market homes for sale, rent and rent to own
• Web analytics and goal tracking

The end result is a well rounded web design and web platform that Rosen can continue to build upon.  In this market where people need foreclosure assistance, credit re-building, rent to own options and a faster way to sell a home, Rosen Properties brings a ton of options.

Make sure you check out the new website:  www.RosenProp.com

While many companies and organizations rush to redesign their website to improve it’s performance, they overlook a simple change in approach that might make the biggest impact.

A shift is taking place on the web for small business.  Websites and web content are moving to reality, far away from marketing hype.  If a company can change their approach and find ways to bring valuable content to users, then they can improve traffic and ultimately leads.

A Clear View, Show What You Can Do
A buzz word in the web design world is transparency.  To me, this simply applies to the ability to show potential customers and current clients just what you can do for them.  Instead of pitching them that you are “the best, the leader, number one” why not drill into exactly how you can help them?

Example 1: A CPA Firm could use their content to outline their menu of accounting services … and their content might read the very same as 10,000 other CPA websites in their industry.  If they shift their approach, they could provide a summary of how they helped a small business find financial efficiency, position it for growth and help it succeed.

They could show their target market exactly what they ARE doing and make it easy for that user to understand the type of benefits they bring with their service.  Their services mix to create success for a client, instead of a users trying to guess what they need off the standard services list.

Example 2: A Restaurant can show their menu items and a burger is a burger is a burger in print version.  But if you take a short video clip of making your gourmet or special burger, post a series of photos and customer comments on it … you have something to bring hungry stomachs in.

In taking the approach to show the reality of your ingredients, the process and the visual WOW factor, you have created a distinct difference from your competitors websites.

Those are just two quick examples of how taking a better approach to web content and involving ideas, media and real web content can have an impact.  EVERY business out there can find these valuable ways to better illustrate how they can benefit, help and serve their clients and customers.

Build you website visitor a clearer picture on your offering, expertise and process and you will become a clear choice as the one to buy from.

You can’t interact with any form of media these days and not hear about Twitter.  TV, radio, print, web, mobile and face-to-face networking are all jumping in. Big traditional media, big business, big stars, big sports … all on Twitter.

But you, you’re not big.   You’re a small business and while you’re interested in tools and strategies to grow your business, you don’t know how to evaluate the Twitter buzz.  It looks like a time waster, meaningless chatter and something that falls to #524 of what you have to accomplish in your day.

You might want to reconsider. I could list out my 100 reasons a small business should get involved with Twitter, but I think having 100 different voices (comments) would be better.

So I’m putting it out to the Twitter community in the attempt to gather a total of 100 reasons or more to be on Twitter as a small business. Give me yours, leave your Twitter ID too (I’ll link it for you), and lets help those on the fence decide and all of us learn a new thing or two on the benefits of Twitter.

Two things happened last week that had me thinking about Internet marketing and the opportunity for success a business has with it. It also made me think about why companies seem to be held back from exploiting the benefits of marketing online.

Number One: Who’s The Crazy One?
The first was reading a great Internet marketing article from Andrew Eklund on MinnesotaBusiness.com.  The article easily outlined why Internet marketing is a dream (and reality) for any marketing team/person.  Eklund had some great points that anyone could understand and my biggest takeaways were:

1.  Reworking old and tired traditional marketing is not the answer.

2.  Ignoring the medium (Internet) where prospects are, customers are and that allows for complete tracking of your marketing to sale process is plain crazy.

3.  Internet marketing is not risky, not marketing online is risky.

Give the article a read and you’ll hopefully find a spark to push yourself into investing more time and strategy into leveraging the great benefits of Internet marketing. You’re crazy not too.

Number Two: Ignorance Is Bliss? No.
The second thing that happened was a scenario that unfolded in my email inbox.  I received an email from a business development person I know that contained their newsletter in a PDF attachment.  I froze.  They had a great email subject headline on a topic that I wanted information on but … they would never know that.

I couldn’t believe that the company would ignore the fantastic benefits of email marketing after all that hard work.  They put together a well designed PDF, it had compelling and educating content … yet it was only doing half of its job.  It wasn’t going to clue the business in on its relevance, performance and its outcome.

If they had sent this information via an email marketing program they would have gained these valuable marketing benefits:

1.  Who opened their email newsletter

1b.  Better yet, they would have reduced effort (clicks & time) to get to the goods

2.  What links users clicked on to get more info or take action

3.  The ability to fully track users from email to website to conversion

4.  They can still include the PDF version AND see who downloaded that

This marketing campaign could have been so much more.  Don’t just go half way, take advantage of the simple opportunity to get everything you want from your marketing efforts.

So to get to my title question, what is holding your company back from Internet marketing?  As Ecklund’s article pointed out, it offers accountability, sustained progress, sales, leads, return-on-investment, and deep business intelligence.  Let’s add to that affordability too.  Email marketing is an extremely low cost.  Consider though, at any price, the ability to track and measure makes any number realistic when you know what it produced.

So get rid of your fear (or ignorance), make the move, take the right steps, ask questions, get answers and find the ways Internet marketing can improve your business.  There are many.

In our industry we often hide behind browsers, Internet connections, email and our web designs.  Just where are these web design experts working everyday?  So here is a look at our office space.  We moved into another section of our 100 year old building this winter as we found a renter for our old space.  It still needs some TLC, but you get the picture.

The last photo is of our 1950’s Philco refrigerator.  It’s where we keep our web designs and ideas cool until we need them.