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Myth #1 - "It's easy, just put up a website and you're set for success"

Many perceive the sheer numbers of people online equates to enough of them coming to your site and making it consistently profitable. It doesn't quite work that way because if your site is out of sight, out of mind, then nobody knows it even exists.

Remember, when you search for something online, you go to a search engine, type in your phrase and you get pages of results. This is exactly what your customers do! Not only do you need to register on search engines, you need to be prominently registered - aiming for top ranking or at the least, second page results. Anything less will considerably diminish your chances of being found.

Now if you don't even register on the search engine radar, how will your customers find you?

Myth #2 - "Anybody can do it"

Very few people can do it right.

Attempting website promotion services on your own is disastrous. It is extremely time consuming and will greatly frustrate and disappoint if not done correctly. A lot is involved - the entire website promotion process is composed of several components that must fit together in a synchronised way in order for it to work properly.

Let's take just three of the many aspects of website promotion to illustrate this myth:

1. Keyword research
2. Copywriting
3. SEO Marketing

These form the backbone of any website promotion strategy, but how will you devise effective techniques for each of these when this area is not your company's expertise? Where will your company begin to research for keywords? Are they the correct ones? At what optimum density levels should they be used?

Your copywriting is crucial as is your SEO marketing. Who will write compelling and effective content to capture search engines, rankings and sales?

These are just three of the many components. All it takes is just one aspect to be done incorrectly and it can retard the whole process.

Myth #3 - "Presentation Is Everything"

In website promotion services, this couldn't be further from the truth. Content is what makes or breaks a site's effectiveness. If you put up a site with nothing except amazing graphics and flash, you have zero chance of selling anything. But if you put up a site with nothing but sales-pulling copy and rich content, you have every chance of securing business.

Presentation is part of the process; it's not the process itself. There's a fine balance that must be struck between visual appeal and effective copy. Professionals know how to integrate the two at just the right levels.

Myth #4 - "Sending Your URL to Thousands of Search Engines Is A Good Way To Get Business"

It's actually a good way to have your site banned or de-listed from search engines. Any company that offers to blast your site to thousands of search engines is a company worth putting on your blacklist. Unfortunately many businesses register thinking this technique works. All you are doing is spamming the search engines and they don't like it at all.

The best way to get business is having a results proven company put together a well planned website promotion campaign using the best experts available.

Myth #5 - "Website promotion is fast and yields quick results"

Whilst some aspects of website promotion are relatively quick, most of it is an extended process that takes time to research, develop, test and implement. It's not about getting a quick sale. Building trust and credibility with your customers takes time and often results in longer term relationships. Results are always contingent on the quality of the website promotion program. Naturally, profitable programs will yield much higher results over the same time period as mediocre programs.

The Author has put together a resource website strictly to educate potential and current business owners about website promotion. You can visit it at http://www.1web-site-promotion.com.

Tina Valiedi is the Executive of Marketing and Chief Editor of MPStrategies Firm,a company whose breakthrough service unleashes the power of the internet to drive hidden potential clients to your site. For more marketing how to information visit: http://www.mpstrategiesfirm.com

Search engine marketing, internet marketing, google, yahoo.

Greg Narain and I had a long discussion with the Jive Live team at BarCamp San Francisco. They take high quality video of all sorts of live events, from art openings to the Pride Parade here in SF, and then post it to their website. In some ways they think of themselves as a daily video newspaper.

We talked about using blogs and RSS and existing video communities to spread their content everywhere, to get traffic going to their site. They currently host their own videos, and Greg and I were of the opinion that as soon as they actually got significant traffic, their video costs would start going through the rough. The difficulties of success when it comes to video content on the Internet today...

A large part of the discussion centered around what we all would and would not do on the Internet, including talking about who subscribes to RSS, uses tags, etc. As I have said time and again, feel free to ignore the small part of the population that uses these tools directly....just stick the functionality on to your site, and the structured nature of RSS, the tag glue, and the automated tools and aggregators that are in place will blast your content around the Internet, which has the net effect of raising your Google ranking, which is really how everyone finds stuff on the Internet today. RSS = higher search ranking, enough said.

When you start out a home based business it's a common mistake to start off advertising your website. If you have a website with lots of things for sale on it you'll probably just end up confusing your potential customer. They may or may not be able to determine what it is that's for sale. Here are a few reasons why it's better to advertise a Splash Page/Squeeze Page vs. a Website.

1. If you're using Google Adwords to drive people to your site then you'll want to get sales for your advertising dollar. If you're paying for people to come to your website and they are confused about what it is that's for sale, chances are that they will click on through. If a splash/squeeze page is used then you can capture names, email addresses and a whole lot more useful information. By using the splash page/squeeze page you will at least get some information in which you can use for a sale down the road. Having a newsletter sign up on the splash page/squeeze Page will accomplish this.

2. If your using Traffic Exchanges for your advertising then you'll want to make sure that your surfing is all for not. Using a Splash/Squeeze Page to capture leads for your business is what people are doing more and more now. The splash/squeeze Page forces the surfer to put in info by using a method like: "If you join now I'll give you this free.....", or "Join up now before it's too late". By using this method the seller accomplishes two things; they obtain info on the potential customer and give away probably some sort of viral e-book/software etc... This method of advertising is becoming more and more popular. Why? Because it produces results.

3. Joining Ad forums/groups is another yet not as effective way to advertise yet the same thing applies here as well. By using a well thought out ad and using a splash page/squeeze page to obtain information you will accomplish some results. If you just advertise your website, again people will tend not to take your offer up because they get confused about what's for sale.

By using a splash/squeeze page you will obtain very important information on your potential customer which will give you an opportunity to repeatedly give you chances to sell what ever it is you're selling. The whole idea of Internet Marketing is to have buyers for your products and to be able to have repeat customers is what the splash page/squeeze page is all about. If you just advertise your website then you risk the customer clicking through and not ever seeing them again.

About the Author

To find the Best Home Based Business Ideas and Opportunities Visit: http://www.siriusfreehomebiz.com/blog

SEO experts are constantly telling us about the importance of good quality content and good quality back links from web sites with relevant content. They also tell us that reciprocal links and page rank are of decreasing importance. They then instruct us as to how to go about getting good links by personally contacting other web sites and proposing a reciprocal link! Confusing! As is much of the advice given to prospective site designers.

Personal experience with our own web site has shown that the following is correct and works;

- Content is the key. Lots of it, with constant up dates to it, and it should be well written and informative not just a sales pitch.

- The more pages you can create the better. Upwards of 100 pages will highlight your site as an important one. Sites with only a few pages rarely appear on the first page of search engine results.

- As the site ages its importance will increase. Those who got in early generally outperform the later sites. Google also have an ageing process for links. As these links approach six months old they become of more importance.

- Reciprocal links once gone through the ageing process are still being counted, even with Google's updated algorithm.

- Article writing and publishing will produce huge numbers of backlinks. You should be looking to produce upwards of 30 articles and aim for around 250.

- Attaching a weblog to your site which is updated daily will increase the rate at which the search engines visit your site and at the same time adds valuable content and links.

- Page Rank has still some importance in determining your position in the rankings because it is based on the links and the content of your site. However the page rank as given by the Google Toolbar is not necessarily accurate. A more accurate page rank can be gauged from using the detail supplied by the Google Sitemap statistics. Consequently generate a sitemap and submit it to Google.

The most important piece of advice is to design your site for the visitor and not the search engines. Have as much information within the content as possible and keep the graphics to a minimum.

About the Author

David Andrew Smith is the owner of http://www.wesparkle.co.uk a cleaning services company which operates throughout the UK.

Disclaimer: This post is about (gulp!) the Internet. If even the idea of putting up a real estate website for lease options leads makes you sleepless then wait for the next post on Hotlines etc that don’t require you to even have a computer. :-)

How to use the Internet to attract buyers for your Lease Options:

There is a pretty big section in most newspapers, week after week, called Rent To Own in the Real Estate Section. Some newspapers call the section Lease Option also.

You will also see ads targeting to prospects with bad credit saying something to the effect that if you have been turned down by the mortgage companies – call us to get the home of your dream.

As a side note I am not a big fan of Land Contracts in Michigan. The foreclosure process that is required to kick out a non-paying Land Contract buyer who bought your home and then defaulted is long and governed by the same laws in Michigan that govern a bank foreclosures.

Although in certain circumstances (property being vacant) you can accelerate the eviction and some astute investors who play in the Land Contract world have told me that they add a eviction clause in their custom made Land Contracts – I have yet to see one contract in reality.

So some of the companies in Michigan who advertise and focus especially on bad credit / home ownership themes might be selling a 12 / 18 month Land Contract deal which gets the seller cashed out at a later date via a refinance. So keep that in mind when you are reading these ads.

Rent To Own Ads are pretty much 100% Lease Option ads and it is a good idea to check them out in your local newspaper before you do anything so to get a feel of the marketing.

Very very few real estate investors use the Internet to market their lease options which if you choose to do so does gives you a pretty good advantage over your competition in your local city. This is how it works:

1. Run advertisements consistently (more on classified ads later) in your local newspaper. I said “local” and “consistently” – two very important and precious words to keep in mind. Also you want to run these ads EVEN when you have NO house at the moment to Lease Option (more on that strategy later also).

2. Direct your prospects to your website.

3. Your website has pictures (lots of them), virtual tour if you want to really blow them away, description of the house with the list of all the upgrades you have done, any promotion you are running (free appliances, gift gas card etc), lease details such as monthly payments, Option number and finally the most important thing of all….

4. An invitation to join your Lease Option Buyer List. So lets say 10 people come to your website as a result of an ad that you ran in your local newspaper.

Well technically you can only sell your 1 home to one out of 10 but the other 9 are still in the market to buy something. May be they don’t like “that” house but who is to say that will not like the second house that you put up next month.

Entice them and ask them to join your Hot Lease Option Upcoming Houses Notification List so they get priority notification even before the house hits the classified section.

Sort of a Pocket Listing Invitation if you want to use the REO slang.

Understand that this strategy is advanced and mostly not used by anybody. Everybody wants to wait till they have a house or worse when the house is done.

The term you need to remember in real estate is Build To Suit – if you doing this, week in, week out your market will tell you what kind of houses you should be looking for.

This is the beauty of having a website and use it for more to tell you what the market wants in your local Michigan city instead of thinking about your website as something to sell that ONE house that you have right now.

I know it might sound hard to believe at first try but really most investors get so tied up in “doing” that deal that they have burning a hole in their head that they forget to build a business.

Nothing personal – just a fact of life. All entrepreneurs go through it. I did too in the beginning.

5. These are some of the things that you should be asking at your site from your site visitors – name, email, number of bedrooms in the house they want to get, basement preference, brick or frame, garage preference, city preference, if you are operating in a city which is comparatively big – it would help to ask a more specific question for example if you see Detroit ads they will mention something like East Side or West Side preference.

Where can you advertise on the Internet to get leads?

1. Detroit Craig’s List; at http://detroit.craigslist.org Free

2. Google Base: http://base.google.com Free

3. Google / Yahoo will be a pain the rear to do and get some leads because you are competing against everybody and their mother selling a $20 book on how to do lease options. Very hard to do Pay Per Click ads and get some leads out of there – not to mention expensive.

4. The thing that I am watching closely is the evolution of Google Local ads that will let you target and run really local ads on Google, which will be really effective for our kind of business.

5. For Sale By Owner sites: cheap prices for the most basic packages. Owners.com is a good example. The whole idea is to get people come to your Lease Option website.

6. EBay – will cost money to run - $150 at least. Plus my feelings about EBay are that it is more suited toward building an Investor List than attracting local homebuyers.

Where can you advertise offline to get Lease Option leads?

I am very old fashioned when it comes to real estate leads. May be the reasons that the damm $26 ads have made me so much money. Real estate is a Local game.

Seriously doubt that a guy in L.A. is thinking about buying a 3 bedroom in Redford. But there are renters in Redford with kids in Redford schools and mom & dad working in Dearborn and Sterling Heights.

They are reading the Sunday’s Free Press and Redford Observer – may be a small percentage looks on the net – may be it is a big percentage; there is a no hard data available anywhere that can pinpoint where most of the people are looking for Lease Option deals.

But I would suggest to you that do both – with 1-2 Knockout punch:

Punch #1: Use the free resources – Google Base; Detroit Craig’s List initially till you close on some deals, put some new money in your business checking account and then think about spending some money on the Internet. Since both of the above are free (at least for the time of writing this)

Punch #2: Spend you money where it will get you the biggest Return on your Advertising Dollars – your local newspapers. In the above example – run small ads driving people to your website in BOTH newspapers – Detroit News and Redford Observer – I repeat run ads in not one but both newspapers.

Sometime I get emailed about the cost of running these ads – well I worry about what comes back to my bank account and not too much on what I have to spend.

As long as coming in number is bigger than going out number – all is good. You can charge the advertising on your business credit card and pay it once the house is Lease Optioned off.

Or you can close one deal and take $500 off right from the top to spend it on advertising on your next deal. The real big mind shift that most entrepreneurs never make is not to think of advertising / marketing as an expense but as investment to build their business.

There are 2 big things in my business I spend money like it is going out of style – my education and my advertising. As long as I feed these two dragons, all is good in Planet Ijlal.

Website Domain Name Tips:

Spend some time thinking of a good and short domain name for your website. Rule of thumb is that keep it within 21 characters with the dot COM thing so it fit in one line.

Newspapers classified sections have a notorious tendency to break down the name in 2 lines if it is long and put a hyphen in the middle. I don’t have to tell you that that becomes a different name.

I had this experience personally one time when my ForeclosureTour.com ad became Foreclosure-Tour.com in two lines. Suffice to say that I did not get any leads that week.

So keep it within 20-21 characters and you will be in the limit. Also you don’t have to use www moniker anymore. I don’t use it anymore. www.MarkIjlal.com or MarkIjlal.com work the same way.

Also I hate long winded domain names – abcpropertyinvestmentsgroup.com is a great tribute to your LLC’s name but come on…. One of my coaching group member Lou Provanzano got a cool name recently for his Detroit deal – www.DetroitOnTheMove.com which gets full marks for originality and sounding good when you say it, print it and leave it on your voice mail.

And yes I am guilty of having long names in the past too – some of them are so crappy that I am actually embarrassed to share them here.

But the point is you want to have a good name; should spend some time on it, make a list of 10-20 names; ask your significant other, if you are in my coaching group, email me the names before you blow the insignificant amount of money needed to reserve them via Godaddy.com. Get a second opinion. This is how the world will see and your business. It is worth spending some time on.

How to get your Lease Option Website Designed:

This is the part where most will hesitate because they are still thinking big dollars when it comes to websites. In 2006, websites are so cheap that there is no excuse left for not to have one.

Where can you get a decent site made?

1. Do you have kids? Do you have neighbors who have kids? Do you have nieces, nephews, and little cousins? Know anybody who goes to a high school??? Every High School in America has a clique of geeks who can design a better-looking site than most web design firms out there.

I have personally hired 16 year olds – one time even flew one from Denver, CO to Michigan to work for two weeks on a business that I used to have. I had one 18 year old actually move to metro Detroit from U.P. to work on a project.

These kids were smarter, harder working and had a better work ethic than most grown ups I have worked with in the last 10 years. They get it. And they love doing this stuff and putting it for the world to see it.

I met an 18-year-old two years ago who was designing websites for Detroit Hip Hop acts – his sites could go heads up with a $50,000 site – he was doing this for $10 per hour.

Ask anybody who is going to high school and is between 14-18 in your life. They know a geek who can whip up a world class website for you in 7 days for probably pennies.

2. You can always go the outsourcing route and use a website a www.elance.com or www.rentacoder.com which will let you post up for free what you are looking for; bunch of companies (most of them in India / China and Eastern Europe) will put up competitive bids. They all have reviews on the previous work they have done; read them and give one the site to do.

If you are totally lazy and don’t want to do anything at all – then spend couple of hours trolling Google and Yahoo and find a website on lease options that you like and then tell whomever is doing your site to make your site look like them.

And for crying out aloud don’t copy blatantly but use it for inspiration and ideas. Most people like me use a copyright protection service that trolls the web looking for lift offs.

When we find somebody cutting and pasting our stuff – we get him or her shut down. I did that to bunch of bogs already that were just copying and pasting my content on their sites.

Next Part 5: How to figure out your Cashflow Payments, Exit Strategies that nobody wants to hear about but they sure do work, the absentee owner thing.