Could you just …

Can't find the party store?

Do you watch your site statistics? Have you ever paid attention to how many of your customers are visiting your site with a mobile browser? It’s a much publicized fact that there are more phones and tablets being sold these days that are capable of surfing the ‘net than there are computers being bought. So, if your site is not mobile friendly you could be missing out on business!

Can they find what they’re looking for?

As an example, I was out driving with my daughter one night, looking for a restaurant that serves fish and chips. While driving by a locally owned restaurant, I asked her to pull up their website to look at the menu. Oh boy. Not only was the web design not mobile-friendly at all, the menu was only available in .pdf format!

The customer has spoken!

Mobile searches have increased four-fold since 2010, and users want their mobile experience to be as easy as their desktop or laptop experience. Compuware’s 2011 report “What Users Want From Mobile” shows that 60% of users expect a mobile website to load in 6 seconds or less, and they will try no more than 2 times to load a poorly performing site. More than half of all mobile users will not recommend a business that has a mobile site that is not user-friendly, and just under half have gone to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile experience. Now do you want to be the competitor? Or are you happy with your site the way it is?

An effective mobile site has a call to action. Do you want your customers to call you? Make sure the phone number is prominent and easily accessed “by thumb”.

Do you want your customer to sign up for a newsletter? Make sure they don’t have to expand the screen to enter their contact details.

Make your information easy to scan in a single look, and you’ll have your customer’s attention.

According to Google’s 2011 report “The Mobile Movement: Understanding Smartphone Users”, 61% of smartphone users call a business after finding it in a search and 57% visit the business. 90% of the time this action takes place within 24 hours.

What are they looking for?

Product reviews, the best price, local availability of a product, dimensions, color choices, you name it … your customer is searching for it online. And they’re looking while they’re shopping! They are scanning barcodes to find competitive pricing, and it’s all done with an app they downloaded – for free. That’s how convenient it is.

Can you afford NOT to have a mobile site?

Can I help you with your mobile site?

“I have this really cool idea for a book! My only problem is that I’m not a writer.”

Have these words passed your lips? Have you been told that you should write a book? So many people have wonderful stories to tell – whether they be fact or fiction – but just have no idea how to get started, or if they even should get started.

How much should I pay a ghostwriter?

The rate you’ll pay your ghostwriter is entirely subject to agreement between the two of you. You could ask 10 ghostwriters for their rates, and get 10 totally different answers. Radically different answers. Ghostwriters may work on eBooks, novels, web content, short stories, blogs or sales letters.  Rates vary from a “per word” rate, to a “per piece” rate, to a “per hour” rate. So which one is right for you?

The rate you should pick is the one you feel most comfortable with.  Interview your potential ghostwriters, and ask for samples of their work.

Will I need a contract?

Seal the deal on the monetary side of things before the job starts so neither party is confused at any point. A contract outlining expectations on both sides is highly encouraged. Make sure you cover expected deadlines, any requirements regarding updates, payment terms and methods. Think about things such as revising and rewriting. Is your ghostwriter writing the whole book, or just embellishing what you have already written?

A good ghostwriter may be hard for you to find, and even harder to keep. Make sure your topic is interesting and engaging for the writer, that way you hold their interest. It can be monotonous for a writer to give the impression they are enjoying a topic that they really find tedious, and it will certainly show in the results.

How do I find a ghostwriter?

Ghostwriters come in many forms – you may find one by looking for a ghostwriter, a creative writer, a freelance writer, an article marketer or a content writer. Use oDesk, rentaghostwriter.com (yes, really!), or you could also send me an email!

Often what I see missing in social media is the “social”.

This is not a Build It And They Will Come strategy – but an Invite, Discuss and Learn strategy. Build your online presence in a format that invites participation, and the logical place to start is Facebook, because research shows that most of your clients are there anyway.

Is there anybody out there?

Build an appealing page for your business or product and start by asking your friends to “like” the page. As long as you’re posting interesting, pertinent information, the popularity of your page will increase through the viral nature of the ‘net, and conversations will start.

People will ask you questions about your business. The surefire way to kill your page is not to answer those questions. Remember, we’re going for “social” here, not “I am business, hear me roar”. Social is a two-way street. They ask, you answer.

Everyone’s a critic

Another way to ensure that your page will see an early demise is to ignore the critics. You will have posters who dump on your product, or your service, and they certainly have the right to do so. This is an open forum. You must follow up. This is essential. A negative comment is a chance for you to set the story straight. It may take some self discipline to hold back and comment from your head rather than your heart, but your social network will become stronger for it.

Outsourcing

As part of your internet marketing strategy, social media is something you cannot overlook. If you don’t have time to spend working on your social media strategy, or if your personal social media skills are lacking, it just makes good business sense to contract it out. And it also makes sense to trust your internet marketing strategy to a social media practitioner who has an established social network.

Do your research, ask for references, look at their work, and save yourself a headache!

photo credit: Rosaura Ochoa via photopin cc

It’s a phenomenon now, but when I joined Pinterest back in the early days, it really was just a repository for cute pictures of cross stitch, knitting patterns, dream spaces and amazing clothes! I had no idea it would become the the next big thing in social networking!

Now, the social media community has embraced the power of Pinterest as a marketing tool, and its popularity has exploded!

Imagine you are an artist – let’s say you make lampwork beads, which you market through etsy. In order to offer your work to a larger audience, you may choose to link your etsy listing to Pinterest, and this expands your audience exponentially as others “repin” your pin.

What is Pinterest?

Let’s back up. As a member of the Pinterest community, you are a “pinner”, and the images you collect on your boards are “pins” – think of them as visual, shareable bookmarks. You can cluster your pins into boards – each board centered on a different topic or theme, for example “On my bookshelf”, “Looks I love”, “Places to visit” – go wild and make your own Vision Board to share with the Pinterest community!

You encourage social networking by inviting your friends to follow your boards, if they haven’t already found you through Pinterest’s “find friends” feature, and when they love something you pin, they “repin” it, so all of their followers can see it too! Of course, pins are not just available to your followers, you can view all pins from the Pinterest home page as they are pinned!

Your pins can also be shared to your Facebook and/or Twitter account – making Pinterest the ideal vehicle for social networking!

Pinterest and social networking

So, how can your business take advantage of the social networking aspect of the Pinterest community and use Pinterest as a business tool?

Installing the “Pin It” button into your tool bar gives you the ability to pin any image to Pinterest right from the page you are surfing, with a link from the chosen image, back to that page. Imagine what that can do for your online catalog! When other pinners repin your pin, it increases your reach to include all of that person’s followers as well.

Link your Pinterest account to your Facebook and Twitter feeds and you have increased your audience yet again. A word of caution here, you cannot link your Pinterest account to your Facebook business page as yet. Of course you can share by copying and pasting the Pinterest link into your business page.

A great way to stifle your Pinterest promotion is to only pin your own products. Make sure you share other things you love! It really is not all about you and your brand.

So, what can you pin to promote your brand?

Do you have an infographic depicting how your product has grown in popularity since it’s inception? Well-constructed infographics can draw a lot of attention to your product or service!

Utilizing the “Pin It” button on your website gives consumers an easy option to share your wares! It may take a little set up in the beginning, but the increased marketing potential is definitely worth it.

Host a contest – ask your friends to repin a picture of your product and offer a prize!

Don’t neglect the power of video! You absolutely can pin videos to your boards.

ROI

Don’t forget to check your site analytics to see how much traffic Pinterest is driving back to your site. Use the results to plan future pins, based on which pins drove the most traffic, or which contests created the most user activity.

Feedback, please!

What have you pinned that surprised you be becoming popular? What great marketing experiences have you had that involved Pinterest? Please comment below on what works for you, and don’t forget to link to your Pinterest account so we can follow you, too!

Need help with your pinning strategy? Contact me!

We’ve all heard “don’t sweat the petty things”, and to a certain extent, it’s true. But, if your “petty things” are things you notice every day – or at least consistently – then they can become more than “petty” and really take time away from your productivity.

Every time you think to yourself, “Hmm, I really should change out that shower curtain” or “I stub my toe on that box EVERY time I walk out of my office!”, you’re sweating the PTs, so, why not remove them from your life for good?

Here’s an exercise you can do with me. List 100 PTs that cause you annoyance or discomfort, and write them down. Here are a few of mine to get you thinking about yours:

• update photos on office wall with more current photos
• take care of the pile of papers to be filed
• fix overflowing hanging file draw
• find storage space in the kitchen for the juicer
• clear space on desk
• sew button on jacket (it’s in the pocket!)
• get the dishwasher fixed

You can see that these are not things that you do on a regular basis, they are the little things that you never remember until they become an issue again – you don’t think about the button until you go to wear the coat. So, once you have your list written out – 100 PTs – then you get to take care of them! And once you’ve taken care of them, they are no longer a PT that you’re going to bump into as you go about your day.

Fewer PTs = more time to focus on your business.

It’s not necessarily about time management, it’s about finding time in unexpected places. It’s about optimizing the time you have available to you, and let’s be honest, focusing on what you should have done is not doing anything for your productivity!

Would you shoot me a note and let me know if this exercise helped you? I promise to report back on my progress!

You may wonder how a virtual assistant can benefit a real estate professional. Let me count the ways!

• consistent branding
• blog posts
• Facebook posts
• client appreciation
• “just listed” postcard campaigns
• website creation and maintenance
• eNewsletters
• social networking
• search engine optimization (SEO)

These are just a few services a virtual assistant can offer to assist you in efficiently organizing and running your business. You want to do what you do best – sell real estate, not the “behind the scenes” work!

Besides making more time for yourself, and your family and friends, hiring a virtual assistant means you are not locked into a contract, and you don’t have to pay for office space, training, equipment or supplies. No social security, state or federal taxes, sick pay, or holiday pay. You’re not responsible for health benefits, 401K or retirement plans.

And you only pay for time on task.

Couldn’t you just use more time?

I want to say yes, of course I can do it all! However, integrity prevails and I know my skills and limitations.

I am extremely lucky to have a strong network of professionals that I can defer to. From dog walkers to PHP coders, Reiki practitioners to roofers, I have a professional lined up ready to give you the best service possible.

So, when you contract with Virtual Solutions, you’re getting access to the whole shebang, the “who’s who”, your personal trade directory. That’s peace of mind.

I wish I could correctly attribute the single best explanation I found for using a Virtual Personal Assistant (VPA). Alas, the reference escapes me and efforts to retrieve it have been futile. It goes a little something like this:

Paying a Virtual Assistant $35 an hour to perform my more menial tasks frees me up to charge $150 an hour to do what I do best.

… and besides, it’s just smart to leverage your time in this way.

Virtual assistants, in their many forms, can save you money in other ways. They already own the technology to get the job done, so you don’t have to spend your money buying it.

Pick the right VA and you have a trained professional for the job that you now don’t have to spend time training for.

You’ll never miss an appointment again, because your VA is managing your time AND your reminder calls!

Today’s VPA is well connected and has referrals at her fingertips, which could result in new customers for you as she makes those natural connections between the seeker and the sought after. She can be hired for the long term, the short term, or by-the-job. No commitment or full commitment – whichever suits your needs. And when the assignment is over, you have either formed a strong bond with an assistant you can call on again and again, or you move on to the next one.

Be assured, though, that your VA has a vested interest in creating the best working relationship she possibly can. Her livelihood depends on it, and she’s only as good as her last testimonial.

Imagine you’re relocating from another area. Chances are you’re going to need somewhere to live!

If you’re going to need somewhere to live, whether renting or purchasing, how do you check out your potential new home without having to spend time traveling from your current home to see if the new home meets your needs? You’re in luck if you have friends or family in the area! No. Wait. You’re in luck if you have your virtual personal assistant in the area!

Realtor photos and promises from a potential landlord are all well and good, but do they tell the whole story? You need an unbiased opinion. You need a VPA onsite with a Flip camera!

Imagine a full tour of your new house or apartment – a narrated walk-through – so you can see every nook and cranny, the good, the bad and the ugly!

Now, THAT’S  service for you!

Born out of an inbred need to connect, to inform, and to share, CouldUJust started out life as “Go2Gal”.

Go2Gal would run local errands, whip up a website, connect you to a graphic designer, suggest a personal organizer, find the best price on an 8′ pre-lit Christmas tree, research the latest fad diet, write a grant, and much, much more … until I explained the concept to my Ma. We often bounce things off each other, and she’s very much in tune with the way I think and the things I do, and she told me a story of someone she knew in England who had a kind of a handyman business called “Could You Just”.

This person has long shuffled off this mortal coil, his business was both born and buried way before the advent of the internet, and research proved that I could, indeed, just adopt the name for my business!