June was the beginning of the wedding season.

Traffic was “off the charts”, as they say. I’ve recorded record numbers of brides searching for services and information on the web. January used to be the month I looked foreword to every month and prepared my websites for the excess amount of traffic. I would normally have a good deal, a discount or even a small gift for them so that I could get the leads.  Needless to say this month I was not even ready for that..

Below are the comparisons:

First Let’s Show the past 30 days overall increase in traffic across all my websites.

Note: I am using Google Analytics and their numbers are always lower since they use JavaScript to track customers and a lot of customers have JavaScript turned off so they are never recorded.

As you can see All websites show a good amount of increased traffic. A good website, probably yours, if it’s doing good, gets the same amount of traffic as HoustonPartyBooths.com (521 Unique Visitors for the month of June 2009). Although Traffic was down for HoustonPartyBooths.com the number of inquiries was up, which is odd.

FHPEntertainment.com, according to Google Analytics is at 4,247 Unique Visitors for the month of June 2009. That is around 10 times more traffic than your average good website.

Ok, on to what really matters to you..

Wedding Traffic Trends for 2008

What you can see from that chart is that January did really well…Then it Dropped in February, Picked back up in March and started going downhill until June… then it spiked back up in July.

That was almost identical in 2007.

This year the traffic trend is completely different. So I was shocked and was actually looking forword to actually see what it would look like.

Wedding Traffic Trends for 2009

This year January Spiked quite a bit, and as expected it died down for February. Also as Expected it picked back up in March, however, it kept going up in April and May, and Just shot straight up in June. Where last year June was really low.

The actual numbers, according to TraceWatch, a tracking software that I use on my server and is alot more accurate than Google Analytics, is 6,447 Unique Visitors for the month of June 2009 and 25,076 Hits (or page views) to my pages. That is the most EVER!

Compare that to June 2008 where I received 3,946 Unique Visitors and 13,286 Hits (or page views). Almost a 100% increase in traffic!!!

So does bloggin work for traffic?

You bet your sweet ass it does!

Happy Bloggin!

–
|o| Simply Frank |o|
Bloggin Wedding DJ in Hosuton

Isn’t that pretty neat??

That kinda led into my next idea, well that and the fact that I just revisited my two landing pages on my website: The one for Weddings and the one for Quinceaneras.

On a quick note, a landing page is a page designed to motivate your potential client into giving you his information.  So good Landing Page design is supposed to build confidence on your product or service, informing your potential client completely about what you can do for him, and answer the question what’s in it for me. Accomplish those objectives within your landing page and you will motivate your visitor to take action. After all, as I stated before, if he is not motivated enough to take action the first time, what will motivate him to come back again to your website?

I had not really looked at these pages in a while, and I have to say, they are horrible!!! I can’t believe I let them stay up as long as they have. They look very poorly made, and have absolutely no motivation for brides to contact me. As I stated before on a post, I get an average of 32 leads per month from potential clients that want to know more information about my services.

One thing to take note on, is that this was probably throughout the busiest time of the year. The beginning of the year, brides are looking for wedding vendors online, more than any other time.

So I guess the crappy looking page that is on that page right now is not really stopping them. There are countless errors and things not lining up. Honestly I’m ashamed of my work, so starting tomorrow I’m going to go through and redo these two pages, starting with the Quinceanera page and then on the the Weddings page.

I also would love to redo my DJ Upgrades, Up lighting, Monogram and Interactive DJ options page to match the new landing pages.

Stay tooned as I go through this transformation!

Happy Bloggin!

–
|o| Simply Frank |o|

Bloggin Wedding DJ in Houston

Bing is designed to be a “decision engine” to help people search the Web more intelligently and to simplify everyday tasks such as getting directions, and said the tool is aimed at giving people more ways to organize search results to their preferences.

Check out the new search engine and see how well you rank on its search engine results…

My search term results seem to match closely what Google has on their front page… But definitely check it out and see how it ranks your website.

Happy Bloggin!

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|o| Simply Frank |o|
Bloggin Wedding DJ in Houston

Ever wonder how to effectively sell to more brides at a Bridal Show?

If you’re like me, you probably have asked yourself this question before or how to increase the number of brides that purchase your services after meeting you at a bridal show.

Sonja van Florestein, of the Houston Wedding Showcase, has put together a seminar for not only her existing clients, but for anyone who exhibits at bridal shows. Best of all it’s free and you don’t even have to sign up for her Bridal Show to get all the great information she has to offer.

I am going to give my honest opinion and review to the best that I can. It is not influenced by anyone nor was I asked to do this.  I was intrigued by the email Sonja sent and I honestly had no intention of attending her show.  I just wanted the free information. After attending the seminar, I was compelled to write this review.

The seminar I attended was held on Wednesday, May 27th at Chateau Crystale. Doors opened at 5:30 pm for networking and the seminar started at 6:00 pm and went until 8:00 pm. She also offers one, today, May 28th, but it did not fit my schedule and besides I wanted to get in early to the information.

The name of the seminar is perfect:

The Secrets of Selling to Brides

If you got her email you could see that she asks a few key questions about Selling to more brides, getting the most out of your marketing dollar, and increasing your sales.

I think she delivered right on target!

The presentation was excellent, very well prepared, and very professional.  Two hours did not feel like two hours, they went by fast.

Without giving away all her secrets, here are a few things that I picked up that could definitely drastically increase my sales as a result of attending a bridal show.

1. I generated 3 key ideas on how I can  stand apart from my competition (no I’m not giving those away)
2. I was able to ’see’ the different components that make up a well organized and effective booth. I could see a booth and say it looks good, but I could never put my finger on why or what made it look good. There are some key components that I had not realized before.
3. The seminar covered in great detail the importance of advertising and really made me understand how and why advertising works. It made me want to advertise, and that is hard to do, since I have all the free traffic in the world from Google and Yahoo and all the search engines.
4. How to figure out how much you are spending per bride, and the importance of knowing that one figure.
5. The #1 secret, in my opinion, to effectively sell to more brides at the show. I almost feel like giving it away, but that would be unfair to Sonja, you have to attend the show yourself in order to completely understand it.

I could go on with 5 more key concepts that I learned, but you will not get the full effect until you attend the seminar.

In my opinion this seminar was worth over $300 dollar if you had to put a price tag for attending, however in benefits, it is up to you on how you implement what you learned but you will definitely increase the number of visitors to your booth if you implement the ideas well.

There were over 17 points well covered in great detail. Any exhibitor (me or any other wedding vendor) could easily understand and implement all or any of them  into their booth.

The only thing I wish I would have seen covered more in detail would have been “Compelling Content.” They threw that word around a couple of times, and in my opinion that is one of the key factors in selling to the brides.  This is just a suggestion that I think could add another dimension to an already great presentation. However, it may increase the length of the presentation a little.

Like I said before, this was a well organized presentation, very professional and inspiring, and many other people would have charged well over $300 to sell that same information. Sonja gave it away for free. In my opinion, she wants to gain your business and your trust by helping you have a better turn out at any bridal show, no matter what bridal show you attend. Who does that? Would you give away your secrets for free, even if your client bought from your competition?

Congratulations Sonja on a great seminar.  you can’t beat the price, the ideas presented were great, and if implemented well, you will definitely;

1. Sell to more brides
2. Get the most out of your marketing dollar
3. Increase sales

If everything works out well, I hope to see you at the  Houston Wedding Showcase on August 29th. For more information visit their website at HoustonWeddingShowcase.com!

Happy Bloggin!

–
|o| Simply Frank |o|
Bloggin Wedding DJ in Houston

What’s the #1 Question you should be asking yourself before every post?

Why am I doing this? What is my overall objective?

Most bloggers fail to understand the main reason for bloggin, for me there are only two: To attract readers to my blog(s) or to attract traffic through a targeted keyword or keywords.

If you aren’t bloggin for any of these two reasons, why blog at all.. Just to have something on  your blog?

I guess you could add reason #3 and that’s to add images of work you’ve recently done, but without an audience and without targeted keyword tactics… Who is actually going to look at your imgages?

It’s hard for us wedding vendors to create an a blog and have followers who read it. Most brides read blogs that are in general about the wedding industry, I mean what kind of advice can a DJ or a photographer offer to a bride that would encourage her to share the blog with other brides? Not much, well not on a daily basis at least.

Your tactics for blogging should be to write content that will attract more readers, possibly other phtographers or DJ’s or possibly some wedding coordinators… or to target certain keywords that you want to rank well for as I stated on a previous post about keywords.

Having a clear objective before your blog will not only help you rank well for certain keywords or attract more readers, it will help you feel great about yourself once you complete your blog entry.

Happy Bloggin!

|o| Simply Frank |o|
Bloggin Wedding Dj in Houston

Looking to improve on the number of links pointing to your website or blog?

Wordpress by default adds the “nofollow” attribute to any comment placed in a blog. I’ve gone and found a plug in that that takes away that attribute, so your comments can have some link value added to them.

What is the Nofollow attribute?

According to Wikipedia:

nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.

Pretty much what it means to the search engines is do not follow a link, it has no relevance or importance.

In an effort to increase commenting on this blog, I’ve added the NoFollow Free plug in to my wordpress. It removes the nofollow attribute from all links placed on comments. So please, feel free to place a link to your blog and leave a comment below.

For more information on the pluging, visit the wordpress page; NoFollow Free.

Happy Bloggin!

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|o| Simply Frank |o|
Bloggin Wedding DJ in Houston

A recent Eye tracking study reveals some of the hot spots you may want to concentrate on.

The Best of Eye Track III: What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes

This is a long read, it would be a good idea to scan the main highlighted points of interest and read the surrounding text.

Here are some 10 points I found interesting

1. “The eyes most often fixated first in the upper left of the page”
2. “Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page — especially when they are in the upper left”
3. “Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior… larger type promotes lighter scanning”
4. “For headlines — especially longer ones — it would appear that the first couple of words need to be real attention-grabbers”
5. “Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best”
6. “Shorter paragraphs performed better in Eyetrack III research than longer ones”
7. “We found that ads in the top and left portions of a homepage received the most eye fixations.”
8. “Close proximity to popular editorial content really helped ads get seen.”
9. “Text ads were viewed most intently, of all the types we tested. “
10. “Size matters. Bigger ads had a better chance of being seen.”

If you do think about reading the entire article, be prepared to spend about 10 minutes of your time…

Happy Bloggin!

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|o| Simply Frank |o|
Bloggin Wedding DJ in Houston

Getting traffic to your blog or website is a tough thing to do when you are starting out. If you have a constant  amount of traffic to your site, increasing your traffic is, yet,  a lot more challenging.

For example, when I first started my website at Elegante Entertainment, my traffic was between the 0 ( zero) to 10 visits per day range for a long time (approximately a month or two). However, This was not the Case for HoustonPartyBooths.com since I already knew what I was doing. I had a rush of over 70 visitors the first day I launched the website… Today it averages 16 unique visits a day (according to Google Analytics), which is better than an average website. Whereas, Elegante Entertainment is averaging 106 Unique Visits each day (according to Google Analytics).  Note: Google analytics is usually a lot lower than the actual number of actual visits. Since Google uses Javascript to track visitors, if a visitor disables Javascritpt on their browser Google cannot track them.

For those of you starting off and even some of you bloggers that are looking to increase your traffic, I am going to give you a great (super secret ninja power) Idea to try…

Before we continue, let me just say that lately, I’ve been looking for blogs to read. Blogs that are part of the whole wedding industry. I think that I can increase the traffic and readership to this blog by finding other great blogs, whether they are photographers, coordinators, cake designers, or any other type of wedding vendor, and placing some great comments on their blogs.

You know what I found out…

The majority of wedding vendors that have a blog, host it on an external domain… WHY?!?!?!?

I can think of 3 reasons; lack of knowledge, a very low self concept, and/or laziness…

Here’s why I think that…

Lack of Knowledge: Most people don’t understand how the search engines work. They don’t understand that when a search engine indexes a blog or a website, they associate a lot of the keywords with the website that it is hosted under. For example, most people get a blog at Blogger.com, typepad.com, blogspot.com, or wordpress.com. When they write good content and targeted keyword content, their host, Blogger.com, wordpress.com, etc…, gets all the credit for it. If you host your blog on your website, then guess what… All the great content and keywords are associated with your site. If you happen to write one article that brings tons of traffic, you will see right away that Google will move your website very high on the search results for many of your key words. It’s gradual and it’s exponential. It’s really amazing to see it happen.

People have a very low self concept: Most people want to try blogging but don’t immediately want it associated with their business website. They do it to ‘get started’ with blogging and to see if it ‘fits their lifestyle.’ I guess that’s a good idea, I am more of the type to say, if you are going to try something new, go at it 100% not just to see if you are going to like it. Right there, you are leaving a door open to fail. Never start something if you think it’s going to fail. Why even do it at all?

Laziness: Ok I am going to combine laziness with cheapness. Some people are too lazy to install a blog on their website host or don’t want to pay someone to do it for them. It’s so easy to just go to one of the free blogging hosts and sign up for an account there and start bloggin. I would avoid that at all costs and invest the money to install it on your own business domian name. The benefits are endless.

Back to the super secret tip I was going to tell you about…

The reason I went off in a tangent was because when you host your blog on an external host, you have so many limitations that you are unaware of and you will have a much harder time increasing traffic to your website and to your blog. It’s almost as if you created an extra job for yourself to do; drive traffic to your website and drive traffic to your blog. Additionally, this super secret tip you cannot perform if you don’t have your blog installed on your own web host or your business website…

Before you proceed, you must have already installed the Google Analytics Tracking code, if you have not already done so, please do so before you can continue. Get an account at google, if you don’t already have one, log into your Google Analytics Account and get the tracking code. This post will not go into detail on how to do that, maybe later I will do a quick step by step process on how to do it, but there are already many articles out there on how you can add the code to your blog.

So here are the steps for this one Idea on how to grow your traffic…

1. Log into your Google Analytics Program.

2. Change the date range to go as far back as you can. I would set it to start at the beginning of the calendar year or to cover one entire year.

3. Select the ‘Traffic Sources’ link on the left hand side and Select to View

4. Select to display the top 100 Keywords

5. Select the Keyword(s) you want to target.

6. Write an article geared around those keywords. People are landing on your website or blog looking for information related to those keywords. Give them what they want… the #1 rule in selling.

7. Watch your traffic grow for those keywords over the next few months.

If you do this one action, over and over you will: 1.) Target traffic that is related to your specific division of the wedding industry, 2.) Get some great ides for writing more articles, 3.) Grow your web traffic, therefore increasign the number of inquiries on your website.

If you notice above, you can see that I’ve targeted 10 new ideas for posts on my blog. All of them have the potential to bring in the traffic that I want… Brides and Quinceaneras.

Happy Bloggin!

–
|0| Simply Frank |0|
Blogger Wedding DJ in Houston

My brain never stops working!

You see, I easily get bored and often wonder…. How else can I make extra money???

Who doesn’t want to make more money by only working a couple extra hours a day? I know I do and I am always coming across people who make $5,000 a month, $10,000 a month, $100,000 a month, $600,00 a month. All in US Dollars.

I want to know how I can make that much money myself, so I often try new things, but I don’t just jump at the first singn of a money making opportunity, I usually wait a year or two of doing research, reading testimonials and seeing results.

I don’t want to just jump into something and not know what I’m getting into. I love my money and I love to take care of it.

But the thought does cross my head… “If they do it, why can’t I?” I’d be happy wit an additional $5,000 USD a month… Who wouldn’t?

Most of these people that I am talking about are Bloggers! I have been following other professional bloggers for 3 years now and have seen some, such as Yaro Starak, Entrepreneurs-Journey.com take his blog from making a few thousand dollars a month to now claiming to Make over $10,899.83 in September of 2008!!!

How do they make money???

Besides blogging everyday, they teach people how to do their craft through a Membership site where their students pay them a  monthly fee, sometimes it’s a one time payment, but most people chose to pay monthly as it is easier on the pocket book.

Here’s how it works…

1. Action: They build great content on their blog daily.
   Result: People read their blog posts, love what they read, in some instances use their content to improve their blog, their business, or their lives. In turn, since they love what they read, they share it with their friends and family!
2. Action: They build an email list of followers.
   Result: Bloggers can keep their readers up to date with what’s going on, what’s new, what’s hot, what’s coming up… etc… Now you may ask yourself, why would they do that if they already have a lot of readers on their blog?? Well simple, not everyone visits their blog everyday, so by sending a quick email to their list, the blogger  can remind his readers to visit the blog when a new article or a new review has been posted. Maybe another great bloggin guru has released a new product that might interest the blogger’s readers. Through an affiliate program, the blogger can make recommendations to products that he would use, has used, or thinks his readers in his email list can use. If his readers buy the product, he makes a commission.
3. Action: They create a membership site.
   Result: By creating a membership site, the blogger, or creator of the membership site, can teach his followers the secrets behind how he makes money online. It is usually a step-by-step, detailed series of videos that the student can follow and create his own blog or even his own membership site.
4. Action: Build Testimonials from people who went through his course.
   Result: Encourage other, non-believers, or hesitant people to take an action an purchase the membership course next time they re-launch it or re-open it. When the non-believers ee that soneone already has purchased the course and used it to great success, the non-beliver will easily convert to a believer.

Why is this relevant to you and your wedding business???

Well, if you notice, 3 out of the 4 steps I described above, I have re-modeled and used on my Houston Wedding DJ Business and my Photo Booth Business , My Up Light Rental division of my Wedding DJ Business. I have a Blog: Brides who read it are almost instantly filled with confidence about my experience and are so ready to book my services, it’s unbelievable sometimes. I have a list of brides:  If you remember, I posted a few days ago about not being able to keep up with the number of brides that inquire on my website, well I use an email list to keep track of them. I use testimonials: Who doesn’t understand the power of well written testimonials?

Now, you remember I told you I get bored easily? My brain is ticking and thinking…

How can I use the all 4 steps above with my brides???

How can I create a membership site for my brides?

I have a few concepts, of which I am not ready to share, hell, I have not even put them to test myself… But once I do, I’m sure it will be a success just like the other 3 action steps I have discussed above.

So see for yourself, read other professional bloggers and get an idea of what they do to make money online and how they actually do it. Most of the time they are just eager to tell you how they do it so that you can pay them to teach you how you can do it yourself.

Bloggers I Recommend!

Yaro Starak, Entrepreneurs-Journey.com
The Membership Site Masterplan, a free report that tells you how Yaro makes his money. Join his newsletter, I’ve been a member for a year and Love the way Yaro writes and how easy it is to understand his teaching methods.
The Membership Site Masterplan Sales Letter: Watch the video to see what he has to offer.
The Daniel Scocco Interview: A case study of one of the students that went through his program and now has h is own $10,000 month membership site .

Darren Rowse : ProBlogger.net
31 days to a better blog Series I am in the process of trying out this 31 day challenge.
Day 1:Write an Elevator Pitch for Your Blog [Day 1 -31DBBB] Give it a try…

Brian Clark : Copyblogger.com
Tips and Ideas to create captivating titles, attractive headlines and compelling sales copy!

Jeremy Schoemaker : ShoeMoney.com
Ideas on how to make money online…

These are the top bloggers that I read almost every day. I love their content and I love what they are trying to do: Create Professional Bloggers that can generate a great source of income on the internet!

Happy Bloggin!

–
|o| Simply Frank |o|
Professional Wedding DJ Blogger

Ok, so a few days ago, I posted an update on my Facebook profile stating that I need help. I have so many online inquiries that I cannot keep track of. As a matter of fact, yesterday I spent some time going through my history of emails and fond 10 (TEN) emails from the past 2 months that I had lost track of, and what I mean lost track of is not that I did not reply to them, but that I did not follow up with a reason why they had not responded to my last email. Most had already hired another DJ and 2 were still interested but would get back with me (more following up, IS THERE AN EASIER WAY TO DO THIS?)

Now, that’s not that bad compared to how many inquires I get from my online forms.

1. January 2009           31
2. February 2009        27
3. March 2009              31
4. April 2009                 39

So this year I’ve had a total 128 leads as a result of having an online form as I suggested in a previous article about converting bridal show leads into online clients using the power of the net. Now, since I have not done any bridal shows in over a year, and I only advertise in one magazine, Premiere Bride, and I have only one online ad that I pay for, The Knot, and since keep track of where all my web visitors come from, I know a few things for fact.

1. 90% of those 128 leads come to my website from the search engines.
2. 5% of the leads come from The Knot
3. 5% of the leads come from other thing such as My magazine ad, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, referals, etc…

Now 128 leads may not sound like a lot to you, but take into consideration many limitations on my website…

1. I don’t have my prices online… Major turn off to some people as they feel I may be hiding something or I am too expensive.
2. I proudly am a Bilingual DJ and Master of Ceremonies…. Major turn off to some people as they feel that I may not be able to represent them correctly or I may not know the music.
3. I don’t have the most beautiful DJ website out there… some people may be turned off by how simple it looks.
4. My website is too wordy… Some people are turned off by not enough pictures and having to read my stuff and find out there is no price anywhere to be found.
5. I don’t have the details about my DJ equipment that I use… this is mainly something other dj’s have suggested.
6. I have ads on my website.
7. I am marketing online… Vendors automatically assume that online brides are cheap, they are if yo u consider paying a DJ 1,200+ for a wedding reception cheap.
8. Worrying what people will say about telling their friends and relatives that they ‘found their DJ online.“
9. They never have heard me play before and I don’t allow outsiders to my events… EVER!
10. People worry about giving out their personal information online… This is a huge one, well they are all big
11. Many other limitations, or mental blocks that people place on their heads about putting an online form on the FRONT PAGE OF YOUR WEB SITE.

Keep in mind, these are all leads that used my online form, mainly because when they arrived at my website, they did not want to call me.

Here is something that you may not realize…

When people are online, having to reach for the phone and call you is an extra action that they have to initiate! They really don’t want to call you unless they really have to and they are extremely motivated to do so.  Think about it when you are online doing research, don’t you want to keep researching, whatever you may be researching? Don’t you want to continue without any interruptions? (unless of course they are friends or family members calling to distract you, lol.) Aren’t most of us procrastinators? Don’t we say, ahhh, I’ll get to this later (I’ll call them later)… and how often does later never come?

What I’m getting at, is make it sooo easy for your bride to contact you that the 11 (Eleven) objectives above are not even thought about, or are easily outweighed.

I even go as far as putting on my form, give me your phone number ONLY if you want us to contact you by phone, what that means to me is that they are interested but are too lazy to look for the phone to call me so they would really love you if you called them… So they don’t have to.

I hope you understand that I’m not trying to brag about how many leads I get; but I am just merely giving you a report on how you can INCREASE the number monthly leads. It’s so simple, place a contact form on your website. I have it on all of mine where they can easily fill it out. See for your self, I have it on my Houston DJ Website and My Photo Booth Rental Website.

Happy Bloggin!

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|o| Simply Frank |o|