Let me ask you a question…

What is one of the most effective marketing strategies in the world?  Do you know?  Is it social media marketing, SEO, direct marketing, internet marketing?  I could go on listing all of the different marketing strategies that are extremely effective to help your business make more money.  But none of the above strategies are as effective as the OLDEST strategy in the world.

What is it you ask?

It’s ‘word of mouth marketing‘ my friend.

I mean, think about it.  Word of mouth marketing has been around since the beginning of the world.  I can bet you that in the prehistoric times, when the cavemen ruled the world, word of mouth marketing existed and worked extremely well for everyone.  If one caveman made a really good club that didn’t break, worked well and was easy to use, his cavemen buddies probably told their cavemen buddies about the club when their club broke into pieces trying to beat each other over the head. Talk about word of mouth marketing in prehistoric times

You get the point, right?  Word of mouth marketing is extremely powerful because you have other people, besides you, telling their friends about your services or your products.  You are no longer the one who keeps telling people: Buy my stuff!  You have your past customers, clients or anyone else for that matter, tell the world about how great your product or your service really is.  That my friend is POWER! That my friend is word of mouth marketing at it’s finest. 

But how do you achieve that word of mouth?  How do you get it going?  First of all, your service or your product can’t suck.  If it sucks, it won’t stick.  Are we in agreement?  Cool.  Everybody knows that if a product or a service sucks, they won’t recommend it to their friends.  In fact, it can have to total, 180 degree negative effect on your business.  How?

Let me ask you a question?  Have you ever had a bad experience with a product or a service and you were so mad that you told everyone you knew about how bad that experience was?  I remember reading about a Cable repair man who fell asleep on the sofa in customer’s home while waiting on the reply from the support department.  The customer went ahead and recorded the guy sleep and it was plastered all over the internet.  BAD news for that company.  By the way, that company is one of the biggest cable companies in US.

So, having a great service and/or product is a must, that goes without saying.  Next question is: How do you get exposure for your product or service so you can get the attention you deserve.  Sometimes, you need to do some good old fashion marketing.   Sometimes, it may just fall right into your lap.

And today, I think that opportunity has fallen right into your lap.  What do I mean by that?  Well, if you live in United States, you have probably heard of a magazine called FAST Company.  You can check them out at fastcompany.com.  About a month ago, they started a campaign called “The Influence Project.”  Basically, the influence project was created to find the 2010 most influential person online.  Here’s the crazy part about this project.

If you sign up with the Influence project, they are going to print your picture in their November issue of the “Fast Company” magazine.  Now, let’s think about this.  You are trying to get more clients.  Do you think that being published in “Fast Company” magazine would give you a really BIG credibility boost?  HECK YA!  For me, it’s a no brainer.  In fact, I did it myself and it was easier than ever.  So, unless you don’t want more credibility for yourself and your business, I suggest you get listed within the Influence Project.

Here’s how it works:

Step #1 :  Click on the image below to go to the Influence project page.

Step 2:  Once you are on the page, get started by signing up with the Influence project.  It’s really easy.  All you have to do is provide them with few details like your name and email address, picture and you are all set.  They’ll give you your very own url that you can use to share with the entire world.    Why would you want to do that?  Because when you do, you’ll influence rank with get bigger and you’ll be able to influence more people.  I don’t know about you but I love helping people.  If I can help someone get more business, help their life get better and/or make more money, it’s all worth it.  That’s why I do what  I do every day.

Step 3:  Here’s a tip for you:  Send your link to your friends on Facebook and twitter.  Just post a short message telling them about the project.  if you don’t know what to say, here’s a short message you can use:

Want to be published in a popular magazine? Fast Company will publish your photo in their Nov. issue for FREE here (insert your link here)

Cool.  I hope you went ahead and did this.  Here’s what else I am going to do.  Later this week, on Friday to be exact, I will post another blog post about this project and how it used word of mouth marketing in its success.  In that post, I will dissect the Influence Project showing you how you can use this to benefit your and your business, how to make it successful and how you can do a similar project for your business to get tons of exposure.  In short, you won’t want to miss that post.

I’ll see you on Friday.  In the meantime, go ahead and sign up with the Influence project.  That way, you can see first hand how they did it.  Also, let me know what you think about the project in the comments below.  I would love to hear your feedback about the project and the word of mouth marketing strategy.

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Generating quality real estate leads from Craigslist can be hard, tedious and time consuming.  Especially when you have to go to craigslist each and every day to look for those leads yourself.  But what if, just what if there was a way to automate the whole process of getting TARGETED and high quality leads AUTOMATICALLY to your inbox each and every day?  Wouldn’t that be great?  Better yet, what if you could use that strategy for FREE and have it up and running in the next 10 minutes?

How would that sound?

Well, I have the answer for you today.  I know that many people are using real estate craigslist for their real estate business.  Many people, which may include you, go to craigslist to
look for leads and spend hours searching for that lead.

But what if I told you that you can setup an automated process to have all of those TARGETED leads come to your inbox each and every day and it will cost you….NOTHING!

Check out the free video by clicking on the image below and you’ll be taken directly to the video.

It will take you about 10 minutes to set up and you are done.

I love this strategy.  I showed it to a recent bootcamp attendees and they kept coming up to me afterwards saying how much they appreciate it and how much time I have just saved them each and every day.

Well, now, it’s your turn.

Also, don’t forget that I am offering my monthly SWAT Inner circle members area, normally selling for $97 per month for a one time  investment fee as a 4th of July special.  Check it out and I hope to see you on the other side.

Last but not leads, share this with your friends.

To Your Success,

Peter Kolat

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One of the biggest problems most real estate websites face on the internet is getting people to not only stick around on their site but to return to it later. This is one of the biggest problems websites face. Why would someone want to visit your site? Why would they want to come back and see your site again? Well, the solution to that problem is much easier than you think. You can fix that problem in the next 10 minutes. Then stick around and read this article.

Let’s take it step by step to address the problem. What do real estate websites have that does not make the visitor come back to the site?

A typical real estate website has a home page, an “about us”, a “contact us” page, a page that describes what they do, information on how one can sell their home fast, a page targeting private money lenders, maybe some calculators and a long form the buyer/seller needs to fill out in order to contact the investor.

Now, do you see any problems with that layout? I do. Here’s the problem. First of all, the entire website is “about the company.” It’s focus is not on the visitor, but rather the company. It doesn’t look deep into the visitor’s problem and really solve it. Sure, it does talk about how they can sell their house fast and how they can stop foreclosure but it always goes back to the company.

When you visit a website, you should be thinking to yourself: What’s in it for me? What am I going to get out of this site, this page? What will this person/company/site do for me? Why am I reading this article? What is this article going to do for me? How is it going to benefit me?

You need to apply that same concept to your real estate website. You have to absolutely, positively figure out your target customer and then give them exactly what they are looking for. Do you see how I made that statement bold? I did it because it is that important. That’s one of the reasons why I am not a big fan of the “template real estate websites.” You know, the sites that give you every single page already pre-written for you.

Not only does that NOT help your SEO (search engine optimization) case, but depending on what you are trying to achieve with your business, it probably is not very targeted to your visitor. Plus, don’t forget that there are hundreds of other exact real estate websites out there and your visitor has probably already seen at least half a dozen of them. If your competitors didn’t convince them to get in touch with them so they can buy their house, what makes you think that your same template based website will be different and more successful.

So, what is the solution? How can you help your visitor and keep them coming back?

You need to stand out from the crowd. You need to provide the visitor with the exact solution they are looking for. Find out exactly what their problem is (and it’s not getting rid of their house or stopping foreclosure) and solve their problem right then and there. Don’t make them jump through hundreds of steps by filling out long forms. Just give it to them without expecting anything in return. Believe me, they’ll see that and will choose you to help them.

But how do you give them the solutions to their problem? One of the best ways to do that is to write fresh content on your website. Look at my blog. Why do you come here every day and every week? Because the content you read here helps you and your business. You come back here because every time you are here, you learn a golden nugget or two that will help you in your life. Now, how many sales pitches do you see here? I think we both know the answer. How popular is the website? How many members does this website have? Thousands!

So start writing content that your target audience will love and that is going to help them. Believe me, not only will they come back to your site and ask you to help them but they’ll tell everyone they know that has the same problem about you and your company. And we both know that word of mouth is one of the best advertising your company can ever have.

One last thing, write as you speak. Don’t worry about proper English. When you convey ideas in text as you would verbally, people relate to it on a different level. Say it as you think it!

To Your Success,

Peter Kolat

P.S.

Let me know what you think about this article in the comments below. As you can see, if you are logged into Facebook, you can now comment here on my blog using Facebook. How cool is that? Don’t worry, I don’t collect any data from you. So, what did you get out of this article? Do you agree or disagree? Do you have any questions? I would love to hear your feedback on it. Talk to you soon.

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I had to take a picture of this and share this with you.  When my wife pointed it out to me in the store, I laughed really hard.  It made my day and I figure I share this with you to hopefully make you laugh and make your day.

Question: How do you keep America healthy?

Answer: See the picture!  By the way, this is a 100% REAL, untouched photo taken at a big chain store you’ve probably visited at least once this week.   I took it with my iPhone and haven’t made any changes to it.  Enjoy!

Jay Leno, where are you?  This can be your next Tuesday headline! lol

Anyway, here’s the photo:

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Here’s something interesting…

A little birdie told me ,actually it was adage.com, that Facebook is coming out with another MEGA feature.  I think they are challenging Google and Twitter here which is fun to watch.  However, for us entrepreneurs, this type of a feature has a different meaning.  Why?  Because it will allow us to market to our audience on a local level and compete with businesses we never thought we could compete with in today’s economy.

So what is that feature I’m talking about?

Well, as of right now, it sort of seems as a rumor because Facebook won’t confirm it but here’s the deal.  it seems that by the end of May or beginning June, Facebook will releases a location based feature into their status updates.  What does that mean?

That means that whenever you create a status update, you will be able to share your location with the world.  For instance, if you just had a tasty frap at a local Starbucks and want to see if anyone wants to get together with you, you will be able to post and update with your location and your friends will be able to get together with you.  Now, let me ask you a question…

Is that cool or scary?

What do you think?

I want to hear your thoughts on that in the comments below.  As far as real estate goes, I think that this feature will allow real estate professionals to do some crazy, localized and targeted marketing using one of the most popular websites on the internet.  Did you know that Facebook is signing up about 1 million people per day!  Yeah,  I said per day, not month, not a year, per day.

Doesn’t that just blow your mind?

So, let me know what you think?  Personally, I can’t wait until they release this feature.

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In today’s post, I wanted to talk to you about Google’s recent changes because it affects you in more ways that you can imagine.  If you are utilizing Google for your marketing purposes, trying to get on the first page of Google, allowing people to find you in your local market on Google and so forth, then you need to read this post and watch this short video.

In the past month or so, Facebook has shaken up the internet world with their releases of Web-Wide share feature.  It has been said that Google views Facebook as their only real competitor who actually at the beginning of March of 2010 has received more traffic to their website that Google itself.  Now, that’s an accomplishment.

In response, Google is releasing their tricks including their new and improved search page.  Actually, they have released this feature long time ago but until last week, it was released on a limited space.  This past week, Google released the feature across their entire network.

So, how does this affect you and why should you, as an investor, a businessman/businesswoman care about this?

Watch this short video and I’ll tell you why.  It’s some powerful stuff!

So, what did you think?  Do you have any questions or comments about this new change?  Let me know in the comments below and I’ll answer them for you.

To Your Success,

Peter Kolat

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Hi everyone,

It’s Peter Kolat.  In today’s post,  I want to share with you a new feature that twitter is testing, or at least one of their employees to help them gain even more viral market share for their website.  What is that new feature you ask?  Well, it’s the ability to embed tweets into websites.

What?  Embedding tweets?  What does that mean?

Let me explain…

You know how when you watch a video on Youtube, you can take the video, hit the embed button under the video, and Youtube is going to give you a piece of code you can copy and paste into your own website?  Well, that’s what twitter is working on doing for their own website.  Can you see the possibilities?

I hope so.  If not, then check out the video below.

Ohh, and here’s a sample tweet I inserted into my own website to see if it work.  Ok, twitter…  Let’s see what you got.  Here I go:

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I don’t normally talk about politics but I had to write about this.  Why?  Because if this was you or me, we would be out of business LOOOOOONG TIME ago.  Let me ask you a simple question:

What business can you run where 80% of your customers don’t trust you and still run that business?

I’ll tell you what business.

The US government!

Better yet, what business can you run where 80% of your customers don’t trust you, you spend money like crazy on stuff that you can’t track it’s results, get into a huge debt because of that, your customers can almost never reach you, and the people who run that business are NOT even a businessmen, they’re politicians?

I’ll tell you what business.  The government!

How does this work I ask you?

Even better, what business can you run where 80% of your customers don’t trust you, you spend money like crazy on stuff that you can’t track it’s results, get into a huge debt because of that, your customers can almost never reach you, people who run that business are NOT even a businessmen and here’s the best part, the customer can’t say:  “I can’t believe how badly you are running your business.  I’m taking my business elsewhere.”

I’ll tell you what business.  The government!

Now, I hear that they are putting new laws into place that can seriously make business harder for those investors who run their business doing short sales.  Did any of these “policy writers” bother to actually talk to an investor to see if the new rules will help the economy?

What’s your take on this issue?  Like I said, I don’t normally get into politics but I couldn’t pass this up. I would love to hear what you think.

By the way, here’s the rest of the story.  It’ made the front page

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100419/ap_on_go_ot/us_government_distrust

Here’s my favorite quote from that article.  “”Politics has poisoned the well.”- said Andrew Kohut, director of the nonpartisan center that conducted the survey.

Now,’we’re talking.  I strongly believe that the government is a business entity and should be run like one.  As of right now, I don’t believe it even comes close to that type of a system.  When your end customer, in this instance, the American public doesn’t trust you, wouldn’t you make a big overhaul to change things?  Change the way the business is run, talk to the end user, the American public, ask them what they don’t like, ask them what they want to see happen, what they want, what they need and stop doing things you THINK are going to help.

That’s all from me.  Now, it’s your turn, let me know what you think!

One last thing, spread the word.  Tell your friends about this.  I don’t think it’s a hige shock for anyone to hear this news but maybe, just maybe, when majority of public takes action on this business, they’ll do something about it.  Please click on the retweet green button at the top of this blog post to share with others.  Thanks.

To Your Success,

Peter Kolat

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In today’s post, I want to talk to you about a strategy that you should be using in your real estate business.  Why?  Because this one strategy, if implemented correctly into your business, will help you explode your business and make you more money.  Now, who doesn’t like more money right? 

To tell you the truth, the reason why I am writing about this strategy because of my really good friends who is a very successful real estate investor and who owns a very popular website, which you probably been to in the past, asked about this strategy.  I went ahead and replied back to him with my answer.

Since I want to genuinely help you as well, I figured that instead of charging for this, I would just post it here for free.  What do you think about that?  Is that cool or what?  But why would I just give it away?

Well, the way I see it is, at least hope that it will happen is that if I provide you with a killer stuff on my blog, not only will you come back here to my site and join thousands of other real estate investors on my list who get cool strategies like this for nothing, but you’ll hopefully pass it along to others, spread it around the internet and the good karma will pay back for you in dividends.

So, the question was:  When it comes to email marketing, should we send out just text emails or html emails, or both?

Before I answer that question, let me explain what email marketing is and why you should use it in your real estate business.

“Email marketing is basically a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing.” -Wikipedia.

That’s basically what email marketing is.  But email marketing is more than that.  Email marketing is about following up with you customers and subscribers.  Just think about it for a second, you have someone sign up to your list on your real estate website.  Obviously, they want to hear from you.  But if you don’t use email marketing and follow up with them on timely basis, you are not going to get far in your business.  I think we can all agree on that, right?

Now, back to the question about using just text or html inside your emails.  Here’s my take on it and why I think you should use both text and html based emails when talking with your subscribers and visitors.  You definitely need to use both, text/html emails. However, unless you are doing a newsletter style email where your subscribers are exposed to it right from the begining and used to your newsletters, I would stay away from templated emails with all kinds of different graphics and stick to text only.

What I recommend is that you do a text based html email with some text bolded, italiced to emphasize the main points/benefits. That way, you can track the open rate as oppose to the CTR rate (click through rate) on your email only. Why would you want to do that?  Because if your send out an html based email and use one of the emailing marketing services such as aweber, the system will tell you if your subject line converts well and your body sucks.

If you get a high open rate on your email, it’s because of your subject line. However, if the CTR on the email is very low, not many people are clicking on your links inside that email, there is something wrong with the body of the email. Maybe the body is not as relevant to the subject line as you would think, the link does not work (it’s not clickable), or the email does not convince the reader to go to the page.

All in all, having html based emails can help you increase your email marketing success by a very high %. For instance, if you didn’t use html emails and you saw that your email is not getting a very good click through rate, you might think that there is something wrong with the email, right?

However, in reality, that email body may be the highest converting sales copy you ever written. It’s the subject line that sucks and a very low rate of people open your emails. For instance, you might have 5% open rate and a 40% CTR (hypothetically speaking) on the email but without html email, you wouldn’t know that.

So, now you go ahead and start changing the body of a very successful email whereas all you needed to do is change the subject line.   Now, you wasted a perfectly good email and all you had to do is ONLY change the subject line of that email.

Lets think about this for a second:

If you send out just one emails to 1000 people and your original open rate was 5% (50 opens) with 40% CTR (20 people clicking through to where you want them to go).

Now, If you just change the subject line because you are using an html based email and you know that your subject line sucks, you may double your open rate on that email.  Now, the number of people ending up on your site just went from 20 to 40 people. That’s a 100% improvement just by changing one line in your email. Now, that’s cool! (Thanks Frank!)

Now, its your turn.    I want you to tell me, what is the biggest thing you got out of this article?

Also, I decided to run a little experiment.

I want you to tell me, what do you want me to write about next?  This is your chance to get me to give away some of my secrets right on the blog here.  All you need to do is tell me to write about a marketing strategy that you would like to learn more about or get some juicy info on.  It doesn’t matter, it can be about SEO, video marketing, social media, articles, press releases, getting more traffic, business management, etc.  Just let me know and I’ll pick one topic and will write a powerful article on it.

To Your Success,

Peter Kolat

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In today’s post, I am going to make some people mad.  Here’s the deal.  This past week ending on March 13th, 2010, Facebook has dethroned Google as the #1 visited website on the internet in the United States.  You can see the new release by going to Facebook_reaches_top_ranking

WHAT!!!???

Facebook got more traffic than Google?

Yes it did.  But I wouldn’t discount Google yet because they are starting to do some crazy stuff when it comes to social media marketing.  I find it very interesting though that Facebook got more traffic than Google.  They are not a search engine but a social media website.  People go there to socialize, not search for stuff they need to find on the internet.

Social interaction still kicks butt and will for a long time.  In fact, I strongly believe that is will get better, bigger and faster.  Why do you think Google is integrating social media aspects into their SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages).  See my post on How To Get On 1st Page of Google For Highly Competitive Real Estate Terms Using Social Media Marketing.

So how does that affect you?

Well, if you haven’t joined the social media marketing world, I think it’s time for you to do so.  I mean think about it, what is business all about?  Is it about selling services and products or building relationships?  What do you think real estate industry is all about?  It’s about building win-win and lasting relationships with other people.  That’s a big ingredient in success, especially when you align yourself with other more successful people.

Social media allows you to do that.  Think about it?  Before social media sites such as Facebook, would you be able to contact people  like some of the real estate gurus or CEOs of different companies?  Would you be able to connect with people such as Matt Cutts of Google?  Probably not.  But that has changed.  Matt for instance, uses Youtube and other social media sites to connect with Google users.

He answers questions about Google’s search engine index, rankings, sp@.m and many other related subjects.  Do you think that Google uses those questions to help them build a better search engine?  I bet they do.  The listen to their customers and so does Facebook.

If you own any kind of business, including real estate investing business, you need to communicate with your customers both past and present.  Believe me, they’ll change your business forever with a much better outcome.  Not only will you earn more money but have a great relationship with your clients who will rave about your business to everyone they see.

For instance, look how many popular companies are using GetSatisfaction.com including Microsoft and Nike.  In fact, Facebook just announced they will integrate GetSatisfaction into the Fan pages.  Now, that’s awesome.  You can learn about that at Facebook integrates GetSatisfaction.

How can you apply that to your business?

First of all, get a fan page for your cause, service or business.  Then talk to your fans and listen.

Now, you tell me, what is the most important thing you got out of this post?  How can I help you to grow bigger and better in your business?  is there something I should do to help you in your marketing efforts?

Post your comments below and let me know.  Remember, we can achieve greater results by working together.

To Your Success,

Peter Kolat

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