For business owners who use social media to promote and bring awareness about their business, lead generation is important to understand. Allan McNabb with Image Building Media and his guest, Jorge Vazquez with Graystone Investment Group, discuss proven ways to generate leads with your website.
The video includes:
- Three major types of website marketing.
- Minimum website requirements.
- How to use your website to generate leads from your network.
- How to generate leads from organic search results.
Webinar Cheat Sheet
Here is the cheat sheet we provided to the agents who attended the webinar. Although we did not cover all the items during the webinar, we are making all the available information. Download the complete PDF of the webinar cheat sheet: How to Generate Leads with Your Website.
Video Transcript
Allan McNabb: Alright, everyone, this is Allan McNabb with Image Building Media, and I appreciate those who are with us on Zoom, and I know some are with us also on Facebook Live, and I appreciate them being with us also. We have, in the Zoom chat, we have the link to the cheat sheet I’ll be using tonight. I invite you to get a copy of that because it’ll help you to remember some of the things we’re talking about. And we’ll cover a lot of information. There’s also some good links there for you to follow up. And of course, you can always visit Facebook, the Image Building Media Facebook page, and it should also be on the Graystone page, and be able to follow some more with the… To see the video. I know many are doing that, we appreciate that. Well, Jorge Vazquez with Graystone Investment Group is joining us, and a lot of his real estate agents are joining us also. And Jorge has done an amazing job. He has built a very large company, several companies combined, and he’s done that in large part with website marketing. So I’m glad he’s able to be with us here. And Jorge, give us a little intro and get us excited about this topic, would you please?
Jorge Vazquez: Awesome, guys. Yes, of course. Let me tell you something. First of all, my name is Jorge Vazquez, CEO of Graystone Investment Group, where you invest and we do the rest. I’ve been in this business for almost 20 years. And one of the reasons that other people in the market always say to me, “How come you do so many transactions? How come you’re able to sell the properties more expensive than I can ever do?” And it’s because I started early on with online marketing. I wasn’t the best wholesaler, I wasn’t the best realtor, I wasn’t the best investor. I wasn’t any of those things, but I was a really good online marketer for the past what? 12 or 13 years. I was doing social media before Myspace. I was, I had… Some of my websites are 12 or 13 years old, so definitely, online marketing is the place to be. The real world is becoming the virtual world. The virtual world… I’m sorry. The real world is becoming less and less relevant. So I encourage you to train yourself as much as possible because we have competition. The competition is against computers, against automation. Our competition right now is with other websites. So making sure that you look the best you can online, have the best website, to me is the top, top priority as a business owner.
Guys, I mean, Allan think about COVID-19. If you would’ve would have… A couple of things with the website. The first thing I could think of is you could sell your product globally. So that I challenge you, are you selling your product globally? If not, start thinking of doing that. And what’s the best platform? A really nice website. And for those of us that utilize our websites as our main store where we get everything, we didn’t get affected that much by COVID-19. Business as always, as usual. So that’s my three cents on that topic. [chuckle]
Allan McNabb: Well, Jorge, I appreciate that. What I wanna do is I want to share… I wanna share the cheat sheet here that we’ve got. I invite, again, everyone to download that. And we wanna clear up some confusion here and we also want to address some of the biggest mistakes businesses make in regard to their marketing. And one of the business biggest mistakes is that they do not realize that your website is your number one lead generation tool. Absolutely, hands down, none other. And so a lot of times, maybe a business is getting started, it’s a small business person it’s they think, “I’m gonna go do a little bit of social media.” And they fail to recognize that the purpose of social media is to bring people to your website so that you can convert them so that you can generate leads. And so we want to clear that up, we want to just really make sure everyone totally, completely understands this point. And Jorge, you and your business, and you’ve got several websites. And like you said, you’ve got some that have been out there several years. And Jorge, would you… Let me just ask you this question. Would you say that you’ve basically built your business through lead generation with your websites?
Jorge Vazquez: 500%. 500%. I knew that the market was very tough, a lot of competitions. So from the get-go… Am I still there, guys? Do you see me?
Allan McNabb: Yep, yep, you’re still here, yep.
Jorge Vazquez: Oh, okay. I don’t know. I lost you guys for a second, but real estate, think about it, guys. How many realtors are out there? Real estate is a tough, tough market to break through. There’s a lot of people, a lot of competitors, a lot of people doing the same thing you do. From the beginning, I raised my hand and I said, “You know? I’m not even gonna try to compete with them on the same playing field. I’m gonna be the best online guy that I can.” And what happened at the beginning, I was spending a lot of time understanding SEO, understanding everything that needed to be done. But long term, it took off, and boom, and I was able to pretty much beat anybody in Tampa. I was actually nominated business of the year back in 2009 by the Business Journal in Tampa, this little company. But everything we did, all the business we did in those years and the business we do now came directly from online marketing.
Three Major Types of Website Marketing
Allan McNabb: Exactly, and I wanna again share the cheat sheet and get to that. But one of our very good clients, Jorge, you know very well, Mary Catchur with Marimark Mortgage. And she’s learned that if you rely completely on other people giving you business, I.e. Referrals, then the minute a referral dries up for any reason, your business is down the tubes. But if you’re generating business yourself through your own marketing, online marketing, then you don’t have to worry about that. And indeed that’s been a big part of your business too. I wanna get to the cheat sheet here for just a moment, and I’ve broken it down into three major types of website marketing. And the first one is to boost your network marketing and to generate leads.
Now, this… Unlike what Jorge did with SEO when he was talking about that a few moments ago and unlike what we do for our business and for other businesses, there is a very valid and useful marketing component to a website and that is to boost your network marketing. And so what this does as you go about and you talk to people, you want to bring them to your website. As you’re you are on social media, every social media post, try to bring them back to your website. Every email, all of your email marketing, bring them back to your website. And so this network marketing is boosted and it’s great for… Not only does it help you close sales, not only are you there for people to check you out but it also helps with customer retention. Now Jorge, a lot of real estate agents… And quite honestly, we can’t have 50,000 real estate agents on the first page of Google, right? And so this is very valid and I would say the majority of real estate agents do not do SEO to be on the first page of Google for sell my house or sell my house Tampa. So if you can for a moment speak to to your… Especially to your agents, ’cause you’ve got a lot of agents that this is what they are using their website for. So speak to this. It helps to boost your network. Although you’re not on the first page of Google for the best keywords or something like that, it’s still very useful and very helpful. Talk about that for a moment, would you please?
Minimum Website Requirements
Jorge Vazquez: Absolutely. In regards to having a website, there’s are so many different components. But one of the most important ones to me, at least in my business, this is for real estate, is that you’re able to sell your product globally and that allows you to… So maybe when you’re doing SEO for something very basic like Tampa realtor there’ll be a million. You will never be able to compete with those people ever. Now if you look for niches and it depends on your audience. If your audience is the entire world, then you could what Chinese investors are looking for in Tampa SEO, what Indian investors are looking for in Florida SEO. So you’re able to Google SEO more targeted, more of a niche. Therefore, you’re gonna be able to get more traction that way. So trying to compete with the basic words of realtor Tampa, forget about that. That’s Zillow, that’s Trulia, that’s every agent out there. So one thing is, expand your clientele, that’s the first thing if possible depending on the product. Second is branding, branding. Because if you wanna talk to…
Okay, let me tell you about the types of clients I get. I could get Joe, the client that buys one property and needs help with his credit, and we help him through the whole process, it takes us six months, we make $5000 real estate commission. He’s not really gonna care about how exciting my website is. But the guy that I picked up this week that owns 50 properties, he has $2 million to invest. I would actually say the first thing that he will say to me will be, “Can I check out your team and your website?” And so branding and looking professional is super important in order for you to take things to the next level. And the last thing I will say is if you wanna use social media, and by the way, when you…
To me, it’s not about putting a whole bunch of garbage in your website, it’s about providing really good content. Where are you gonna send those people to? You don’t have a website. So let’s say you have… You could be indicating all these things, but who’s… What platform is gonna work as the cash account that’s gonna grab the leads? So those are some of the things to me that are the most important. The website allows you to sell globally, the website allows you to look bigger than you are, and the website allows you… It’s like a cash account, it’s where you send your social media to. You could have a million people on in social media and you’re like, “How come I’m not closing anything?” Because social media is not a closer. Your website has to have some sort of pre-closing type of a message and then you close it. You’re always the closer but your website’s gonna get you there, not just your social media profile.
How to Generate Leads from Organic Search Results
Allan McNabb: And Jorge, this is… I’m so thankful you especially mentioned that social media is not a closer. Social media is, for the most part, does not generate sales. It does not generate leads. Now, and I understand, you can do Facebook ads and things like that. But what do Facebook ads usually do? They’re bringing people to the website. And now you can, I understand, do some lead ads and things like that. But generally, social media does not ring the cash register. Social media brings people to your website so you can ring the cash register. That’s so important. You’ve gotta understand that. And also, your website for people to check you out. That’s so important, right? Is someone going to write you a check for a $100,000, $200,000, $300,000, or Jorge, in your case, a few million dollars and not do a search and check you out on your website, on your social media? And what’s gonna happen if they see you’ve got a website that looks like… Maybe you sell $50,000 houses and they wanna buy one for $300,000 or a million dollars, what’s that gonna do? Jorge, this is… I’m gonna tell you a real quick story. You know this person, Elaine knows this also.
Jorge Vazquez: I have one for you too.
Allan McNabb: And a very good friend told this story publicly and she sells million dollar houses here in Tampa. And she was having a meeting with a prospect and the prospect wanted to sell a house, a million plus, and looked at her website, which is one of those free ones that looks like trash, and says, “You know, I don’t think what you’ve got going on here is really what we’re looking for.” In essence, lost that house…
Jorge Vazquez: That opportunity.
Allan McNabb: Because of the website. Go ahead, Jorge, you tell ’em.
Jorge Vazquez: Well, I have another one too. We were having a board meeting today and we have this BA company that we’re using. We actually have seven BAs that we’re using, and everything’s been wonderful until there was an issue on billing, right? We have a big plans for this BAs, we wanted to do more stuff. And then all of a sudden, we have an issue on billing and we’re like, “Okay, let’s look into this company.” And all of a sudden, we noticed that some of the phones were personal phones. Their website had a couple of areas that didn’t make any sense, the spelling wasn’t correctly. So all of the board members were like, “Well, wait a second. Now, let’s question all the billing going back a year or two, and let’s figure out if we really… If this company is professional enough to continue working with us.” That decision, that thinking came from the poor website when we looked at it.
Allan McNabb: Absolutely, so it’s so important. And we’ve talked about, through all of these training webinars, perception is reality. We talked about it with all the social media, and we again talk about it with the website. As I was thinking the last couple of days of getting ready for this training webinar. And I asked myself a question, “What good company that is making the sales, that’s doing great, that’s growing, what company out there does not have an appropriate website?” And that website needs to be appropriate for what you’re doing.
If you’re selling a $150,000, $250,000 houses, well, it needs to be appropriate. If you’re selling one, two, three, four, five million dollar houses, the website needs to be appropriate. If you’re Graystone and you’re selling properties to clientele all over the world, the website needs to be appropriate for that. It needs to project the correct image, and Jorge, that’s really what you were talking about with branding. It needs to project the correct image. And so that’s super important with that. And some people use their website just for that and don’t… If they’re on Google for a just keyword, that’s fine. But they’re not investing in that, they’re not working on that, and that’s perfectly fine. That’s a totally legitimate reason. And that’s part of the website marketing.
Jorge Vazquez: It’s like real estate. A domain is a piece of real estate, it starts with no value. And by the way, Allan, I’m gonna be 100% transparent. I don’t think people should go out there and build $20,000 websites.
Allan McNabb: Correct.
Jorge Vazquez: It makes no sense. And first of all, you need to have a business plan, you gotta find a niche product, you gotta see if there’s a market for it. Ideally, I always tell people, “Think globally, do not think your backyard only.” And then if you only have the budget of creating something neat, focus on the neat, first make sure the website is neat and functional. And then little by little, you can add stuff to it, because at the end of the day, the website… For these people that think, “Okay, I’m gonna spend $10,000 and the website’s gonna generate me $10,000 in 30 days.” No. The website is just a tool, that you’re gonna utilize as you’re doing your marketing effort. So we’re not saying go ahead and spend $50,000, really the money needs to go into the marketing budget, in order to pay ads whatever the case might be. But once you get to that point of, okay, let’s spend some money on the marketing, you don’t wanna lose any leads because of the website not being professional enough. And I think people start running before they could walk, in a way, and that’s why I’m so thankful, Allan, that I have you to consult me and say, “Jorge, this is a stage one. Once you get to stage two, we’re moving to stage two, and then we’re moving to stage three.” But you have to have something otherwise, you’re almost invisible, in a way. Invisible, think about COVID-19, now you’re invisible, you’re home, nobody knows about you, so anyways… I can tell by the…
Allan McNabb: Oh yeah, that’s great. Jorge, I wanna share my screen once again, I want to… I don’t wanna spend a lot of time on these other two items because they’re not what most people are going to be interested in or going to be doing, but I do wanna mention that just so folks want… Just so that folks know. And we did talk about, just a little bit, number two here, use your website and generate leads through organic search results, certainly Greystone does that. And, that’s very appropriate. And what people need to know is that the further out you want your influence and reach, the more work, therefore the higher the budget needs to be. So if you’re trying to reach, for example, we’ve got some laundromat clients and they’re reaching usually two or three miles around their business location. That’s really easy to do, and the budget is very modest. But if you want to then reach all of Tampa, that’s a whole different thing. If you wanna reach Tampa Bay that is a much different thing. If you wanna reach the State of Florida, that is a much, much, much bigger thing. If you wanna reach the whole US, as you said, you’re competing against Zillow, realtor.com, Wikipedia. I mean, that is a really different thing.
So if you wanna use your website to generate leads organically, just realize, and a lot of times business owners they try to do too much, they wanna bite off too much at one time. And again, just as Jorge was talking about, start small, and so start like maybe you’re going to do Carrollwood, maybe you’re gonna do Temple Terrace, maybe you’re going to do Land ‘O Lakes or Wesley Chapel or Lutz, or maybe you’re gonna do North Tampa or South Tampa, or… Pick a modest area where you can get started without trying to compete with Zillow, and then grow from there. The other thing I wanna mention, Jorge is number three on our cheat sheet here, is internet advertising to generate leads. And I think the most important thing because there’s a lot of small business people, a lot of real estate agents, and I wanna get your input on this in just a moment.
They say, “Oh, I’m just gonna run some ads, and I’m gonna get so many leads and I’m going to sell so much and I’m going to be rich.” And what they neglect to understand, again, as we have touched base already, that social media, the purpose of social media, and in large part the purpose of running ads in social media is to bring people to your website. And too many times, and I’ve seen this many times with real estate professionals, spend money on ads to bring somebody to a deficient website. And the ads do their job, they get people to the website. But they’re never getting leads. So Jorge, can you speak to that? Just a little bit about running ads to bring people to a deficient website.
Jorge Vazquez: Well, absolutely, I think you hit it on the nail. I think that doing advertising, paying all this money in social media without having a website, it’s pointless, right? At the end of the day what are we talking about? We’re talking about following up. We’re talking about database. We’re talking about… Because we know 9 times out of 10, the first time you talk to that client it’s not the time that they’ll do business with you. Sometimes it takes two to three or four touches, right? So even if you say you got the lead, but you don’t have no where to send it, either to a website or even either to a database or ideally a combination of both, really you’re not doing anything with it. That lead is gonna come and go, boom. You don’t have a follow-up system.
I say, Allan, at least if you send them to the website, they recognize the branding, “Hmm. Greystone,” they’ll navigate your website, there’s a chance that they’ll say, “You know what?” A week or two from now, they’ll say, “You know I went to this website, let me just check on my history. Oh okay.” It’ll be more likely that they’ll remember where they saw that ad, versus an ad they click on Facebook, and you’re supposed to call them, they’re not gonna remember, first of all, what they click, okay? And then if you add to that a database, then the person is seeing you in the website, now they’re getting a follow-up email. But you need to have… In order to have the database, you need to have the website. You can’t just have a… How’re you gonna populate the people if it’s that… It doesn’t come through an entry or some sort of form. So yeah, to me, just getting leads without having a place to land, is pointless. You know?
Allan McNabb: Yeah, and, you know, we’ve… We have clients and oftentimes, they’ll wanna run the ads and we’ll say, “Well, where are we gonna take them to?” And there’s a problem with the page, maybe they’re asking them to fill out 20 different things, I’m saying you, there’s just no way that’s gonna happen, but we’ll give it a try. And then a week later, we come back and you’ve had hundreds of people go to the website and not one person fill out a lead, a lead generation, none. And so have the website, again, it doesn’t have to be like the Taj Mahal, but it has to look respectable, look nice, look good for what you’re doing. And have the call to action there, have the lead generation form, and we’ve got some information on our website, imagebuildingmedia.com, I mean, there are things that you can have there, if you have a video on the landing page, 80% higher conversion rate. If you’ve got some testimonials, preferably video testimonials, higher conversion rate. Don’t have too many words, 200 words maximum on the landing page, just things like that, just very simple things like that to encourage people to fill out that form, get the lead, goes into your database and then you start with the email marketing, that has some of the highest ROI.
So that’s basically it, in a nutshell. Okay, Jorge let me again, share my screen here, I want to just touch on the next point we have… Oops, sorry, here, the next point that we have here. And say someone says, “Okay, well, okay, a website. What do I need?” So I put the minimum requirements here, and basically, you need a good quality business hosting service to start out with. Sometimes people will start with the GoDaddy, which GoDaddy’s terrible customer service stinks. Yeah, but they’ll start with GoDaddy and that’s what $2, $3 a month. But that’s not the quality. You call GoDaddy and you say, “Hey, I want some business-class website hosting”, starting out price is $29 a month. I mean, that’s where you need to think about being. You need a host, that’s got the speed, the technology, the security, the reliability, because Google’s not gonna be sending people to your website if they’re just gonna sit there and just wait for it to load forever. You know the website needs to have the infrastructure to rank on search engine, it’s gotta have the design that’s appropriate, that we’ve been talking about quite a bit. And none of this is a lot of money. We’re not talking about spending $10,000 or $20,000, nothing like that. But it’s simply making good choices, be informed, know what you need to do in that regard.
So now Jorge, I wanna go down here and talk about lead generation, and I’ve got… Hang on one second, before I do that, there’s… There’s something different that I want to do, I want to share… I want everybody to know we’re talking about the host for the website. I did a live Facebook video about this today, and we’ve got this article on our website, in our news section, Google’s new ranking algorithm for 2021. They’re giving us a heads up about this. And we need to know what’s going on. And if I can put it in a nutshell, right here what’s important, it’s how fast a page loads, is it secure with an SSL, HTTPS? Now, let me tell you this, if you’re with a good reliable business-class hosting for your website and I’ll put in a shameless plug, that’s all that we sell to our customers, it comes with this security, the HTTPS, the SSL included in the price. You don’t have to spend 70 to 100 or $125 a year to buy that separately. Okay, so what has Google told us? Has to be fast, has to be secure, has to be mobile-friendly, has to deliver a good user experience, not decrease in the performance with ads and don’t you hate those websites when they load, everything sort of moves around as it’s all loading, none of that.
And so again, just understand the $2 a month website hosting, $3 a month website hosting is not gonna cut it. If you want somebody to be able to Google your name, Google your business name, that’s not gonna cut it. And so just know the small investment upfront that you need to have the website, that’s necessary. Now, Jorge I wanna move on, I wanna talk about… I wanna talk about, just a little bit more about using your website, I want to talk about being found online. Yeah, one of the most frustrating things is to know somebody, you know their name, you don’t have their phone number, you Google their name and you don’t find them or their business. Isn’t that the most frustrating thing?
Jorge Vazquez: Absolutely, super frustrating.
Allan McNabb: It’s crazy. So I wanna show you, this is one, I looked this up today. So Ray Hendricks is one of the Greystone agents and, Jorge, just tell us just a moment who Ray is and what he does for Greystone. Would you please? He’s not able to be with us today. He was, he’s driving and he’s listening, but he’s not able to be with us, so Jorge will you tell us a little bit about Ray, please?
Jorge Vazquez: Absolutely Ray is an awesome guy that has come to our firm to take it to the next level. He’s an active broker, very excited to have him in the team. He’s a superstar. Yes, he’s one of our agents broker here, and one of the leaders of the company at Greystone.
Allan McNabb: That’s awesome. So just as an experiment, getting ready for our training webinar today, I looked him up on Google, just put in Ray Hendricks, and number one. I don’t know. By the way, I don’t know if there’s any other Ray Hendricks in Tampa, Tampa Bay or Florida or anything.
Jorge Vazquez: Let’s just say there’s 200-300, and he’s number one.
Allan McNabb: Yeah. So, he’s number one, and by the way, number one with this real estate, realestateraytampa.com is the website he got from us with the Greystone special program we have for Greystone agents. Jorge, he’s had this for what? Maybe two months? And it’s already number one on Google.
Jorge Vazquez: Yeah.
Allan McNabb: Below that is realtor.com, North Tampa Chamber, Facebook, etcetera. Alright. So then I look up Real Estate Ray, which that is his… What do you call that? His nickname maybe, his handle, something like that, Jorge, Real Estate Ray?
Jorge Vazquez: Something, something, yeah.
Google My Business
Allan McNabb: Yeah. So here is, he is in the Google three-pack at the top of the page, and Jorge, we gotta talk about that. We gotta make sure time doesn’t run out on us, we gotta talk about Google My Business and being right up here in the three-pack. Okay?
Jorge Vazquez: Okay.
Allan McNabb: And I see, we’ve got some chats coming in, we’re gonna get to those also. Then you go down a little bit, here he is on all of this, and here’s his brand new website, it’s only been out there for a couple of months, first page. Alright, now, I also went over to Maps, ’cause you click right up here, this takes you over to Maps and you see right here, and the Greystone website, greystonefl.com is in this. And every business person, every real estate agent should have the Google My Business and their website, their profile page on the broker’s website, whatever it is. It should be in here. This is so important. Jorge, the Real Estate Ray comes here, the top of Google with the Greystone website. Talk about that, will you, please?
Jorge Vazquez: I’m very excited. Yes, absolutely. This is very important having your local business to register with Google. Very important. I mean, in general, Allan, it’s all about taking your online presence very seriously, taking your website very seriously. The misconception… I see thousands of agents and I’m talking about agents because that’s my industry, real estate agents, have a website they put together, have IDX that works half of the time and then, boom, they have a website and they feel like this is all they need to do. No. There’s other things you need to register, as Allan is saying with Google Business, there’s a whole bunch of other websites you need to register with. But at the same time, I know it could look overwhelming, but trust me, if you spend $50 extra a month, $100 extra a month as you can, and you pace yourself, in the next 3 or 4 years, you’re gonna see that you’re gonna have everything you need, you’re gonna have all the SEO, you’re gonna have the website that you need. But it’s all how you treat it. If you just put the basic minimum, might as well don’t do anything.
And we understand that it’s a budget thing, but you can’t just… Let me put it to you this way, if your website is a live entity, you should be checking on it in a weekly basis, checking the pulse, making sure that the entity is still alive. You can’t just set it… So you have to… It’s also like a plant, you have to continue putting fertilizer and stuff like that, but I will guarantee you if you do it little by little, you’re gonna have a bad-ass website within six months, a year, whatever the case may be. But yes, definitely, Allan, this is another great tool, having… The more connections, backlinks you have to your website, the more relevant you’re gonna be. Absolutely.
How to Prevent Spammers from Signing up on a Lead Generation Form
Allan McNabb: For sure. Now, Jorge, I wanna take a question from Elaine, and she’s a web designer here in Tampa. She’s been with several of our meetings here, and I go to one of the networking meetings with her. Let’s answer her question. It’s, “How to prevent spammers from signing up to a lead generation plugin on a website, example, MailChimp.” So what happens is, you can have spammers, they’ll go to your website, they’ll fill out your lead generation form, and it just causes problems. Okay. So there’s a few things with that. Number one, you’re not gonna stop it all, don’t get frustrated by it. It’s part of being in business. That’s it. Somebody… Some crazy person wants to pay someone in a third world company or a group of people in a third world company, to just go out there and create havoc for people. I mean, there’s nothing you can do to stop it. But here are some things that you can do. Number one, make sure you’ve got reCAPTCHA. That’s where you’ve got to click the little thing for Google, and then you gotta choose the picture or something like that. Make sure that’s on there. Number two, keep all of your software in your website up-to-date. And again, let me give another shameless plug for our company Image Building Media, that’s part of our service for every customer that has their hosting through us. We do that, we take care of that because it is so important. Make sure that all of those are up-to-date.
What happens is software isn’t perfect. It constantly needs to be updated. Whether you’re running WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, whatever it is, it’s not perfect. It’s constantly being updated. And so what you need to do… The security vulnerabilities, the spammers find them and begin to exploit them. When they do that, then the software writers find, “Oh, we’ve got a problem. We need to fix it.” So if you don’t go in and update your software, you’re just leaving that vulnerability open and you’ll start getting spam all over the place. So that’s basically all you need to do. Make sure you’ve got reCAPTCHA on every form. So Google is going to check to see if… They’re gonna make them pass the test.
Number two, keep your software up to date all the time. Every time you go into your website, make sure it’s up to date. If you’re putting in on an article or a video or something in your website, and maybe we’ll have time to talk about content here in a moment. Every time you go in there, just check. And of course, use a company like ourselves. If you got any problems, we’ll take care of it for you. We’ll make sure that’s all up to date. Okay, thank you, Elaine. And again, if anyone has a question, just put it in ChatForce and we’ll do our best to get to that. Jorge, let me share my screen and show the Google My Business because as you know so much and you’re… Let me share again and I’ll make sure I get this right. Can you see my screen there, Jorge?
Jorge Vazquez: Yes, yes.
Allan McNabb: Okay, for some reason, I can’t… Oh, there it goes. Okay. So as you know Jorge, and I imagine, well, maybe everyone in our audience today, one of the easiest ways to get to the top of Google is have your Google My Business profile filled out accurate. So important, have the correct category selected and have it verified. Usually to verify it, they’re going to send you a postcard to your business address. Alright. So to do this, you just simply go to your info once you have it started out, started up, and you just fill all of this out. And again, our category, internet marketing service, and you just make sure all of this is filled out. And it’s easy, you say, “My hours are not that important.” Well, it’s that important to Google. And so, if they’re going to send people to your place of business to have an appointment, you need to have the hours in there. Special hours, are you closed on Christmas, or something like that. But there was…
And I don’t see it right now. There was a notice for COVID-19. Go in there. Put your COVID-19 notice in there. Make sure you’ve got your phone number. Make sure you’ve got your shortened name. Make sure 100% you’ve got your website. This is a free backlink. This is some of the strongest SEO backlink you’re ever gonna get. Have your appointments in there. List all of your services in here, and they’ll give you an option to have a price. Put a price, that price range, put the price range in there, and put a great description that has your keywords in there to what’s important to you. Add photos. You can post to this. It’s so important. And again, the software we provide to our customers for those we do full-service social media, we post to this. It is so important. But, Jorge, this is the one thing you can do today to get on the first page of Google within about a month. Alright. So do you have a comment on that? I know it’s important for you and your company and you’ve got several of those.
Jorge Vazquez: No, absolutely. Like I said, how hard is it to find a backlink? How hard is that? And if you don’t mind explaining to the audience the power of a backlink very quick and how you can do it literally within 30 days with Google out of all people?
Allan McNabb: Yeah. Jorge, we talked last time about getting backlinks on YouTube, powerful, powerful, powerful. I mean, YouTube is the second busiest website in the world, second most used search engine. You can get it there. You can get it here on Google. And let me, Jorge, I wanna go over to the cheat sheet here a little bit. And I want to talk about generating leads with organic search because that’s really what SEO gets down to. It is at… Because of the reason of SEO when we’re looking at Ray Hendricks, he appeared on the first page of Google those occasions we looked at him. And so, I’m also going to share it with you. I’ve got a link right here for you. And I knew there was no way we were going to get around and talking very much at all about SEO. A link on the cheat sheet takes you to one of our major pages on our website where we thoroughly go into SEO. I mean, you’re gonna get a great education. If you can understand this page, you’re gonna study to understand this page, you’re gonna get a great education.
Three Important Components to SEO
Jorge, let me break it up like this. There’s three important components to SEO. One is content on your website. And I wanna click over here on the sheet, website content right there. Website content, number one. Number two is backlinks. A backlink is a link from one website to your website. In other words, it’s the link on Google My Business to your website. It’s the link on YouTube to your website. As a matter of fact, I pulled up this right here. This is our YouTube channel, and this is one of the featured videos right there, boom, backlink to our company. I mean, that is gold. That is gold. And the third component is Google’s algorithm AI, an algorithm. Now, there’s nothing you can do about that third point, but you can do something about the first two points. Basic backlinks just with filling out your profiles, super important. Do that. Those are all great. Then focus on your content because, Jorge, what happens? If you’ve got good content, what are people gonna do? They’re gonna link to it, aren’t they?
Jorge Vazquez: Absolutely.
Allan McNabb: Have great content on your website. So those are the three major components. And Jorge, before we run out of time here, I want to share… This is the link I’ve got right here, content marketing stats. There’s a lot of web pages that have these stats, but I want to… And I encourage you to go through all of these, but let me just pull up a few. Why is it important to put content on your website? And Jorge, tell me, I think this is one of the things most businesses neglect is they do not put, whether it be articles, videos, whatever it may be, they don’t put it on their website and someone goes there and they say, “Well, you’ve not put anything on your website for three or four years.” And I think that is a huge, huge mistake. What do you think?
Jorge Vazquez: Yeah, I think that the conception is that most business owners do not believe it. They don’t believe it. We tell them, listen, it’s all about content. It’s all about having great articles, education, first of all, and you’re gonna start bringing traffic, but most people just don’t believe it. They don’t believe it until they see it. I could tell you, I was one of those guys 10 years ago, and I had a guy like Allan said to me, “Hey! Content, content.” I was like, “What? No, no, no. Why do I need to do that? Let me post pictures, pictures,” but no. But once the client or the business owner sees the results for the first time, then they become a believer. Then they want to create books, e-books. [chuckle] They wanna do everything. But I think that most people have their websites. They think that just having a website… That’s it. And especially for realtors. One of the worst, most awful websites I’ve seen in my life come from realtors, because they think that it’s all about having access to the MLS just having their picture there and that that solves the problem. Who really in their right mind would utilize that website for more than once? Who would really… It’s not sexy. It’s just there’s nothing else to do there. So I do believe… Make it something live. You have to constantly provide more feedback if you want readers followers. You know the easiest way to sell your product is through a fan.
Allan McNabb: Exactly, exactly.
Jorge Vazquez: It’s so easy.
Allan McNabb: And that’s one of the big things with content marketing… The sales funnel. You have to understand sales funnel if you’re gonna be in sales. The sales funnel starts with exploration and education. It doesn’t start with, I’m gonna go buy something. Now, maybe if you’re selling something that costs 50 cents or $5. But if you’re selling something that is of great value, like you’re selling houses and homes, people are gonna do research, they’re gonna check people out, and oftentimes, they’re gonna take a long time to do that. They’re gonna educate themselves. They’re gonna learn, and when it gets time to buy, who are they gonna buy from? And Jorge and his company, great for years, even before Graystone, even before Jorge created Graystone, and he educates people. And then when they get ready to invest, or maybe they’re investors already, when they get the next money to spend on investments, where are they gonna go? They’re gonna go to the person who’s been educating them all of this time. Let me throw out these stats. I encourage everybody to go check this out. I’ve got the link in our cheat sheet.
Content marketing is incredibly cost-effective and offers an amazing ROI. As a matter of fact, it costs 62% less and generates approximately three times the volume of leads. It’s incredible having content on a website to drive people down the sales funnel. That’s what we’re talking about. Let me do two more here. Content drives conversions-like gangbusters. Number three, the biggest brands in the world realize that content is the future. And Jorge, content… Real estate people, a lot of times are great at making videos, right?
Jorge Vazquez: Yeah.
Allan McNabb: But that is instant content. Let me just show you over here. Let me go to our blog really quickly. And I’m going to go here to our Twitter webinar that we did, and Jorge, I’ve got 9000 plus words on this page. I’ve got a little introduction. I’ve got information. I’ve got the video, and then I’ve got a transcript of 8000 plus words. And the transcript, we’ve got a company that does a transcript for us. It cost me 50, 60 bucks to have all of this content!
Jorge Vazquez: This is… A lot of synergy there. You don’t even have to… You worry about, I don’t know what to write. Do the transcript of the video.
Allan McNabb: Absolutely. Okay, well, Jorge, our time is getting close to being up, I see that we don’t have any more questions in the chat. I’ve not been able to keep a watch over Facebook to see if any have come in there, but… Okay, yeah. Okay, transcript. $50 for a video. Yeah, as a matter of fact, I’ll put in the chat right here… Thanks for the question. And I think I talked about this with our YouTube, training Scribie. Scribie is the company. It’s like 80 cents per minute. So, if you have a two to three-minute video, what do they cost you? A couple, three bucks. And in a way, it’s free content. It’s repurposing content, which is really super big in the marketing…
[overlapping conversation]
Jorge Vazquez: If you have an accent like me, it’s gonna be like 10 bucks a minute. [chuckle]
Allan McNabb: Hey, I’ll tell you very quickly. So, with the last transcript I bought, and I think I paid… Oh, it might have been 80 bucks or something, ’cause it was a long webinar. Plus, also, I pay for the transcript that we upload into YouTube, and not use their automated one, which is terrible. So I pay a little extra for that, and it was an extra 25 bucks because of accent. But you know what, it’s worth it. All day long. All day long.
Jorge Vazquez: I wanted to end it with this. Right. If the internet was gone tomorrow, what will we miss the most? Think about it. Allan, what will you miss the most? Being able to find out something, right? Information will be the first thing we will miss. Not the pictures, not social media. What we would miss the most, is be able to ask Google a question. Find, research something. So, that’s why, information is the most important thing. And by the way, one thing that I always say, as soon as you have a really good article, it’s evergreen. Talking about something in general, it could last forever. Somebody… You could die for god’s sake. If somebody could look at your video and say, you know… You could change somebody’s life. Look at it that way too. Everything you do online, it stays there forever. So educate, your clients, make them fans, make them love your branding. With that said, you need to look professional. And the sale will come on its own. Don’t push it. But, very important that you work on your online presence. It is very relevant now. In 5, 10 years from now, it will be the only thing that matters. So take advantage of it.
Take Away
Allan McNabb: Absolutely. I appreciate the great comments coming in. You’re welcome, to everyone. We do have a question here. What do you think about podcast? With a video, you can do a post, yes. And you can do a podcast. Hey, let me give you this quick little tip. You can… With the videos, and with the software that I use, just to dress them up a little bit. You can get just the audio file. You upload the audio file into SoundCloud. They’ve got a free account, their paid account is very inexpensive. It will auto-generate the podcast, and all that, automatically generated. It is one of the greatest things out there. So podcasts are great. And two, with podcast, include a transcript. Include a transcript. Alright, Jorge, our time is up. Thanks again to everyone for the great comments. And again, I’m Allan McNabb with Image Building Media, internet marketing with proven results. And Jorge, give us your website and your tagline, and all of that.
Jorge Vazquez: This is Jorge with Graystone Investment Group, where you invest. And with the rest, please follow, Image Building Media, because we’re gonna be doing this every two weeks. We want you guys to participate more. Sometimes not all the questions get answered. We have very low participation, but please, take the time, next time. And thank you for the time. That’s it. Thank you Allan. I appreciate it.
Allan McNabb: Thanks guys, I appreciate it. And Raffi, I see you’re there. Thanks for being with us today. Also appreciate that.
Jorge Vazquez: Well, Raffi, thank you for the support. Appreciate it.
Allan McNabb: Thanks brother. Bye.
Image Building Media
Image Building Media is an internet marketing company based in Tampa, Florida, serving clients in various industries throughout the U.S.
We specialize in internet marketing, including SEO, social media marketing, website design, content marketing, video marketing, email marketing, SMS marketing, mobile web marketing, online reputation management, CRM integration, and more. We also provide consulting services, including conversion analytics.
To learn more about Image Building Media and our services, book a free consultation or contact us direct.