I've been doing it all wrong and I'm sorry :-)

I’ve been doing it all wrong and I’m sorry :-).  So, I spent an hour on a webinar with my website/email/seo Coach.  He pointed out some stats that kind of blew me away.  We talked about emails and social networking and variety of other things.  I’ve been totally clueless about Twitter and other social networking tools and how to use them as marketing tools.  I learned a ton in an hour conversation that I never knew before.   Here’s what I learned:

• Our website presence and SEO for our real estate club is great.  A testament to that is the number of memberships we’ve brought in over the last month.  An even greater testament is the number of people who come to the website and  join Boston AREIA without opting in.  So, bottom line is more people are finding us and more people like what they see than ever before.  So, hats off to my coach and his team for rebuilding our website, the SEO and other things they are providing and hats off to all of us for the new look and feel of the website.
• We email the list too much!  Uggh!  So, our open rate is good, but, it’s not great and not where we want it to be.  But, what’s worst is that people aren’t clicking on links in the emails, which means they aren’t fully engaged.  Also, the emails are too long, people open them to see a quick blurb, but aren’t reading the whole email because like everyone else out there, they are too busy in their lives.  Here I thought I was keeping people informed and reminded of meetings and upcoming events and what I’ve been doing is causing their eyes to glaze over.  So, I’m sorry!  Totally not my intent.  I did set up an email with quick, short links and the click rate was 10 times higher.  So, because you liked that, I will do more of it!
• We don’t push people to the right Facebook page.  Way back when we first started getting involved in FB, there wasn’t the option to set up as a business page.  The option was to set up as an individual.  So, we did and we have a good following on the page.  The problem is that we haven’t been converting people to the business page.  NOT GOOD!  So, if you are reading this…please LIKE our Boston AREIA Networking meetings page!
• We haven’t been pointing people to the website in our social networking posts, we’ve been linking to the email campaign…NOT GOOD!
• We don’t engage people on our Twitter account and use some techniques to go viral on Twitter.  I never understood how you could actually engage people on Twitter.  Go figure.  My coach was the first person that actually explained why and how and what the purpose of a hash tag is.  So, if you prefer to communicate through Twitter, please follow us @BostonAREIA which is our Twitter handle.  I promise to do a better job at keeping you informed.  Our goal is to get to 1000 followers before summer.  We’ve got some work to do.  LOL.
• We should be using more video.  I kind of knew that already and am so excited because I have a videographer coming in June to our meeting to create a beautiful, quick video for the front page of the website.  But, I’m also going to do a video training blog to help others with marketing for deals, building networks and more.

I learned more…which I will go into in a different blog post…from what I understand, my blog posts have to be around one page to keep your attention.  So, I will end for now.  You will have to email me at dette101@gmail.com to ask about my coach and his team.  And, make sure you get to the upcoming Boston AREIA meeting!  Tony Youngs is awesome!

DESIRE.  COMMIT.  SUCCEED!

Bernadette Trafton, Boston AREIA Chief Connector