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Your Business Blog: Doing It Right — Part 1

If you own your own business, or are thinking of starting your own business, perhaps you’ve heard that you should have a blog. Maybe you’ve even gone so far as to go over to WordPress.com or Medium or Tumblr and get an account. Maybe you’ve even written a post or two. No matter where you are in the process — whether you haven’t started yet, or you’ve already launched but feel a little stuck, or have been blogging for a long time but aren’t getting the results you want, this Doing It Right guide will get your business blog off-and-running in the right direction.

We’ll break this Guide down into four parts:

Understanding Your Business and Your Customers
Picking A Topic for Your Blog (A Good One!)
Creating (and Maintaining) A Publishing Schedule
Creating A Promotion Plan

We’ll tackle each part in a fair bit of depth, giving you step-by-step instruction on how to create a blog that is not only successful as a blog, but helps you achieve your business goals.

Step 1: Understand Your Business and Your Customers

Depending on the current stage of your business and your personal business background, you may have a more or less firm handle on this already. But if you don’t, now is the time to get as clear and explicit as possible. A great place to start is by creating 1–3 target marketing-personae. If you don’t know what one is, you should go back and review our article on creating your first marketing persona. Seriously. Do that before you do the rest of this. It can be a PITA, and for the action-oriented entrepreneur it can seem too much like “business school BS”, but trust me — it will make your life immeasurably easier down the road, and your blog a much greater success.

You may notice that our persona article is focused on brand-new businesses and creating a persona purely from your imagination. If you’re a more established business with existing customers, or have a solid grasp on your target market, you should augment the process by conducting interviews with your sales team, customer support, and the customers themselves. We like our template better than theirs, but HubSpot has a great blog post on how to conduct these interviews. How to select your interviewees, how to solicit them and get them to engage, and what questions to ask them.

Regardless of whether or not yours is a brand-new business, you may also notice that we suggested starting with at least one persona. You can move on to the rest of this blog discussion with only one, but we strongly recommend you not do so. Creating a meaningful, successful blog is going to be challenging, and the most challenging part is going to be selecting your topic. Going through that exercise will be substantially easier if you have more source material — in other words, if you have more, good-quality personae developed. Here it’s less important to take one persona and create multiple, more detailed sub-personae; rather, you want to hit as many of the top-level archetypes for your customer base as you possibly can. The more different the better. Absolutely if you sell both to consumers and businesses, you’ll want to create different personae for those. But also if you have a wide fluctuation of purchaser income, or a wide fluctuation of other demographic parameters such as gender or age, do those as well.

Once again, really — go do it now. Then come back. We’ll be waiting here, I promise.

OK. Are you done? Great. Now you can get started.

Grab your marketing personae, and add some additional information — focus in on their interests, hobbies, spending patterns, travel patterns; really, any detail you can imagine which is fairly consistent across the persona in question. You want to strike a balance between generic and specific. For example, if you’re business is an ice-cream parlour, it may be common for teenagers to ride up to your shop on their bicycles — so put “rides bicycle” as a hobby. You probably don’t want to put “rides BMX”, even if you have lots of kids riding their BMXes to your store, because you’re better off capturing the broader category. If you’re having a hard time striking this middle ground, don’t worry about it — you’re better off brainstorming and listing every tiny detail than fretting over whether an item is too generic or not generic enough.

Once you’re done creating your marketing personae, and flushing them out with some additional details to help inform your blog content, come back here and move on to Step 2: Picking A Topic for Your Blog (A Good One!).

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Credits
Thanks to Life of Pix for the image of the engine.
Male head silhouette by SimonWaldherr – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Twitter Advertising: Getting Started

Post author By theibisnetwork
Post date February 12, 2015
Categories In Marketing, Social Media, Twitter

Twitter has lots of powerful, native functionality that you should already be using, including Twitter cards and pinned tweets. Now we want to take a quick look at advertising on Twitter.

Get A Twitter for Business Account

First of all, whether you intend to purchase Twitter advertising or not, you should sign up for a Twitter for Business account. You should do this no matter what because it’s free, and it gives you access to Twitter’s analytics console, which can inform your future actions on the platform, even if you don’t intend to advertise.

Getting access to this analytics data is easy: just go to Twitter Ads and sign in with your account. There is a lot of data available here, so we’ll cover analytics in detail in another post. Once you’ve signed in, you’ll have access to all of that data, but you’ll need to provide a credit card to get access to the advertising tabs. Now that you have an account, you can get started advertising.

Use Tailored Audiences

Twitter gives you some awesome ways to reach exactly the right audience with your message.

If you want to be really specific, you can upload and target just your own lists. Your list can be Twitter IDs, but can even include email addresses or mobile phone numbers — Twitter will automatically find users who have provided that information. Just upload our list and Twitter will map it to who’s active on Twitter. This is a great way to send targeted messages to existing customers, or special promotions just to prospects.

Another great audience you can target are people who have already visited your website. This is the idea of retargeting that we discussed in our post on Facebook advertising.

Target Demographics

For most advertising campaigns, you’ll want to reach out to people who don’t already know about you. To do that as effectively as possible, you’ll want to make sure you hone in on the right demographics.

Twitter is a global platform, but odds are you don’t want to advertise to the whole world. You may not even want to advertise to the whole state if you’re a local business (then again, maybe you do). You can limit your promotion to any combination of countries, states/regions, metro areas, or even postal codes.

You can also specify gender, language, type of device, and mobile carrier. We suspect you’ll usually leave these blank, but it’s worth putting some thought into it — if you can be more targeted, you should be. So, for example, if you’re a beauty spa, maybe you want to promote a tweet just to men advertising your Valentine’s Day special.

Find The Right People

Whether you’re target-demographic is broad or narrow, you’ll still want to be reaching out to the right people within that demographic. Because Twitter is a social platform, finding those people can be easy — if people are interested in a specific topic, then they’re probably already tweeting about it, searching for it, or following a certain set of Twitter influencers.

Twitter lets you target your ads by keyword, interest, or Twitter handle. Targeting @usernames can be particularly powerful. It allows you to target people similar to those following the username. So, if you’re a sports bar in downtown Detroit, maybe you want to target users similar to followers of @DetroitRedWings. You can combine these different targets as well. So, you could add “beer” to interests and target people in your geography who are similar to those who follow the Red Wings OR who are interested in beer.

If you want to get even more specific, you can use keywords. Keywords target, well, key words — but specifically, keywords in search queries, recent Tweets, and Tweets with which the user recently engaged. This is perfect for when you want your Tweet to drive direct user action by reaching users when your keywords are top of mind, or to catch users in the right moment when they are asking for specific content. So, if you’re offering a post-game happy hour, maybe you want to specifically target people who are searching for “cheap beer”. You get the idea.

Pro Tip: Use Twitter to Build Your Email List

Most of the time, your campaigns on Twitter will be designed to increase followers, increase Tweet engagement, or drive traffic to your website. But Twitter also has what they call a “leads campaign”. Leads campaigns are designed to help you collect emails from people who express interest in your offer by allowing Twitter users to quickly and securely share their email address with you. With two simple clicks, potential customers can share their contact information with you. This is a great way to get people to sign up for your email newsletter.

This article is part of our February series on social-media advertising. Hopefully you learned something new! The first article in the series was last week: 4 Facebook Advertising Tips. To make sure you get the rest of the articles, sign up for our weekly emails, either in the page footer, or over at the top of the right-hand column!

How Is Your Email Open Rate?

“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” – Mark Twain

Mark Twain is dead though, none the less. And some day the same may be said for email. Hard as that may be to imagine now, it’s possible there will once again be a world without email. Or at least we may see a world where email has evolved into something that is so different from what it is today as to be unrecognizable. But for fortunately for us, we live in the present. We have email, we use it every day and contrary to many popular beliefs, the reports of its insignificance and death are, by all measurable data, greatly exaggerated.

According to a Madison Logic stat, 122,500,453,000 emails are sent every hour. That’s 122 billion, and that’s every hour. Yes, that’s a lot of emails. And with this kind of volume, it validates the view that email is far from irrelevant, but is in practice, very relevant indeed. And it’s relevant for a number of reasons.

For opt-in email lists, your clients and prospects have asked you to update them, and the preferred channel is email. This group wants the info, and email is a cheap way to deliver it. Emails can be easily personalized. Names, preferences, interests can all be quickly customized into email. And the best reason for the relevance of emails is: it’s inexpensive.

And what’s more, email ‘gets’ mobile. In a recent report from the Pew Research Center, 52% of cell phone owners used their phones to check their emails. And email works on other mobile devices too. With the current migration of users from PCs to mobile devices, this is becoming a greater and greater space in which you need to be seen and heard.

So with email being all these things, it makes sense to use it well. Here are 5 tips for your emails to get them noticed, and bring up your email open rate. After all, if your emails are not getting opened, then it doesn’t matter what the content is.

1. Focus your list – Email is one of the most effective channels you have when it comes to targeting the right people. The key is email lists. Building the right email list from past or potential customers who have opted in will ensure you are hitting the right people. When you have created the right list for your message, odds are that the majority will show an actual interest.

2. Keep it simple – Back in the 60s, Archie Bell and the Drells had a dance called the Tighten Up. Your emails need to listen to that song. In an email campaign, your first email needs to be concise, to the point, well written and poignant. Not an easy task by any means, but very important. Emails that are too long, and too rich with information tend to be glossed over, deleted or simply ignored. Keeping your email message tight and to the point will get your message across in the few seconds you have the readers attention.

3. Get your Subject Line Right – Well written subject lines increase open rates. Capitalizing emails helps and punctuation isn’t really relevant (But, keep in mind: using all caps is a sin that is UNFORGIVABLE). You should also keep your character count to a minimum, MailChimp suggests that subjects with 10-49 characters are most effective. And lose any spammy words to avoid getting dinged by filters. Words like FREE, $$$ or 100%. Following these points, the email subject line 5 Steps to a Better Mortgage works better than five steps to a better mortgage.

4. Ask a question or include a deadline – Where there’s a question, readers will naturally want the balance of an answer. Americans simply don’t like leaving things half done. Questions challenge and inspire readers to find out more. In relation, implying a deadline is also an effective call to action. Register Today! is a great CTA, but the subject line: Open registration is not so great.

And don’t do both together. Why Aren’t You Registering Right Now??? is probably not the right tone to get voluntary action on the part of the reader.

5. Personalize the ‘From’ field – This is the 2nd line of defense for many of us. When an email is balancing on the razors edge of ‘Open’ and ‘Delete’, the ‘From’ field can tip the balance in Open’s favor. Having the ‘From’ field populated with NoReply@SomeCo.com is not a way to communicate authenticity. Having the field populated with a first name and company can be the hail mary that scores an open.

The point of all this is that while email is about as old as most readers, it is still as relevant as you are. The barriers to getting started with effective email marketing campaigns are low compared to other options, and if you are too busy to handle email marketing on your own, it is an easily outsourced effort that can bring in solid, traceable ROI.

On top of that, when email marketing is tied in to rich content on your web site and in your blog, the results can be amplified many times over. Including email as a core part of your overall social-marketing effort has the potential to create and reinforce a direct connection between you and your prospects.

Do you use email in your marketing efforts?
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The Failures of Success

Performing on the high wire without a safety net is not a way I’d suggest to learn from failure. Odds are, your first time on the tight rope, you’ll make a mistake. On the plus side, you’ll probably only make one, so you got that goin’ for ya.

But in life, as in business, failure is part of the game. You give it your best shot, with a positive attitude, a bounce in your step, and reality comes crashing in, seemingly destroying everything you built. It’s not fatal, no matter how we sometimes react to it, but it hurts.

Equally, as much as failure is part of the game, bouncing back is part of the game too. And it’s never cliché, because like every great story, each success cultivated from failure is a unique and inspiring truth. Learning from failure and applying those lessons is the key to making failure part of the process, and not and end to it.

1. Face your problems head-on
Mark Hendrickson started a company called Plancast in 2009. It had a lot going for it early on, and success was just around the corner. Then everything went wrong. He learned a lot from that failure. “I think the most important lesson here is that we should have tackled these problems more head-on through particular design changes rather than hoping the positive aspects of our product would simply outweigh the negative ones.”

2. Listen to the right people (not just your friends, your critics too)
During a TED Talks presentation, Elon Musk said, “Really pay attention to negative feedback and solicit it particularly from friends, this may sound like sort of simple advice but hardly anyone does that and it’s incredibly helpful.” David Cohen, a very successful entrepreneur in his own right, wrote, “Always keep in mind that the most critical customers who post the most awful reviews can sometimes present you with your biggest opportunities.”

3. Take the long view, you will out live your failure, not the other way around
Nick Woodman was a surfer. After that he was a B student. Then he failed with 2 businesses and burned a few investors along the way. His failures drove him harder in his next business, GoPro. “I was so afraid that GoPro was going to go away like Funbug that I would work my ass off. That’s what the first boom and bust did for me. I was so scared that I would fail again that I was totally committed to succeed.” He’s one of the youngest billionaires today. But stay tuned on this one, he may still have some lessons ahead, Apple just filed for some very GoPro-like patents.

4. Own your failures
You can go to a conference about failure. No kidding. In 2009, Cassandra Phillipps founded FailCon. It was a one day event featuring presentations about the biggest failures from successful executives. You know what? It failed. Ashley Good who partnered with Cassandra and is a CEO in her own right comments, “You can actually say to yourself, ‘Just because I failed doesn’t mean I am a failure.’” And that advice is working out for Cassandra. She is starting up FailCon 2.0 in 2015. Look for it this fall.

The thing that all these stories have in common is that failure was one chapter in a longer book. Whether you are hitting the wall in listings or loan applications or goofed up your most recent project, every shortcoming comes with a lesson. The ones who look for that lesson usually heal up and get out there again with an improved attitude and a bit more knowledge to face future challenges.

So, how many failures will it take for you to get over the hump?

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Does Your Landing Page Convert?

Like many things in marketing and advertising, advertising online is effective when all the pieces come together. Lots of great ideas don’t live up to expectations because the system fails at some point. That point might be the first thing your potential customers see when they arrive at your site from one of your advertisements.

The Landing Page

Your landing page is the front door to your website for these visitors, and if it isn’t done right, you might not get the leads you paid for.

Done well, a landing page will push people who arrive at your site quickly through to your call to action. Whether you want them to enter your contest, or download your ebook, a landing page should present no barriers, and no confusion. If your landing page is done poorly, potential customers may not make a 2nd attempt to connect with you and go through that door.

1. Communicate clearly
Don’t say anything unnecessary on your landing page, only the facts. Minimalistic, sparse, whatever you want to call it, keep it simple. You need to communicate your unique value proposition (UVP) front and center. Your ‘give away’ needs to be prominently featured and your call to action (CTA) needs to be simple and straightforward. Anything more is decoration.

2. Give a little, get a little
Landing pages are generally built to get leads. Visitors land here, and if your page is working, they literally fall right through to your prospect funnel. When you give them something, like a subscription to a newsletter, a webinar or a white paper, they’ll feel good about giving you their contact info. Put a little sugar in your landing page to build trust and credibility.

3. The call to action
When that visitor starts typing, you get one shot to do it right. Keep the call to action simple and clear, but make it unavoidable. Your CTA should have 5 boxes maximum: first and last name, company name, email, phone number. Beyond that, you’re wasting their time. Make the submit button clear and obvious. Color is key. Green is always a positive reinforcement color choice. Blue is nice too.

4. Clean design
This is the easiest thing to get wrong. Don’t over think this and don’t reinvent the wheel. The easier you make it for people to see what you’re offering, and what you want in return, the more likely they will play along. Make it easy to navigate, choose complementary colors, use a liberal amount of white space, and keep your entire page above the fold. You have 5 seconds to get them to initiate action. Test it before you launch it. If your testers can’t do it in 5, it won’t get done by visitors.

Landing pages are the starting point of your engagement with a prospect. They are the key point in a successful inbound marketing campaign. Every marketing effort you run and every offer you make should drive visitors to a unique landing page that ties in to the theme and location of each campaign.

What does your landing page look like?
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4 Facebook Advertising Tips

Facebook is known to every person you know. And probably every person they know. It’s ubiquitous, it’s everywhere and it is involved in most everything. Having a party? Make an event on Facebook and invite everyone you know. Have a major announcement? Put it up on Facebook, everyone will see it.

But what about your business and Facebook? Are they ‘friends’? Do they ‘like’ each other?

If your company’s Facebook presence is lacking, purchasing Facebook advertising is a great way to drive more value and traffic from your Facebook presence. But purchasing Facebook advertising is a path that some people claim is fraught with danger and failures. They are right. Many people who attempt to run advertising on Facebook don’t get the results they had hoped for. But from their failures, you can learn and benefit. You can be the Darwinian entrepreneur that makes the evolutionary step to success.

1. Remarketing – Remarketing is a way to retarget advertising to people who have connected with you before. They might have visited your website or showed some interest in your services or products or may have purchased them before. There is a simple conversion-tracking pixel provided by Facebook that you install on every page of your website that will track visitors and target your ads to them on Facebook.
Remarketing on Facebook helps build branding, is more likely to drive an interaction when they click through, increases conversion rates and helps you target a specific audience. All this delivers increased value to your ad spend.

2. Customize Your Audience – You already have an email list of customers and if you are doing it right, you have a list of potential customers too, right? So import them into custom audiences in Facebook and engage them. Facebook allows you to create these audiences by matching up your emails with emails they have for users. You can expect about 30% matching in most cases. Keeping them (customers vs. prospective customers) separated is a good idea, so that you can target each with a custom message.

3. Track Conversions – Facebook now offers an ‘offsite pixel’ that you can place on your site. It’s essentially a small piece of code like in the first point, above. The pixel code communicates with Facebook when an ad is clicked and from where the ad click happened. By adding that offsite pixel to a specific success page, Facebook can determine that the ad created a successful conversion. For example, if you wanted them to sign up for your newsletter, after they sign up, they are directed to a thank you page, where the pixel is placed.

4. Focus on the Newsfeed – The sidebar has been a neglected piece of real estate on Facebook for some time. On mobile, it’s a bit more so. (Note: Facebook is constantly changing algorithms to make the sidebar more relevant, so this is a true answer for a limited time only most likely.) In today’s environment, news-feed ads are one of the best options for your spend. And even more specifically, mobile news feed. The amount of Facebook traffic from mobile continues to edge out desktop visits and the trend should continue to widen that gap in the coming years, making mobile the preferred news feed to target.

These are just a few simple strategies for Facebook ad campaigns that can drive additional traffic to your website and increase engagement on Facebook. The list is by no means complete, but these are useful, practical tips to get you started. The first thing you need to do is to set up your account. From there, Facebook takes you through a pretty good tutorial and should answer most questions. Once you are ready to go on Facebook, consider some of these tips, and good luck.

Part 2: FSBO: Loan-Officer Marketing Ideas

There are way more than 5 ways to market to any group, FSBOs included. Part 1 of this article pointed out some of the pain points that For Sale By Owner properties may face. In this part, we’ll look at 5 ways that loan-officer marketing and mortgage brokers can market to FSBO sellers.

5 ways to Market to FSBO: Loan-Officer Marketing Ideas

1. Reach out – Every FSBO that you can find is a potential lead generator. Try spending a few minutes writing the sellers a hand-written letter to wish them well with the sale of their home. You can also let them know that if they should need any advice or if they want to try a different tact, that you are available to them, include your business card. Don’t sell them anything, just offer encouragement and an open door.

2. Qualify – The majority of FSBO deals fall through because potential buyers can’t get qualified. If a potential buyer does not qualify, it’s a waste of the sellers time and resources (pain point). By offering to pre-qualify all buyers, you will be providing an extremely valuable service and relieving the sellers of a pain point. The offer of free pre-quals will benefit you by getting interested home buyers to come to you. If the potential buyers qualify but don’t buy the initial house that brought them to you, you will still be in a position to work with them and a real-estate partner to help find them the house they want.

3. Follow – Does the listing have any open houses planned? If so, write a quick, hand-written letter (or if you prefer, an email) asking them about how it went. If the event was a success, great, if not, find out why and offer to set up another one. If they have no open houses planned, you could offer to assist in planning it or even arranging some catering, and attend. Again, you can meet potential buyers, pre-qualify them and become a valuable asset.

4. Wait – Watch the listing. If the listing drops in price (and it’s a pretty good bet it will) or it languishes past the average selling time for your area (for homes sold with an agent), get in touch with them to point this out. By reaching out to them, you just might save them from FSBO hell. They may be fed up with the demands and want to turn it over to a real estate-agent anyway, and if you are prepared, you’ll be the partner in mind.

5. Don’t press – The chance to work with an FSBO seller is real, and it has value. However, FSBO sellers can be very suspicious of anyone who is not a potential buyer and they may not readily identify the value proposition. FSBO sellers can be a tough nut to crack. It may take patience and a soft approach rather than the hard sell. As a loan officer, you can clearly demonstrate that you are not interested in payment from them, but that their prospects are also your prospects and by working together, you might just be able to help each other reach their goal.

By connecting with and offering to help FSBO sellers , you’re building a relationship with a seller. This connection will create a pipeline for leads for not only your loans, but also potentially for business real estate partners, home improvement contractors and landscaper/gardeners as well others..

When you come to an FSBO seller with solutions to save time and money, and avoid costly troubles as well, the seller will connect you you with buyers interested in purchasing homes, your target market. Also, the Seller will be looking to buy a home as well, right? Think you could spare the time to help arrange their mortgage too?

Are you marketing to FSBO sellers in your area?

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For Sale By Owner and Loan Officer

For Sale By Owner (FSBO) seems like a very American thing to do. You have a home, you want to sell it, you do all the work, you manage the process and you get the reward without having to pay anyone. Sounds good on the surface, but the reality is a bit different. (As most ‘to good to be true’ things are…)

9 percent of houses on the market today are for sale by owner. The most common reason for going the FSBO route for those who chose to do so was not wanting to pay realtor commissions. Of all homes that sold through FSBO, about 44 percent knew the buyer who ended up buying their home.

Eddie Tyner, general managerof forsalebyowner.com, reported that nationwide, FSBO sales are showing an upward trend, with a rise of16 percent nationwide in the second quarter 2014 over Q2 2013. With this kind of growth, FSBO may spell opportunity.

5 most common FSBO mistakes that Loan Officers can help with

The process of selling a house is not a walk in the park. Even good real estate agents experience some issue that complicates things in the course of almost every deal. As a loan officer, it’s important to know that virtually every FSBO seller will have some challenges. Knowing the problems is great starting point for connecting with the people who want to sell their homes by themselves. If you learn what people are doing wrong, you can prepare solutions for them. By adding value and finding common ground, you can begin to show that you understand the challenges, that you are a professional with experience and that you are bringing solutions to the table. The reward is that by adding value to the sellers efforts, you will be introduced to the buyers, your target market.

Here are some common problems that FSBO properties experience.

1. The price is all wrong. Either pricing is too high or too low. Helping a FSBO find the right price point is a great way to get an in.

2. No Marketing Campaign – The seller has no idea how to market their home. Look to see if they are on the MLS database.

3. Slow response and flexibility issues – This is an issue that most FSBOs never consider. Selling a house takes full-time dedication. If they are not able to flexibly meet the showing times requested by buyers orif they cannot answer emails and texts immediately, it might be time to bring in an agent. (You can make the introduction)

4. Not fixing up the property – Help them see the value that fixing up the property prior to putting it on the market brings to the final price.

5. No pre-sale inspection – If they failed to complete a pre-sale inspection, explain the benefits. If they think they can rely on the potential buyer to carry out the pre-sale, remind them that this puts them at the mercy of the buyer and their inspector.

These 5 points are only a few of many points on which you can connect with the sellers. Consider that many properties that start out as an FSBO are only testing the water. They are on the FSBO market for a few weeks to see if someone bites. Reaching out to them early may fit perfectly with their existing plans.

How are you reaching out to the For Sale By Owner market?

On Wednesday, we’ll have a look at ways to market to FSBOs in the 2nd part of this article. Go to Part 2.

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Keep Your Eye on the Boomerang Buyers

For any one older than 7 years old, you probably will remember 2008. That was the year the American economy almost drove itself off a cliff. How anyone survived that crash is something historians will debate, and citizens will be paying for, for decades. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your take, the credit market has a memory span of about 7 years. Personal credit scores are beginning to forget that year altogether. Like a bender in Vegas, that long night will be a forgotten footnote with only the errant tattoo or phone photo to show for it.

The 7 Year Itch

A foreclosure (or damage to credit from something like a short-sale) often impacts credit for seven years or in some cases longer. People whose homes were sold short or foreclosed in 2008 at the depths of the crisis are going to be crossing the 7 year mark this year, and with a bit of luck and good planning, might be in a position to think about home ownership.

In many cases, it may take a few more years to qualify for a mortgage, but getting approved for a mortgage after seven years or earlier in some cases, can be done if people are willing to put in the effort. And this is the year that those people who put in the effort will be arriving on the market. According to RealtyTrac, about 7.3 million boomerang buyers will be crashing the U.S. housing market party.

However, all 7.3 million won’t be showing up at the same time (that would just kill the vibe). RealtyTrac estimates that only about 500,000 people with a foreclosure from this time will be in a position to be approved for a mortgage this year. A further 1 million former foreclosure victims will be eligible next year, and about 1.3 million by 2018 before it starts to drop off over the course of the next 5 years.

Many of the applicants will have to deal with their housing to debt ratio, but those that find themselves on the right side of the equation should come out with an FHA mortgage with the assistance of a few housing initiatives. The FHA has offered a Back to Work loan program since 2013 for people who lost their homes because of the housing crisis. VA loans — guaranteed by the Department of Veterans Affairs — will find some space here as well, with more lenient rules, and in some cases no down payment requirements.

Loan Officers and housing professionals that get involved with boomerang buyers might find themselves faced with clients that have learned the hard way what it takes to be successful home owners, and a real can-do attitude. Getting a handle on matching their expectations and offering the types of loans for which they qualify, might make them an attractive group in the coming years.

Are you getting Boomerang Buyers in your pipeline?

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What Kids Can Tell You About Marketing Strategies

Post author By theibisnetwork
Post date January 29, 2015
Categories In Marketing

Kids have a way of cutting through the distractions to see the center of issues that we, as adults, unwittingly struggle with. Kids can sometimes see through the layers surrounding issues and, like Occam’s razor split the issue open to its logical core. It can be brutal to hear, it can be comical, it can be utterly brilliant, but it is usually accompanied by a certain ‘a-ha’ moment of pure clarity. The moment when you realize someone just did something brilliant is a moment of true cool.

Successful marketing strategies are often a pursuit of the simplest way to convey a complex message. They often are the result of unorthodox thinking, outside-the-box approaches, brainstorming sessions and more that create simple and clever ideas. You know, the kinds of ideas that kids have every 10 seconds.

Listening to your kids may, at times, require enduring a jumble of single syllables repeated over and over. But at other times, it can yield insight that companies pay millions to achieve. Kids are some of the savviest creatures on the planet, and their ideas (not all of them mind you) are worth a listen.

Jim Lodico set up a lemonade stand with his daughter. He initially suggested to sell lemonade for 25¢. But his daughter got bored fast when he tried to explain cost, price, return on investment, etc. She looked at him and said “But Daddy, I just want to give it away. Our neighbors are so nice, I just want to give them the lemonade.”

Unable to convince his daughter otherwise, they went about setting up a lemonade stand for free lemonade. As the folks arrived at the stand set up outside, neighbors and strangers (they weren’t customers after all, they weren’t buying anything…they were people who wanted to participate in the activity) arrived for the lemonade. The first one offered 50 cents. So his daughter got a cup to put it in and left it out on the counter. That cup got seen by each and every following person…and they threw in their 50 cents or more each time. One guy stopped in his car to get some ‘free lemonade’ and gave her 3 bucks.

The brilliance of her insight is that if you give something of value to your target market, they will repay you in kind. Whether it’s your knowledge, some helpful tips, constructive advice or a product sample, when people interested in your product or service can try it out and get a feel for it, they will remember you. They will reward you, and they will tell their friends. When you are seen, identified and persistent, people will notice.

While we’re not advocating you giving away your product or service entirely for free (though there is something to be said for the freemium model), this notion of giving away value is exactly what content marketing is all about. The more valuable content you can give to people interested in your product or service for free, the more likely they will become paying customers in the future.

Jim’s daughter gave away lemonade, and her Dad got a great lesson in return, what are you giving away?

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