I can’t emphasize how easy this marketing method is, nor the effectiveness per minute spent compared to other marketing venues. Here’s the formula… get ready because it’ll really blow your world away… it might scare you…
Within TwitterFeed, create RSS feeds for your blog to automatically post to both your Twitter and Facebook accounts
Blog blog blog!
The idea here is quite simple: harness the power of modern web technology to broadcast your message from a single place that reaches three key high-traffic sources (search engines, twitter, facebook) automatically for you.
There are a TON of ways to do the actual marketing portion (i.e. post topics, etc), but if you can’t figure out what messages you want to send to people you are probably in the wrong business.
Feel free to post questions and your blog, facebook and twitter info in the comments and MBL will be glad to be friends and follow you!
Everything in the mortgage industry seems to be in electronic form, loan applications, closing documents, etc. The benefits of having electronic forms can be taken even further by utilizing them beyond the loan process. You may not realize it, but nearly every document that you work with can be converted into an electronic form. Maybe your office still utilizes a paper form for employment applications. Or maybe you are using post it notes to let the secretary know you need more #2 pencils. Regardless of the task your old paper form is performing—an electronic form can do it better.
Electronic forms can also help you perform new tasks as well. You could use a form on your website to capture information from potential customers, perhaps offering them a free appraisal for filling the form out. You could send existing customers a form to pass on to their friends, offering a reward for each form that is returned to you. All of this can be done with a PDF. The form can be tracked, and even an email button inserted into the form to ensure that the form comes back to you.
Regardless if you need a paper form converted or a new form designed from scratch, electronic forms are the way to go. Get rid of the paper, post its and Word docs and utilize an electronic form.
Electronic Forms are beneficial in any industry. They can help save trees and reduce your companies carbon footprint, increase productivity and efficiency, and increase the accuracy with which data is collected. Square Melon Designs can convert your paper forms and outdated Word or PDF documents into dynamic electronic forms. We can also design a form from scratch or customize one of our many standard forms.
Is there a secret formula to winning a customer “for life”? Many say there is. In fact, entire marketing systems have been developed with the goal of earning life-long customers.
As a mortgage professional, do you put any value in doing business today in a manner that will help you do business with the same customer a few years from today?
Let’s assume for this article’s sake, that you Mr. or Ms. Reader, work towards repeat business with each of your customers. What specific behaviors do you engage in that increase your chances of getting a 2nd, 3rd, 9th deal from the same customer? If you don’t immediately have a list of answers to the question, it probably means you aren’t really working towards repeat business.
So what can you do? Here are a few simple ideas that may seem obvious, cliche or old fashioned, but they work.
Be honest.
Be fair to your client and to yourself.
Put your client’s interests before your own.
Communicate with your client. You don’t have to be their best friend as long as you deliver information the client wants and needs in a timely manner.
Stay in touch. Whether you send an annual birthday card or call them every once in a while to see how life is going, just find something and do it.
What else do you purposefully do with every client that helps you earn repeat business with them in the future?
Creating “Link Bait” is what search engine marketers call the art of creating unique, compelling content that motivates other webmasters to link to your site. It often comes in the form of weird, funny or controversial and it is probably the single most effective thing loan officers can do to boost their website or blog’s search rankings and website traffic.
The reason link bait is so effective is that it plays to what search engine algorithms like the most: growth of so-called “natural” one-way links from other websites. If you put something on a page of your site that inspires other webmasters and bloggers to link to it, you have generated more positive affect to your search engine rankings than submitting your website URL to 1,000 directories or getting 1,000 reciprocal link deals with other sites BY A HUGE MARGIN.
A great example of link bait and it’s close cousin, viral marketing, is the following video posted to YouTube. You’ve probably already seen it because it is effective and people have talked about it, linked to it and generated buzz for the creator.
If you are like me, you try to automate anything you can in order to boost productivity. One great tool I’ve recently been playing with is the iMacros add-on for Firefox, which is also available for Internet Explorer if you prefer IE.
It’s a free download that plugs in to your browser and allows you to record things you do in the browser and replay them anytime you like. You can even set the “macros” to loop as many times as you want if you have a task that needs to be repeated over and over again.
The sky really is the limit in uses for this tool. Here are a few ideas for boosting productivity, all potentially requiring only a single click:
Pull up your favorite lender websites each morning, login and go to your preferred rate sheets.
Pull up your personal website/blog and login to view your daily statistics.
Pull up webmail (if you use webmail), login and go to your inbox.
Post an ad on Craigslist.
Run a search on your county assesor’s website for ARMs that will convert soon. It’s even possible to set up a macro to extract data and prepare a list for you.
Viral marketing isn’t a term often used in the mortgage industry, probably because many people believe it’s too difficult to achieve viral-like results in an ultra-competitive marketplace and the concept really only exists in online marketing. However, thinking “outside the box” may lead you to alternative approaches in your marketing that can achieve viral symptoms. So what makes marketing viral anyway? There are three basic keys we’ll discuss in this article.
Viral Marketing Key 1: Make it easy to pass on
Think of a virus – it easily transfers from host to host usually via air or touch. Viral marketing gets it’s name because the marketing material is easily passed from one person to another and so your viral marketing campaign must include a way to get your material from one person to another, the easier the better.
When a customer visits your website and finds some aspect of it really cool, do you have a way for them to quickly and easily share it with their friends and associates? If not, find a way to do it because otherwise you may not be maximizing the investment you’ve made in your mortgage website. A feature that lets site visitors “share with a friend” is a good example.
The brokers out there who are still around since the market turned sour all have the ability to adapt. Congratulations to you all! Looking at the silver lining in heavy storm clouds doesn’t pay the bills, however, but returning to business basics can help you weather the storm until the cold winter the industry is now facing melts off into a warmer spring-like market place again.
FHA
With subprime loans going extinct for all intents and purposes, FHA loans are more important than ever. If your brokerage is still not approved to originate FHA loans you may want to get approved now or it just may be “never”.
Work with Realtors
When refis are few and far between, funding purchases can be the gravy train you need to keep things rolling until refis heat up again. Establishing new Realtor contacts and greasing existing ones is a good place to start.
Home prices falling across the board in the U.S. is good for buyers and though there are currently less buyers eligible for financing, many eligible buyers may be looking to upgrade while prices are low.
Cut Costs
Cutting costs is not only not enjoyable, it’s often difficult to do. Equipment leases, leases for office space, employee salaries and other expensive items can be difficult to reduce and possibly impossible to cut when the revenue isn’t around to pay all the bills. However, now is the time for creative thinking so that cash flow can meet expenditures.
Overall, a shift in mentality is required to make it through times like these and if you don’t adapt, you die.
The National Association of Mortgage Brokers (NAMB) will be holding their western regional conference (NAMB/WEST) in Vegas in early November. These conferences are great networking opportunities whether you are a broker, loan officer, branch manager, or industry service provider (you guys should have booths!) so if you’re in the West try to take advantage of this great opportunity.
I contacted the people in charge of NAMB/WEST about promoting the event (for free) here on MBL and met a luke-warm reception, at best. I suppose I’d be skeptical as well if someone from “the internets” randomly emailed me with an offer for free advertising (okay, so maybe I was hoping to get hooked up with a free “attendee” pass for the event as a token of good will for my efforts in promoting NAMB/WEST, but I wasn’t going to ask for it nor do I care that I won’t be getting it) to my target audience around 2,000 strong.
Turns out I’m legit and I’m not going to hold it against them because I’m a strong believer in the value of these conferences, regardless of what industry you’re in. Anyone who is going send me a private message through the forums or email me and we’ll get together for dinner or drinks.
If you’re into search engine optimization as a strategy for driving traffic to your mortgage website, you may want to purchase a listing in the BOTW.org directory. They aren’t cheap, but they are quality links. If you have a blog, you can get into the blog directory for much less since it’s still relatively new.
Also, if you go before the end of today (Aug. 31st), use promo code SIZZLE25 for 25% off.
There is a new feature here at MortgageBrokerLand – a mortgage wiki. Wikis are community-driven collections of pages that anyone can add, edit, or nominate for deletion.
The purpose of the wiki here at MBL is to provide a place where any of our growing 1,800+ members can provide easy to find industry related information for anyone’s benefit.
Why add a wiki to a site that already has forums? Good question. Wikis are different in that you can edit a page over and over and over again while forums simply allow you to create new posts. So forums are good for conversation while wikis are good for refining and perfecting valuable information. You can liken the value of a wiki to that of the wisdom of crowds.
Creating “Link Bait” is what search engine marketers call the art of creating unique, compelling content that motivates other webmasters to link to your site. It often comes in the form of weird, funny or controversial and it is probably the single most effective thing loan officers can do to boost their website or blog’s search rankings and website traffic.
If you are like me, you try to automate anything you can in order to boost productivity. One great tool I’ve recently been playing with is the 