Online marketing, also called digital marketing, is using online channels to market your product or service. Online channels include email, website advertising, social media, and search engines.
Connecting Mortgage Seekers with Mortgage Brokers
Our website is ideal for mortgage brokers. We’re here to connect mortgage seekers with you.
Mortgage Crunch is dedicated to educating consumers about mortgages. It’s already ranked highly for mortgage related search terms in Google Canada, which brings in mortgage seekers to my site and gives you exposure.
Focus on Marketing
You may have learned the hard way that paying a designer to do your website didn’t actually help you get any leads, as beautiful as it may have looked. That’s because a beautiful website is just that! Looks is important for maintaining a visitor, but, if you have no visitors, then don’t focus on looks too much. Just make sure it’s clean and user-friendly.
There’s more to getting leads than a great looking website. Look at it this way, in the Yellow Pages (I know, who uses that, but, just bear with me), there are xx million listings of people and businesses. When someone gets added, does anyone know? Nope. Does it matter if you have the best looking website? Nope.
This is the same thing with a website. When you create a website on the internet where there are about 140,000 new web pages per day and over 1 billion listings (2014), do you think anyone will know after you create yours?
So, how do you get known? It’s no different that old school advertising and marketing, you have to tell people. The “new school” however has some new channels such as ads on websites, emails, social media, remarketing, pop-ups, call-to-actions, and search engines, particularly Google.
The Difficulty with Mortgage Broker SEO
The difficulty with SEO for mortgage brokers is that most of you offer the same services to people. New mortgages, refinancing, self-employed, etc. I know very well that the service offering is the same. So, your website content is also the same as the next mortgage broker. It’s just re-written slightly differently.
So, it doesn’t help when I did a bit of research and found one particular popular Website and SEO Agency that specializes in Real Estate, Mortgage Brokers, and other real estate related professions; they just copied the same text from broker to broker for several pages on their websites. I checked four broker websites created by this Agency and they had the same text.
If you’re a web design agency only, then I don’t feel that’s a problem depending on the contract you negotiated with the agency. But, if you offer web design and SEO, then you shouldn’t be doing something like that.
Because that’s just plain bad SEO. Your money is better spent on actual marketing rather than paying for that kind of service. Marketing can get you immediate results. SEO can take half a year or longer. Don’t bother spending much time or money on SEO until you’ve got cash coming in. It won’t give you immediate results.
Digital Marketing Methods and Resources
Website
The #1 method for marketing your business online is through your website.
Your website is like your business card to the digital world.
Mortgage Brokers websites are generally straightforward: In most cases you just need 4 pages or sections: Home page, About page describing you and / or your team, Services such a new home financing, refinancing, renewals, special situations financing such as new immigrants, self-employed, bad credit, and others, and Contact page. Some extra pages can include a rates page, calculators, and application.
But, for the most part, you can get business with the 4 main pages only. You just want a clean, simple, professional looking site that clearly outlines how you can help people so that when you refer people to look at your site, it conveys a simple message and hopefully converts.
You can add more pages for visitors when you feel you have enough visitors or demand for it.
Resources
Here are some tools that can help you create your own professional looking website without the need for a designer:
Weebly
Weebly is a website builder that you can use to create professional looking websites quickly and easily and using your own domain name.
How much will it cost? I would suggest the $10 / month plan or higher. You can start with cheaper ones, but, they have ads on them.
The cost doesn’t include email and you can add that for just over $4 / month and it’s powered by Gmail using your own domain name.
Basic Email Marketing
I call this basic email marketing because it’s really just about getting an email account.
You can add email to your Weebly account or if you aren’t using Weebly, you can get email from Google and attach it to your own domain for only USD $5 / month.
You can then start sending out emails to potential clients and leads.
Email marketing is a great way to market online and arguably better than SEO because you don’t need to rely on the rules of the search engine, you just send out emails to your list.
The hardest part is getting a list.
If you want more info on getting business class email, try Gmail for Business by Google.
Advanced Email Marketing
For advanced email marketing, I suggest 2 options. MailChimp if you have 5,000 or less emails on your list.
For lists with 5,001 or more email addresses, I suggest AutoKlose. Now, I am not suggesting these two different services because one is better than the other, it has more to do with cost.
MailChimp charges $50 / month when you have 2,701 to 5,000 subscribers. AutoKlose charges $50 / month for any number of subscribers.
If you have a list of 10,000 subscribers, MailChimp will charge you $80 / month vs $50 / month for AutoKlose.
The cost difference becomes more pronounced as your list grows bigger. At 20,000 emails, MailChimp will cost you $150 / month vs $50 / month with AutoKlose.
Conversion Focused Landing Page or One-Page Website
(one-time fee only)
We offer a conversion focused, landing page that is equivalent to a one-page website on Mortgage Crunch to get you leads for your business.
We actually recommend this in conjunction with a website. And if you’re starting off, this can work fine by itself.
Why?
Because it’s ideal for mortgage seekers. Even though from your perspective, you’d rather have mortgage seekers only go to your website, the fact is, it’s actually not best for the consumer.
Consumers like being able to shop at one spot and compare everything there. That’s why shopping malls, auto malls, Amazon, and stores with variety are so popular.
You may also think that by maintaining a page on Mortgage Crunch may lead them to find a competitor. That’s true. But, it also goes the other way: When a consumer searches for another broker, they may find you!
If you think a consumer doesn’t do any of their own research or hasn’t heard of either Google, Yahoo!, or Bing when shopping for mortgage rates, then yes, hosting your web page on Mortgage Crunch may not be a good idea.
Otherwise, we offer many benefits to creating your conversion focused landing page with us: Fast-loading, seo-optimized, and responsive.
It can have all the sections you have in a regular multi-page website such as your Home section, Services, Testimonials, Contact form, and About section.
From a price perspective, we offer a one-time price and you don’t have to deal with the technical aspects of managing your one-page site.
There are a host of companies that charge about USD $100 / month and up on managing WordPress sites alone. And that doesn’t include any technical support. That’s just for making sure your site runs smoothly.
This is also on top of the cost of your hosting.
When you purchase this, your landing page will remain on Mortgage Crunch as long as Mortgage Crunch exists. No recurring fees, no need to hire someone to manage your website.
It includes a full-width, responsive landing page that is conversion focused to get you leads.
In addition to it being a beautifully laid out one-page website, you can add extra videos, graphics, and other content if you wish to supply it.
Your page can have everything that your own website would have without the hassle of managing it.
If there is a website or web page you like that you would like to emulate, just let me know. I can incorporate the colours or features for you in yours.
Email inquiries will go directly to the email of your choice even though the page is hosted under Mortgage Crunch.
We host your page on our website with the following features:
- SSD hard drives – 20x faster than regular hard drives – this makes your web page load faster
- Responsive website – meaning it will look good on mobile, tablets, and desktop
- No Ads on your page like Yelp, where you have to pay to stop other mortgage brokers’ ads surrounding and crowding your listing
- No links on your page even to our own website or to anywhere – this page is just for you!
- SSL certificate – this is good for SEO and improves visitor trust
- Beautiful, responsive, full-screen design
- SEO optimized
- Viewer statistics
- XML sitemap installed
- Business Class Email Accounts (requires domain registration and hosting with our provider)
- Regular backups of your web page
All prices below are in Canadian dollars.
Taxes are applicable.
One-time Pricing.
standard
Simple, fast and effective one-page website with all the main details of a regular multi-page website
$
240
- Working time 24/7 all days
- Includes 5 sections: Header, Bio, Services, Features / Benefits, Testimonials, and Contact sections
- 1 Contact form
- 1 Lead Generation form
- Setup and Connection to Mailchimp, Aweber, or several other mailing list software for your Lead Generation forms
- Appointment and reservation service (see below for more info
- Included in the Featured Profiles section of one city directory
Appointment and Reservation Service
Get more leads by getting visitors to book you right away.
No need for visitors to go to another website for booking.
They can book you right away!
Manage your appointments in our dashboard.
Set holidays, block times off, and customize your schedule.
Allow your assistant to manage your times as well.
We offer multiple logins to manage your account
Right now, this booking service is included with your one-page website.
See the demos below to try the booking service.
The appointment booking is at the bottom of the demo pages listed below.
Custom Website with Business Class Email
What’s different between this website feature and Weebly that I mentioned above?
Going this route gives you more flexibility.
But, you have to do a bit more work too.
The monthly cost however is cheaper, it’s only $8.95 / month.
And you’ll get affordable business class email under your website name included. Access your email from anywhere.
With this web hosting, you get 24/7 email support usually within 2 hours.
In order to create your website however, you’ll need to do your own designs and possibly hire a developer. That is usually a one-time cost, but, you’ll get customization.
You can easily get a beautifully designed website for $2k to $5k. You can always get something cheaper or more expensive, but, I don’t see the point of going more expensive.
Email Features
- Secure SSL access
- Unlimited email accounts
- Built-in Spam Protection
- Ad free, unlike using Gmail or Yahoo! or other many other free providers
- POP3 and IMAP support
- Unlimited storage
Website Features
- Unlimited Traffic
- Unlimited Websites
- SSL Certificate Included
- Unlimited Storage on SSD
Social Media Posting
Did you know you can post on your social media accounts on auto-pilot?
There are tools to help you automate your tasks so you can focus on getting leads.
For example, Google has a tool called Buffer where you can schedule posts into your social profiles.
Just find or create a few posts, schedule, and sit back. Buffer will post it for you accoding to your schedule.
They have a free plan where you can schedule up to 10 posts at a time into 3 social profiles.
They offer more advanced plans that include analytics and scheduling more posts and to more social profiles.
Content Studio
If you are in need of something more advanced possibly for your team or you have more than 3 social profiles you want to post to, Buffer has more advanced plans. However, it can get costly.
An alternative you can try is Content Studio.
There are actually many apps that can post to your social profiles on auto-pilot. Posting is actually not that time-consuming. What is time-consuming is finding good articles to share or creating your own content.
This is where Content Studio shines. You can discover articles related to your field and create custom searches to regularly find articles for you.
After you’ve created a custom search, you can refine it until it meets your needs. Once you’ve got that set, then everyday or week, or however often you wish to run the search, you can have articles ready at the push of a button.
Another button and you can post it or schedule it.
The cost to Content Studio is much more attractive than Buffer when you want to post to more than 3 social profiles.
To find out more info visit the link below.
If you want to try a premium plan at a reduced cost, we have a special plan that you can try for free for trial use for 1 month. Just send us a note at the bottom of this page.
Would you like to ask Mortgage Crunch about other tools to help with your business? Contact us below.
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