05
Aug
2008
Posted by admin as Thirty Day Challenge
Leads Real Estate.
At first, this may seem like a neanderthal Realtor trying to convey what they want for their business - but it’s not.
So what is this? It is a key phrase in which I am going to have the majority of the first page of Google rankings for. Starting from scratch. Today.
So as part of my 30 Day Challenge, I will tackle this feat and show Realtors the power of the Internet for their online business, by improving my own.
Leads Real Esate - you heard it here first.
05
Aug
2008
Posted by admin as Thirty Day Challenge
The 30 Day Challenge is well underway. Last summer I utilized this 100% free course to obtain the most effective techniques to market my business online.
For Realtors out there, this means that you can use your existing online presence, or create a new one to produce Real Estate Leads that add to your bottom line. This challenge is produced by the preeminent authority in Internet Marketing - Ed Dale. This program is no joke - I highly recommend that if you have any inkling to produce business online you take the time to do this course.
The first 5 days have been all about Market Research. This is the most vital step in the progress of your online presence, or your “niche.” A niche is a market that is somewhat unique - a good example is “Tribeca Lofts.” A bad example is “New York Real Estate.” Your chances or ranking on page 1 of search engines is far greater honing in on a niche like Tribeca lofts than it is for such a broad keyword phrase as New York Real Estate.
Or even further is a “micro niche.” This might be something like “Tribeca Lofts Under $500,000.” Your chances of developing a site that will be ranked in search engines is far greater now that there is even less competition. Of course, you still want to make sure there is enough traffic to make your site profitable.
All of this is explained in detail through video in The Thirty Day Challenge. And all of your market research is done through the amazing program - MARKET SAMURAI. This software is free when you sign up for the challenge.
Using my existing business model - I found a key phrase that meets the 30DC requirements (over 80 searches a day, and under 50,000 competing sites. It is “Real Estate Leads.” My blog posts will be a testament to the challenge as I try to get www.AgentStealth.com to obtain page 1 ranking with Google.
So get on the 30 Day Challenge - and get with the program!
02
Aug
2008
Posted by admin as Thirty Day Challenge
Today marks the beginning of the Thirty Day Challenge.
This is the single most important thing you can do for your Real Estate business online right now. Trust m, this is what you have been looking for. This will take you from being a beginner to being an expert on what it takes to generate business online. DO NOT SLEEP ON THIS ONE.
Familiarize yourself with what is going on by going to the Thirty Day Challenge website and registering. The whole process is done through video and is absolutely free. DO NOT PASS THIS UP.
I will be taking my own business Agent Stealth through the challenge and I will report daily with commentary and results.
The fundamentals of this challenge are:
1. Market Research
2. Traffic
3. Conversion
4. Product
Now get on it!
17
Jul
2008
Posted by admin as Uncategorized
The folks over at 1000 Watt have re-designed their Real Estate 2.0 Mind Map.
If you use the Internet to promote your business this should be your bible.
You can find it by clicking below: http://www.1000wattconsulting.com/web2.0/
23
Jun
2008
Posted by admin as Uncategorized
19
Jun
2008
Posted by admin as Real Estate Marketing
Who isn’t utilizing the web these days to grow their business?
If I had to answer that question, I would say a lot of Realtors who simply are ignoring the most powerful, efficient, and convenient medium to get their message across.
Imagine if you could continually stay in touch with your current client base, or reach a potential one by simply creating a message to them - one of perceived value and sincerity. No more expensive mail-outs, wasting paper, lost time, annoyances - just reaching an audience who is interested in what you have to say. These are the people who will do business with you, not some random person who receives your flyer regarding the 5th house sold in their neighborhood this year. In fact, they probably will never know ou because that pesky flyer will hit their trash can.
Here is a great way to create an ad to promote your business, and more importantly give the potential client an opportunity to “opt-in” to what you have to say.
As FOREM reports:
“Using AdReady you start an ad campaign for your business using a library of ready-made creative, which includes a number of pre-existing ads in the real estate category. You can choose your base design based on the most successful CTRs (click through rates) or simply pick whichever design catches your fancy…”
Read the full post here, and start thinking strategically how you can save time, reduce waste, and become more effective in communicating with current and potential clients.
http://www.futureofrealestatemarketing.com/adready-lets-you-get-creative-with-your-ads
18
Jun
2008
Posted by admin as Uncategorized
16
Jun
2008
Posted by admin as Technology
There is no question regarding the power of using video to not only promote your product but also yourself in the Real Estate market. As attention spans get shorter and shorter online - you need to be as compelling as possible via the most entertaining medium. There is a reason people would rather watch the movie that read the book.
Here is an excerpt from an interview with Morgan Brown a Marketing Director with Turnhere.
“How can real estate professionals use video in their marketing?
With such a large percentage of home owners starting their search for property online, using video in online listings is the first thing that comes to mind. Pictures are nice and descriptions are helpful, but there is no substitute to video for giving a user a firsthand experience of the property with a well-done video home tour. In addition to using video to highlight listings it can also be used to showcase neighborhood attributes and provide a profile of your business and team.
For example if you are a Realtor in the East Bay of California you can use video to highlight the quaint neighborhood of Rockridge and its beloved walking streets lined with local restaurants and shops. This content is ‘evergreen’ and helps people evaluating your listings get a true sense of the surrounding area.
Is appropriate for every listing?
I can’t think of a listing where it isn’t appropriate. Even properties that don’t have the most curb appeal can benefit from a video by capturing the attention of just the right buyer. Listings that are moving fast already and perhaps properties that rely less on online research for sales are exceptions to that statement.
Videos too expensive for most Realtors, right?
Professional video production is totally affordable for nearly all marketing budgets. Compared to traditional marketing channels it’s a bargain. It’s much cheaper than print materials, flyers, radio, TV, outdoor (bench and billboard) and other marketing vehicles.
What makes a good web video?
I think there is a big misconception out there that it is easy to make a good video. The fact is making good video that is compelling, authentic and relevant to the viewer is difficult. To wit, of the millions of videos watched on YouTube each day the average view time is less than 10 seconds. This is a direct result of most video not meeting the needs of the viewer.
When the viewer gives you permission to talk to them by clicking play you have to deliver, and deliver right away. To make good video for the Web (which is much different than traditional broadcast video advertising i.e. a :30 second TV spot) it needs to focus on three key things: authenticity, delivering a compelling message, production quality which makes it enjoyable to watch and drives action.
Bottom line is that web viewers have near-infinite choice for their attention and are typically skeptical. This means that your message has to be compelling, relevant and real. Over-produced sales pitches or videos that don’t meet the viewer needs are big turn-offs online.
What are some ways you can leverage the video content you create?
The nice part about video is that it’s a highly portable piece of content so you should look to get it out on the Web to get as many eyeballs to it as possible. Using a smart distribution strategy can put you in front of the right people at the right time. Whether it’s putting your video up on YouTube, Facebook, Active Rain or making it shareable via email and embeddable in a widget the idea is to get your video out there to where the viewers are.
Can you give us some examples of some of your favorite videos on the web? (Not those kind of videos…)
My favorite videos are ones that are compelling and interesting. They take a piece of everyday life and show it to you in a different way. I love to see the stuff that you don’t get every day in mainstream media. Show me the true character of a city by doing a tour of all the BBQ joints in town or show me the kitchen of the hotel that cranks out 1,000 four-star meals a day. Give me a clip of the author talking about why they wrote their new book. One of my favorite videos is the author David McCollough talking about how Washington escaped from the Red Coats at the site of the Brooklyn bridge - amazing insight that I would never get. I also love the videos of Mentos and Diet Coke so it goes both ways. Videos that give me a unique, authentic perspective on life are the ones that I love.”
13
Jun
2008
Posted by admin as Technology
What is a widget?
Well simply put it is a tool that should be easily accessible. Ideally, for Realtors it will be something that promotes their own business whether it be a listing, their blog, a profile, social networking sites etc.
How do I get one?
Well Sprout makes it easy for those wishing to promote themselves. As posted by Joel Burslem of The Future Of Real Estate Marketing read on.
“Sprout is just one of those places.
Sprout is a web-based Flash editor built in Flash that lets you build your own Flash files (how Meta is that?).
Basically, it’s a very simple way to build out your own Flash-based widgets. It’s just dragging and dropping active elements, linking in actions and then publishing it all in a package to the web. Pretty easy really.
Here’s a couple widgets I built last night. It took me roughly a couple of hours or so to make them - including the time it took to figure out how to use the web site, so not a huge investment.”
16
Apr
2008
Posted by admin as Technology
I was forwarded a great article today from a Realtor regarding Search Engine Optimization. It was written for RIS Media by Mike Parker. It goes a little something like this:
“RISMEDIA, April 16, 2008-While SEO is the hot topic these days when agents and brokers talk about succeeding on the Internet, there is one thing you absolutely must know: you need to know that without SEO, you stand two chances at success when it comes to attracting Internet buyers: ’slim’ and ‘none.’ Every agent and broker needs an organic search strategy in order to tap the power of the Internet. With over 80+% of all real estate transactions being started online, and with 66% of all Internet home buyers finding their agents through a major search engine, there are few things that are more obvious. It is about a whole lot more than SEO, however; it’s about SEO that: 1) Helps you and your website be found by Internet buyers; 2) Helps you raise your conversion level from simply “Visitors” to “leads”; 3) Helps coach you as to how to convert the Internet leads to sales; 4) Helps you keep up with content updates, search engine algorithm changes, and that makes them non-events for you because they handle them for you, automatically. Furthermore, two additional points must be made here at the outset: 5) Good SEO will not overcome poor marketing practices. Getting people to your site is step one in a three-step process; once there, you must handle them properly and respond to their inquiry within four hours, maximum. Enable your website’s notification system to text message all Internet leads directly to your cell phone so that you can make this requirement happen. The best SEO will not overcome bad business practices and lackadaisical lead follow up. Just this week, a client complained that he ‘wasn’t getting many leads this week.’ We had him check his cell phone and he found that one of his clients had been feverishly text messaging him from London saying “I am ready to buy today!” Seven others were trying to reach him to look at specific properties. No product can overcome lack of immediate follow-up. 6) Individual pages on Realtor.com and other “Mothership’ sites can not be optimized or even found by search engines. In order to avail yourself of the benefits of SEO, you must have your own website-agent or broker. With the programs available today that bundle a great platform website, coaching, analytics beyond your imagination and first page placement for under $300 a month, there is no excuse anymore: the facts about the importance of the Internet are plain, the SEO solution is a needed part of every agent and broker’s basic tools. Here, then, are a few things that may not be so plain to the hardworking agent or broker trying to make some sense out of the whole topic of SEO and Internet Marketing Services for Realtors® and real estate professionals: 1. Your webmaster or site designer is probably not a leader in effective SEO. The software, knowledge and experience required to place more than 90% of clients’ real estate websites on the first pages of the major search engines resides in a few specialists’ hands and minds. SEO is not a part-time job, or something anyone can dabble in. It’s a full-time job. 2. A good template website is often more search engine friendly than a custom site. For a very long time, website designers have held out the concept that unless you spend lots of money on a custom website, that site will not bring you meaningful business. That is just flat wrong. There is no need to spend $5000+ on your Web design when you can get a fabulous feature-loaded platform for about $50 a month, or for free as a part of your SEO subscription. Drip e-mail systems, prospect management, syndication and even predictive marketing are not standard on some template websites and there is no need to try to deny that those features are more important than simple pretty designs. Template websites also can be updated, changed, and expanded by you or any reasonably competent person whenever they should be. Custom sites mean you pay for every single thing you ever want to add, change, or subtract. There are plenty of capable virtual assistants who will work with you to customize such a site to what you wish for it to look like for between $500 and $3000. At last count, our customers have employed 87 different website providing firms that we have optimized. Some are marginal in their SEO friendliness, others are outstanding. Key factors are your ability to change copy, headings, html tags and more with ease: Do Not sign up for any website-custom or template-that does not give you full authority and ability to change any feature on your pages. Don’t lock your asset (your site) into anyone else’s permanent control, ever. 3. Your website is not finished until the html tags are properly written. When I am optimizing client sites, I am appalled to find things like “Home” appearing in the html title tag. This is more frequent than you can imagine. Equally bad is the site where there are no title or meta description or keywords tags; or where long flowery sentences are inserted into the html tags. A website with improper html tags is like a filing cabinet full of files with no tabs on them: just as you cannot know where any particular file is in such a filing cabinet, neither can a search engine tell where any particular website is with improper html tags. While most template sites “leave the factory” with computer generated html tags which are laughably inadequate, custom or customized sites often are put live without any tags at all. Think of a filing cabinet without file tabs where all files are lumped in without being arranged alphabetically; how hard it would be to find any particular file? Without proper html tags and proper attention paid to them, your website is incapable of being found by Albert Einstein’s intellectual equal, let alone an Internet buyer. 4. Some SEO is better than no SEO. Get the booklet SEO Secrets (free as offered at the end of this column) and do what you can. That will leave you far better off than if you do nothing. You won’t be on the first pages of the top search engines, but you might get up to page five or so, which is better than being on page 1000. 5. Don’t cheat-it could really hurt you. The search engines do not take kindly to folks who try to cheat. They can actually ban your site. A good way to get banned is to engage in reciprocal linking with other sites that are hosted at the same host; reciprocal linking is specifically prohibited by most search engine guidelines or algorithms. If you try too much of it, you will be caught and all your hard work goes right out the window. Most search engines today deduct outbound reciprocal links from their algorithm’s evaluation of your authority. 6. The only kinds of links that have value in SEO are INBOUND relevant links from sites with good page rank. Every time I see “experts” holding forth online in various blogs strongly asserting that reciprocal linking or any other kind of linking but the right kind is of value, I am reminded of how many false turns so many take due to bad advice. Folks, some real estate agents know a good bit about SEO but the vast majority simply repeat “advice” that they have heard from ‘urban legend’ kinds of stories. Before you seriously consider advice from a real estate agent holding forth on a blog somewhere, check out their standing as successful agent in your local stats: if they are not in the top 10 in local market sales, you can assure yourself that they are not expert in Internet Marketing for real estate professionals. 7. You need to appear on more search engines than just Google. Google may have (latest reports) 56% of all searches, but you aren’t supposed to worry about all searches, just real estate related searches. Yahoo, MSN, AOL and ASK are important, because lots of people who are your target buyers use those engines. Do you have an e-mail address with one of those? If so, you probably search for most important things off of your homepage browser’s search engine. So do folks who are looking for houses. With organic search, your site appears across all seven major search engines. Additionally on this topic, study after study shows that consumers trust organic search and prefer it over paid search results. Like all fundamental truths, this is easily demonstrable: when you search for something, do you click on the paid search, or do you prefer the organic search result? 8. SEO is never “done,” it is a continuing work in process. The two major reasons that this is so are because the search engines often change the algorithms (formulas) that help them decide how to place websites on search results and because others are continuously attempting to knock those on the first pages off them. People from outside your town are hunting for the buyers and sellers in your town from their perch far away. With so much at stake in the Internet real estate business, getting on top and staying there is a continuing effort. 9. Content alone will not get you top placement. “Content is King” is the mantra of every Web designer and SEO guru around. Folks, you can have the world’s best content and your site still may not be found. Optimization is half the battle (and that includes content); the other half is off-page criteria (The SEO Secrets booklet explains these things: what they are and how relatively important each criteria is). Most agents and brokers-no matter how savvy-cannot compete against a top firm in the off page arena at anything approaching the economic efficiency that the full time SEO firm brings to the task. Moreover, pictures are not content from a search engine perspective: they cannot read pictures; they only read words and html code. While pictures are good, too many is bad. Resist the temptation to “go pretty” and go search engine friendly, instead. It is possible to have a very welcoming and attractive site that is both friendly to the Internet buyer and to the search engine that will bring her there. 10. SEO will be the factor that determines which agents and brokers become Internet real estate agents and sell homes to Internet buyers and lack of SEO is literally something that threatens your continued success as a real estate agent. If they can’t find you or your website when they enter that search for what they are looking for, you don’t get the shot to sell to them or to list for them. With 11 billion different pages to search on the Internet today, yours will not be found unless it is properly optimized and properly promoted to the search engines on a continuing basis. 66% of Internet buyers find their agent with a search engine! If you can’t be found, the agents who can be are going to land the 66% of all Internet buyers looking for homes in your town.
