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!

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/ Or here.

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

Wow. What next? Joel Burslem of Future of Real Estate Marketing reports:  ”Sure enough they did open it up and today, Trulia became the first national search site to incorporate the Street Views (available in over 40 cities) into their search results – though others have already done it on a more regional level… It’s definitely a very nice feature, and one that continues to keep Trulia ahead of the pack when it comes to rolling out new features that aide the search process. With this news though, I thought it worth reminding FOREM readers that you can also embed Street View maps yourself on your own sites (see New Google Street Views Can Be Embedded on your Site). I’ve taken to using this myself a lot recently, especially when trying to communicate a specific location with multiple parties. There are also a number of vendors who have automated the implementation of this feature to agents on their personal web sites (Diverse Solutions) or their single property web sites (RealBird).” Now how can you incorporate this into your business to keep up with what will surely be a popular function?

DECLINING house prices, rising job layoffs, skyrocketing oil costs and a major credit crunch have brought consumer confidence to its lowest point in five years. With a relatively long recession looking increasingly likely, many American families may be planning to tighten their belts…” Click on the link before to finish the story! http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/opinion/02aamodt.html?ex=1364875200&en=f5df03cfd6225f41&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Here is a great article outlining Email Marketing for Realtors. Here is an exerpt:  “Forced to contend with softening home prices and the resulting struggle to attract buyers and close deals, many real estate agents are using web-based marketing tools to support their sales and marketing efforts. According to the survey, nearly 60 percent of respondents noted that their websites and the use of email marketing, produce the best results — driving more buyers and sellers to their businesses. Among marketing methods, email marketing ranked highest in cost effectiveness and speed of delivery.” This is a great way to stay in touch with your clients, in a real-time fashion. Add to the yearly calender mail outs, and notepads by providing your clients with fresh content that keeps you in their minds. You can choose to write on Real Estate news, or even post photos of you latest vacation. Whatever it is – it keeps you in your clients mind. When you go beyond just your profession it adds that much more of a relationship. And it is the relationship with your email marketing list that brings in the dollars – any internet marketer will tell you that. Here is the link to the rest of the post.

So you have an online presence. Maybe it”s a website, a blog, a pay per click campaign, an ezine article, or one of our Stealth Systems. Whatever the case may be if it is search engine traffic you are looking for, you must know how to be found. Keywords or key phrases, are what the consumer types into search engines that then relay applicable results. Ideally, you would like your online presence to be found here and preferably having a high page rank. Do you know what keywords your consumers are most likely to use? Here are a couple tools to help you test your market research: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html Take the time to research what consumers in your market are typing into that empty bar. In the real estate market your keywords and key phrases should contain the name of your local market. Further defining a specific neighborhood in your keywords increases your chance of being found by that area specific consumer. Here is a link to a great post on using Real Estate Key Words: http://www.particlewave.com/internet-marketing/2006/05/01/selecting-real-estate-keywords/ “If you build they will come” attitude is not effective online, “know how they come and then build it” is a much better approach.

The art of branding. We all know the importance of this vital step in our real estate careers, but rarely is it evident. A simple way to figure out if you have created a brand is to ask yourself how do consumers identify with your services? Are you the condo specialist? Do you work a specific niche area? Do certain demographic groups identify with you more readily? Are you an active member in your community? If you have a hard time figuring out how the public recognizes your name or your company name, then you need to re-evaluate your branding scheme. I love the guys over at Wow Branding, they have set the bar for a lot of major companies and within their site you can find some good advice. Click here. A brand represents the image you want people to perceive you by, the qualities they will identify your name with. The branding process is repetitive by nature, and over time if you relay the same message while sticking to it, you will make your mark in the consumers mind.

Having a blog in the real estate industry is like having a cellular phone these days. Everybody whether young or old, newbie or veteran, seems to think that they “should” be blogging. Well if you are going to start blogging seriously I highly recommend using a theme that will entice your readers, and provide something of perceived value for them. A functional theme is one that users can easily move throughout and get the pertinent information they want. Consumers attention spans are so short these days, that if you do not provide this the first time they visit your site, and within seconds – they will not come back. A real estate blog without traffic is pretty damn useless. Here is a great free WordPress theme I came across – for Realtors. Get it here. It”s from the people at Realivent.com photo credit: RobertN

It seems everybody wants a piece of the Online Real Estate pie. So what happens when the “Big Boys” start to encroach on the realty market? Can the smaller fish in the pond compete with that? Sellsius wrote a blurb on this matter taking effect now. Snippets include:

“Realogy Corp. (which owns Coldwell Banker, Century 21, Sotheby’s International and E RA) announced it will be syndicating its listings on the internet, sending them to real estate aggregator sites Google, Cyberhomes, AOL, Homescape, HGTV’s Frontdoor, Zillow, and Trulia. Other big real estate listing players, like Prudential, are sure to follow this marketing approach.

Question is: what will happen to the little kids when all the fat guys start belly flopping into the pool?”

Click here for the rest of the post. Be a shark in a little pond, not a minnow in a little one!