Real Estate Marketing Blog

SEO in a Nutshell

Tim's SEO Recipe

Sometimes my clients and friends accuse me of geeking out when I explain Traffic building. So here is the simple recipe for on line success:

Represent your marketplace thru phrases on many pages.
Point a ton of relative links to those pages from many unique webpages.

Wait 30-60 days to start feeling the results.

Repeat.

Many agents attempt to do this themselves. Many successful agents hire firms like Spider Juice Technologies. Either way its expensive in time and/or money. The ROI is well worth it though.

Reasons to charge more commission!

As an ex-California Realtor, I have always joked that there is an agent for every corner in California.

Well I just saw that:

1. Nearly 2 % of Californian adults hold a real estate license to sell residential property in the state.

2. So far this year, there has been over 135,000 real estate exams administered in California.

3. Since the beginning of 2004, California sales volume have gone up by 2%,  the population of agents grew 26%.

If you think the market is soft, maybe it because there are less transactions available per agent, and not really a soft market.

Here is an interesting thought. While the market has increased in value, many naysayers say that realty agents are over payed. Yet, your competition has gone up by 26%!

Not to mention, the fees you charge are often making up for that deal that fell out of escrow, or the buyer or seller that jumped ship after you spending hours and hours with them.

Don't let the naysayers chisel you down!

And The Bubble Says Puft!

Toll Brothers recently downsized significantly citing lower than expected demand. Bad Credit talked about massive insider dumping of stocks by the builders. Is it finally going to burst?

Rather than worrying about that, my question to you is....what is your response to this negativity?

Feel free to comment here, as I think it wise for agents to start coming up with valid rebuttals to the doomsdayers. I think the time has come because I believe the doomsdayers are about to raise their ugly head again.

Here are some starters:

• More people own a home now than ever in the history of the U.S., There is less property available than ever in the U.S. Supply and Demand is tough to beat.
• Rates are still historically low
• We are in the best economy in 30 years based on employment numbers. (The doomsdayers hate this one and will come up with huge debt, and other "sophisticated reasoning" to talk a buyer out of a purchase.
• A home is a long term investment. Long term real estate is strong.

You get the idea. Let's give a ton of reasons why real estate ROCKS! Can you believe I actually read a news release where a Realtor professed the bottom was falling out of real estate? This guy is in the wrong business. Who in their right mind would get near this guy when it comes to anything financial.

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I am adding some more to the above post from earlier today:

Jane Bryant Quinn adds some positivity and negativity in her article.

• when rates go to 6.5% fixed the market could slow because of less demand because of higher payments
• in major markets like LA we should see a 10% drop
• NAR thinks it will be a soft landing—"like the air coming out of a balloon
• The boomers are reaching the age where they want 2nd homes
• A recent 26-year study reports that the annual cost of owning a home is currently just about average, compared with incomes and rents.(Here comes the but)
• But costs are highly sensitive to changes in long-term interest rates (adjusted for inflation), says economist Todd Sinai of the Wharton School in Philadelphia, one of the study's authors.

The piece ends with :

But don't sit in a rental waiting for prices to drop so you can buy something cheap. Prices might not drop. What's more, you'd be losing your chance to stabilize your long-term homeowning costs, Sinai says. If you expect to keep the home for at least four or five years, there's more risk to staying out of the market than getting in.

Well, there you have it. Where are your rebuttals?

RSS and You

In the rapid world of real estate, agents jump on trends enthusiastically. Sometimes, without concern for hype.

RSS-or as many call it; Real Simple Syndication is a method whereby your content is pulled by readers of your content. When syndicated onto other websites, we call that website an "eater" of your content, whereby your blog is the "feeder".

In a recent article from NAR, titled "What's RSS and How Can It Help Me?", the author describes what RSS is and how you desperately need it. As far as I am concerned RSS is the real benefit of having a blog. It allows your content to get easily syndicated across the net. The author finishes by declaring, " Do your homework so that you’re not left behind on this next big thing in online marketing technology."

Realtor: Keeping up with the Joneses

This statment is exactly what causes Realtors to waste money on every gimick out there. It is clear to me that the author does not clearly get why RSS is important, nor does he make a very good case for what it can do for you.

Is RSS important? Yes. Is blogging important? Yes. But just because you have a blog and RSS does not mean you will be successful.

In our article earlier today, we end the piece by offering you the ability to get on our RealtyBlogger.com site. We pull your RSS feed. This gives you a link back to your site. Pretty cool heh? Plus your news is syndicated on our directory. This is part of the power of RSS.

Making the Case for Blogging

Using the Internet journal (blogging) allows the modern Realtor to talk directly to his/her audience.

Unfortunately, most agents are not using the most powerful feature of the blog. Authority.

What am I talking about? When someone writes a book, immediately they become an expert on their subject. The writer of the Magazine article, the Newsletter author, for some reason are revered in our society. Heck, even the Journalist is raised on high.

Why is Maureen Dowd or Walter Cronkite so revered? Why does their opinion matter? We will even listen to actors who wax political. Why?

Well instead of worrying about the why? Can we agree on the affect?

And, if we can agree on the affect, then we ought to be making our opinion known.Yet, as I started this article,most Realtors are blowing the opportunity.

My guess is that many of the agents that jumped on the blogging bandwagon see it as an opportunity to manipulate a search engine.

The search engines are great. It is what our company does. We get client's leads thru targeted search engine traffic.

However, I can tell you, that my articles, getting printed in magazines & offline material create more traffic for me than a search engine ever has.

Credibility, drives this one folks. Again rather than asking all those whys, lets accept it and start writing.

I believe that most of the realty blogs out there in the space, are merely copy and paste renditions of what was emailed to the agent that morning by Inman or NAR.

That's OK, but what if you offered your opinion on what that means to your area locally? Your opinion gives you personality, it makes you a real person. It makes you an expert.

The biggest objection is usually the time. I can tell you that I create tons of content, and I have many readers of my content thru rss readers, visitors, and syndication. I believe it is because I  offer a very unique take on search  engines, lead generation, and websites.

The Same Thing Said 6 Ways

We all have about 5 or 6 or 7 ways that we will present our information right? And the reason I think we do that is we get bored saying the same thing all the time. We also change our presentation to fit our audience.

And, if you are good salesman you are always looking for better analogies, and better ways to make your point more compelling.

That is how I get my content. I will take notes from my own presentations. If I say something brilliant, I immediately write it down. I have a notebook of topics and content ideas.

Another great source is news with your commentary. This article was inspired by a piece on blogging in Revenue magazine. I was reading it over my morning coffee and jotted this down into my blog software.

I urge you to add your personality to your blogs. One technique that will force you into this style is to start using words like you, your, yours, etc instead of acting like an impartial journalist. You are not impartial, you are a salesperson.

If you have any success at all in real estate then you have a unique perspective that no other agent has. Your public hires you for your expertise and opinions. Not your ability to regurgitate news.

More reasons to blog:

• 6% of the U.S. adult population has created a blog ~ PEW
• Their are 10.4 blog posts a second ~technorati.com
• 80,000 blogs created daily , 13% are updated weekly ~technorati.com

My take on this is that there is a bunch of junk out there, just like websites. Thus, your personality will be the unique factor that makes your blog above and beyond the average.

• 32 million blog readers (16% of U.S. population) ~PEW
• 30% of all net users visited a blog in the first quarter of 2005 ~ ComScore 
• Traffic to blogs increased by 45% from the first quarter of 2004 ~ComScore
• The average blog reader gobbles up 77% more pages than the non-blog reader ~ComScore
• The average blog reader spends 23 hours on line per week, the non blog reader spends 13 hours on line. ~ComScore
• Blog readers are 11% more likely to have incomes over $75,000 a year ~ComScore
• Blog readers are buyers. They are not only more likely to buy, they spend 6% more than the average Internet user. ~ComScore

I know you cannot sell a house on line. But, these people do in many ways match your target audience, yes?

So how do you win? As the Revenue story says, "A few will increase their sales by order of magnitude. Then they will be imitated to death and, suddenly, no one will be unique anymore. Its very important to be the first with a unique story to tell. It becomes harder to be second or third."

Just because you have a blog, it does not help you unless people can find you. I have already offered free linking/indexing ideas on my websites.

However, if you would like to get more link equity for your blogging efforts, we have are in pre-launch for the worlds first Real Estate blog directory.

Links from a relevant page are absolutely neccessary to succeed in todays online environment.

You can have your own site listed as well as your rss feed, including a snippet of your feed. We are offering a large discount for the year and you can get in for a very favorable price. more

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Tim O'Keefe
Tim is President of Spider Juice Technologies and specializes in accelerating Realtor website profits thru traffic and lead conversion, as well as automated follow-up strategies.

Comparing Websites

Looking at others, to determine if one is going in the right direction or not is a common human behavior.

In fact, Robert Cialdini wrote about Social Proof as a powerful human trigger. This is why using testimonials work so well.

Well,Forrester Research just posted an interesting piece on how it is common for industries to base website standards against others within the industry, and how this can be a poor approach if profit is your objective.

It is obvious — and understandable — that many customer experience executives judge their Web sites against those of their competitors. But periodically, firms need to look beyond their own industries to find out what the rest of the Web world is doing. A structured process for searching the vast universe of Web sites can make this task manageable and help differentiate truly great Web innovations from so-so sites.standable — that many customer experience executives judge their Web sites against those of their competitors. But periodically, firms need to look beyond their own industries to find out what the rest of the Web world is doing. A structured process for searching the vast universe of Web sites can make this task manageable and help differentiate truly great Web innovations from so-so sites.more

At Spider Juice Technologies, our overiding objective starts with the question: what is the fastest and most profitable approach for our client? Let's face it, just because someone in your market has a website does not mean they make money at it. Just because they even get traffic does not mean they make money. Just because they get leads does not mean they make money.

When desiring a feature that a competitor has, it is a prudent act to ask first ,"does that make him or her money."

If you don't know, then you do not know if it is a good idea.

To illustrate this, a family member once told me that she loves a particular feature on a Palms Springs hotel site. She was adament that all hotels should use this, and all Realtors too.

Hmm.... I asked "did you buy"?