Real Estate Marketing Blog

Blog Myth Conclusion

1. You gotta Blog if you are going to Survive Online
2. The Search Engines like blogs better than a website.
3. A Blog Is easier to get traffic from engines.
4. I can write anything on my blog
5. The Blogosphere matters
6. A Blog Is about You
7. Social Media and Web 2.0 is the future of the web

I have put off writing the final myths because I have tetered back and forth between using the same format and actually scraping this whole thing and doing a whole paid series on it. Seriously, I could do a whole book just on Social Media and Web 2.0.(Which I am, at last a report anway).

But the big empty featured post has been up now a month+ and it sits there at the top of HouseBlogger with its vapid stare.

Thus, I have bundeled the rest of the Four Blog Myths into the following post.

Is Your Blog Vain?

Is your blog about you? Actually a blog is about your reader, and what you can do for your reader.Anything else that distracts from that journey is a potentially distasterous path. You blog is your digital brand.

Digital Types

Your blog at worst is a textual brochure. At best it tells your story. It is your textualized brand that tells your business story that unfolds over the course of your posts.Like a paint by the numbers set, you should know what your final painting will look like before haphazardly painting individual numbers.

The Blogosphere Matters

As I noted in an earlier blog post, modern search is a two sided coin. Web 2.0  search and Traditional Search. Both produce traffic. Only 1 significantly produces sales.

That is unless you live in Geekville USA, where children are born with Blackberrys and an Acronym dictionary (OMG).

Face it, normal society (your buyers and sellers) do not hang out at Technorati or MySpace. They are not on Facebook, they are not Digging, Pligging, or bookmarking del.icio.us. They pretty much don't know, or don't care to know, a blog from a webpage.

My oldest is in high school and might hang out on the web IM'ing (instant messaging), while multi-tasking contacts on his cell phone, and his MySpace.  His mom on the other hand, runs across town from work to pick him up from school. Her multitasking is getting dinner on the table, making sure the boy does his homework, while preparing for the next day.

Now, America's mothers (women make the decision to buy right?) are not socializing at Facebook. The real chat gets done at gym, dance, Little League, and Boy Scouts. Are you with me?

The Blogosphere is usually the Water Cooler bloggers more interested in socializing than capturing leads.

Your market is not hanging out online. They are busy living their life.

So what is this Social web stuff?

It is real, but thinking that your social web will be fulfilled thru your blog and comments are a joke and myth.

Web 2.0

My dad loves widgets. When the TV commercial offers the Solar Powered Window Shade Fan Cooler, pops is all over it.

Isn't that what the web is becoming? A bunch of useless widgets (yes they call them widgets, and my blog host Type Pad offers a mind numbing plethora of widgets to litter my website).(side note: until the web, my only experience with a widget was as referenced in my business and economics classes. The Professor would often reference these widgets as pretend units of products in a fictional company.)

These tools or widgets are supposed to offer useability benefits for us and our readers.These are a big part of Web 2.0.

The term  Web 2.0 was coined originally as a publicity play after the Internet Dot Bomb of the late 90's. It was what the web promoters chose to help prove the commercial viability of the future internet.

We Got Pubbed

Forgive my indulgence as I humbly link you to an article that mentions yours truely.

The piece in the Chicago Tribune Real Estate section considers the modern real estate conversation from the barbershop of yore to the modern digital blog.

Thanks to my Chicago Realtor friend David Weiss who gave me the introduction to the writer of the Chicago Tribune article.

The only downside is that I am from L.A., not San Diego as the article says. Not that Diego is a bad place to be.

Agents keep the conversation going
A billboard near the intersection of I-55 and Kingery Highway outside Willowbrook tells a lot -- by what it doesn't say -- about how the real estate business is changing. The sign, advertising Wexford Homes at Stonebridge Woods in Homer Glen, touts the Web address for the development, but offers no phone number.

If you cannot get the article you can download the real estate article here.

"Does Your Web Makes for Skinny Kids"

I Got SEO'd

We get approached all the time to "do SEO".

Search engine optimization is the most over hyped, misunderstood activity on the web. And the spin starts at the top. Meaning the head spin meisters are Google, MSN , and Yahoo. Why would they do such a thing? They want you to spend money on their ads.

Additionally don't think that the guys who get real online marketing, don't do their own disinformation of what works today in SEO.

Yah, free is worth just that.

Its the part that boggles me most in the internet arena. Nothing is FREE, not forever anyway. MySpace had to make money somewhere. So they eventually littered their site with ads of buxum ladies who supposedly are looking for a date.

Murdock bought MySpace for the eyeballs. Google bought YouTube for the eyeballs.

Big dollars seem to cloud fundamentals in an industry (real estate) where real marketing is seldom understood or executed. I remember when I was green and I was taught the proverbial 30 points of action. In a listings presentation we were told to parrot, "Yes we will do open houses, and hand out flyers, etc, etc". We don't say that we would use their house as a device to harbor the local buyers. Sure if they buy this house great, but we also knew that chances were they would buy something else.Of course the 4 Color ad brings in the luxury buyers, but seldom sold the advertised house. But it sure makes for one hell of a presentation.

How many agents never figure out the misdirection? Whom of them never really get the marketing? Then along comes the web and these same agents jump right into the boiling pot where the TRUTH is further obfuscated.

First its YOU need a website. Then you need IDX, and then you need SEO. Blogs. Each with its own mind numbing set of nuances. The sale of course is always something for nothing.

And now the long tail . Ah yes. The proverbial long tail. The excuse that I cannot get real traffic, so I go after the scraps.

That's the way it is typically executed anyway. The longail is also over hyped and severally misunderstood by most. At least as it applies to SEO in real estate. It is often used as the excuse on not spending any real budget in an online campaign. I can just blog and get traffic and business.

Yah RIGHT!

Search has morphed into a two headed beast.

1. The Blogosphere/Web 2.0
2. Traditional Search Engines

You can blog at the so called blogospere. But guess what they ain't buyin'.

Or

You can blog for traffic and leads. That takes SEO from the real search side of the engine.

It requires muscle called link equity. And sorry your blog roll of yours isn't going to do the trick.

Now don't get me wrong I am not against the blogosphere, but I use that to leverage getting our SEO clients traffic. The Secrets to using the Blogosphere and the Longtail for optimal traffic are what I save for our clients.

Links Matter

So I send out the final publicity letter for the contest, and I get a question.

"I do not know what 50 links Are"

Well, that not really a question, as it is an implied question. Nevertheless the message that I think she was asking was why do I care about links?

The short and simple answer is:  links from other sites to yours increases your sites value in the search engines.The more links to a page, the more value that the engine sees in your page.

Now I can give you a much more technical reason answer. But in the end the above is the reason links matter. The more links the more value. Better yet, the more valuable links to your page, the more value that your page will have.

You can build the most gorgeous, SEO'd website. Without links to the pages of that website, the site in affect will not exist in the engines eyes.

"Link Winners!"

And the winners are:
Adam Bailey -
Next Level Realty representing Cambridge MA Real Estate
Peg Archibald-
Representing Savannah Georgia Real Estate
Tony Marriott-
From Arizona Representing Scottsdale Phoenix Real Estate
and last but not least, this would not have been a contest without a Texan!
Brad Dixon-
Representing the Austin Real Estate market.
I know I said only three winners, but I am feeling pretty good this morning and I want to give :-)
(They gave some of their answers in the comment to the original post)

Don Pardo can you tell them what they have won?

Adam, Peg, Tony, and Brad are the winners of a lovely set of 50 inbound links thru a multitude of Real Estate Authority websites. Their lovely links will be from Publicity, Blogs, Directories and oh so much more!

Okay, I learned a lesson thru all this.

So I ran a Publicity campaign to get people to pay attention. Four luck winners are getting important links that will help their websites get traffic thru additional page rank and link popularity..

Then I found out not to Ass-Sume anything. I offered links as a persuader to get in on the contest, and got emails back asking why do links matter.

Oy Vey!

So my next post is why they matter.

But for now congratulations to the winners!

We will be reporting on some of the great links they are getting soon.

We have lost one of the greatest marketers

Gary Halbert, a man who was a living direct response legend has passed.

Another legend, John Carlton said,

..And he truly was a great man. He single-handedly changed the nature of modern direct response advertising… and through his teachings, spawned three generations (and still counting) of rabble-rousing entrepreneurs and marketers who continue to force the business world to bend to their will.

I never knew him. But he was one of the great legendary marketers that inspired me to do what I do. He was on my list of people I want to meet. That will have to wait now.

Halbert could write a sales piece, and it was so purposefully unassuming, that it immediately took your guard down. It would be only a matter of minutes that you would be pulling for you wallet. As Carlton said about him, he experienced life with a passion and thru his trials and tribulations (he had many), he turned Grey Clouds into Silver and Gold.

From The Ultimate Swipe File:

One of the many striking characteristics of Gary as a marketer was his knack for attacking a giant sized market with the precision of a surgeon.  Take his: 'How to collect social security at any age.'

I have a few of his works that I treasure. Including a how to succeed in DR Marketing manual that he wrote from prison to his son Bond as his legacy. He was no boy scout, and anybody will tell you he should not have been there. But he turned rocks into diamonds in ways that many of us online marketers will never know, but should appreciate.

The King Of Copy's wit and genius can be experienced at his body of newletters here.

Seven More Hours

I am raising the stakes from 25 links to 50 links! Yes you get 50 links if you answer the easy questions. More links equal more traffic and more leads for you.

Read the original post, listen to the video, and get 50 links. Who knows, one of those links may be what pushes your site over the edge to a number one position.

Go there  now and simply email tim at spiderjuicetechnologies dot com or answer in the comments. Hurry there are only a few more hours until I pick the three winners.

"Spam Killer?"

Have you ever heard of Spam Arrest.

The idea is that you sign up in a websites form and that person in order to send you email has to fill out a captcha in order to send you, what you requested.

Personally, I think this is ridiculous to force someone to do this, especially since you have requested the information.

But, hey it works and in the end all is well.

However, Earthlink also has what I shall dub, a reverse double opt in.

Every time I send out an email blast to my list I inevitably get about 20 emails that say:

I apologize for this automatic reply to your email.

To control spam, I now allow incoming messages only from senders I have approved before hand.

If you would like to be added to my list of approved senders, please fill out the short request form (see link below). Once I approve you, I will receive your original message in my inbox. You do not need to resend your message. I apologize for this one-time inconvenience.

Click the link below to fill out the request:

http ://theurl.com

The link takes me to a page that looks like this:

Get Free Links

A Retraction

Last Sunday I made a April Fools Joke.

But no one really got it... oh well.

So the video is my retraction that Spider Juice Technologies in fact had nothing to do with the sale of a home in Appalachia Lake front, which happened to be the most expensive sale of a home ever! So to make up for the blunder I am offering 3 lucky Realtors a chance at getting free publicity from our Real Estate Blog, and other websites. Hurry the contest ends Tueesday. Watch the video for details.

If this video does not work you can get the direct You Tube Link here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjTIlt5kBe8

What Kind of Form Get the Most Leads?

Less Traffic But More ROI?

One "point of view" that I have struggled with because it seems common sense to me. Is that you must make your listings freely available to your visitors.

My assistant put the argument to rest after running some interesting numbers from a couple client websites.

Both are in the same market. One is a big franchise with Gold Coats. The other a boutique.

I wanted to know the lead disparity of the Lollipop Ratio (How many visits to get a lead) as measured on both sites. The Big Gold Coat Franchise is a soft opt-in taking you to thumbnails of listings,while the other takes you straight to a register form. In other words the message is if you want to see listings sign up here!