Real Estate Marketing Blog

Supplemental Result Finder

The Makers of IBP have listed in their recent newsletter a new way to see if your web pages are listed in the dreaded Google Supplemental Results.

Simply query into Google the following:

site:http://www.yoururl.com/&

I thought I saw actual results this AM. However, now when querying, I do not see the typical supplemental ID next to the link.

It had been rumored that Google was considering removing that ability to find your supplemental results. Maybe it has happened. Hmmm, I wonder why they would do such a thing? <insert sarcasm here>

Realty Video

Video habits are changing online. I have always thought that Video as a mainline medium is a tough sell. From the filming, editing and then uploading. It is a process that requires some technical skill and patience.

Building Your Brand on a Digital Bench

The web is full of new ways to skin a cat.

Despite big promises, in the end the web can only accomplish a couple goals.

Build brand or build sales. A sale in your case is a lead because you cannot directly sell a home online.

There are plenty of mediums that promise the traffic and leads. Websites, Blogs, Social bookmarking, Social Networking, Group Blogs (like active rain), Video Blogging (like You Tube or more niche incarnations like Rexnet), Podcasts (a fancy word for a recording), RSS, Ajax and Mashups.

Do you want to know a secret?

These fancy mediums are really just the newest evolved versions of  something that we are all intimately aware of.  They are only just a website.

And a website either serves you or it doesn't.

Mind Freaking Viral Video

Going viral with real estate marketing is tough without seeming gimmicky or cartoonish.

However, it does work in many cases. Just ask the founders of Hotmail.I guess, you can argue that the Zillow ap went viral when they launched.

Viral Marketing tends to work best in very targeted contexts as this most recent example by the Magician Chris Angel. I love magic and how if you study it, we are taught how easily the mind can be fooled.

Check out this Viral expose.

The Clam Effect

I don't have the stats to back this up, but there seems to be a correlation of Broadband use and the Clam affect.

What is the Clam affect? It is the result of online consumers Clamming Up. They either forge their registration with fake names like Micky Mouse or simply do not give any information.

Consumer Electronics Association (CEA),says that 72% of adults in the U.S. have access to a broadband connection, and over 50% of households in the U.S. have broadband subscriptions.

I have seen this time and again that getting reg's are tougher as an areas Internet Sophistication rises.

Mortgage Marketing Sucks

Has this ever happend to you?

You are watching your favorite sports team or TV show, or banging out new brillaint posts on your blog, and the phone rings. Hoping that its your loved one, you eagerly answer. "Hello?"

This is how it usually happens to me...."Hello, Mr. Okefay (My name is O'Keefe") we are calling from..." and they go into some lie that they are giving people in my area special rates, or some gal named Mary is calling from their San Diego office, when clearly she is from India, and she is not named Mary.This despite the fact that I am on the do not call list. And is there anything more annoying than those computer calls that hang up on us? No doubt this is some way to confirm our number as live.

Well the Harris Interactive Financial Services Group released a new poll this week and I guess I am not alone the target of these aggressive tactics.

66-percent of consumers surveyed online believe marketing strategies on mortgage loans are "not credible.” And, of the 2,383 poll respondents, only 34-percent found the marketing strategies “credible," while 22-percent called them "not credible at all."

Green Real Estate Marketing

The notion of built it and they will come has not died. It has just gotten a bit more sophisticated. As web 2.0 has assaulted our senses with audio, video, interactivity, & connectivity, the playing field has only gotten messier.

Without a plan, without a strategy, & without a slippery slope that leads consumers down into your machinery is a big waste. Like a flume of search engine smoke, traffic is burned and pollutes your pocket book as it travels to brochure style websites with little or no conversion to leads.

Who Else Has This on Their Website

A webpage has over 200 elements that can affect ranking. Although, it has been proved that you can get into a top position on links alone with even a blank page, who wants to? So I came up with a few "gotta haves" that should be in all your webpages. ( If you want to position well in the engines that is).

• Robots.txt
• w3 declaration
• Google/Yahoo sitemap
• Character Encoding in Header
• Language Encoding
• Links back to your home page that say your main keyword instead of "home page".
• Title &, Description tags.

The Title tag is by far the most important on page factor.

Who's Stealing My Content?

I recently went to the web and was flabergasted to find my content on another website.

The nerve.  Hell, its not an insult, its a damned crime. That's what it is. But what can I do about it?

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:228HtfRRgVQJ:houseblogger.typepad.com/+real+estate+blog&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

Yep, there is Houseblogger totally housed on this other website.

Okay, I mention this only tongue in cheek to contrast a recent post about what is an ethical issue, perhaps a legal issue, and a marketing issue.

Now, we all know that Google and the other engines crawl/scrape our pages and sites to list them in the search engine index. That makes us happy, and is a large source of my clients and my income.

However, a recent post by the Phoenix Real Estate Guy about a splog (spam blog) post made me pause and reflect. The gist of his post was that a site scraped several posts off the Phoenix site and listed it on their site as a post. This is very common. However, other than the name itself, their was no link back to the Phoenix site.

Now, I started off bashing Google as doing the same thing to create a contrast. This is the inherant challenge with the web. Just like drug addicts,we are cool that the engines copy and do what they will with our sites.

Webmasters trade not just their copyright, but even personal information and datamining for possible leads. We are willing participants in what would amount to copyright infringement in the old world. However, we accept their intrusions for that sweet elixir called traffic. While the splog in affect does the same thing, and we call that criminal.

It is a complicated issue that a small post cannot answer, but I at least wanted to contrast from the "Phoenix' posting.

Are Your Pages Disappearing?

Are Your Pages Disappearing in Google's Supplemental Hell?

About a year or two ago,Google somewhat quietly instituted a new index that sort of sits on top of their main index. It is called the Supplemental Index.