Real Estate Marketing SEO Blog

Happy New Year

Here is wishing you a most prosperous and healthy 2010. My daughter says that this video is cheesy but I offer it to you anyway as the view is really cool. It is time to plan so here is a gift: Rob Minton is giving away a goal setting book that is simple and to the point. Get that one here: http://www.freegoalbook.com/

How to Beat Gain Marketshare and Crush Your Competition

Putting Strategy into Your Content Production

Its like freaking out before a Midterm. Most small business owners struggle with content.

"What do I talk about? What do I say?"

Answer this question and you have a beginning:

Ask yourself,"in the grand scheme of things why do you or your business matter to your marketplace?" If it doesn't matter you have a larger problem than just missing web content. 

From your market position begin to ask yourself about what your marketplace needs to know prior to getting close enough to ask you an intelligent question.

That is where your potential client is when they read your content.

We have all been in those spots where we are asked by a salesperson, "can I help you?". And we know we need help but have not a clue of what we need help with.

This is also why you publish content.  You publish to claim your authority over your market and to elevate yourself above the pretenders that nip at your business and chip away at your market share.

The good news is that your competition has neither the desire or the know how to create useful and meaningful market centric content. 

As they say Content is King. Actually meaningful content is king.

Realtor Survival Guide for 2010

Create Content or Die

The lesson in this post is about the need for creating content if you plan to survive online in 2010 and beyond. In order to understand this new market driver, we need to take a peek into market trends and history.

MLS.Google.com

Google has made Google real estate part of Google maps.  This has happened just while NAR was announcing their intent on building out their own national database. Snooze you lose I guess.

What is most interesting is that while NAR moves at a snails pace. Ironically, Google gets their data spoon fed from Realtor sources nearly in real time.  In other words, if the Realtors stopped giving them listings, then Google would not be able to provide this new feature other than fsbos.

Of course, neither would real estate verticals like Trulia survive. But of course the nature of taking a listing is to sell the listing. So it has always seemed counter intuitive if not downright non fiduciary to hold onto a listing with such tight fists.

Givin' Away the Farm

MLS syndication has been a source of controversy since the beginning. To the best of my knowledge I was the first to write about the ultimate demise of the  MLS system as far back as January 2005. Since the start of this blog I have pontificated about the MLS system, and the giving away of Realtor data. 

Human Nature Sucks

I recently finished a long successful season of Coaching my kids youth football team. After 21 straight wins, my little guys came out flat for the Championship against a team that they had already beaten twice in the past two seasons. They got beat that day and pretended like they did not know what happened.

Isn't that the way it is though? We sell in good economic times like order takers more than marketers or salesmen. Then think doing the same thing will work in a tougher selling environment. 

We hope it will turn out alright, instead of making it turn out alright. We hope for better sales instead of going and getting them.

Are Your Tactics Hurting Your Strategy?

It has been said that the easiest sale for a salesman is to sell to another salesman. As entrepreneurs and real estate and mortgage professionals typically thrive on hype and puffery.

We love to hear a good pitch.

We get more susceptible as we think higher of ourselves. The person who swears you cannot hypnotize her is the easiest for the hypnotist. As we have learned all these cool gizmos and maybe we are first adapters we naturally have adapted an arrogance that creates blind spots in our critical thinking. Its natural and it happens all the time.

We naturally align with folks who will tell us that we are right. We all want to be right. And lets face it if we are early...

How Many Keywords do Searchers Use?

Percentage of U.S. clicks by number of keywords
Subject	October 2009	November 2009	Month-over-month percentage change
One word	24.03%	24.13%	0%
Two words	23.13%	23.14%	0%
Three words	20.53%	20.37%	-1%
four words	13.83%	13.84%	0%
Five words	8.13%	8.13%	0%
Six words	4.42%	4.43%	0%
Seven words	2.43%	2.43%	0%
Eight or more words	3.49%	3.54%	1%
Note: Data is based on four-week rolling periods (ending Nov. 28, 2009, and Oct. 31, 2009) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users.

It seems one to three keywords still rules search. Typically, keywords become longtail as they increase in number.

PPC Showdown: Bing Vs Google

Every engine wants your ad spend. you can chose from AdWords at Google, Bing, and of course Yahoo.  So the knee jerk reaction is to jump on over to the big Daddy Google for your ads.  Not so fast.

Bing Has Better Click-Rate than Google, Yahoo! But AOL is even Better!

Chitika, an online advertising network claims that Bing gets better ad click-through rates (CTR) than Yahoo! and Google.

• 1.74 percent Bing
• 1.37 percent Yahoo!
• 0.98 percent Google
• 1.76 percent ASK
  
• 2.50 percent AOL

So this means that Bing users click a CTR that is 77 percent higher than Google users.

The post did warn that Google still gets 84% of all traffic. However, when comparing one Google visitor to a Bing visitor. The Bing visitor is more valuable.