Real Estate Marketing SEO Blog

How To Blog Comment For Profit

Yesterday I posted an article on affiliate marketing for real estate and mortgage pros. It was in response to a post on another RENet vendor website 4Realz.net

I had left a comment on Dustin Luther's post that was in opposition to posting affiliate ads all over one's brand.

Since the comment has been deleted I post it here:

I think this is a bad idea in so many ways I cannot count them all.
Let me begin by going back to the movement towards localism.
Why did that have to be?
Because many of the posts had nothing to do with the real estate in that agents town.
I remember seeing ( and still do at times) agents writing about SEO or Online Marketing. As a marketer and SEO vendor I find those posts interesting. However, it diminishes that authors brand. What are you an SEO or a Realtor?

 In the case of affiliate marketing it is very tempting to slap a moving company up on ones blog. Moving.com, Foreclosure.com, Forsalebyowner.com are some places that would make easy fits.

For a few sheckles you just diminished your message.
You would be much better served to offer this stuff on the back end of sequencing or an email campaign.

And in fact even better off to partner with local vendors to offer tips and strategies and commissions(textual, video, etc) as content for your front end and backend lead marketing.(I let you deal with the legalities one way or another as I have no idea how that would work)

In the end, why would you dilute your brand and message with other brands, stronger than yours stealing screen real estate?

I am not sure why Dustin deleted my comment post. Perhaps it was by mistake. However, presenting other's opinions are the point of comments. And in fact allowing for commentary that fly's opposite of yours is an opportunity to bolster your standing amongst your "tribe".

I discuss this in my next installment of free videos at the RealEstateGuerilla.com

How to Get Link Juice For Nothin'

In the Pre internet days of the last real estate recession, an old pal of mine Phil Gilboy went head to head against his Multiple Listings Service. It seems ole Phil was looking for new and exciting ways to prosper during a down market and he started a new phone service called something like 1-800-cal-lmls (I made that up as I cannot remember the exact number).

Well the Westside MLS came down hard with their legal beagles claiming infringement. Except one thing was wrong. The ones owning MLS as a trademark are Major League Soccer. They eventually let Phil do his thing.

Now besides this legal issue of who owns what. The real issue of course is why would an entity that Phil helped support attempt to take away his right to make a living?

The Realty Associations of course have a long history of this type of dumping on the ones who brought them to the dance.

At the dawning of the World Wide Web, NAR made a desperate plea for higher fees to help fund Realtor.com. If the site was not built it was argued then that Microsoft and others would take over the MLS.  The site made by NAR for its reason for being was built to much fanfare. It quickly sunk from the notion of protecting the MLS and into a new revenue stream. Thus charging its members to participate in the site built on their behalf.

Ironically, a few years later and now we have Trulia who many in the public might argue is the defacto online MLS.

This whole issue was brought to the forefront of late as a Florida MLS has not only used the traditional means of regulating their members, but many bloggers believe that they have gone so far as to compete with the very people who pay them for help in their business.

This story begins with a Realtor who owned a domain with the word MLS in it, some strong SEO and link juice. And then a Multiple Listings Service who in this authors opinion went to extreme measures to use their power.

Who is the Realtor? Marc Rasmussen of Sarasota, Florida. The URL was TheSarasotaMLS.com, and the Board?  None other than the Sarasota MLS.

Archive.org show the url going as far back as Sept 2003. So why now in 2008 would this Association feel that they could impose an ethics violation?   

According to RealEstateWebmasters:

Article 12 of the National Association of Realtors Code of Ethics".

".. the NAR adopted a new stance on the use of the acronym "MLS" in a Realtor's domain name – basically stipulating that "at their discretion" MLS boards could adopt new policies prohibiting the use of MLS in a Realtor's domain. In my opinion, the NAR did not practice any measure of responsible due diligence before adopting this addition to the COE and it was extremely poorly received by its membership as evidenced by the extreme negative reaction by the Realtor / webmaster community as a whole.."

John Allen a Sarasota Realtor and competitor, defends Marc Rasmussen. He turns the issue on its head when he asks if the Sarasota MLS is going to claim ethical violation for the use of their name in the website The Sarasota MLS.com. Then Allen asks about the SAR owned domain Time2BuySarasota.com:

Considering SEO as a Boost for Your Real Estate Brand

The following was inspired by an email thread that went back and forth between myself and the President of a Web Design House. the project mentioned is  in the very beginning stages of an SEO project that we are fulfilling for one of their clients.I thought you might find this of interest.....

At the start of a project brand increases because of linking. Often times a client thinks that this was built in, when in fact some of it may have been but Google does not necessarily care about your brand. They care about mentions and citations of your brand. Google cares only what links to the references of your brand across the web on your site or not. As your links increase to your pages of your site, your brand references (keywords) within your analytics should go up.

So what you get last month in your original, pre-seo campaign "brand traffic" spreads out to larger derivatives of that word and more searches as it gets links to the pages with brand words. And links that carry those branded words in the anchor text increase. In the case of brand it usually is not very competitive if at all, so a few links can really get the brand out there.

Reputation Management
This by the way is what reputation management is about. One can easily steal your brand by creating pages about your company on many web pages. It can even be done anonymously on free sites. Its easy to do because there is 0 competition for it until someone actually does it.

The idea being that you can get crowded out totally or partially from the SERPS (search positions) for your own name!Thats why it is important for companies to do more socially and thru syndicates to populate the web with references to their brand.

By the way we often will get an agent site to come up higher in the SERPS than a broker site online (if the broker is not our client). Its very easy if the broker isn't working for in bound links.

This reputation thing is not as bad as it is hyped up to be yet. I have seen few attempts by malcontents but not done very well. But I do think it will be a major problem down the road not just in the real estate business. But I see this playing out in how news and politics can be perceived.

For a glimpse of the future and managing reputation and perceptions, study how the Obama and McCain campaigns have run their online marketing for the past election.
Election Special: Whatever You Do, Do Not Vote For This Candidate
Even McCain used online Video masterfully. Obama used the web better than any one politician or business yet.

Confessing Your Sins Will Get You Traffic!
A site can be SEOd all day long, but if it does not have links it does not fully or even in some cases partially exist to Google. On many templated real estate sites there is not much one can do as far as onpage optimization.

So how does one get high rankings?

Links. Links make up for the sins of the site. They are the absolution from the priest called Google.

So right now a month into the project what we see is a start of a wider span of brand words. And even a small start at seeing real estate search words giving traffic.

We can do that by comparing the search strings from last month before the SEO launch to now. This month is almost double brand based visits. (names changed to keep the client private)
The list is longer (width) and many words are getting more visits compared to last month.
ie. TOTAL BRAND visits  are double last month
27         century 21 franchise name
26         url.com
19         century 21 franchise name realty
14         franchise name
6           century franchise name
6           www.franchise name.com
4           city century 21
4           century 21 in state
etc.....

The Big Daddies of real estate

RISMedia’s announced its 20th Annual Power Broker Survey.

Interestingly, the total number of transactions down from 2,754,618 in 2006 to 2,322,210 in 2007. On average, real estate firms did over 1,100 less transactions in 2007 compared to 2006. Total sales volume in 2007 was down more than $100 billion, from $855,755,959,352 in ‘06 to $749,201,552,294 in ‘07.

Positioning

Marketing is to a large degree about positioning. Redfin claims advantage over their competition. Their Unique Position seems to be superior savings . So they did a customer survey and found:

• 95% Customer Satisfaction (CSI).
• On average their clients net $5,048 more.
• On average they refund back $10,520 in real estate commissions.

What are you doing to Positionyour company, and what are you doing to prove that position?

Your Real Estate Candidate

I love politics. Say that word Republican and Democrat in civil company and people run for the hills. As a student of marketing that is pathetic. Hopefully, as a student of marketing most of us are open to studying the greatest marketers.

The Obfuscation of the truth...

....& The Orgy of Free

I offer you two videos today on getting a free real estate blog and then follow up with a rant on Free Blogs, Websites, Social Networking and well anything....

Free.

Part I

Part II

The site mentioned is part of a course that we are about to launch called
Get a Cheap Real Estate Blog