Find out how he changed with this changing market.
Majoring in Minors
So often the online webmaster community is taught to look at each of these as one singular event. Without acknowledgment of the larger picture. And of course each of the above bullets represents a whole body of disciplines. We are taught to obsess over small singular actions such that our online marketing is nothing but a series of short lived, poorly executed tactical executions.
Some major minors:
Search Engine Positions: Search positions are nice. But a top position and fifty cents will only get you a cup of coffee (well maybe in 1976, I just paid $1.75 for a large at Mickie D's yesterday). A position is only implied traffic. Folks worry about 1 ranking phrase while my clients and I rank for hundreds. Folks worry about keyword density or proximity. They matter, but not much.
Server Analytics: Look at your visitors. Who are they? How many of them are there? Well analytics do not give names, but they give numbers and behaviors based on keywords. So if you are majoring in just one keyword phrase (everyone loves to major in "city + real estate" ) phrase look at your server logs. You will find you can attract a much larger audience by considering your keywords that people use to find you.
Lead Counts: Conversion. Think of the "tootsie roll pop" ratio. This is where you get into visitor values. How many visitors do you need to get to a lead? If a visitor is worth $20. Then, theoretically you can spend up to $19.99 to get that visitor as a client. But you will not know that unless you track.
The above are what lead to sales and closed deals. Within each are mountains of knowledge bases that can easily waste a lifetime.
However, when you start with the end in mind. That is your business plan calls out for x amount of sales, and y generated online balanced by your own values and objectives. Then you have a start. A target.
Instead, so often we live with the delusion that if "I just rank number one for Happyville Real Estate, then I will reach Nirvana."
Did You Forget Why You Came to The Dance?
So often I hear that I blog to give my visitors great information to enrich their lives or at least online experience. BULLSHIT! You are there to make money. And the sooner you admit that the sooner you will make it. Otherwise stop writing it off as an expense as it isn't a business it is a hobby.
But learning this stuff can be fun and exhilarating. I get that. But you have to stay on focus or the web and vendors will steal your most precious selling time.
The web requires you to grasp the big picture or you will get lost. Not only your time will get wilted away but also your money. In order, to succeed on line you must develop a strategy first before jumping into the next big thing.
At http://www.realestateguerilla.com is an exclusive Coaching club where we will work with you on your top down success strategy. Or if you would prefer a private consult, contact Tim O'Keefe today. 310 533 9145. He consults at $500 an hour/minimum 2 hours.
->related blog post:
Are you trying to hit a home run with your prospects without even asking them out on a date?
Facebook Value: $10 billion
Youtube Sold To Google:$1.65 Billion in Stock
MySpace Sale: $580 Million
Social Media Company Planning their Sale:
And we dream just a little bit about internet riches.
What we are not told is that for every YouTube there are 100's of other wanna be's hoping and praying for some schmuck to buy them.
What do the above companies all have in common? Zero Revenue.
Google thought that they could slap Adsense onto videos and they would enjoy their next success. They are no doubt working on a new plan. What does 1.6 Billion just doesn't go as far as used to I guess.
You and I. We are not those kids making a new widget in our parents Garage with our college drop out buddies building a website for the sole purpose of IPO riches. This is the modern day geek version of kids playing hoops on the city yards of Chicago dreaming of the NBA.
You and I have chosen our profession and we are looking for a lead. A sale. In real estate since you cannot buy a home online, you are looking for a lead. Even a mortgage ap online is really just a lead. Nothing has transacted.
The real estate industry could afford to be early adopters through a historical wealth infusion of the last several years.
The real estate online evolution has gone from:
Websites
IDX Websites
Drip Campaigns
SEO/SEM
Blogging
Micro Blogging/Social Media/2.0
I have been there since the beginning and every single part of this evolutionary process has been met with an enamored audience.
Vendors have been more than happy to sell the Koolaid that this thirsty market of Realtors wanted. And the packages have come in many shapes and sizes and a budget for everyone.
And like the pharmaceutical industry that to a large degree educates the medical community on drugs. The real estate vendors have educated the Realtor and Mortgage community on marketing themselves online.
Many never having run more than their own company website marketing. If that. Many selling concepts that have yet to work or make money. Some selling business models that are more useful for those garage geeks building the next Facebook.
Instead of a real estate or mortgage producer looking for a lead that will turn into a side.
This single concept is what has led an industry down a slippery path of majoring in minors and not focusing on what matters. A strategy that will propel them into more deals and sale.
Why Are You Online?
So as the evolution of website to 2.0 moved forward the industry has forgotten why they came to the web.
In the name of delegation the industry embraced plug n play. IDX and pre-written email sequences that were never customized.
Blogging came along. It was sold easy as a bypass to SEO. "Well that would get rid of that expense". Or more than likely, allow those who up until then could not play, to play. While the busy agents doing sides would react like a client of mine did. "Who the hell has the time?".
These bloggers would/will spend all day blogging and no time emailing. Email is still the backbone of any online marketing you do. The money is in the list as they say.
Now I notice many of the resistors to blogging have embraced Facebook and post all the time. What the!!??
Seriously, if you put in that kind of effort into your blogging and your website you might get somewhere.
But the larger picture never has been considered. Everything is a singular event, not related to the other. And for this reason is more often than not a business, and barely a promotion.
The secret is that the community must embrace publishing and not get myopic into one tool or activity. To say "I specialize in social marketing, or blogging" is a sign of a handicapped marketer. One easily replaced by the bigger thinker.
The truth is that blogging is not a real word. A blog is only software and social media is just a new name for an old game. We used to call social media BBS, and forums.
To succeed online you must embrace the fact that you are a publisher. And then re-purpose your content across the channels or tools that best serve you.
Find out how to use Guerilla Online Marketing Strategies to propel your business: Real Estate Guerilla
->related blog posts:
Real Facebook&Blog Marketing Strategies
Web 2.0: What is it?
Frittering Away on Twitter
Profiting From Social Media: Advice I Gave to a Recruiter
Social Distortion
There has been lots of talk here and there lately with affiliate marketing and real estate blogs.
Short answer:don't.
Long answer....
What is affiliate marketing? Many believe that the term was invented by Amazon who actually coined the phrase "associate marketing". They liked their new word so much they wouldn't let anyone else use it so they had to use "affiliate". Each Associate gets a small fee for listing Amazon's ad or widget on your webpage or site. For a site like Amazon the payment is near 5-10% (depending on their terms).
If that answer didn't get you to think twice about doing affiliate marketing on your site then run the numbers.
How many leads do you get now? Compare that to your visitors and you have the Tootsie Roll Pop Ratio. That is how many visitors to get to a lead? 
Now add another message called an advertisement for Amazon and now you just split your message in two. But more than likely you will even get less of a return than before because your message is no longer focused.
The types of sites you might use are foreclosure.com, forsalebyowner.com, moving.com, etc. Probably the largest affiliate network can be found at CommissionJunction.com.
FOCUS
The challenge I find with most real estate websites especially blogs is that they lack a slippery chute. In other words, no call to action. No, "I wanna get to you better" offer. And I must admit I have been guilty of this myself.
It amazes me however that often times the RE NET, are more than happy to discuss passing off traffic to an affiliate. Which in turn hoses their branding, while refusing to ask the visitor to sign up for any kind of email sequencing/drip. All for a few bucks, maybe. Its absurd.
If you are going to do affiliate marketing this way then I would suggest that you send the ads as recommendations through email. The conversions will be better for you this way. But still I wouldn't do it.
The Real Way to Do Affiliate Marketing and Real Estate
Do not step over Dollars thinking you will make Dimes with the traditional online affiliate networks and companies. Instead...
You know that Title guy that bugs you for business weekly? The Escrow and Pest Control. You know all those affiliate people that have jobs on the backs of your transactions?
They owe you. Make them add some value to your business. Here is how:
Have them help you create back end and front end educational services. Please, I do not want to here about various legalities.( Or any other legal excuse not to market. That is for you to figure out with your Legal people.)
Now the buyer or seller will insist on these guys and actually have a reason to pay for them down the road.
You can also go to your local Moving Company, Furniture Company, etc and create offers that either pay you through affiliate commissions or in barter, trade, etc. Get creative. I like where you can get the affiliates to help with the upfront content as that is where most agents suffer. If they have materials in print all you have to do is digitize and repurpose them into useful online content.
So be creative and do not step over Dollars for Dimes. Not when you can create a team of affiliates that you can leverage for multiple payoffs instead of just one small fee.
We will discuss these concepts in much more depth at http://www.RealEstateGuerilla.com
I just penned a post over at the PositiveonRealEstate Blog on perceptions and the way they influence our decisions and more importantly how perceptions drive the real estate marketplace.
The issue being at its core is how are you as a publisher influencing the real estate conversation?
I see Realtors on FaceBook or Twitter report their number of showings or 4 offers for the day are implying that their marketplace is robust. The article I wrote goes even beyond that in discussing how language can move people. Of course I steal mostly from political examples as they are the most obvious.
Consider the following scenario:
If the market comes back you want to be already prepared.
WHEN the market comes back NOW you will profit from the turnaround. Face it most people do not even know the market has turned around before it is too late.
When is stronger than if, and Now puts people into the moment and more of an action oriented place.
I learned log ago a few truths that are THE path to sales success.
People buy for emotional reasons and justify with logic. As an example, all the gurus are trying to explain how Obama was brilliant with his social media expertise. Let me tell you the Obama win is easily explained. It was because he was more emotional stimulating than McCain who was about as exciting as watching my cat clean himself. And there was Palin. And then things changed for a second. Until the bailouts started.
Facts Tell and Stories Sell. I learned this in my brief stint in Multi Level Marketing and it is how you move lots of people to follow you. Tell a narrative and people will be much more interested in what you have to say than if just told.
Just Ask....
HouseBlogger started off way back in 2004 proclaiming that the web was best suited as a DM tool for real estate agents. DM means Direct response. 
Which implies that you start with a slippery chute that starts with traffic & finishes with the outcome of a lead & then sale.
What might that chute look like?
Without some sort of DM strategy a website is nothing more than a digital brochure and we all know when someone asks for your card or brochure in the real world, your paper is usually headed for the round file!
Ask. Many real estate agents see their leads double when they just place a registration out front.
How do you create this with all your social web pages lie Twitter, Facebook and the like? They are merely webpages are they not?.. and they can serve to bring your peeps back to your call to action.
From politics, to markets, to opinion. The web can and does influence.
The web is a syndication machine as distributed computing allows networks to talk with one another with ease. It is what has given us Google and their huge computing power. It is what RSS is about.
This ability to manipulate the perceptions of the crowds is what I alluded to in my early 2008 http://www.positiveonrealestate.com mission as a way to take back the news and in fact change perceptions thru multiple syndications.
Pat Kitano (listen to our social media interview/podcast with Pat Kitano) is employing similar techniques by getting "armies" of micro bloggers. What I would call at its core content publishers that are building pages of juicy content to drive traffic to their home base.
As a SEO professional, I think I could add some strategies that would help them get social traffic and organic as they can coalesce, but will often have to be received independently.
Another way of thinking about this is to employ the social networks as a propaganda campaign.
Does this stuff work? You bet otherwise how can stupid rumors like the Yahoo Microsoft be passed off as news this past weekend:
The Times of London reported that Microsoft may acquire Yahoo’s search business for $20 billion dollars. While the Times report included detailed information, named parties, including Velocity Investment Group founder Ross Levinsohn, said there is “No truth to it.”
So how does one go about propagandizing the web? Stay tuned and sign into http://www.realestateguerilla.com as we are about to open it back up for more membership spots.
How can this web propaganda work?
Ask Obama. Or any politician of late. The Dems have done it especially well online the last two elections.
Why is it that buyers won't buy, even though all indicators are that the market has hit bottom (notice my own pre supposition here? This is used allot in propaganda)? The web can rapidly deploy ideas or memes that spread across multiple channels and change perceptions and beliefs. Exactly what you want as a marketer.
Last Saturday the team I Coach of 8 to 10 years olds played one of the most inspirational games I have ever watched. There was tears of grief in the stands and tears of joy for our side.
In what was one of the most grueling games I have ever watched, my El Segundo Eagles won the PCC Championship for the Mitey Mite Division.
I am the dude closest to the pole.
So why would I write about my team on a marketing blog? First off I am breaking my own rules and taking that rare moment of indulgence. While I am at it may I wish you a Happy Thanksgiving?
This team won a game that was won on pure desire. Heart. In other words it took three overtimes to win this game. I kid you not only were the teams and staffs drained, the parents and fans were wiped out.
I have not experienced this kind of noise on the sideline since my days of playing in College.
Three overtimes is not easy and I for one have never been put into that kind of pressure cooker as a player or Coach. Imagine 8 and 9 years olds. These kids on both teams got experience that will serve them for ever.
In a way the students taught the teachers(Coaches and Parents).
Yah we adults face a world currently that seems a bit bleek. It is the Over Time on some of your business futures. Taxes are due and some of you haven't had a deal in awhile.
Kevin Hogan discusses the current Survivor show on NBC as a game of will. Much like my football players victory, this show is a battle of "who wants it more?"
Hogan compares success to a rocket:
The fact is that she broke the earth's gravity and that took a LOT of fuel. A TON of energy. But once you have momentum, once you have established the ability to control the self, amazing things happen.
Like the team I Coach who paid dearly in sweat and practice all season, constant improvement is necessary for success that most will say is easy and instant.
As Woody Allen says,"The secret to success is showing up. How many ever do actually show up and are present when faced with adversities? Honest assessments of self are necessary for growth.
Todays market is crazy. But I promise someone in your marketplace is succeeding right now as I write. Someone is tearing your market up. Transaction City! Why can't it be you?
Much like 8 and 9 year olds who frankly may not know any better than to give their best effort...Why can't it be you who gets the deals? Or are you too adult to keep persevering?
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