Targeting homebuyers through social networking

This article from the New York Times highlights how savvy real estate agents are using social networking to target their buyers.

Some important points raised in the article include how the new trends on the web are reaching younger audiences for free. This more tactile marketing by many web-savvy professionals are now sending messages on Twitter, getting referrals on LinkedIn, posting blogs, uploading virtual tours onto the Internet and sending text messages and alerts to customers’ phones when homes come on the market.

Bettie Meinel, vice president for career development at Century 21 Laffey Associates, based in Greenvale, said that because consumers are already online seeing the photos and virtual tours, “that is their first showing.” Actually touring the house shows more serious intent, she explained. “If they like it enough, they make an appointment to come and see that property; that is the second showing,” she said.

Also check out other blog posts on these topics in the social media and video sections.

Link Trading: Advantages and Pitfalls

The world of SEO is a dangerous place to have a baseline level of knowledge. People can read a few blog posts, understand the basics (Keywords, Content and Links) and go to work on their websites. There are many mistakes to be made in this situation, especially in the world of link exchanges. At its most basic level, it is generally understood that the more inbound links a website has, the better its ranking will be. This understanding has spawned a whole link-exchange industry. You can join link exchange directories and if you are the primary contact for a website you have undoubtedly received countless emails – both spam and legitimate – from people who want to exchange links with you. As with so many things in the online world, link exchanges are not as simple or straight forward as they appear.

The best way to think about a link is as a recommendation between websites. When you link your site to another website, search engines count it as a recommendation of that site by you. As with any recommendation, its importance is totally dependent on the source of the recommendation. Online, this all breaks down to what Google calls Page Rank. Page rank is tabulated from a complicated algorithm involving a multiplicity of factors but that can be effectively represented by a number between 0-10 with 0 being the worst and ten the best. [Note: Don't confuse Page Rank with SERP rank. The former is a quality index which impacts the latter. The latter (Search Engine Results Page rank) is the position of your site's link on a search engine results page.]  If you spend lots of time on your website adding pages and pages of unique keyword rich content, it is updated frequently, and other high-page-rank sites link to you, then Google is going to rate your site towards the top end of the scale. (To give you some context, whitehouse.gov and harvard.edu each have a page rank of 9. Most Real Estate sites are a 2, 3, or 4 although a rare few rank higher.)  A favorable page rank will inspire other sites to want to exchange links with you because a link from your site will really help their own Google Page Rank. There are two factors that you need to be aware of in this situation.

• First, you want to make sure that the site you are linking to has good content that will add value to your client’s experience. For example, if a client follows a link off your page and it leads them to a bogus website it will not reflect positively on you. On the other hand, a recommendation by your site that proves useful will encourage people to come back in the future and trust your opinion.
• Second, you need to be aware of whether the reciprocal link from this other site will do you any good. This is where page rank comes in. If your page rank stands at 5 and the site you are linking with is at a 2, then the link will really not help you in the eyes of Google and thus you should not waste your time with it.

Of course, this second consideration can be overlooked if the site to which you are linking has information that will be useful to your clientele or you have some other motivation such as a close personal or business relationship. However, if you are purely linking for linking sake, then you will want to be discriminating in you choices. There are many free online utilities that check page rank but the best of the bunch is a plug in for Firefox called The SEO Toolbar. This little toolbar sits below your other toolbars in Firefox and can give you immediate data on any site you happen to be visiting. By using these tools to evaluate the quality of the websites that are contacting you, you can make informed choices about which you want to link to and which you want to ignore.

Link building can be a very good avenue to pursue in your ongoing work to optimize your site. But like all decisions you make about your website, it is imperative that you utilize the tools that are available to you and make sure that your decisions are based on data.

Negative Real Estate Consumer Report

I receive daily emails from ActiveRain, these cover all kinds of topics. Usually I don’t have a lot of time to read through them; so I skim over the newsletter titles and see if anything catches my eye. Well today one did: “Survey Says… REALTORS Suck”. Wow! I certainly clicked on that one.

The first thing that struck me was that this is a great example of an attention grabbing blog title. It will get your readers to click and read. It is controversial, and let’s face it, people love controversy. As a former real estate agent and the daughter and sibling of two REALTORS I couldn’t resist reading on.

I found the article interesting. I think it is a good reminder to ANY agent, new, old or otherwise, about what your consumer is looking for and what is important to them.  A professional in any field should always be keeping up on the needs of their clients.

Two of the most interesting points for me where:

1. That the most important thing to the consumer is lowest commission and knowledge is the least. My reaction to that was, “No wonder you think REALTORS suck.” In my experience the lower the commission, the less attention paid to the client.

Maybe that’s not true in all cases, but I have a feeling it doesn’t help! So how does the average REALTOR put this information to use? Should they all be slashing their commissions?  Well it turns out that 95% of consumers are still using Agents. Even though the consumer feels they can get just as much knowledge by doing their own legwork, they are still relaying on real estate professionals when all is said and done.

I don’t think this is a free pass and should be counted on, especially in this market. I think it’s important to be the best at what you do and the most knowledgeable about technology, your area, the state of the market, etc. Those are the agents that will get the business and keep it.

2. The example photos Jeff Corbett uses, got me giggling. He could not be more dead on with this point. If all you can fit in the bathroom shot is the toilet, leave it off the listing! Nobody needs to see the toilet. Okay, so the owner did a great job redoing the bathroom, but it is too small to photograph. How about taking close-up shots of some of the details? BUT, please spare us the toilet shot.

The other one that always gets me is the tiny bedroom, that just shows the bed or maybe a corner of the bed and a window. In those cases, how about a video of the property? We can help guide you through this process and you’ll be better off for it!

Just to hammer the point home, here are a few examples of photos you should skip!

Are they selling the bed or the house?

Ahh the lovely toilet… So homey!

Overall its a great article so give it a read! “Survey Says… Realtors Suck!” By Jeff Corbett, Active Rain Staff Writer. You’ll probably find one or two take aways.

The Evolution of Facebook and Twitter

The graying of Facebook

Two articles that comment on the increasing median age of Facebook users, in particular the 35+ crowds. A recent one, ‘Facebook Users Growing Up Fast’ from mediapost.com, talks about how now over half their users are over 25 in part due to the aging of existing users and the influx of older users. It also discusses ways in which marketers are looking to serve this new group of users.

The second one ‘My Midlife Facebook Crisis‘, which came out a year ago,  is a hilarious day-in-the-life style article from the Wall Street Journal. It anecdotally makes the point that we’re all inescapably social net-workers now.

Twitter flying high

Twitter has been getting a lot more mainstream media attention lately, so we thought we’d post this article ‘Putting Twitter’s World to Use’ from the New York Times. Amongst other things it talks about the increasing interaction between businesses and their customers driving business decisions and as a research tool diving into the world’s collective mind.

It’s only upwards for the folks at Twitter.

Real Estate Blogging Success Story

When talking to clients, USM consistently recommends starting an on-site blog to help boost their website’s performance. At their most basic level, on-site Blogs are very beneficial to a lead generating website on two distinct fronts:

• On the human side of things blogs, offer a way for a business to show their clientele a more personal side with minimal time commitment. When writing copy for a business website, the author needs to think about maintaining professional voice and assuring that the piece that they are writing is consistent with the subject of the page they are posting it. The beauty of a blog is that by their very nature people expect blogs to be more informal and cover a variety of subjects. On a blog you can have two posts one after the other about completely opposite subjects and it is completely acceptable.
• As with everything on the Internet, you are writing for two audiences: people and search engines. There is lots of fancy language involved in Search Engine Optimization, but the keystone of SEO is “the keyword”. If, as you blog, you do so with an eye to your site’s primary keywords, you can turn your blog into a treasure trove of unique, keyword-rich content for search engines. The SEO value of blogs does not stop there, however. Because of the nature of blog software, every time you write a post, the software notifies Google that it has new content and the blog is re-indexed. The more frequently the site is indexed the better your placement in Google will be.

These are pretty standard, as long as you blog frequently on you own domain you will reap these benefits. Quality of writing and pertinence of subject also can provide their own benefits. Take for example our client, Brad Dinsmore, a Southern New Hampshire Realtor. Brad had us build him an on-site blog a few months ago and started blogging about subjects effecting his market area in and around Windham, NH. He was doing a great job, titling his posts with keyword rich language, blogging frequently and linking to the rest of his site. Because of this, he was receiving the benefits listed in the bullet points above. Because of the quality and originality of his posts, a reporter from a local paper called the Eagle Tribune came into his office last week with a copy of one of his blog posts titled Southern NH Home Sales: 1st Quarter 2009 the reporter wanted to write a feature article for the Sunday Edition based on Brad’s post. The end result of this was that on the front page of the Sunday edition of the Eagle Tribune were two large color photos of one of his office’s agents Debbie St Jean and two, first time-home buyers as part of an article entitled First-time buyers a ray of sunshine in dismal N.H. housing market. This is publicity that you cannot buy and a perfect example that when you put your expertise out there you will reap the benefits. If you know your market better than anyone else then let people know. Add content to your site and blog regularly. You may not get a featured article out of it but you will start to gain the recognition that you deserve.

Keyword Benefit Index – Applying Data to Your Internet Marketing Decisions

We all know the old marketing and advertising model: take out an ad in the paper or buy some billboard space and sit back and see what happens. There are many problems and inefficiencies in this model. First of all, aside from a loose geographic area or subscription audience, there is no way to target the specific groups of people you are interested in reaching. Second, there is no way to gauge the number of people that the advertisements actually reach and, more importantly, effect. Third, once the ad run is finished or the billboard comes down, the only residual benefit is some passing brand recognition.

Internet marketing –  including organic search engine placement, Pay Per Click advertising and online social media  - has decentralized how businesses reach their target audience. With this decentralization has come many advantages. The advertiser can more quickly respond to market shift and trends while focusing marketing dollars on a targeted demographic. However, with this decentralized model lots of people are trying to manage their ad campaigns themselves rather than hire a marketing professional, which comes with many pitfalls. Advertising agencies had focus groups and opinion polls that they used in their process. With the new model people often bypass this step and base campaigns on what they perceive consumer interest to be in their market. By basing their efforts on their perceptions, they are missing out on many of the advantages that online marketing offers.

Why base your online marketing on a guess when you can base it on fact? Thanks to the analytic tools available on the Internet, you can convene a focus group of your own that is made up of your entire market area. At its best, online marketing is driven by keyword data, while everything else (design, functionality and products and services) takes second seat. You can have the most attractive site and the most cutting edge product on the market, but if no one comes to your website then you garner no benefit. This is why keyword data analysis has to take first priority in your online marketing budget.

To frame our investigation of the fundamentals of keyword analysis, lets take and example of a business — we will call it ACME. ACME is trying to decide what keywords to focus on for their new website. The first thing that they have to do in their decision making process is define their online market area (OMA). OMA is made up of every conceivable combination of keywords that a potential customer could type in when looking for ACME’s products or services. Humans are a generally imprecise species and thus there can be literally thousands of keyword combinations, including misspellings, that could relate to ACME’s goods and or services. Having defined this through keyword research, ACME chooses two possible keyword options, X & Y.

While ACME wants to lead with X or Y they also want to take as much advantage of their OMA as possible. However it would be inefficient, expensive and likely impossible to try and optimize ACME’s site for their entire OMA. Because ACME can’t effectively optimize its site for thousands of different keywords, it is necessary for them to focus efforts within some section of the OMA. This is the point where ACME might commit the cardinal sin of online marketing: they may look at their OMA and choose which keyword they want to focus on based on their perceptions of what will bring them the most traffic. To avoid this, ACME needs overlay two more sets of data onto their OMA.

The First set of data is search engine traffic. Getting hard data on the frequency that certain keywords are used helps to focus their efforts on more productive terms within their OMA. This is another point at which people make a classic online marketing blunder. For example judging by the keyword traffic data displayed in figure 1 Acme’s obvious choice would be X.

Fig 1

While selecting keywords from this set of data will be more productive than keywords blindly chosen from the entire OMA, there is still one critical piece of information in ACME’s decision making process that is missing, namely keyword competition.

Keyword competition is defined by the number of websites and pages competing for organic placement for a given search term. ACME makes the right decision and looks at keyword traffic and keyword competition data on the two terms displayed in figure 2.

Fig. 2

With this new source of data, ACME sees that while X has 30% more traffic than Y it has more than twice the amount of competition. To quantify this data we can generate something I have developed called the Keyword Benefit Index, using this simple formula:

Keyword Traffic / Keyword Competition = Keyword Benefit Index (KBI)

In this case, the KBI for term X is .005 compared to .01 for term Y. KBI is a simple tool to evaluate potential keyword benefit for a unit of investment. The actual KBI value is not in a high number — but in providing a scale upon which all the terms can be measured. Once a KBI has been assigned for any given term, the list can be sorted by that KBI value, identifying which keywords offer the most opportunity. When utilized in this case by ACME, they discover that keyword Y is a better keyword choice than keyword X.

This is a simplified version of the data analysis and decision making process necessary for selecting primary keywords for a website. If a company such as ACME is going to take full advantage of this new decentralized advertising model, then they owe it to themselves to utilize the tools – and most importantly the data – that is available to them in today’s online marketplace. To do so they need to develop in-house expertise or hire firms with a strong track record in Search Engine Optimization. Anything short of that is an improper use of their marketing budget.

Internet Marketing Basics for Realtors: IDX participation

In all the hubbub about listing aggregation services like Trulia and Zillow or the classifieds site Craigslist or any number of other new and emerging real estate services out there, some simple basics can get lost. If you are a real estate professional interested in getting the property you list seen by the most people there’s often a basic tool available to you: MLS IDX participation.

I know that it isn’t new or sexy. In fact, it’s really old. But getting your listing viewed by people who are genuinely interested in buying property can be achieved right out of the gate by participating in your MLS IDX. The people who see your listing via the MLS IDX are likely to have the following traits:

• Interest in buying property vs kicking tires
• Interest in working with a Realtor
• Interest in the geographic region served by your MLS

That’s the basics. If someone meets those characteristics then you probably want them to see your listings. By participating in your MLS IDX program you make it easier for more qualified people to see your listing.

Once you’ve got that basic piece down, then go wild with all the other aggregation and syndication options you can. In some MLS programs they will even handle the syndication themselves. If not, your web developer may be able handle automate the syndication as well (I know the real estate websites we make at Union Street Media can have syndication options enabled).

But start with the basics. Don’t miss out on all those people interested in buying, interested in working with a real estate professional and interested in your area.

Why video is good for marketing real estate online.

[Ed. note: The Real Estate Internet Marketing blog welcomes a new voice to the blog, our intern Tom Cull. We think you'll enjoy his perspective and experience working with video in this and other posts.]

Remember when “Video killed the Radio Star“? According to The Pew Internet & American Life Project, almost 15% of all web traffic comes from You Tube and other video-sharing platforms. Couple that with Google’s increasing ability to index video into top search results and using video becomes a key component.

Many small businesses are jumping on this bandwagon as people are becoming more accustomed and willing to watching video online as they are to read text, especially with advertising. Using platforms like YouTube also saves on storage and bandwidth costs with great distribution possibilities from social networking.

But a caveat, large or small it is important to follow some basic rules of online video to communicate your message effectively and not turn off the viewer: Read more

Internet Marketing Basics: Time-sensitive blog topics

Sometimes news breaks that is very interesting to your target audience (usually something that has an impact on their wallet). When the news breaks, there may be a lot of stories and reports about the topic in general but often there is very little useful reporting on how that bit of news effects your local market or how people can make the best use of the information.

Adding local context and use to a time-sensitive news event is different from writing about a seasonal or recurring event (4th of July Fireworks, for example, happen every year). With a time-sensitive news event you want to publish quickly and get right to the point with your useful, localized tidbits; all the big news brands will handle the general context for you.

What makes for a good time-sensitive blog topic?

Writing a post about a time-sensitive topic means you have to stop what you’re doing, understand the issue and then figure out how your audience can use the information about that topic. Since it isn’t a recurring event, the post may have limited long-term value. So you want to pick the right time-sensitive topics to blog about. Here are some characteristics to look for:

• There’s something in the topic that has a direct impact on the lives of your audience
• Other news outlets are providing the general overview information (so you can focus on how your audience can use the information)
• You can afford to take the time to write your post before the news cools down

Once you have your topic, pound away on the keyboard and get your post out there.

An Example: February 2009 Stimulus Package

As I write this blog post, there’s a new stimulus package going through Congress. This stimulus package will likely have some impact on housing markets across the nation. If you are marketing real estate, I bet there’s something in that bill that will be of interest to your audience. Here is the search data from Google Insights about the stimulus bill:

Looks like a rising trend, something you can perhaps use for your internet marketing.

Since stimulus bill is a national topic other news organizations are doing the heavy lifting for explaining what’s happening:

• Michigan Business Review is rehashing an AP story
• Forbes is running Reuters’ story on Obama’s support of the bill
• The New York Times is discussing how the bill got smaller before passing

There’s probably more, those are just the ones that I found at 3pm on the day the news is breaking. Somewhere in that bill is likely some information that real estate agents could find that might be helpful for home buyers or home sellers.

If you can find that information and, ideally, put it together with actionable local resources for readers, then you’d have a blog post to help insert your name and brand into the national conversation about real estate and the stimulus bill.

So go write your post and be sure to do the following:

1. Insert local context wherever possible
2. Include some step-by-step ways to make use of the information wherever possible
3. Get the post live as quickly as possible

Guess which post I wrote, in order to capitalize on the current time-sensitive topic of the housing stimulus?

Internet Marketing Basics: RSS Feeds

You’ve probably seen the little orange icons and “subscribe to my feed” buttons on sites you’ve visited (you can see some over to the left of this blog post, in fact). You might even have read articles where people argue about things like RSS and Atom and so on. Maybe you’ve heard of things like Google Reader. This is an article written to help you start using RSS feeds to help your online marketing efforts. Read more

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