Posts Tagged ‘real estate marketing’

Let's get online vs online marketing in perspective

Why do you want your real estate website on the first page of google? Simple, to get more leads. So, once your there are you’re done right? Wrong!

Being found in search is key. Creating an effective online presence for your real estate brand by building the right site, in the right way is essential for real estate agents who want to take their business to the next level. However many agents think that once that has been achieved they can sit back and wait for the leads.

Well as an aspiration it’s admirable, however they may be leaving 50%* of their sites visitors unaware of their site’s existence. (*I don’t claim to know the % here, but probably neither do you! : -) the point is your site will be more effective the more eyeballs reach it)

It’s certainly true that more and more people use search engines as the starting point for information gathering, but one could argue that an equally sized group don’t. For those people, they don’t know you built a site to provide them with the information that they crave. Perhaps, they wouldn’t know how to go about finding this information online anyway.

That’s where offline marketing comes in. 50% of your audience need to receive the mailing telling them where to go to find this information. They’ll get the mailer, see the domain name and then type that into their browser giving you a direct hit.

Google analytics & real estate

Tracking traffic...terrific!

You can track this traffic through your website’s analytics software. Visitors to your site who came from typing in the URL or domain name are called a direct hit. Direct hits are usually from mailers, advertising or business cards. If you can track this, you can start to figure out which offline marketing avenues work most effectively. (You can learn more about using analytics to track your marketing spend here).

Another benefit of creating a niche focused, or community website is that it makes the offline marketing a more realistic proposition as you have already limited the geographical sphere of you reach.

Remember that your mailing pieces need to also promote the main topic people are interested in, which homes sold, which homes are available, what’s their house worth. That should be the focus of your website.

Josh Wilton, Manager of the Weichert Princeton office says it like this:

A real estate agents job is to market themselves. Period, end of story. The more they market themselves, the more money they put themselves in a postion to make.  A key mistake that Real Estate agents make, is ‘I have a website…now what?’ If the website is well constructed you will get Search results and business that way, though you don’t want to rely soley on that. Realtors have traditionally been neighborhood specialists, namely, marketing themselves to a neighborhood, getting marketshare etc. Results from Realtor direct mail is generally around .003 (that is 3/10 of a percent). We also know that nearly 30% of a realtors farm will check out their website

Why would a realtor not want to increase their presence in their farm via the website. Google does only some of the work, they need to do the rest.

To blog or not to blog...I think it's pretty clear, BLOG!

Still not blogging? Well, we’re not going to rest until you are. Are you blogging, but not really sure why?

Here’s yet another reason why it is such a good thing. It might get a little geeky here, but we’ll insulate you from the worst of it.

Ok, on a fundamental level websites and blogs are typically constructed using different frameworks. This is essentially because historically speaking they have been built of different purposes.

The Typical Website Model

Generally speaking websites, at worst, are rather like pretty fleshed out yellow pages ads. A series of pages who’s content seldom changes, (disclaimer: this is not the approach we approve of ), how many times does a Contact Us, or About Us page really have to change. So whenever a page changes or new pages are added, its wise to update your sitemap.

In short, a sitemap is a file that features all the links to pages on your website. When you have an updated site map, you notify the search engines that it’s updated and at some point they’ll pop over to take a look.

There is often a delay, of days if not weeks for search engines to come by and check out the changes. Frustratingly there’s not much that can be done to encourage them to by any sooner.

The Blog Model

Blogs are about being current, what’s happening now, or what’s just happened. Their MO is to get news out there.

The whole point of news is that it’s…that’s right, NEW.

When you write a new blog post and hit ‘publish’ something amazing (you might have to be a geek to use ‘amazing’ in this context) happens. Hitting publish, not only publishes your content to your blog but, importantly it sends out a ‘ping’ to the search engines to notify them that some news has just been reported.

Newness is what search engines crave.

By writing content on your blog you are giving search engines what they are looking for. Is it starting to become clear?

The Difference is Remarkable

Whereas it can be days if not weeks for search engines to find your new page on your website, you can get them to see (or index) your new blog post in minutes, which is frankly, astounding. Simply give search engines what they want and be rewarded.

See For Yourself

Click to enlarge

The blog post you are reading was published to the web at 9.15am this morning. It’s now 9.25am and google has already indexed or seen the post and this can only help our relevance in search results… That took 7 minutes.

Most Realtors call us to complain that they can’t be found at search engines. I think we both know what you can do to change that.

We can help you design and configure your real estate blog and coach you in your blog-craft.

"Extra Extra read all about it..."

The irony of Twitter’s Biz Stone sending an email newsletter over the weekend was not lost on me.

Could it be that perhaps the single most efficient tool for disseminating information, the micro-blogging phenomenon, Twitter, really sent out a newsletter by email???

Well, it did, and I, as uncharacteristically, read it.

Ultimately, I think it depends on who’s it from, when Biz Stone sends me and email which begins, “Dear limeyboy..” my interest is piqued.

However, I think that an email newsletter is today, at best, a bi-product of time better spent elsewhere.

Meaning , create a blog post, write to the point, original content, feature it on the homepage of your website, tweet to it, and link to it from your facebook business page, ooh and while you are at it send an email out to your contact list.

A lawyer we know each month sends us a ‘company’ update via email with a pdf attached. We never read it…

Increasingly I think your news is more likely to be read on your facebook business page, where it’s already opened and paraphrased. You don’t have to rely on people opening an email. (It is true that email still works for the “old-timers”)

I would also say that if you are going to send a newsletter make it relevant, which essentially means write it yourself and also don’t send it as a pdf, which is a good format for legal contract but a dreadful format for some warm and fuzzies.

We see lots of very generic content on real estate websites, such as:

• cupboard organizing ideas
• window treatments
• green decorating

Let’s face it, this is NOT why you are being hired, and not what people are looking for. Stay on point and always be relevant to real estate information in your town.