Web Site Design and Development

One of the elusive goals that I’ve had for my business for many years is to improve our customer service and our follow-up on leads while centralizing my company’s database of clients.

That’s why I was very excited this week when I took a second look at 37signal’s product HighRise.  The first time I looked at HighRise it struck me as a bit simplistic, but this time around it dawned on me that I may have found a solution that does about 99% of what I expect and need it to do, and does it elegantly and affordably.

Tracking IHomeFinder Leads

One of the core features of HighRise is its ability to work superbly well with email.   Elite Properties has several real estate web sites that I’ve developed over the years, and all the most productive ones are running IHomefinder IDX.  For some time now the workflow has looked like:  leads come in to my computer, and I either handle them myself or have my email software (Eudora) forward them to the agent on duty.  This works tolerably well, but as a broker needless to say I’m always looking out for a way to increase our conversion rate, and I also want to know that the leads my company has spent lots of time developing (through hard earned blogging / SEO sweat equity) are followed up efficiently.  Moreover, the system falls down somewhat if an agent is out on a listing appointment or showing property, since when that happens the leads tend to just sit in their inbox all day.

This problem brings us to a core feature of HighRise, the "dropbox", which is a kind of intelligent mailbox that can read incoming email that’s forwarded to it, figure out who it was forwarded from, and either create a new record for that contact or add the email information to the existing contact.  So now instead of forwarding to the agents, which I was already doing, I can simply tell Eudora to forward them to HighRise, and Highrise will instantly create a contact record for the lead, or add it to the contact history that already exists.  It doesn’t get every field in the right place (such as phone numbers in the lead), but since the email text is sent along with it, it’s easy to just paste things into the right place.

In addition to email tracking, HighRise allows you to very easily keep notes on conversations and calls, and track tasks you might want to schedule such as follow up calls or emails or property showings.  The UI design is mostly elegantly simple and uncluttered, with the tools right where you need them to be.

Tag, You’re It!

HighriseHQ you can "tag" a contact with pretty much any keyword you want, and the tags are pretty much like the blog tags that many of my readers here will be familiar with from "Tag Clouds".  One of the uses I like for Tags is that it allows me to assign a lead to an individual using their name, or to mark it as "Open" so the first agent to be available can claim it.  No doubt once you get in to the software you’ll find lots of uses for tags.

The Down Side

HighRise lives and dies by simplicity.  The fact that it does a few things extremely well and poses a practically non-existent learning curve is a core feature.  On the other hand, once in awhile you find yourself wishing it would do some things better or be a bit more configurable.  Although there’s an API available for developers, if you’re a non-programming power user you’ll find that you either like what it does, or you don’t, because you aren’t going to be changing it much.  I’m sure a lot of this comes from its developers being a Ruby on Rails shop.  Ruby on Rails is a web development tradition noted for an extreme minimalism.  This can be great on a tools level, but one might argue that minimalism outlives its usefulness when it seeps into the product.

One feature I would like, for example, relates to upcoming tasks.  When you create tasks, they show up in a view that tells you what’s scheduled today, next week, later, etc., and the dates are displayed (without days of the week!) but as soon as you have four or five tasks in there, you find yourself wishing for a calendar view so you can see them graphically.  Another feature that would be nice is to display times along with dates for notes and contact creation.  Also, HighRise’s dropboxes work fine with plain text emails, but they strip links out of HTML emails.  As a result, those easy-to-use links that IHomefinder provides to log in and see what homes a potential client is looking at go away.  A workaround for that is to also forward the lead to a separate shared email account, but naturally that’s a bit of a hack.

Overall Impressions

On balance, for me the simplicity and ease of use of HighRise and its ability to "do the right thing" with a new lead far outweigh the features it lacks.  Add to that the fact that getting a team of a half dozen agents up and running will set you back only about $24 per month compared to $210 per month for Top Producer, and HighRise’s minimalism becomes if anything even more exciting.  We’re in the middle of rolling it out and I will let you know how it goes!

This week I found lots of lists of more reading to do.  It’s amazing how a few hours with populating a good feed reader with great feeds can quickly pile up to more reading than you can possibly keep up with. 

Build Quality Links
You may have heard that along with great content, good quality incoming links are essential to a successful search engine optimization campaign.  There are dozens of ways to go about this, and Sergey Rusak, an SEO specialist in Boston, has published an excellent list to get you started in his article, 52 Ways to Get Quality Links.  (I think English is Sergey’s second language — nevertheless the resources collected there are awesome).  For that article, we have a hat tip to Lorelle on Wordpress (and by the way, though we may not be attending SOBCon — I’ve found Lorelle’s blog to be always worth a trip).  Remember when embarking on a link building strategy to always keep in mind Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and their page on Link Schemes.

Brushing Up Your SEO
Writing for the Online Marketing Blog, Lee Odden covered the winners in Search Engine Journal’s Search Engine Marketing Blog Awards.

Social Networking Software
Those of you who found my critique of Ning.com to be a bit over the top and who are looking for a serious review of some social networking software solutions may want to check out this review of Ning, Kickapps and other social networking software.  After John Jantsch stopped by last week I saw he was running a social network on Kickapps, so I stopped by there to give it a spin.  So far I’ve found Ning to be a bit more robust.

Real Estate FAQ
As he always does, Phoenix Real Estate guy Jay Thompson has done a good job implementing a real estate marketing idea that you sometimes see surfacing on other sites, the Real Estate FAQ.  Such in depth real estate coverage may help you with "long tail" search results, and help to establish your expertise to your clients and your site’s relevance to the search engines.

Have you been successful in your real estate or lending career largely (or partially) because of your Internet marketing? Our “What’s Your Internet Marketing Strategy” series (see our announcement) highlights authors who are using the Internet to close more business. You don’t have to have an “Internet-only” marketing strategy or be a super top producer, but in general we’ll try to focus on authors who are either so active now that their future success seems assured, or those who have a history of at least three or more closed escrows per year from their Internet marketing efforts. Mainly what we’re looking for in the series is a variety of different viewpoints.

Guest authors of course will have their own byline and appropriate links in their article.  (I recommend no more than five self-serving links, and no more than eight links overall).  If you’re interested in contributing, please contact me and let’s discuss it.

This article goes into some questions and guidelines that may be helpful to you as a guest author in our “What’s Your Internet Marketing Strategy” series. You don’t have to answer any particular questions an certainly not all of them, but you may find that going over the list will help you to come up with ideas to round out your article:

• How important is the Internet to your overall marketing plan? Is it the only kind of marketing you do, or is it just one of many strategies?
• What percentage of your business can you trace to Internet marketing?
• What companies have helped you with your Internet marketing?
• What role if any does your personal web site(s) play in your marketing strategy?
• What role if any does your blog (s) in your marketing strategy?
• Which of the following (if any) have been important to you?
  • Organic search engine optimization.
  • Link building or reciprocal linking.
  • Pay per click advertising.
  • Other traffic generation (banner ads, directories, etc).
  • Pay for lead services.
• How do you use social networking services (if at all)? Social networking services include ActiveRain, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, etc., etc.
• How many closed transactions can you trace back directly to social networking services?
• How important are having online listings to your strategy?
• Do you have visitors register for listings?
• What types of leads does your web site generate? Which of these have you had the most success at closing?
• What do you consider the strengths of your online marketing program? What do you think could be improved?
• What do you do in the way of short-term follow-up? How fast do you respond to your leads on average?
• What types of long-term follow-up systems do you have? Do you do any drip marketing other than sending listings (a newsletter, etc.).
• How cost effective is Internet marketing compared to other forms of marketing you’ve done?

This is the third article in our three-part series with tips and suggestions for making your real estate blogging easier using common writing formulas.

See Items 1-7 in Twenty-One Easy Blog Posts for Your Real Estate Blog, Part I.

Items 8-14 are in Twenty-One Easy Blog Posts for Your Real Estate Blog, Part II.

We now conclude with items 15-21. Readers, if there are other formulas that you use to make your writing easier, please share them in the comments section and if we get enough of them we’ll publish a follow-on article based on your input!

15. The Feed Bag / Link Karma / Week In Review Post
    Athol Kay has an occasional post he writes, the Feed Bag, which is just a few links out to articles of interest. Brian Clark at Copyblogger does the same thing, and often under the title “Link Karma”. I have a long winded series that I run here, The Real Estate Internet Marketing Week In Review, which essentially does the same thing with some commentary thrown in.What I’ve found from the Week in Review is that these articles can actually take some time to write if you’re not keeping up on your reading, and the reading and surfing can be somewhat labor intensive. Because of this, I would think twice before making this a regular series, but if your feed reader has a lot of blogs in it you may find it easier to bang these out.A tip from my weekly series: I tag articles I want to remember with the date for that week’s article on my del.icio.us account. To make this easy to do with one click, I’ve installed the del.icio.us browser extension (see the Firefox or Internet Explorer version).
     
16. The Colleague Shout Out
    This is similar to the blog article response piece, but focuses on the individual colleague or perhaps their whole site rather than on a particular blog post or point of view. Maybe they linked to you and you just want to say thank you and do a short write-up linking back to their site. Or maybe they just really have a great search tool for the greater Possum Ridge area, and you wanted to tell the world.
     
17. X Web Sites That Can Help You Y
    For our purposes, X is a number and Y is something that your readers would want to do that’s related to finding, selling, or owning a home. This variation on the How To article could be anything from “Five Fabulous Home Improvement Web Sites” to “Possum Ridge Sheriff’s Office Crime Maps”. Or how about a list of school web sites, or school district web sites. At the national level, sites like CLTA.ORG, where buyers can shop title insurance rates, are a great consumer resource and show you’re looking out for your clients’ bottom line.
     
18. The New Listing Post
    To my way of thinking, this is a no-brainer, at least to people who recognize it to be a no-brainer by virtue of having a brain. (Yes, sorry if that’s a bit controversial and ad hominem). If you have a listing, your seller has hired you to expose it to the world, so flaunt it! Vflyer.com has a free service (with a low-cost ad-free upgrade available) to create beautiful online flyers you can use. Posting your flyers will give you HTML you can copy as is into your blog post. To see some examples of how these look, check see for example the Elite Properties VFlyer site.
     
19. The Best Deal In Possum Gulch
    (…Or Squirrel Peak, or Cougar City, or whatever other town you sometimes work in). This is a formula I’ve wanted to use for some time, but never got around to actually implementing. Meantime an agent in my market area, DeeDee Riley, recently reminded me of this unkept promise to myself by doing an excellent job with this formula on her Realtown Blog. The idea behind this formula is to write about homes that are priced well (check price per square foot in the MLS) and that show well (from your own touring with clients or previewing).A possible limitation of this approach is that you have to be aware of MLS rules about advertising other peoples’ listings if you use this formula, so you may want to talk it over with your broker first. On the other hand, most listing agents would undoubtedly give you permission if you call them.
     
20. The Featured Neighborhood Post
    Featuring neighborhoods (or subdivisions) is a great way to capitalize on so-called “long tail” search results. In other words, by talking about specific neighborhoods, you reach readers who are interested in a very specific area for one reason or another. If you do it consistently, you have an opportunity to position yourself as something of a “neighborhood expert” in that area. Starting from scratch, your MLS can serve as a guide to when the homes were built, what they’re selling for now, price history, inventory, etc., etc. These are easier posts to put together. More ambitious posts could include interviews with residents or the like.
     
21. The List Format
    Like the How To post, this is a general blogging formula so tried and true that it bears mentioning in this contest. How about “Twenty-One Easy Blog Posts for Your Real Estate Blog” — hey, that’s this article! Or think about David Letterman’s famous top 10 list. Can you use this format to write a humorous article of your own, perhaps with some local interest. A How-To article can also be in list format, as can practically anything else you can think of. “Five Great Local Neighborhoods” is a variation on the Featured Neighborhood Post.Of course, any list can be as long as you want it to be, but some of the tried and true numbers that are often used are Three, Seven, Ten, Twenty-One, and 101. Longer and more useful lists can serve as great link bait (oh sorry, was that a hint?), but of course, they’re harder to write.

I’ve just installed Chris Fink’s Feed Statistics Plugin to test it out here after finding yet another group of RSS screen scrapers stealing the content of another blog of mine.

OK, I realize that for many of my readers I probably skipped a whole bunch of technical steps and background info there, so let me fill in.

As many of you know, RSS Feeds are a kind of machine readable version of your blog. The fact that they’re machine readable means that folks can subscribe to them in an RSS reader, like Bloglines or Google Reader for example.

Here’s a video that breaks it down if all this is greek to you so far.

Most blogging systems have a feed you can subscribe to like this. Your ActiveRain blog has one for example. (Scroll down and look for little links on the bottom right that say “RSS” or “Atom” — those are links to two flavors of RSS feed for your ActiveRain blog).

OK, well now fast forward. If people who read blogs are gradually learning how to do this, eventually people who write blogs going to want to find out how many subscribers they have, and how many times people click through to their site. Enter Feedburner.com, a free site that will “burn” a new feed — which means it’ll take your original feed that doesn’t have support for statistics and turn it into a new feed that DOES have support for statistics. Now you can find out that your article about Possum Gulch Luxury Homes was hugely successful, and bask in the sheer glory of it while writing more articles about that.

So far so good. You have your feed on Feedburner, and you’re finding out what a Possum Gulch superstar you are. All’s well and good. But what if you don’t want your feed hosted on a third party web site? For example, what if (like me) you find out that someone has taken your feed and published all your content somewhere else, but because your feed is now on Feedburner, there’s no good technical way to shut them down. (Of course, there are legal solutions because clearly it’s a copyright violation, but it’d be nice if you could shut them down another way — which you could do if the feed were hosted on your own site, but how you do that is a whole different story, with the short answer being: “ask a nerd”).

Bottom line, because of some disreputable criminals, I have to jump through hoops.

Isn’t the Internet great?

Find Ways to Use These Groaning Resources

It’s time for the Week In Review, so I’ll publish Part III of Twenty-One Easy Real Estate Blog Posts on Monday. 

This week I found a new tool to help me gather my Week In Review links, Awasu (Gesundheit!).  Awasu is a very slick — if, at times, somewhat buggy — RSS feed reader for Windows.  I’ll probably have an in depth review in a future post. 

Pet peeve time:  People who use "Blog" to mean a single post on a Blog.  These are no doubt the same people who say Real-a-tor.

This week’s Web 2.0 "There Must Be Something We Can Do With All These Web Sites" award goes to John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing for his brief Let’s Get More Social article.  Sometimes I think Social Networks should be the butt of the joke we used to tell in college about sociology — that it’s a subject in search of a subject matter.  As John says, "You’ve got to get in there and find ways to use these growing resources." (Right — because it sure ain’t obvious).

On the other extreme, the winner of this week’s "The Heck With That, I’m Growing My Own Resources" award is Elite Properties’ own Sacramento Real Estate Gal, Purva Brown, who graciously calls me a mentor even though most of her success is just from getting in there and learning and making things happen.  Purva just escaped the Google sandbox yesterday and is now appearing on page 2 of Google for a keyword combination with 725,000 competitors.  Not bad for six months!  Go Purva!

In other Web 2.0 news, Bruce Clay’s web site scared the tar out of me when I glanced at an article Why Social Media.  Bruce is a very renowned SEO expert, so if he’s telling you to yank your YouTube [I can't believe he said that], part time luddites like me are in a heap of trouble.  It turns out the article was by a guest author, so it looks like I dodged a bullet for this week.

New reader and fellow Real Estate Marketing author Tim O’Keefe throws a much needed wet blanket on the often lightless fire of ActiveRain. 

Back in the heady world of experimentation, this week social networking for Realtors super-trailblazers Ashley Drake Gephart and Bill Gassett invited me to a new business social network, Konnect.com.  Social network #1,327, please fix your search engine if you want to be taken seriously before the Internet moves on to the next big thing.

You should be reading this guy, if you’re not already.

Do you need a free ratings widget for your blog?  Chances are good that you don’t.  No link for you, Outbrain.  (Doh!)

Meantime for those of you who are not content with these mere seven-day retrospectives, Tamar Weinberg has prepared a list of 2007’s Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts, hat tip to Andy Beard.  Those of you who feel compelled to take on John Jantsch’s challenge to "find ways to use these growing resources", please work your way through the list and report back.  Hey, come to think of it, Ashley and Bill should be guest authors here…