Web Site Design and Development

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?

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…

One of the things that always interests me is hearing from others about what sorts of things they’re doing to make business happen. Naturally, the piece that I’m most interested in is what sort of things they’re doing on the Internet to make things happen, since Internet real estate marketing is my passion, specialty, and business.

Those who’ve read me know that I have some pretty strong opinions as to what one’s strategy should be, and about what works and what doesn’t. But the reason it’s so interesting to hear from others is that I certainly don’t think what I’m doing is the only way to get it right. I’m passionate about sharing what I am doing because it’s worked so well, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only thing that works. There are other approaches that either are completely different or complementary. Even while I’m working on my core strategy, I always find myself wondering if there isn’t some other technique or project I should be incorporating to help my business grow.

What I’d like to do in a future post, therefore, is to try to take a really comprehensive look at my own marketing strategy, and talk about what I think works and what I’ve always felt were the strengths as well as the limitations of my approach. After that, I’m going to be inviting other Realtors® and mortgage brokers to share what sorts of approaches have worked for them. I’ll put together a list of questions as a guide for authors so that you won’t have to start completely from scratch unless you want to. I already have some ideas in mind about people I’d like to invite, but if you have some ideas and would like to contribute an article on this topic, please let me know.

I have several screencasts and blogs planned around some topics in mastering Internet marketing for real estate agents, and lately have been considering offering some of this material initially on the blog, but with the eventual goal of organizing and expanding it into a course of study in real estate Internet marketing.

The course would be for those who want hands-on experience building a very low cost web site. It would be for people who want to not only save lots of money by free (or low cost), tools and vendors, and who want to understand Internet marketing in enough depth to know what to do and what to avoid. The goal will be to equip you with enough information to make Internet marketing a major or a primary source of your real estate income.

Here’s a preliminary course outline.

1. Understanding where we’re going. A roadmap for success.
2. Internet Business Planning, including two or more complete business plans for successful Internet marketing.
3. Researching key words. Find the right major and minor key words. Striking the right balance between search volume and competitiveness.
4. Search Engine Optimization basics. White hat all the way. What to do and what to avoid.
5. Registering your domain name and setting up hosting. (Should also include material on how to use the course with an existing domain name.)
6. Building your webmaster toolbox. Find and install free tools to help you make money without spending much.
7. Installing your Wordpress blog, Part I. Up and Running.
8. Installing your Wordpress blog, Part II. Using Wordpress to manage your entire web site.
9. Customizing Wordpress. Plug-ins and themes.
10. Promoting your blog I: First steps.
11. Blogging made easy I: Free blogging tools. Working with text.
12. Blogging made easy II: Photos and advanced topics.
13. Blogging made easy III: What to write, when to write, and what to expect.
14. Promoting your blog II: Using social networks effectively.
15. Your real estate “killer offer”: understanding IDX.
16. Let your users search, Integrating IDX.
17. Time or money? Using pay-per-click advertising effectively.
18. Measuring results: use free tools to analyze your visitor behavior.
19. New visitors are good. Repeat visitors are great. Get them to keep coming back.
20. Improving conversion rates. Turning visitors into customers. Working with Internet buyers.
21. Dominating your market. From knowledge to mastery.

Now all I need is a few hundred hours with no interruptions and getting it done will be easy.

Real Estate Internet Marketing Week In Review is a new weekly feature where I highlight either the authors and blogs and posts that I found interesting in my reading from the week past or that I thought Realtors® and real estate webmasters should know about.

My series on Comparing Real Estate Blog Platforms was a fairly general overview of real estate blogging options. A more in depth review of specific blogging software is available in Problogger.net’s Choosing a Blog Platform.

Thomas McMahon, writing for Toprank’s Online Marketing Blog, prepared a handy introduction and review of Google’s Webmaster Tools, which is a free set of tools that helps you see your site as Google does.

Whether you’re looking to extend your reach online, get free exposure for a listing, network with your peers, or what have you, an outstanding starting point is Oliver Muoto’s list of Web 2.0 Companies Realtors® Should Care About.

My own marketing philosophy is summed up neatly in the equation SEO + IDX = $$$. For those of you who think you have an online image that needs to be nurtured, however, Bobby Carroll has an interesting article on Digital Brand Management. Again, I offer this position not because I agree with it, but in spite of that. PT Barnum is reported to have said “I don’t care what they say about me as long as they spell my name right.” I might paraphrase: “I don’t care what they say about me as long as my marketing is successful enough that you’re reading what I say about me.”

And now for something that I do agree with, Brad Carroll recently posted this outstanding article on why you should not force your users to register before allowing them access to your IDX web site listings. I’ve agreed with this opinion for years because of the money I’ve made specifically from people who told me not having to register was why they chose me. Brad takes this a step further and explains the psychology and reasoning behind this.

Finally, my friends at Sellsius Real Estate posted this worthwhile blogging tip:

If you are a real estate broker or agent, do a post on closing costs, with a breakdown of real estate transfer taxes, and estimated costs, and put it permanently in the sidebar. Every serious buyer or seller will click it. You betcha. It’s a good way to market your real estate expertise.

Readers, did you happen across a site or blog that should be included in our Real Estate Internet Marketing Week In Review series? If so, please let us know!