Web Site Design and Development

A lot of Realtors® complain about lead generating services, many of which have aggressive and misleading sales tactics. For example, you haven’t been in business very long if you haven’t fielded a call offering you a unique opportunity to lock in your exclusive territory before someone else does. For only $400 per month, let’s say, you can own the zip code 95682 on the world famous SellMeAHouseNowPrettyPlease.com. Of course, it may turn out that SellMeAHouseNowPrettyPlease.com generates a lead for 95682 every 174 years, in which case you’ve paid $835,200 for the opportunity to generate a $25,000 commission by the year 2181.

Most of us would agree that there are more effective ad buys one could make.

In addition to the bad feeling left by scam operators like this, many Realtors® object to the idea of such big-budget “real estate interlopers” charging them for the privilege of doing transactions that would otherwise be “theirs”. Of course, embedded in that objection is the naive idea that if Realtor.com and Yahoo Real Estate weren’t around, you’d be at the top of the search engine enjoying the well deserved fruits of your license. Enter scam artist #2, who’ll “guarantee” to put you there. Again, for a very modest fee.

My Early Revelation

When I’d been in the business maybe four months or so, I was working my broker’s “floor time” one day when this short, old, bald guy who worked in my office came in and offered to sell me some leads “from his web site” — 30% referral fee on the first one and 25% thereafter. Now at the time I was failing in real estate after about ten years of (for the most part) succeeding in professional software development. Though I hadn’t yet seriously begun marketing to consumers online at this point, it took me about a minute and twenty-three seconds to figure out that if the short old bald guy could generate enough leads from the Internet to sell them off, Johnnie software developer could figure out how to the same thing, being younger, taller, still in possession of my hair, etc.

For the next several months, and for many, many hours over the five intervening years, I worked on surpassing this fellow’s business model, beating him first at his own search engine positions and later acquiring more valuable ones which into which he hadn’t even made inroads. SEO plus IDX was the basic formula, then as now.

It took a lot of time.

I don’t think I could replicate a lot of what I did today, but fortunately, as in the military, it’s significantly easier to defend an entrenched position than it is to attack one.

A Balanced Model

As much as I have swung from the extreme of potential lead consumer to “interloper” (which is another word for broker, by the way), I admit that there are two limitations to my own marketing strategy.

The first is that it is extremely time and labor intensive, and it hasn’t gotten any easier to do. I don’t think I could replicate a lot of what I did today, but fortunately, as in the military, it’s significantly easier to defend an entrenched position than it is to attack one. On the flip side, this means potential growth is harder to achieve.

The second limitation is that there’s no guarantee that major search engines will continue to rank me as they do now.

I believe that the problem with paying for leads is not that the big bad interlopers make us do it. We’re always doing it, one way or another — even when we buy yard signs or business cards. What’s truly at issue is how much do we have to pay, and what’s the return on what we pay?

I admit, I don’t have the specific numbers to tell tell you what the “right answer” here is. All I can suggest is keeping an open mind to the different ways to generate business online. I have used both pay-per-click and SEO to good effect, and I would definitely add pay-per-click into the mix if you need to start getting leads in right away. I also wouldn’t discount well known lead resellers like HomeGain, though I need to learn more about this aspect of the business. If you’ve used these firms successfully, please let me know.

I spend quite a bit of time on a few different social networks. Most recently I’ve been reviewing Cre8Buzz here. Yet I don’t spend a lot of time on social networks because I think they’re productive, so as you can guess I think maybe I should be spending less time there. In general I think you get significantly more benefit from writing a blog post or page on a web site you control, as opposed to writing it on a social network. Still, like the proverbial glass of wine with dinner, most non-alcoholics won’t be too harmed by a moderate use of social networks, and may even derive a certain health benefit.

From a search perspective, content on a social network site has an important limitation that content on your own web site does not. This limitation is that your content may appear several links away from the main page. Because of this, even your profile page not be indexed by the search engine for some time after you’ve been active — let alone any brilliantly conceived blog posts you’re letting loose on the world. I’ve yet to see my Cre8Buzz Profile get indexed by either Yahoo or Google, for example.

In addition to being indexed slowly (if at all), although the the community may have collected considerable page rank, being several links away from the home page means that this value is likely to be watered down fairly thoroughly by the time it gets to you.

Let’s take the example of a blog. Let’s see how far away from the home page your blog appears in three different scenarios:

Scenario: Stand alone blog.
Links: 0. (By definition, in this case your home page is your blog).

Scenario: Integrated web site and blog.
Links: 1. (User comes to your home page, clicks on “Blog Link”, and there they are.

Scenario: ActiveRain. Assume you’ve been posting enough there that you’re on page one for your county. Otherwise add links.
Links: 4 Home –> State –> County –> Your Profile –> Your Blog

On the positive side, if you choose a real estate community (as opposed to a general community like Cre8Buzz), you get an advantage from being part of a huge site that has a great deal of “thematic content” about your subject. This would not be the case if you participate in a general community like Facebook or Cre8Buzz. I have also noticed that the search engines don’t seem to index content on the more general social networks as readily as they do the content on more theme-based sites.

The other positive benefit you derive from posting on social networks is the opportunity to provide some link love for your main web site or blog. However, it’s easy to overstate the benefit from this, since traditional wisdom is that the search engines like to see incoming links from a variety of sources. Thus, 10 blog posts on your main site with 10 incoming links from your ActiveRain blog are likely to receive less of a benefit than would 10 blog posts with 10 different sites linking to them. And remember, incoming links only count for reputation — in terms of page rank, a link is a link is a link, and a page on your web site or blog will naturally have a lot more internal links to different pages on your site, and fewer links pointing to the rest of someone else’s site.

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.

The Good Learning Stuff:

Last week I started running my blogging platforms material by a few folks at ActiveRain, and several people who are building their ActiveRain points using content from their other blog asked me about duplicate content. In the course of writing my reply to that I came across the closest thing I’ve found to the official Google Position on duplicate content.

This week I was beginning preliminary work on some posts about A/B Testing, which is one of the ways you can test how different changes to a web page improve or detract from your conversion rate. In the course of looking into how you might use Google Analytics to do A/B testing, I found that Google now has yet another free webmaster tool, the Website Optimizer, which helps you do conversion testing on your site. You can check out the video here.

This week I also taught Purva how to use LiveWriter. Well, John, how come you’re not putting together a nice Camtasia Studio tutorial about LiveWriter and posting it here? How come indeed. Stay tuned. Meantime I saw this post to whet your Live Writer appetite.

The Politics and Opinion Stuff:

SEO, it seems to me, is getting a bad rap from a lot of people, including my good friend, Dave Smith, in his article SEO De-programmers Needed for RE Bloggers. I don’t know if I really want to rebut this or just move on to more “teaching” posts.

One thing that can be said about SEO is that it is a fickle beast in many respects. My own favorite search position is in the toilet this week, so I’m resisting the urge to tailspin into a depression and sit around eating Snickers bars, and instead writing this post.

Your welcome.

In a result that may be completely unrelated, the big news on everyone’s lips is the Great Google Slap of 2007. After documenting the problem fairly well, I thought, Andy Beard went on to point out this amusing Surrender Letter from a Webmaster.

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!