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We’ve written about landing page optimization before.  Traditionally, folks running a pay per click campaign were very interested in making sure they’re converting as many visitors as possible.  However, even if you’re blogging, you should not ignore the fact that you are, at the end of the day, working to make a sale, not just to have your head appear on as many social networks as possible (though we’ll get to that in a minute, too).  This week we uncovered the article, Ten Tips for Lead Generation Landing Pages, which is especially relevant to real estate marketing.

With the recent changes in the Google page rank of many major web sites, many people are wondering if there are other indicators of a web site’s importance that are somehow “better” than PR.  One of the tools I came across this week in this context was Solo SEO’s IndexRank tool.  IndexRank is a measure of how fast a site is growing, based on how many pages are indexed over a period of time.

I wrote about Ning earlier in the week, taking a bit of a critical view of the idea of a social network for everything, everyone.  Later in the week however I had to hurry up and head over to Cre8Buzz after getting a nice invitation from Metrowest’s Bill Gassett, one of our first active readers here on ParticleWave.  Let me pass that invitation along to all you real estate professionals, come sign up at Cre8Buzz.

Now that you’re done buzzing, get ready to learn about Web Analytics and SEO.  Analytics is the subject of Justin Cutroni’s excellent blog focusing on Google Web Analytics, Analytics Talk.  On the SEO front, Original Signal has put together the RSS feeds for several outstanding SEO sites into a single resource, Broadcasting SEO.

And finally, you may need some pretty pictures for your blog.  I personally like the big selection of photos that are more or less a buck at IStockphoto.com, but when it absolutely positively has to be free, check out these public domain photos and this list of free / cheap photo web sites.

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.

If you read Real Estate Internet Marketing In a Nutshell, no doubt you left either feeling a) like you couldn’t believe how utterly basic and maybe even banal the points I made were, (Holy Suffering Self-evident, Batman) or b) hungry for walnuts.

Imagine your surprise now when you discover that, as seemingly small and frail as that article was, it was nevertheless pregnant with yet another small and frail article. And so, following the usual twenty-four hour gestation period of the blog post species, here we go.

One of the two main points from the earlier pregnant article was this: “Get people who want to buy and sell real estate to find you.”

Notice we didn’t say “Getting people to find you.” The phrase “who want to buy and sell real estate” is what we mean by qualified traffic. If a person who doesn’t want to buy or sell real estate visits your site, that’s just traffic.

Don’t get me wrong. Traffic all by itself is not a bad thing, especially if your web site is new and you’re just starting to get some. At an early enough stage having even unqualified traffic will encourage you a lot more than having no traffic. However, if you’re interested in making money, eventually you need to start getting more qualified traffic.

What is qualified traffic? Well, think about the whole universe of people poking around on the Internet, fellow bloggers, etc., versus that subgroup of people who just entered “Yourtown Real Estate” into a search engine. Naturally the latter group is much more qualified to buy.

By far the best sources of qualified traffic, therefore, are:

• New people reaching you from real estate related searches.
• People who reached you from real estate related searches in the past, who are returning. (That’s a whole new subject in itself, getting visitors to come back to your site).

The fact that searches are qualification tools is what makes Internet Marketing such a wonderful investment. Even pay-per-click is completely efficient compared to mailing, for example. Consider, would you rather pay $1.00 to mail to one person at random, or $3.00 to get your message in front of one person searching for “Yourtown Real Estate”. Sure, if you’re doing a mailing, you’d try to narrow down the list, but it’s hard to see it ever getting as good as the list of people who are actively looking for your product right now.

There is a lot of experimentation going on in Web 2.0 — people trying out new things. For the most part that’s a good thing, but it can make the task of Internet marketing seem a bit dizzying.

If you read a few bloggers, especially, you’ll develop a bizarre set of modernistic sounding marching orders. You’re told you need to “find your voice” and “establish yourself as an expert” and develop a following of “raving fans” by being more “transparent” and taking part in a “social community”.

If you feel like that’s a bit too much to take, don’t worry, so do I. Let’s see if we can simplify things a bit, shall we?

If You Can Count To Two, You Can Be Successful

To be successful at Internet marketing for real estate you need to do two things:

Thing 1) Get people who want to buy or sell real estate to find you.

Thing 2) Get people to buy or sell with you once they’ve found you.

I promise you, word of honor as a guy with a picture of a nut on his post: that’s all you need to do.

Sometimes I boil this down into a one line formula, SEO + IDX = $$$, but that only represents my favorite solutions to thing one and thing two.

Of course, the story gets a lot more interesting (and more complicated) when you start really looking into how to do things 1 and thing 2, but that’s the basic formula.

Whenever I have spent time productively online, I was focused on one or both of these two things.

Whenever I have dropped the ball or wasted time or gone up a blind alley, the solution was to get focused back on one of these two things.

RELATED READING:

Integrated Web Sites and Blogs

This weekend at the bookstore I browsed through Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur with a lot of interest. I also looked into a book that’s probably at the opposite end of the Web 2.0 Hype-o-Meter, Wikinomics.

Keen argues with some justice that with the huge proliferation of blogs, the Internet has become a write-only Darwinian struggle to see who can filibuster the longest, with everyone yapping our heads off and no one really listening.

What?

Wikinomics, on the other hand, left me wondering how I, too, could benefit from this whole massive collaboration thing to become blindingly wealthy and massively collaborated, but I couldn’t come up with anything off the top of my head.

As they say on Ron Popeil Commercials: “But wait, there’s more!”

Now not only can your blog be one of over 50 million blogs in the keyboardosphere, now you can be the first on your block to have your own social network, thanks to Ning.com. In the words of Ning CEO, Gina Bianchini:

“Marc and I founded Ning in October 2004 to give everyone the opportunity to create your own social networks for anything.”

Atta girl, Gina. That’s just what we needed, social networks for anything!

And in the true spirit of Web 2.0, I have decided that if I can, of course that means I should, so I am now the proud owner of not just one, but TWO social networks, with me as the one member each!

That was the whole problem with MySpace, come to think of it — they let YOU in. Now we can each have our own MySpace, which for the sake of clarity we can call MyMySpace, to distinguish it from YourMySpace and ThatOtherGuysMySpace.

No, but seriously, come join me. We can massively collaborate, at least on a small scale. Won’t that be cozy?

The first network I noticed when poking around Ning was the virtual Sangha. Hey great, I thought, I’m a Buddhist, but it turns out that one’s by invitation only.

Well, at least I’m not the only anti-social Buddhist with his own social network.

But I have two of them. So there.

After that, I decided to check out the RightHealth Social network. At the right are some of the forum questions from RightHealth so you can get an idea of the quality of the discourse. (Click to enlarge).

I didn’t wait for it to get this bad, it was the first thing I bumped into.

I wonder if I started a Luddite group if Andrew Keen would join me.

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.