Internet Marketing Week In Review
Posted by John Lockwood on December 7th, 2007
I don’t usually like blogs with a lot of Adsense ads staring you in the face. However, I did enjoy Brandon Cornett’s article on How to Write a Real Estate Ad - Magazine Ad Writing 101. Too often we speak in generalities like “excellent customer service”, and Brandon talks about how to get down to specific real estate stories of interest and calls to action.
Brandon’s example of an online real estate forum is an interesting idea and might be useful as a lead incubation strategy. One reason I’ve never launched such a forum myself, however, is the issue of size. I wonder if one can run a successful forum when the number of people buying or selling a home is fairly small. Even in a great month in my area, for example, there are only a couple of thousand homes changing hands. I guess on the one hand you don’t care how many people are there, as long as some of them turn into customers, but to me the most interesting forums are the ones with lots of members.
Speaking of interesting forums, RealEstateWebmasters.com just announced a fairly major upgrade to their free real estate blogs. Real Estate Webmasters blogs provide an excellent opportunity to showcase your content, and they have very good search engine authority as well so you might link back to your other site from your Real Estate Webmaster blog. Don’t overdo it, though — remember the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
At the same time, ActiveRain recently announced a sneak preview of their new outside blogs. I’m sure they’ll sell a lot of them if they price them right, because they have the ideal audience for such an upsell, but I do admit I take issue with two items on their feature list. First is the idea of not learning a new blogging platform. Well, that’d be ok if their platform was the superior one, but I imagine I might get Pete Thompson to vouch for how much easier the Livewriter / Wordpress combination is to use, and the latest (finally not beta) version of Live Writer makes it really easy to set up for your Wordpress blog.
Secondly, the outside blog announcement said, “You will be able to benefit from the SEO knowledge and power of ActiveRain.” The myth of ActiveRain’s SEO mojo is an oft-repeated one — Mike Jones boasts that “Active Rain works (brings Google to your door) regardless of your ability to write or your desire to blog”. Wow, that’s not only incredible, it’s not credible. Mike cites his Tucson area colleagues, including Marsee Wilhems, “one of Tucson’s most successful REALTORS”. OK, I’ll bite, let’s see where the first ActiveRain blog is for the key words “Tucson real estate”, shall we? I tried “Tucson Real Estate” on Google, and got to page 10 without finding ActiveRain anywhere. (And yes, I tried “localism”, too. If any true believers wants to begin the hunt for ActiveRain results starting at page 11, let me know). I’m sure Marsee Williams is successful, but I suspect her success is minimally related to ActiveRain’s content-free Google fairy dust.
There is no silver bullet, folks, sorry. The alternatives are: open wallet, pay Google or Yahoo, or massive content published over a long period of time combined with sensible link building.
And that’s the week in review. Have a great weekend.
