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.

On a business level, I’m so passionate about Internet marketing because it works so well. But underneath it all, what really drives me is that I get such a boyish geek kick out of watching new web sites start to take off and start to be able to make their owners money.

So naturally it gives me great pleasure to see how successful Pete Thompson’s Illinois Mortgage Rates and News is in after only a short time. We’ve been having a phone conference every other day or so to get his new blog established, and it’s really fun to see the creativity and humor he brings to bear. For example, in a recent post, Pete dispelled the myth that mortgage brokers have packed it in and no one’s getting loans any more. (This point is less obvious than it appears. Listening to some of my clients, I’m beginning to think that tales of people not qualifying for loans have taken on the status of urban legends!)

Pete’s already had a few people stop by and comment, and he’s indexed by some of the more important blog search engines and social networking services, and Google’s started picking up his content as well.

What really gets me excited as well is that he’s well on his way (we’ll do a few more tweaks over the next few days), and he was able to accomplish this for about 1/6th the cost of one of my competitors. So in the first year, he’ll save some $2,800 for the same results, and he’ll continue to save year after year on his web hosting bill.

I’m pleased to announce that I’m currently beginning work on a blog installation and training program for for Peter Thompson, a Chicago Loan Officer.  Peter and I met through a comment I made on ActiveRain and we hit it off right away, because I was able to provide him with a low cost and personalized set of services to:

• Improve the Search Engine Optimization of his existing web site.
• Research effective key words to use for his web site and blog.
• Install a Wordpress blog based on a standard template, with some customization to the template.
• Suggest strategies for blogging topics, attracting more visitors (both customers and colleagues that can contribute to the blog’s success), etc.

Based on some of the writing I’ve seen from him both on his newly launched site and his Active Rain blog and his “in it for the long haul” attitude, I expect that it won’t be long before his new blog will ultimately serve as a major resource for Illinois home finance information.

This week we look at some of the resources that can help make you a better blogger. 

Lately I’ve been finding that a lot of the best tips can be found on the general blogging sites, rather than on the sites about real estate blogging and the usual real estate social networks.

An excellent starting point for example is Darren Rowse’s series Blogging Tips for Beginners.

Another excellent resource for blogging advice is the Daily Blog Tips site, which has a very high ratio of posts that actually are, go figure, daily blog tips.

My favorite resource from the point of view of improving your blog writing is the CopyBlogger blog, which focuses on blogging as a special case of ad copy writing.

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.

For a short time I had a bit of a widget installed here that would let me chat with people.  One gentleman who struck up a conversation was in the beginning phases of writing a blog for San Jose Real Estate.  I felt a fair bit of sympathy for him, since it seemed to me he definitely had his work cut out for him.  I had researched San Jose as a possible topic of a real estate web site some time ago, and ended up rejecting it as being too ambitious.

New Projects, Research Main Keywords

I believe that the first ideal time when you absolutely must do keyword research is when launching a new web site or blog.  Some keywords are simply far too competitive.  For example, querying “intitle:San Jose Real Estate” gives over 7 million results!  By just looking at some of the nearby areas we may be able to come up with something much more manageable.  The query “intitle:Santa Clara real estate”, for example, yields a far less daunting 241,000 results.  Sure, you’d still have your work cut out for you to compete for that keyword, but by comparison, going after San Jose is rather like getting into a prize fight with a heavyweight champ.

Sure, you can change your title later on, but the reason it’s so important to do keyword research at the outset of a project is that if you’re writing good content and networking with your peers like you should, chances are good you’re going to start attracting a few incoming links to your blog, and chances are a few of these folks will use the title in their link text — which is a good thing (unless you overdo it).  So you want to try to get it right up front.

Ongoing Projects — Strive For Depth of Focus

The other best time to do real estate keyword research besides whenever you’re starting a new project is really three ideal times in one:  morning, noon and night!  Well, OK, maybe not night — you do have to save some time for watching Stephen Colbert.  My point is, you have an opportunity with every article you write to capture a topic that a reader may be interested in.  One of my agents, Purva Brown, recently discovered the power of this when she got a client from an article she wrote about Crosswoods Condos.  Such “obscure” keywords are often called “long tail” search keywords (after the shape of the curve drawn by the many thousands of non-core keywords buyers may reach your site for).  These long-tail keywords have several important characteristics:

• There is less competition for them.  This means an article about such a topic has a good chance of getting a high placement on the search engines.
• There are fewer people searching for them (individually).  Because of this, they’re inappropriate as the focus of a whole web site, but perfect for a single article.
• Collectively, they can account for a huge portion of your site’s traffic.

Because there are fewer people searching for long tail keywords, they’re difficult or impossible to turn up with traditional key word suggestion tools like Wordtracker (see also their free keyword tool) or Overture. 

However, brainstorming long tail keywords works quite well.  Think about how people search for homes, and where they might want to live.  Try combinations of:

• Subdivision names.
• Neighborhood names. 
• Parks or other recreation facilities.  Sports arenas?  Theaters?
• Schools or school districts.
• Names of Builders.
• Other local place names.

Often just adding “real estate” to your main place name will do the trick, but for things like school districts you might even try suggesting a radius.  “Homes near Mount Vernon High School”  or the like.

RELATED READING

Selecting Real Estate Keywords

I’ve been meaning to write another article about how the enthusiastic tail of real estate blogging frequently wags the dog of analyzing and understanding how our web sites attract and convert business.

The Real Estate Tomato finally provided the impetus when they ran a post yesterday with the title:

The 7 Reasons Why Your (Future) Clients Should Care That You Are Real Estate Blogger

I don’t want to appear like I’m picking on the Tomato or the co-authors of this article, most of whom I don’t know.  However, I do think that focusing on what future clients should care about begs a more interesting and potentially profitable question about what past and present clients actually do care about.  To be sure, as they say in the stock market, “past history does not guarantee future results”.  On the other hand, if you’re about to embark on an activity that’s going to consume at least an hour or two per day for years on end, it helps to go into that activity with the attitude that you’ll investigate what actually does happen, as opposed to what should.

My What-Clients-Should-Care-About Wish List

From my perspective, I’d love it if my clients cared that I’m a real estate blogger. In fact, it’d be great if they cared that I was a Honda owner and over six feet tall, because that would further narrow the field down to me. If they all wanted guys with brown hair who originally come from Rhode Island and now live in Cameron Park, then hey presto: I’d be a shoe-in.

What They Should Want versus What They DO Want

It turns out, however, that clients have their own ideas about what they care about.

There, are, moreover, a few reasonably good ways to get at what those things are that your client cares about:

• Ask them, and they may tell you.
• Listen to them when they volunteer information.
• Use web analytics to find out.

I could stand some improvement when it comes to asking my clients what they care about. When I started Elite Properties, I had all sorts of forms and systems in place before I got around to writing my Customer Satisfaction Survey, for example.

By listening to clients, however, I’ve learned that they usually liked a few things about my web sites and my agents:

1. We don’t make them register before letting them search the MLS.
2. The web site is easy to use.
3. We return phone calls and emails quickly.

Adding web analytics gives us more information.  To be sure, web analytics is a little bit of a dull-edged tool in some respects. For example, it tells me that about 35% of the people who reach the home page will click right on through to the basic search page, versus only about 11% for the blog. It also tells me that more than 80% of the people who reach me for the term “Sacramento Real Estate” stay on the site, while only one third of the people searching for “Sacramento Real Estate Blog” make a journey further in.

However, returning again to the listening to clients category, the thing that most makes me a believer in the power of online search tools is the number of people who end up being clients who start a conversation as follows:

“Hi, my name is so and so. I found a listing on your web site…[goes on to give MLS number or address].”

My agents and I have talked to literally hundreds of people who’ve started conversations like that. In that same time, the number of people who’ve mentioned my blog can be counted on one hand.

So What Do Clients Want?

The beauty about my empirical knowledge that clients like to look at houses online is that it fits so well from what I have reasoned about my clients according to Cartesian first principles.

You all remember Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.”

Here’s my crack at the real estate version: “I buy and sell real estate, therefore, my clients are interested in real estate.”

This is not just garden variety true.

It’s true by definition.

So Why Should I Care About What My Clients Care About?

Caring about what I think my clients should care about is another way of saying that I care about me — and they already probably guessed that before they ever happened on my blog.

In contrast, caring about what my clients do care about helps me to design a site with a clearer path to the goals that they have for a real estate web site, and it helps me see my writing in light of the things they care about. 

In the end this is all self-interest, of course, and it’s nothing new.  This is classic Zig Ziglar: “You can get anything you want, if you help enough other people get what they want.”

The hang-up is, you have to get other people what they really want. Getting them what you think they should want doesn’t work.

There’s a lesson in that for this blog as well, but one could argue that I haven’t learned it yet.  Stay tuned!

One of the (many) great things about the Wordpress blogging platform is the huge number of enthusiastic supporters who write third party plugins. Very often, if Wordpress doesn’t seem to do what you want yet, you can find a Plugin that will modify its behavior so that it will.

With plugins, you can turn Wordpress from an already great open source blogging platform into a fairly complete content management system.

The plugins I’ve downloaded have usually worked quite well “out of the box”, though from time to time I’ve done some “minor” tweaks — minor, that is, from a programmer’s point of view.

Here then are my candidates for the Top Five Wordpress Plugins. Naturally your list will depend on what you want your Wordpress installation to do.

Spam Karma 2
Top Five? Forget it — this is the one! As far as I’m concerned, No Wordpress installation can be considered complete until Dr. Dave’s outstanding Spam Karma 2 is installed and activated. Spam Karma 2 deserves its description as the “ultimate spam killer”. If you’re suffering from Wordpress comment spam, Wordpress now ships with Askimet, which seemed to work ok when I last tried it, but it always struck me that Spam Karma 2 caught more spam than Askimet. Moreover, Spam Karma 2 itself has its own plugin system, allowing people to modify and extend how it behaves.

Spam Karma 2 Moderate
OK, this is not technically a Wordpress plugin, it’s a Spam Karma 2 Plugin (which makes it a Wordpress Plugin Plugin — yikes!). The point of the moderate plugin is that Spam Karma 2 — perhaps being the “ultimate spam killer” and all — thinks that you’d never need to moderate your posts, presumably since it got all the spam. The moderate plugin fixes this by capturing the obvious Spam and then still letting you moderate your posts. This can be helpful, for example, if you’re getting a lot of people stopping by for the sake of arguing with you, which can happen from time to time. (See the CollegeHumor parody on Blog Commenters). As a special bonus, if you scroll down on the moderate plugin you’ll see that I sent it’s author, Peter Westwood, a fix for a minor issue I discovered with the plugin. This proves that even real estate brokers can make good contributions to Open Source projects if they used to be programmers!

Page Links To
One of the neat things about Wordpress is that you can use it not just to blog, but to manage web site pages that are not chronological. In other words, you can use Wordpress as a full-fledged content management system — which is a fancy way of saying it’s an easy tool for creating or changing the pages on your web site. Many Wordpress themes support adding pages, so when you add a page to Wordpress, you automatically get a link to that page added on your menu. But what about the case where there’s already a page somewhere that you want to link to. Maybe it’s part of your IDX system, for example your MLS listing search page that’s maintained by another company. Now what? The Page Links To Plugin let’s you add some code to a sort of “dummy” page, which in turn tells the navigation system to link not to the page, but to whatever web address you tell it that the (ta da!) “page links to”.

Page Category Plus
I recently discovered Yellow Swordfish’s Page Category Plus, and installed it immediately because it struck me that by using it I could set up the page navigation at the left. Page Category Plus lets your pages have categories just like your posts do, so that using it, you can set up left hand navigation for all your pages. Being a programmer, this was not a big deal for me personally, since the old non-Wordpress way of tweaking the navigation bar (put it in a file and then just re-edit the file and FTP it up to the site) has always worked for me. What Page Category Plus allows me to do is create the very same look as I could achieve manually but have it all be part of the Wordpress page system. This means that custom web site clients could update their own pages themselves if they wish.

Better Feed
PlanetOzh’s plugin, BetterFeed, allows you to automatically make some neat changes to your RSS feed. Why would you care about what’s in your RSS feed? Well, for one reason, your RSS feed is what your subscribers see. So let’s say want to offer someone an incentive for subscribing, an idea I’m testing out on my Sacramento Blog. I’m using PlanetOzh’s plugin to add some links to the Subscriber-only content directly into my feed. (Please note that you don’t want to add anything really secret this way, since chances are pretty good your feed is available to non-subscribers as well — that’s how people turn into subscribers is by accessing your feed. But in the case of discount coupons and the like, if someone thinks they found a “forbidden freebie”, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

This is our third and final installment in our series comparing real estate blogging platforms, having a blog that’s part of your main real estate web site. Earlier articles in the series include:

Part 1 — Real estate social network blogs

Part 2 — Stand alone real estate blogs

An Integrated Web Site and Blog Solution

I believe that the best place to have a blog is as an integral part of your web site. By integral, I mean at the very least having it on a subdomain of your web site’s main domain name, though it’s far preferable to have it as a folder off your main domain name.

For me this is not a theoretical idea. For the better part of the last four years, I’ve made my living leading teams (and now, as a broker, a company), whose main source of leads was a successful web site and blog combination. If I point to the web addresses themselves you can better see the structure:

The web site home page is: http://www.sacramento-home.com

The home page of the blog is: http://www.sacramento-home.com/real-estate-events

There are a number of reasons why I think this configuration is ideal, but it boils down to this: eyeballs and fingertips. You need to have the eyeballs of potential home buyers and sellers finding you first when they start looking for a solution — hence the eyeballs. As for fingertips, their fingertips need to be clicking on listing information that you provide, so that when they’re ready, their fingertips can be keying in your phone number.

Background: Pay per click is expensive
Pay per click gets a bit of a bad rap, but really there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with it. We like the “click” part. It’s the “pay” we’d rather dispense with if we can. The online “sweat equity” that we use to dispense with pay-per-click is search engine optimization.

1) Good Search Engine Optimization Requires Lots of Fresh Content
The search engine boost that having a blog will give you is often overstated, but one thing is certain: becoming an authority in a competitive market requires lots of original content. So even though a blog is a web site is an HTML page, the tools that have evolved to blog will help you enormously. Even though I am a web site developer, it is still much, much easier for me to post to a blog than create a “traditional” web page, simply because the tools I have to do the task make it so much easier.

2) Good Search Engine Optimization Requires Natural Incoming Links
Once upon a time, Realtors® were some of the Internet’s biggest fans of reciprocal linking. I link to you. You link to me. Everyone rises in the search engine. Several Google updates later, reciprocal links are no longer valued as they once were. However, bloggers are still notorious for quoting (and linking to) other bloggers.

3) Having the Blog Integrated Means Good Internal Links - Naturally
If your blog is integrated into your web site, naturally each blog post you write will have a link to your home page, your search page, your contact form, and lots of other places where a visitor can begin the path toward becoming a client. There’s nothing problematic there — it’s just good internal site navigation. This means that the benefits you received from #1 and #2 above are going to be passed on as much as possible to your main site without even a whiff of SPAM.

4) Your Best Offer is on your Web Site
In Part One of this series, one of the criticisms we had for social networks was not the question of who owns the content, but what is the content being used to promote and sell. Unlike 90% of the authors who write about blogging, I don’t think that the main goal of blogging is to establish you as an expert. Certainly I don’t have a lot of buyers who call me up and say “I heard you were an expert.” What I DO have is a lot of buyers who call me up and say “I saw a house on your web site”. I think we can dispense with a lot of the silliness that’s written about real estate blogging with a simple quiz. It’s fill in the blank:

“My ideal customer is someone who is pre-approved and has a strong need to buy or sell a ____________ this weekend.”

Did you say “house” or maybe “million dollar home”? If so, great! Now you know why your blog should be on your web site, with a clear path to your real estate search. If you look at my blog, you’ll see you can get to the search page at least two ways from any page, and three from the home page. In fact I think it should have three from every page. I think I’ll go change it.

If you filled in “Realtor®”, then you need to go get your picture printed on BOTH sides of your business card, so you can stay busy flipping it over and smiling.

7) Your Web Site Can Support Other Search-Friendly Work
Are vacation homes popular in your town? Then how about a directory (literally a “directory”, or computer folder) with different pages about vacation homes? Now your blog can support the directory by being your vehicle to announce new features to what in effect has become a “mini-web-site” on a less competitive niche keyword.

6) Competition is Fierce
Back in the reciprocal linking dark ages, many of us would put up five or ten sites or more, optimized for different keywords, since the effort required to boost any single site to the top of the search engine results was fairly mechanical and well known. Nowadays you need a sustained and focused effort to master the search results for even a moderately competitive keyword. That’s why we recommend a clear click path to your best offer, and focusing most of your efforts on a single site (except perhaps for link building and other promotional work, which may of necessity get you out into the world).