This week it is an honor and a treat to welcome another outstanding guest author in our “What’s Your Real Estate Internet Marketing Streategy” series. Maureen Francis is the author of miOaklandCounty.com, which (among other distinctions) is Google’s #1 blog for “Oakland County Real Estate”. Her guest post is below.

The Internet has been at the center of our real estate business almost since we got our licenses a few days before September 11, 2001. I recently wrote the full story about how we began and where our Internet marketing has gotten us as a response to a question about return on investment. I won’t bore you with repeating it, but let’s just say that if you were laying odds on who had NO CHANCE of succeeding in real estate, you might have picked me and my husband, Dmitry.

We’ve built much of our business through technology. We work in one of the wealthiest areas in the State of Michigan. Many of our peers in our Sotheby’s International Realty office have built wildly successful careers through their country club memberships and their social connections. I envy them. Who, after all, wouldn’t want to get her clients while sitting by a pool or drinking cocktails after golf? And I don’t even like golf. These are good agents who work hard and know their market. Their clients just come to them differently than mine tend to come to me.

Marketing us

• Our first web site, Oakland-County-Homes.com is a template site provided by homes.com. I’m not happy with it and it is probably on the chopping block from my marketing budget.
• Our next site was a blog, on Blogger.com. That I began 3 years ago. We converted over to wordpress about 18 months ago, and our traffic exploded with better SEO. miOaklandCounty.com is our main site now, and the center of our Internet marketing plan.
• About 6 months ago, we started miBirmingham.com, which was a free Point2Agent site that I quickly upgrade. I am very happy with it, other than the fact that I think it is “ugly.” I should pay to have it customized. Oakland-County-Homes.com gets much more traffic, primarily because it is an old site and Google knows about it. miBirmingham.com gets more leads. I’ll take leads over traffic any day.
• I’ve had an ActiveRain blog almost since the beginning. I’ve gotten very few leads from it, but I’ve done some great networking. I really have not blogged much there in almost a year.
• I’ve just started contributing to AgentGenius. I like the industry talk and that does not belong on miOaklandCounty.com.
• Social Networking. I think I am everywhere. LinkedIn and Twitter are my favorites.

Our business was built on Internet marketing. We no longer snail mail much at all. We don’t cold call. I don’t do open houses. We have a good referral base and we get lots of opportunities from our sites.

Marketing Our Listings

In terms of marketing our listings a few of our favorite tech tools are:

• Vflyer.com
• MrLetter.com
• Our Point2Agent site because it syndicates our listings, easily creates free virtual tours, and we use it to create free pseudo single property sites with their free subdomains. We then buy vinyl letters from MrLetter.com and put up a sign rider, like 284Tilbury.com. We get lots of bang for our buck with this. Total cost on our single property sites, including sign rider and godaddy domain is under $30.00.

The Internet has done right by us. We know no other way. I hope it’s not going away soon.

Related Posts:

Dave Smith on His Internet Marketing Strategy

Real Estate Internet Marketing Strategy Author’s Guide

Many of our readers will recognize Dave Smith as the author of The Real Estate Blog Lab, a very popular blog about Dave’s experiments with using Wordpress. Dave also runs several blogs for his wife, Barbara Lasky, including the Tucson AZ Real Estate Blog and Tucson Real Estate In the News. Tucson Real Estate In the News has propelled BarbarLasky.com into a first page position on Google, while his other blog ranks equally well on MSN. Answering my call for guest authors to write about their Internet Marketing Strategy, Dave emailed me details on his real estate business. These included some production statistics that Dave later asked me to delete; I hope Dave will forgive me if I let you in on the secret that they were excellent.

Dave writes:

About 85% of our business for 2007 came from our Internet marketing. This is what I’m in charge of doing (you probably already had that one figured out).

2007 was our best year yet. Barbara has been in the business full time now for six years. I’m a newbie at just over two years, but was the database administrator for Long Realty Co. with more than 1500 agents in fifteen offices. They have expanded since I left.

I don’t know how many prospect/clients we are working with currently. I know it is quite a few. We have two sources of business.

1. Past clients and referrals from them.
2. The Internet marketing.

We have done more referrals this year than ever before. We have two commercial deals closing this month with a 20% referral which will be somewhere around $2.3 million between the two of them. These came from Internet leads from our blogs.

We do almost no print advertising except on our Sunday insert a few times a year. No magazine or other media. No mailings, nothing else except a small drip campaign: once a month a post card goes out with a tip of some kind from Barbara’s sharper agent account.

More Guest Authors Wanted

Do you have experience marketing your real estate business online? Has your web site rescued your business from the gloom of oblivion? If so, our readers want to hear your voice as part of our ongoing series, “What’s Your Real Estate Internet Marketing Strategy?” Please contact John Lockwood if you’re interested.

Related Posts:

What’s Your Internet Marketing Strategy: Author’s Guide

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?

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.