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 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.

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!