Have you ever needed a low-tech way of showing a listing? Maybe you don’t want to start up your laptop. Or maybe your clients don’t have a computer. Well check out FlipClips.
Remember the “old school” way of creating flip book animations? It’s been rejuvenated. And with FlipClips, you can create a flip book from any video that is 30 seconds or less. Prices start at just $5.99.
via: Oh Gizmo!
Within real estate, or any business for that matter, website functionality matters. Businesses are always riding the cutting edge of web technologies, hopefully gaining the largets market share. Well, if you want to know what’s really cool, check out TIME’s 50 Coolest Websites. It’s a conglomeration of cool websites, most of which are decked out in shiny Web 2.0 garb.
Here are few that might inspire those with real estate websites.
There were many more, that had some great function (But I didn’t see how to immediately relate them to real estate):
By now, you should know the importance of lots of photos for real estate. Well, digitalTHOM put together a few ideas to accomplish it using Flickr.
Even if you’ve used Flickr before, check out his ideas. I find that getting fresh (okay about 5 months old) ideas help to keep my creative juices flowing. Here’s the summary:
Copying-n-pasting content is one of the quickest ways to get a new site up and running. However, duplicate content like this is also one the best ways to be delisted, ignored, or devalued by search engines. And I’m not even referring to issues of copyright infringement. Duplicate content is a common issue for many sites, and copy-n-pasting is not the only way to get it.
There are many sites that discuss the dangers of duplicate content. And personally, I think most of the “dangers” are common sense. So rather than discuss the dangers, the goal here is to educate you on a few methods to prevent duplicate content. Doing so may help you to improve your search engine rankings as well as reduce any confusion for your readers.
Duplicate content can occur “accidentally.” In other words, they can happen without being an intentional content spammer. Here are a few examples:
These solutions do not necessarily correspond to the issues above. If you have additions or other ideas, please feel free to comment or email me.
Post inspired by Kristal’s Comment.
Wouldn’t it be great to have a face recognition program on your website that enabled you to determine which buyers are the most likely to buy? or, at least, determine the seriousness of their inquiry?
Millions of leads (stats are a total guess here) are generated everyday by real estate lead generation websites. But by the time they make it through the system and reach the buyer’s agent, just a small percentage of leads actually turn into bonafide buyers.
Truth be told, I don’t really know of a way to qualify leads through any amazing new Internet technology. However, the Technology Evangelist proposes to simply show more photos.
Check it out.
Self-proclaimed Niche Marketing Extraordinaire, Charles Amith, posted about how his house for sale blog (actually just a one page website) was the key to his home selling success. (Thanks Richard). He mentions that typical real estate sales techniques resulted in “waiting and waiting ….with 0 guests.” By changing his marketing, he was able to sell his home in “less than a 1/3 of the average time”.
At first read, I was inclined to nitpick some of the flaws in his initial home selling marketing strategy. But you know what? He probably marketed his home like the majority of REALTORS® and FSBOs do! You know, put in a couple of newspaper ads, have a few open houses, and hope for a bite.
What you need to know is that his “new” marketing strategy is, in fact, old (old in Internet years). Not old as in decrepit, rather, it’s tried and true. If you’re not doing what he did and you’re not generating tons of good buyer leads, you may be doing your listing clients AND your business a huge disservice.
Here are two steps to harness the Internet and ADD to your current marketing strategy.
Yeah, I like making things easy. 
You could do like Charles and create a free blogger account or other and get a website that way. Or if you really want to look professional, consider something like an Agency Logic PowerSite. I think the latter is much more effective since it is professional, comprehensive, and can have its own domain name.
One note, however, about using a blogging system… It provides an easy way to establish an RSS feed. This can give you the ability to frequently feed your info to other sites so that you will show up higher in blog search engines. This is just a side note for you to consider. At this point in the game, I doubt many people are looking through blog search engines to find their dream home. But I thought I should mention it.
Update: Charles provides a good argument for the power of RSS in ALL search engines (not just blog search engines).
There are a number of ways to do this both on and offline. Since we’re talking about Internet marketing of a property listing, I will not go into offline marketing such as newspapers, flyers, etc.
You can do one or both of these strategies. And of course, the more the exposure you can get, the better. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) costs cash, while most classifieds will be free. So here’s your simple check list.
In my personal experience and opinion, and of course it depends on your market, many REALTORS® still do not have an effective Internet marketing strategy for their property listings. By establishing a web-based strategy for your homes, you can easily improve your ability to be the best agent for your clients.
If you’re keeping up on different real estate marketing strategies, you’ve surely heard of podcasting. I won’t discuss all the benefits, at least not for this post, of how real estate podcasting can strengthen your market presence or improve relationships with customers. Rather, I’d like to hit the debated topic of optimizing podcasts for search engines and show you how it can be done.
Like I mentioned in Free Real Estate SEO, search engine optimization is hard work. Doing so for podcasts is even harder. If you’re willing to put in some elbow grease, read on.
Most search engines can’t extract information from podcasts. After all, it’s just an audio file. So here are a few SEO tips to help your podcast move higher up for its topic.
For HTML documents, metadata is slowly going by the wayside. The information is frequently inaccurate and some search engines completely ignore it. However, for podcasting, metadata is still helpful.
Metadata (or ID3 tags) is extra information embedded in your podcast to let search engines and listeners know what it’s about. Whatever software you are using, look for a place to add ID3 tag info like:
These terms may not make a whole lot of sense when you’re doing real estate commentary, but they’re the standard fields used by the different systems and aggregators. These fields will frequently be indexed, so be sure you fill them in. Oh, and make sure they’re accurate too.
Tip: “Album” is good for categorizing your podcasts. You can use it to name your series on Buying a New Home or keep all financing podcasts grouped together.
This one is huge. It’s time consuming, but extremely important to be sure that search engines get your content. Just type the whole podcast out and you’ll be good to go. If you really don’t want to spend the time, there are many transcription services that you can hire, too.
I don’t think this header really says what I want, but it was a choice between “optimal podcast environment” and “Hug your podcast with optimized text.” Anyway, the idea is to be sure that the link to your podcast is surrounded by a keyword rich summary of your podcast’s topic. Search engines will see these extra on-page factors and appropriately deduce the topic.
This is where people search for podcasts, so be sure you submit your feed to all the podcast directories out there. And don’t forget Podscope. You also want to ping services such as Weblogs Audio.
If you’ve read this far, I’d guess you already have a podcast or are very close to starting one. Again, this stuff isn’t really hard. It just takes a lot of work. If you have any questions on how to move forward with any of the things I mentioned, let me know. Also if you have other ideas on how to optimize your podcast, I’d love to hear it!
Do you check your website logs? Well, many real estate agents that I’ve met don’t. So when questions of hits, pages, and sessions come up, guess what? They didn’t have a clue. Read on and you may very quickly be ahead of most of your peers.
There are two goals with this post. Or, at least, there should be two goals for you.
Is this just a bunch of extra website trivia that you’ll never need again? No way! Knowing the difference between the number of hits, the number of page views, and the number of other visitor statistics is critical to monitoring your website’s and your marketing’s effectiveness.
You see, these important quantitative factors can reveal things like:
Yep, these are statistics that could drastically impact your bottom line.
For example, say you know that one of your most visited pages is:
http://yourrealestatewebsite.com/buyers/step-to-buying-a-house.html.
You also know that to get there visitors normally click through a series of pages or navigation menus. So why isn’t it on the front page?! Pages like these need to be moved upfront. It’s all about making things easier for your visitors.
Another example… You are receiving 1,000 hits a day to your home search page. Is this good or bad? Well, are the hits real people, search engine robots, or something else? Reviewing and understanding your stats, you learn that it was one website that was scraping your listings and redisplaying on their website. Hmm… I’d say that’s bad.
From this post you probably won’t become an expert in website statistical analysis. However, you’ll have a better understanding of some of the information you’ll see in common web visitor reports. Following are three commonly used terms that are errantly interchanged:
I will only define the three listed here since I hear people use these most frequently and incorrectly. There are many other terms that are found in site reports. So if you have questions on any of them, please comment below or shoot me an email.
This, purely based on my opinion, is the most touted number among website owners. The false success of many sites are based on the boasting of this near-meaningless number. Yep, meaningless.
Hits are the number of times an individual file is requested.
Rubber-meets-the-road example: So let’s say your home page is simple. It has a graphic of your logo, a photo of you, and photos of three featured homes. You also might have a separate style sheet that’s attached to make things look all pretty.
If anyone opens up your home page, that’s at least seven hits. Count ‘em. Seven.
So how’d I get that? Check out the definition again. Each file adds “1″ to your website’s overall hit count. This information doesn’t say whether the visitor was using Internet Explorer, or if they were on a Mac, or even if they’ve visited before. Yet, somehow people use it to definitively say how popular their site is. A site with a million “hits” a day may simply have a lot of images on their pages with very few actual visitors.
This one is a little better for touting. It has a little more meaning that can be tied to pages visited.
Page Views are the number of times a page (including all images) is viewed.
Simple, huh? Where hits count every little image that’s referenced in a document, page views lumps it all together. The previous example resulted in seven hits. When counting page views, the result is only one. Can you see how it’s slightly more meaningful?
Sometime called “visits,” this is where website dollars can be counted.
Sessions are the number of times a visitor viewed the website
The example: If a visitor came to your site and browsed 100 pages of your website and clicked refresh ten times for each page, what’s the session count? Just “1″.
It doesn’t matter how many files they downloaded or how many pages the visited. Your stats program will say that you had one visitor. They may have roamed all around and got into some things that they shouldn’t have (be glad it’s just a website and not your house), they’re still just one visitor who visited once. That’s one session.
Now if they left and came back later in the day, they’ll start another visit or session. That would be the second session in one day. They’re still one visitor, but they now have two sessions.
Didn’t know I was going to give a math lessone when I started this.
So, is everything clear as mud? Let me know your questions!
You, hopefully, have enough info to be dangerous to your peers (in a safe, business sort of way). Reading your website statistics may not always be fun, but it can reveal some interesting things about how well your dollars are being spent.
Many SEO firms that I’ve dealt with (yes, the same ones that call at 2:00pm on Friday afternoon!) seem to make search engine optimization or high search engine ranking an obscure lofty goal that only they can achieve. Granted, it can be very time consuming, but it’s still very doable. Below I outline some strategic tips to optimize your real estate website that will hopefully get you up to the first page or even the first spot.
The magic ingredient to top search engine placement is… Hard work. Other key ingredients to get you there are:
Yep, that’s it. There’s no special tricks that you need to use or special programs that you need to buy. If you continue on, you’ll see why good companies charge a pretty penny for their services. Let’s start with some definitions…
If you’re talking about heaven and hell, “good” has to be absolute. When talking about search engines, good is very relative. What is it relative to? Well, it seems to be just about everything. The quality of your content is ranked based on a whole bunch of factors by Google and other major search engines. The goodness of your site and content are valued based on both on and off page factors. However, not to fear. Here it is in a nutshell:
Good content is unique, authoritative, frequent, and relevant.
Unique means don’t go pirating text verbatim from other websites. Let your own creative juices flow. If you don’t have any, at least use your own words, paraphrase and cite the site. Copying content not only infringes on others’ copyrights, but it also devalues your copied content and your site. You may see short term gains, but it’s not worth it because you’ll lose out over the long haul.
Who knows your market better than you do? Hopefully, no one. But even if you’re not at the top of the game (yet), be sure you let people know that you’re on your way up. Show off your knowledge of your market in a way that is beneficial to your readers. If you have the only information and the best information for your market, your readers will appreciate you and the search engines will move you up.
I should explain this one a little more. Having authoritative content doesn’t automatically move you up. Better ranking is a result of more voluntary inbound links, more readers as determined by feed and search engine “spyware,” and frequently updated content (see next point).
Search engines like sites with frequently updated content. This doesn’t mean just changing a title or adding a picture. Change means adding new pages or new articles as often as you can. These pages will let search engines robots know that your site is alive and growing. They will then visit you more often.
I’ve found that Google robots will visit daily if I make daily changes. If I slow down, they slow down. This has played a role in search engine placement as well. The more frequent the changes, the higher the site moves in placement for certain keywords. Try it with your site and share your results!
Keep your content relevant to the theme of your website. If your site is about Idaho real estate, be sure your article ties in to Idaho real estate. For example, a properly themed article could discuss market conditions, home mortgages, or buyer tips.
Think of it this way, links are like business references. Good businesses refer good businesses. So, you want good websites linking to you (if you’re a good business, that is!). Here’s the nutshell again:
Good inbound links are natural and abundant.
You can’t really force nature, can you? Natural links are links that occur naturally through voluntary linking through peers or visitors who think your site is worthy of mentioning. Because it’s voluntary you’ll see varying anchor text, varying page placement, and hopefully written in context (like within a paragraph rather than a link at the bottom of a page). It’ll be natural.
Well sometimes you have to encourage people to link to your site. In doing so you may provide them with some HTML code with your keyword-laden anchor text with a great description that properly contextualizes your link. Unfortunately, if everyone uses that same link, search engines may recognize this as link spam and eventually devalue the link. Providing link options may be more effective.
Link farms, free-for-alls, and the like are typically worthless when it comes to building your link strategy. They’re considered “bad neighborhoods.” So don’t be associated with them. Don’t link to them. And don’t link from them.
This is yet more hard work that will pay off in the long run. The more websites that point to you, the better. Contact websites that have similar themes to yours and ask them to link to you. In most cases you have to give them something in return. So start a reciprocal link page or directory.
Keep in mind, however, that links from link directories or reciprocal links aren’t as rank-powerful as one-way links coming from another well-themed site.
Of course! There’s always more complicated and more technical details of search engine optimization and ranking. But this article is not about making you an expert on SEO. It’s about giving you an adequate overview of how to place high in search engines. By now you can at least make a better decision of whether you will do it yourself or hire it out.
If you haven’t lived under a rock for the last few months, you’ve probably heard of MySpace, Friendster, and other social networking websites. Maybe you’re a member, maybe you’re not. Well now there’s a social networking place just for real estate professionals. It’s called ActiveRain.
It’s a completely free service that works more like a real estate directory than a social networking site. The main differences are that you have the ability to earn points to move higher in the directory and link yourself to others. A few of the things that you can do to earn points are:
Since the price was right, I signed up and am current listed under Idaho real estate coaches on ActiveRain.
I can tell you why I signed up. Just like real estate directories, you place yourself there for two reasons.
<tangent potential>And never get the two confused. Always do things for people first and you’ll be fine with search engines.</tangent potential>
The networking potential looks good. So let me know if you sign up and I’ll add you to my “associates” link!
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