More than marketing

Truthfully, I think the founders of RedFin.com and other innovative business plans should be commended… for their innovation. It brings about good ol’ competition. Beyond that, I have no desire to enter the debate of whether they’re good or not. However, as a non-real estate agent, I’d like to point out the real issue at hand is not money, it’s representation.

The big issue that people tend to point out is broker/agent fees, a.k.a. commission. But as with any business, all have the unregulated right to set their own fees. Consumers should be made aware of their options and choose intelligently. Discussions of marketing and other value-added services happen at this level.

To serve and protect

The bigger issue for discussion is representation. Most consumers don’t understand the power of representation that an experienced agent can provide. Representation takes a person beyond property marketing and into the deeper realm of protection.

I think good agents recognize the power of protection that they can provide for their clients. Unfortunately, I rarely see it leveraged. If someone considers themselves a full-service agent, they must discuss protection with their clients.

Good agents

I took the classes. I took the tests. And I’ve been in the real estate industry long enough to know that good agents stand as a shield of defense for their clients. Good agents negotiate powerfully. Good agents protect confidential information. Good agents do things in the best interest of their clients.

Whether a consumer pays 8%, 6%, $2995, or $500, it’s their prerogative. It’s the responsibility of the consumer to know their options. It is ALSO the duty of agents to let them know what they’re getting.

What say you?

One legitimate way of getting unique content is to buy it. Do a search for “PLR Articles” and you’ll find a bunch. It’s very easy to find good real estate related articles that you could post on your website. The down side is that in many cases they’re not completely unique. You’ll have the rights to use articles, but so do a small number of other people.

So is it really unique? Nope. You’ll probably get banned from Google for that one.

But wait, there’s more!
I’ll be reviewing a piece of software called Website Content Wizard. This software automatically rewrites articles for you. This means it will make articles unique! You can purchase inexpensive PLR articles, stick it in the software, then post the rewritten version on your site. Voila!

I suppose you could rewrite just about any article on the Internet, but there are some ethical issues you’ll have to deal with.

I checked out the 14 second solution and it was pretty impressive. Most software like this isn’t worth the money. However, this one looks like it has some excellent features. Now understand that it is written for affiliate marketers and not real estate agents. But if it really does what it says, the Website Content Wizard could help to simplify your blogging life.

Check it out the demo here:
Website Content Wizard

Google recently released the data API for Google Base. With it, websites can communicate with Google Base obtaining any information available. I think this is very cool and have already started to play. Listing agents will also love the exposure they can give their clients. However, I know a lot of real estate brokers that won’t be too happy.

You see, there’s a lot that you can do with this new service. Most notably, people will be able to stick everyone elses listings on their own website (provided the data is in Google Base). They won’t even need special IDX access to do it. This is where I think we’re going to see some trouble.

I’ve heard in multiple cases of brokers that are very tight fisted with their listings. They won’t share anything and always check the “don’t include in IDX” box. With Google Base, it really doesn’t matter. If an agent entered a listing in Google Base, it is now fair game to anyone and everyone.

Any guesses on how long before the lawsuits start flying? Or at least complaining?

• Short domain name or long domain name?
• Company name or descriptive, city keyword-laden names?
• One domain or multiple domains?

I will share my point of view on these domain questions. My goal here is to help you to understand a bit of marketing strategy, business planning, and search engine optimization when it comes to buying domain names.

Domain Information: Getting Started

Domain name

A unique name that corresponds to a computer (i.e., web server) on the Internet. Examples are google.com, yahoo.com, and ungos.com.

Purchasing a domain

You can purchase a domain through a domain registrar such as GoDaddy.

Domain costs

Buy domains for 10 U.S. dollars or less. Anything more is a rip off.

Web hosting

Buying a domain doesn’t automatically give you a website. You need to purchase both web space for your website (hosting) and a domain name. Some services will bundle these. Be sure to know what you’re getting.

On to the questions…

Short domain, long domain?

As a rule of thumb, short is better. A short domain name is easier to remember, less likely to be misspelled, and can fit easily into both print and online marketing pieces. Regarding SEO, domain names play a very limited role. The length of a domain name, for search engine optimization, is trivial.

Company name, keyword-laden name?

Both. For people that know your company, you definitely want to have your-company-name-dot-com. Web surfers will assume you have a website and guess your website’s domain. So if you are First Rate Real Estate, try to get both FirstRateRealEstate.com and FirstRate.com.

A keyword-laden domain such as your-city-name.com is even more important. It can be used for marketing your site to buyers and sellers that know your area, but do not know you. City domain names are also more susceptible to viral marketing. This may even include links from your competitors!

And what about SEO? Don’t worry about it. Good content and good inbound links play a more significant role with search engines.

One domain, multiple domains?

One domain is obviously much easier to manage. However, multiple domains can open various marketing opportunities. You can place dot-com newspaper ads for specific townships or subdivisions. You could even have a unique domain for each of your listings. You could then hang the unique website as sign riders.

Note: Be aware of the dangers of duplicate content.

The Best Real Estate Domain

With all that said, there is no perfect domain name. By now many of the really good ones like SeattleRealEstate.com have been taken. Notice that they’re not currently in the top 10 for “seattle real estate” searches. The most important thing is to get started. Buy a domain. Setup your website. Market it like crazy. And while you’re at it, get more!

• Podcast Pickle – Podcast Directory
• Jumpcut – Online Video Production
• ClipShack – Online Video Storage
• Yelp – Local Business Reviews
• Argali – White and Yellow Pages
• Blurb – Blog Publisher (Publish your blog as a book)
• Kayak – Trip Planner
• Google Spreadsheets – Online Spreadsheets
• Writely – Collaborative Word PrRocessor
• Dodgeball – Meeting (Party) Planner
• Meebo – Unified Messaging

There were many more, that had some great function (But I didn’t see how to immediately relate them to real estate):

• SingShot – Online karaoke
• Drawn – Collaborative drawing blog
• Pandora – Custom radio stations
• Mighty Goods – Cool stuff to buy
• More… – Time wasters section

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:

• Use Flickr for listings
• Use Flickr for showings to refresh buyers’ memories
• Use Flickr for virtual tours for out of area buyers
• Use Flickr for neighborhood tours
• Use Flickr to save disk space and bandwidth

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.

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.

Not so new property marketing strategy

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.

1. Setup a unique property website
2. Drive traffic to the site

Yeah, I like making things easy.

Unique Property Website

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).

Drive traffic to your property

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.

• Post to online classifieds (I like Postlets to post everywhere including Google Base and CraigsList)
• Setup PPC campaigns (Using both Overture and Google AdWords will give excellent property exposure)

Establish Your Internet Strategy

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.

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.

Podcast SEO

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.

• Use Good Metadata
• Write Transcripts
• Optimization on-page text
• Submit your podcast feed to podcast search engines (especially Podscope)

Good Podcast Metadata

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:

• Title
• Genre
• Artist
• Album
• Description

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.

Transcripting Your Podcasts

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.

Optimal Podcast Environment

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.

Podcast Search Engines

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.

Get Podcasting

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!

There are two goals with this post. Or, at least, there should be two goals for you.

1. Review your website statistics.
2. Understand your website statistics.

Reviewing your website statistics

So why bother?

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:

• Usability issues that need to be resolved
• Ineffective pages that need to be improved
• Hot content that should be moved to the front page
• Poorly targetted advertising that needs to be refocused
• Wasted advertising dollars that should be reallocated

Yep, these are statistics that could drastically impact your bottom line.

Most visited page example

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.

Lots of hits example

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.

Understand your website statistics

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:

1. Hits
2. Page Views
3. Sessions

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.

Hits

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.

Page Views

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?

Sessions

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.

Get statisticking!

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.