Codename: Real Estate

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Extremedirectmarketing.com recently did a study on direct marketing that the results of using certain words in your advertisements. Their results were very surprising and I thought were worth sharing with everyone. Even though the results were based on Canadian homes, I am sure some elements would relate to the US market.

Here are some of the key points worth mentioning:

1. Listings where the seller was actually motivated took 15% longer to sell and sold for 4% less.
2. Houses listed as “handyman specials” sold in half the average time.
3. Words used to accentuate curb appeal helped sell houses faster than words more focused on value and price.
4. Homes described as “beautiful” not only moved 15% faster, but also sold 5% higher compared to average listings.
5. Homes described as “good value” sold for 5% less than average.
6. Instant action words like “must see!” had little to no effect on how quickly the house sold
7. Houses where an emphasis was placed on landscaping sold 20% faster
8. Houses labeled as ready to move in told 12% less time to sell, but had little to no effect on the price
9. Words the relate to desirable attirbutes (i.e. “granite”, “gourmet”, etc.) translated to higher sales prices
10. Words like “quiet” and “clean” had zero and negative effects on the sale price

More can be found on ExtremeDirectMarketing.com’s post.

A while back, I stumbled into some pretty crazy but very innovative business card designs.  I thought I would share them with you.  Who knows, they could give you some very clever ideas of your own…

I thought this would be something worth sharing, because it seems like a similar mindset that many realtors have in common (at least, the ones I have talked to).

The idea is pretty simple: The more expensive the website, the better it is.

What surprises many people is that more often than not, cheap and simple websites do better than flashy expensive ones. To help prove the points I am going to make with this, click the two links below to see how the sites differ from one another:

A More Inexpensive and Simple Website Example (customized price: ~$300)*

A Flashy and Extravagant Website Example (customized price: $2,800)

*: This is not an actual price. It is just a price I would assume would be appropriate for the caliber of the site.

Alright, without a doubt the Flashy Extravagant example looks better. It’s clean; it’s exciting; and it will probably captivate the user. But let’s break them down into different categories to see how the measure up to one another:

1. Loading Time

I remember of reports done a couple of years ago stating that you have about 4 seconds to grab a user’s attention. It is probably even less now. So, let’s say for simplicity’s sake that you now only have 3 seconds on average to get your visitors to stay on your site. Now with the simple website, it may take a second or two to load all the text and graphics. The extravagant website though has that ‘Loading’ screen, which (depending on the end user’s internet connection) could go well beyond that 3 second time frame. So with the flashy site, your visitors might even leave before ever seeing your site.

2. Search Engine Friendliness (i.e. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization)

There is no doubt that as the internet evolves, so do search engine spiders. One thing is for sure though, spiders always love plain and simple text. When it comes to flashy sites, spiders may have troubles reading them because of all the additional code needed for the animations. In the end with all things equal, chances are the simple website will have a higher ranking in the search engines than a flashy one.

**Preemptive comment: I am taking this from an onsite-optimization factor only. I understand that offsite optimization can have completely opposite effects, so no need to comment on that.

3. End User Ease-of-Use

Because most people have been raised on the idea that anything in blue is a link and anything in purple is a link you clicked on, it really gives the simple site a navigational advantage. Even though more and more people are using CSS Style Sheets (i.e. website formatting) to change this idea, sites that are flashy with cool animations may confuse the end user as to what the can and can not click on. And if users can not figure out what they can do or where they can go on your website, they will get frustrated and leave in the blink of an eye.

4. Compatibility

When it comes to the simple website, the only thing you really need to view the entire site is JavaScript (which is available on all browsers nowadays). The flashy site, on the other hand, requires a flash player, which is not standard on a lot of browsers. As silly as it may sound, people may be scared of downloading new things just to view your site, and the last thing you want your site to do is intimidate your audience.

So there are just a couple of factors to consider when looking at what you want in your own site. Hopefully, this will help you from a business standpoint and with any luck, financially as well.

In my post yesterday about a couple of more advanced tactics for promoting your blog, I talked about the idea of Blogtipping other Bloggers. The idea works great, but I got myself thinking “What if people don’t know where to find related blogs in their industry”.

Well, I hope to answer that problem in this blog. Here are some ways to find blogs in your niche. If they require further explanation, I’ll just state it right to the side of the resource.

1. Google’s Blogsearch: http://blogsearch.google.com
2. The Blog Catalog: http://www.blogcatalog.com/search
3. StumbleUpon: http://www.stumbleupon.com
4. Technorati: http://www.technorati.com (The tagging community I talked about in my last blog post)
5. Alexa: http://www.alexa.com (Discussed below)

Alexa can be one of those tool that can dig blogs pretty much to no end in your niche. All you do is go to their Search section, type [you keyword(s)] blog, click on one of the sites that pop up and then click the Related Websites link. So for example, if you have a blog on real estate, you would type:

Real Estate Blog

Into the search box. Then click on one of the links, check it out and then click the “Related Websites” link for even more.

One of the nice things about Alexa is that it can be considered a website-ranking authority (even though that is not really the case anymore because of various factors). What that means to you is that not only can you find blogs in your niche, but those blogs can have some high traffic. After all, the more popular the blog you are blogtipping, the better the change of getting a lot of traffic.

For a couple of posts now, I have been talking about some various ways to not only publicize your blog into the blogging world (a.k.a the “blogosphere”). Now I thought it would be good to give you some more advanced strategies to help promote your blog that a lot of people don’t know about (or have never thought of).

Advanced Tactic 1: BlogTipping

When I normally talk about this with people, the first thing that normally comes up is the idea of ‘cow tipping’. I’m not really sure why that is, since it has absolutely nothing to do with cows (or that kind of tipping), but you can think of it like more of the idea of tipping a waiter/waitress.

So here’s what the idea of blogtipping is about: You go to someone’s blog that is in the same industry as yours and you ‘tip’ them. Tipping can be monetary if you want it to (you’ll see many people have virtual tip jars on their blogs), but it usually has to do with publicly complementing them on the blogs and the quality of their content.

Here’s the effect: the author(s) are flattered that you took the time and energy (as little as it may be) to complement them on their post. By leaving a link to your blog with your tip, chances are they will have a look at your blog as well as interact with it (whether it be a simple ‘thank you’ or something better). If When they see you have some great content, chances are they will also start sending traffic your way. Whether it be from just talking about your blog in a post or creating a permanent link to it on their blog, you end up winning.

Think about it: If someone spent the time to publicly complement you on your work, wouldn’t you want to return the favor in some way?

This simple strategy has been around for some time and still seems to work wonders, yet people never really think about it.

Advanced Tactic 2: Establish the “You” Brand

Good blogs are those which people will occasionally go back to for new content. Great blogs are the ones that establish an identity that people remember.

You probably know from personal experience that it’s aggravating when you can’t find something you ran into a while ago that you really liked. This is where branding comes into play…

While it is important to use branding on your own blog, it is equally (well… probably more) important to brand yourself using external sources.

One of the more well-known places to implement personal branding is through Technorati. If you don’t know, Technorati is a tagging service so you can help people find your blog by associating it with ‘tags’, or keywords.

So, if you use a service like Technorati, use various tagging to explain the theme(s) of your blog, but don’t forget to use your own name as a tag as well. That way, when people type your name into an engine, they’ll be able to learn about everything you have written about.

Throughout this little mini-series on the Blog portion of my Realtor Web Marketing installments, you have learned not only how to set up your blog, but also the things you can (and should) do to help get your sites noticed by both the search engines as well as other bloggers.

The question is, how can we make this process easier on ourselves.

In other words. how can we lure other people in to not only view your blog, but to possibly promote it as well?

Here’s a hint: It’s a numbers game.

It has been proven time and time again that people are attracted to numbers. Numbers usually help explain things easier (unless your talking about Calculus…). So how can we use this to our advantage?

The answer: make your blog posts and titles number-friendly.

Here’s an example: Say I am writing a post about how to make a good looking website that would attract visitors. Instead of just writing about the different characteristics of a good site, I could make a Top 10 list.

So if my old title would have been: “How to make a great looking website for your visitors”, I could make it more attractive by saying “Top 10 things to make a great looking website for your visitors”.

That way, people know exactly what they are getting: 10 things to make a great website.

Just remember this: for the most part, people like to read lists versus paragraphs (yeah, I know I am a hypocrite seeing how my blog is formatted, but I’m not really aiming for much popularity here). After all, most people skim versus read.

So here are some ideas you could do to use numbers to your advantage:

• 10 Easy Steps to…
• Top 10 Myths of…
• A 101 List of…
• To 25 resources for…
• etc. etc.

Really, you can pretty much turn anything you write about into a number-friendly format. Again, people like easy reads, so if you provide that for them, they’ll visit (and possibly promote) your blog.

So last time, we talked about where to get content to write about and how you should make posts. Now is where the fun part comes in:

Publicizing Your Blog

Now you really shouldn’t be publicizing your blog until you have a decent amount of posts (like 15-20). If you try promoting your blog to other people and they see you only have 1-2 posts, they may think you are creating a spam blog (known as a “splog”). You need a decent amount of quality content before doing any promotions.

Here are a couple of great areas where you can start promoting your blog:

• Blog Directories
• Other People’s Blogs in your same industry/niche
• Related Forums

Obviously, I can’t recommend any specific resources for the above since… well, everyone will have blogs with a different focus. But just go to your favorite search engine and search for these things in your related area.

Now a lot of people seem to screw this up because they don’t know how to properly promote their blog through the above channels. Here is what not to do:

• Make a post with only your URL
• Talk about things not related to the subject matter
• Post about your blog being better than the place you are posting at

This may seem obvious to you, but I have seen people do this so many times it’s not even funny. Not only will people not go to your blog, but they will also tell other people not to go do your blog.

That being said, you can consider blogs and forums like little communities; they’re not fond of solicitors or people trying to ruin what they have.

Fortunately, the solution to this is very easy: post about things relevant to the topics at hand. It’s normally good to create a reputation before promoting your own blog, but if its relevant to what’s being talked about, let them know!

Now, the options I told you about for promoting your blog is only the tip of the iceberg, but it will act as a great foundation. Now go out there and let the world know about your blog!

In the first installment of this series, we talked about setting up your blog. The last installment talked about things you need to consider when adding content to your blog. Now comes the all-important question that most bloggers encounter:

What the heck am I supposed to blog about?!

Granted, you should probably talk about stuff that is occurring in your local area, but what happens when that resource is tapped?

Here’s a two-sentence explanation on why this question is important: Everyone (both people and search engines) love new content on a regular (preferably daily) basis. If you don’t supply your audience with that new content, they will stop visiting your blog.

What Should You Write About?

So how can you avoid running into the dilemma of not having anything to write about? Well, here’s what I do: when I run out of ideas to blog about, I start blogging about things like:

• Recent news stories in my industry/niche
• Articles that are based in my industry/niche
• Recent blog posts from people affiliated with my blog

99.9% of the time, there is always something to blog about in one of the above 3 categories.

With articles, their are special sites that you can go do for an unlimited supply (pretty much), but when it comes to recent news and blogs, there is only one tool I use: Google Alerts.

Google Alerts is a pretty straightforward system: you enter some words/phrases you want info for and your email address. Once you great a Google Alert, it will then email on a daily basis with the most recent news stories and blog posts affiliated with those words/phrases in the last 24 hours.

Best of all, it’s free.

So no need to complain or worry about not having content to write about; you can now get new material to write about daily in your Inbox.

How Should I Write my Posts?

One thing you need to understand with the blogging world (a.k.a the “Blogosphere”) is that it is very down to earth. Everything Almost everything you learned in your High School English class can be tossed out the window, for blogs don’t take sentence structure or MLS format into consideration.

Bloggers write how they speak.

It’s much more personal and a lot less formal compared to writing a paper or an article. That’s what makes blogging so great; it’s much more real, so to speak. So put some enthusiasm in your posts and get your visitors excited to read what you are writing about!

In my first installment of web marketing with blogs, I discussed the various things you need to consider when choosing a blogging platform and where to set it up. Now that your blog is set up, we can move on to the next steps…

Step 3: Use Effective Title’s

In the word of Search Engine Optimization (geek terminology, don’t worry about it), there is something called on-site optimization, which in short is what you can do on your site to make it show up higher in the search engines for people to find. While there are a lot of factors that go into this, your Blog’s title and the titles for each individual post are some of the more important factors for you to focus on.

So What Should You Put in Your Titles?

You obviously want titles that will catch your reader’s attention, but if you want to help your site rank higher in the search engines, ask yourself:

What words and phrases would people search for to find my site?

Make them specific. Trust me, unless you are willing to spend a lot of time and money, your answer should not be “real estate“, for that is a ridiculously competitive phrase that companies with the fat checkbooks fight over.

You need to think more specific. Adding such things as your city, state, and type of real estate will really help you out.

So, instead of “real estate”, how about “Jacksonville FL single family homes”? Now you obviously won’t be able to put “Jacksonville FL single family homes” in every title for every post… that would just irritate your visitors. But what you’ll want to do is use parts of this phrase as much as you can in your titles (providing it is relevant) as well as use the phrase in your post.

This is what we call “keyword density”, which is the percentage that your keyword shows up on a page. To be safe, search engines usually like it between 3-5%, but don’t freak out if you are not in between these percentages.

Step 4: Set Up Some Plugins to Help Spread The Word On Your Blog (Advanced)

In the world of WordPress, Plugins are considered little widgets that help increase the functionality of your site. Some of these plugins can also help spread the word about your site.

Here’s a nice list of WordPress Plugins that you may be interested in browsing: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

While there are a ton of plugins, there are a couple I would recommend for helping spread the word of your blog: Sociable (has to do with social bookmarking) and All in One SEO Pack (has to do with helping your blog get higher in the search engines). Once you download them, just take the folders in your archive and put them in your wp-content/plugins folder. This requires some technical experience, so you may want to ask your server’s customer support to help you.

Alright, that’s good for now. See you in the next installment.

As I was pondering how to start this ongoing series to help realtors market themselves online, I thought to myself,

What better way to start this Web Marketing series than to discuss how realtors and agents can market themselves without having their own website?

The solution: create a website out of a blog.

That being said, the first part of this series will deal with effectively marketing a blog