• Focus on your highlights of the day. Your followers will likely hide your posts if all of them are advertisements. Facebook is still a social site so not everyone will be up to talking shop. Try a status message describing the high points of your job (i.e, “Had a great time assisting a lovely couple find their perfect retirement beach house today!”). This way, you can share positive experiences from the industry without being obtrusive.

• Use mutual interests to build personal connections. Let people get to know you by posting about other activities that you do in your spare time. It’s a given to let people know which industry you’re from, but when they’re drawn to you because of mutual interests, you build a more personal connection that will be worth it whether or not it leads to business opportunities.

• Buy advertisements on Facebook. If Facebook is your new weapon of choice for posting your listings, try doing ads instead. You can pay according to how many people click on your ads or by how many times people see it.

•  Keep in touch with past clients. Stay up-to-date and catch up with past clients if they are on Facebook. Who knows, they may look to work with you again or refer you to their friends in the future.

• Make your own business page. Having a separate company page gives people more options depending how much they want to stay informed with your real estate-related updates. You can even customize your page to have a special tab that will lead to your latest listings.

It’s no doubt that Facebook will continue to be a useful site for marketing. As to how exactly it should be maximized by agents, however, remains to be proven. What about you? How would you advise fellow real estate agents to use Facebook or other social media sites? What’s your  take on posting listings on Facebook?

For solutions on how to integrate your social media profiles on your real estate website or if you’re looking to design your custom Facebook page, contact Agent Image at 1.800.979.5799.

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Real estate professionals now have the chance to leverage the power of video through high-quality agent and property videos with the launch of Agent Image TV. Read the official press release.

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 Social media has become the norm rather than the exception for most businesses so being Facebook-savvy helps you stand out from your competitors. If you’re having a difficult time thinking of new ways to optimize your Facebook page, here are some easy tips we’ve gathered for you.

•  Know your goals. You won’t get far on Facebook without identifying why you’re on it in the first place. Once you know what you want to achieve, it’ll be easier to follow a strategy. For example, if you want more fans to read up on your latest posts or listings on your agent website, you can link your real estate blog to your Facebook feed so that your updates are posted automatically.

•  Use Facebook to communicate. Let your fans and potential clients reach you. Make sure your settings allow wall posts from “Everyone.”Mari Smith, author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day, points out that your wall should have a balance between your own posts and feedback from your audience.

•  Revamp your promotion strategy. Encourage fans and future clients to “Like”your latest video listing or agent video by offering something in return like a VIP pass to an open house event or free courtesy service, which they can then avail  by visiting your real estate website. Play to your advantage with ads that go beyond your usual catchphrase by focusing on what you actually specialize in.

•  Customize your landing page. Running a contest, promotion or advertisement? Let this be the first thing people see when they click on your page. Here’s a sample of a customized Facebook landing page:

 If you’re an Agent Image client, you may contact us on how to add your own custom page. 

 Design and functionality are important when it comes to maintaining your Facebook page. Take time to learn about Facebook’s special features to know which ones will be best suited to your real estate services. If you need more real estate tech tips or marketing advice, visit our Agent Intelligence blog or contact us for a Free Consultation.

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• Inform and educate.  Feature a different member of your team answering FAQs on your company YouTube channel or blog about your opinions on the latest local market news in your area. This way, you don’t just pique the interest of people but you also showcase the expertise of your company by educating home buyers and sellers.

• Showcase your findings. Linking to other sources is a good way to prove that your facts are well-supported; but you build more credibility and impress people more when you make case studies yourself. Share articles or studies you made that will be of value to your potential clients.

• Automate your post updates. Setup your blogs to auto-post your latest entries and updates across all your social sites using tools like Twitterfeed, Ping.fm or dlvr.it. These tools allow you to instantly syndicate and publish your content and expand your reach through added exposure on your social profiles.

• Engage with your web visitors. One of the best advantages of social media  marketing is that it lets you communicate with your audience faster and easier. But what should you do if your company page has hundreds or thousands of fans? Don’t get overwhelmed. Since most social media platforms allow you to create lists, you may place specific contacts or prospects into a separate business list. This allows you to focus on seeing the interactions and updates that matter most to you.  When comments or inquiries are posted on your wall or profile, reply to them even if they don’t have questions. The goal is to have fun and engage with people on a more personal basis. The more you engage, the stronger your connections become. At the very least, you’ll be able to start an open dialogue with your audience, and this is always a plus.

• Manage your “social media time” wisely. Social media is a great channel to advertise and promote your services. However, keep in mind that the goal of social media is to grow your online presence and connect with people, and shouldn’t necessarily take a major bulk of your time. If you don’t have a social media assistant, it is very easy to lose track of time and spend hours writing your blog or tweaking your Facebook page. Since you’ve got a business to run in the real world, try spending no more than an hour each day doing your social media updates. In fact, may people get the feeling that social media can be overwhelming at first. A gradual start is best — you may start with 1 or 2 channels first, then adding more only after you think you can effectively manage them all.  

If you need help on how to jumpstart your social media strategy for your company, you may sign up for a Free Consultation with us. You can also learn more by visiting our newsblog at where we give you tips on marketing, lead generation, and website design.

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Buena Vista Palace * Buena Vista Park, FL * August 23-24th, 2007

Agent Image will be setting up a booth at the FAR Convention in Orlando, FL from August 23 - August 24.

The booth will feature about 10 of our most resourceful and informative representatives ranging from site designers, developers, and web strategists. Our company reps will be available to field questions, promo our products and services and help you get started with a great looking site and/or Internet Marketing Strategy.

Agent Image clients experience a personalized design difference! With a dedicated Project Manager, Design Team and Marketing Consultant, we help you stand out! Get an ORIGINAL design with Agent Image!

Come to BOOTH #906-908
and receive a FREE Consultation
and the new PenAgain
(featured on NBC!)

Come see our Website Specials
available only at the Trade Expo!

Trade Expo Hours
August 23, 2007
8am - 4:30pm
5:30pm - 7:30pm
  *Twilight Trade Expo

August 24, 2007
9am - 2pm

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• Associate: Includes (10 links + 2 links per month)
• Agent: Includes (20 links + 4 links per month)
• Broker: Includes (40 links + 8 links per month)
• Office: Includes (80 links + 16 links per month)

What’s included?

Search engines rank websites based on popularity. The more links a quality, content-rich site has, the higher its rank will be.

• We create keyword-rich inbound links (links from external sites back to your own site) from well-ranked, properly indexed external sites.
• Phone and email consultation with a dedicated Web Strategist.
• Based on a 6-month agreement - Cancel any time after first 180 days.
• A monthly activity report

None of these are a one product solution, in more competitive areas you might need multiple products, including Linking, Content, Press Release, etc.

Please contact one our our web marketing consultants to help you figure out which package best fits your needs.

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• Associate: 15pgs (9 pgs + 1 pg per month for 6 mo.)
• Agent: 25 pgs (19 pgs + 1 pg per month for 6 mo.)
• Broker: 50 pgs (38 pages up-front + 2 pg per month for 6 mo.) –10% off page price
• Office: 100 pgs (52 pages up-front + 8 pg per month for 6 mo.) –20% off page price

What’s included?

• All contracts have a 6-month term
• Original copy is written and uploaded to your site
• Custom site map built and linked from home page
• All page meta tags across the entire site will be unique and customized to the pages’ content
• A contact form appears at the end of every page of copy
• Extensive internal linking both from the home page to the inner pages and among inner pages themselves will be built. Outbound hyper linking to external sources will be created to encourage search engine credibility.

The most effective way to compliment content is to make sure that there are inbound links to your homepage and internal pages of content

None of these are a one product solution, in more competitive areas you might need multiple products, including Linking, Content, Press Release, etc.

Please contact one our our web marketing consultants to help you figure out which package best fits your needs.

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http://www.revenuetoday.com/story/Buddy+Up+to+Google+With+Content

http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/htgla_con.php

There are a few major areas in any new website that have to be developed in order to effectively target higher rankings for targeted key phrases.

• Content
• Inbound links
• Meta data
• Age of domain name

These all effect the value of the website in the eyes of Google (big brother of search engines)

CONTENT SERVICES
Major search engines like Google and Yahoo share a common check list that help them find, index and rank your site. These guidelines change from time to time and many websites do not fully meet these requirements. One of the most important factors right now is to have many pages of content (text) relevant to a certain topic.

Our Content packages are designed to dazzle search engine spiders with easy to read sites, full of content created by our professional writers.

This service works because we base the work that we do on Google’s published guidelines. You can see the most current example here:

Google Guidelines for Webmasters

INBOUND LINKING
This is a strategy that needs to be implemented that is basically a popularity contest. If you have a site and there are a significant amount of other popular sites pointing back to yours, the search engines start to rank you higher based on how many links there are. The more in bound links (more popularity) the better your site looks in the eyes of the search engines. This product is the perfect compliment to a content package in order to have your pages of content ranking higher.

Click on the links below to search for the terms highlighted on Google

www.kerrigancountryrealty.com
Westhampton real estate
Quogue real estate
Hamptons waterfront homes

www.hitlonhyland.com
Beverly Hills real estate

www.huntleyrealty.com
Hampshire Illinois Property

www.rubyhillfinehomes.com
Homes in Ruby Hill
Estates in Ruby Hill

www.temeculaforsale.com
La Cresta Homes

www.esonomahomes.com
Sell Sonoma Homes
Finance Sonoma CA Real Estate
Invest in Sonoma Homes

www.debbienelsonrealestate.com
Summit County Resort Community
Keystone Second Home

www.brickshirerealestate.com
Brickshire Virginia Property

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Please view our online demo here

TopRank LEAD-GENERATION:

• Agent Image has launched a new marketing strategy for those interested in aggressively marketing themselves and generating highly qualified leads. The best way to market yourself or generate leads is to canvas the search engines with multiple entry points.
• Agent Image will build customized landing pages designed specifically for capturing visitor information. Agent Image has had so much success with this program we offer a money back guarantee. If we don’t deliver the guaranteed amount of visitors to your site, we’ll refund 50% of what you’ve spent, plus you keep all the leads you’ve received up to that point.

What’s Included?

• A custom designed lead generation page created specifically for the purpose of capturing visitor information.
• A guaranteed number of monthly visits to your site.
• A lead capture database system that allows you to effectively manage the visitors we deliver to your site.
• One-on-one phone and email consultation with our lead-generation specialists.
• Based on a 3-month agreement - Cancel any time after first 90-days.

Available Top Rank Lead Generation:

• Associate (1 marketing page)
  • GUARANTEED: 100+ qualified visitors to your website every month
• Agent (1 marketing page)
  • GUARANTEED: 150+ qualified visitors to your website every month
• Broker (2 marketing pages)
  • GUARANTEED: 200+ qualified visitors to your website every month
• Office (3 marketing pages)
  • GUARANTEED: 300+ qualified visitors to your website every month

What do our marketing pages look like?
Our client Lori Young’s TopRank marketing page
Compare to her home page

As you can see in the above examples, we are committed to superior design, and we maintain the branding and aesthetics you have worked so hard to build.

Remember that this service comes with a Money Back Guarantee:
We deliver visitors or we refund 50% of your fee.

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“Buyers used a wide array of resources in searching for a home: 85 percent used a real estate agent, 80 percent the Internet (up from 77 percent in 2005), 63 percent yard signs, 55 percent print or newspaper ads and 47 percent attended open houses. Smaller categories include a home book or magazine, home builders, television, billboards and relocation companies.”

Basically, 8 out of 10 people started their home search on the Internet. This number continues to grow in 2007. Furthermore, most people conducting home searches are looking to work with an agent. This is why it is so critical to build an online marketing strategy that not only attracts searchers to your online tools (MLS search, website property search, etc.) but also to what makes you and your business unique. People still prefer to work with people.

Marketing research association, ClickZ.com, estimates that online advertising for real estate will double by the year 2010. They report: “’There’s still a lot of room for online spending,’ observed Borrell Associates VP Pete Conti. The research firm found that while 77 percent of real estate buyers use the Internet for home searches, just 15 percent of the 535 agents surveyed place ad dollars there. Forty-seven percent of agents said they’d spend more online this year than last, and 45 percent said they’d spend the same amount.”

This means that most real estate professionals polled are still not using online advertising methods even though research clearly shows that their potential clients are increasingly using the Internet to begin their home searches. The good news is, there is still plenty of time to get over to the winning team before inflation prices many realtors out of the online advertising market.

I’ve observed many realtors continuing to pour advertising dollars into newspaper ads, real estate magazines, billboards and bus bench ads. I wouldn’t recommend ceasing those methods entirely, as long as they are working for you right now. But it’s vital to allocated more of the budget than ever before to online advertising. Media Post Publications notes “that much of the growth in online real estate ad spending will come at expense of newspapers. This year, real estate ads in newspapers are predicted to total $4.327 billion–down almost 8 percent from last year’s estimated $4.682 billion.”

Many realtors who have been in the business for many years fall into a rut by telling themselves, “traditional advertising has always worked before, why fix something that’s not broken?” ClickZ’s research says that there is “a disparity between long-time agents and those who are relatively new to the industry. It showed that 36 percent of those who have been agents 10 years or longer use online advertising, while 64 percent of those in the business for 10 years or fewer buy online ads. Seventy-one percent of those less-experienced agents will boost their Web ad budgets this year compared to 48 percent of their veteran counterparts. The agents with longer histories in the industry, opined Conti, “are going to lose out pretty soon” because more and more people entering the market are using the Web to find their next home.”

Essentially, realtors who are new to the real estate game are allocating larger amounts of advertising dollars to things like online lead generation systems and natural search engine marketing. Considering that less experienced realtors are dominating online advertising, I think there is a vast untapped resource available to experienced and talented real estate agents and brokers. Your future clients are looking for you.

What do you think? Do you still receive leads from traditional methods of marketing, or do you find that a dollar’s worth of newspaper ads doesn’t go as far as it used to?

Are you new to real estate? What have you tried that’s worked?

Please leave comments (we always respond), and feel free to contact us directly. See the top right of the page for our emails and phone numbers.

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