This is a niche product with a specific purpose. Creating individual websites for each property an individual or company wants to market on the internet. I believe this product will be a HUGE hit in the marketplace. Not only do I believe it is an industry leading product, I am offering it at a price lower than my competitors.

Accounts are FREE to sign up and “Try Before You Buy” and each website is priced at $43.95 per website and bulk purchases can bring the price down to as low as $36 dollars per website. One of the great aspects of the internet is that it legitimizes niche products as you are able to reach a far greater audience for pennies. As a result, we are able to pass on the cost savings to the consumer. If we had to use traditional marketing vehicles to market this product, we would have to charge $100 per website.

So now that all the elbow grease has gone into creating the product, I know must use all of the knowledge I have learned over the past 4 years to see if I can market the product in a cost effective manner to generate a product. Wish me luck, check out the website and if you know a real estate agent, rental agent, property manager, investor or FSBO, please tell them about this product. The website should be able to answer all their questions, however if they still have questions, please feel free to give them my information.

This is MAJOR project for me so any assistance with word of mouth advertising is greatly appreciated.

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We are entering an economic period not seen by this generation. I believe that we have a stronger infrastructure based on the principles of Adam Smith but if our political leaders try to hard to manage this correction, we will only be extending the inevitable.

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Over the past 3 years, we have built a business based on the concept of providing our clients with a solid platform in which they themselves could grow their online business from either the knowledge they learned from us through our consulting program or through other means like the various real estate fourms or real estate social networks currently online.

The ongoing challenge throughout this process has been finding a platform which was scalable (read search engine friendly CMS system) or a manual process which was cost effective enough to compete against every web designer and developer on the planet. This was a problem because to create a strong solid platform for agents to use to grow their business is not cheap. Our packages cost on average $5000 for a 20 page website.

The crux of the issue is that when the potential client is being told that it will cost that much to build from us and the guy down the street will do it for $1,000 what do you think the non educated agent will do…….build the cheap site or maybe buy a templated site thinking that they will upgrade in the future. They don’t realize the mistake they are making until it is too late. At the time of the decision however it makes sense when you think about it from the realtors point of view. 

However, If you are successful because of your track record or sales skills and sign on a client, conventional wisdom dictates that even an educated client wants instant results from the money they are investing. The reality is that isn’t going to happen from an organic point of view. 

So where is this leading. Well, I don’t know Morgan but know that people either like him of hate him.  What I can’t necessarily blame him for is trying to give clients instant results for the money they are paying him.  If I was a client, I would want results and from what I know, he charges far more then we do. As a result,  he needed to be agressive in his optimization strategy. I am not making a case for him, but am trying to understand what happened and how if may or may not affect our business moving forward.

We stopped doing any link pages over a year ago for two reasons.

• It did not make economic sense from a business perspective
• It created an undo risk for clients who spent the money.

By making this decision, it definately affected our ability to bring on new clients as we could not be as agressive in our belief to generate results for the clients, but it also soilidified our standing with our existing clients because it gave them the confidence that we would always operate in a manner which was in their best interests.

So how is this recent decision by Google going to affect our business. Well, as I have always said, until the consumer better understands the product they are purchasing and the search engines perfect their process, there will always be companies pushing the edge of the envelope. In the meantime, our job as a company is to continue to figure out a way to provide the best possible service at a competitive price.

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For much of 2005 and 2006, most people looked at the internet as only a lead generation vehicle. With the advent of myspace.com, facebook.com and other networking websites, people are starting to realize that the internet has multiple faces. Even as I gave this advice to many clients, I did not take my own advice. It seemed to me a great avenue for people whom were good communicators of the written word, but very difficult for those who were better at speaking, not writing. (ie…real estate agents).

I now believe that internet networking is not just for those who can write. It is for everyone who is looking to build or increase their business using the internet. For example, in the online real estate world, networking websites have taken hold in 2007. The top sites are Active Rain, Wanna Network and Real Town. These sites don’t require you to write lengthy articles to gain exposure. You can but it is not necessary. They are networking sites where you can share information, exchange stories or just keep up to date on the the world of real estate.

Now these networking websites are not new. What they are is an extension of various forums of communication which have been available on the web for many years. What makes them different is that they offer multiple forms on communication under one URL. For example, in the past there were bulliten boards which were used by die hard internet geeks to communicate. These still exist today. Then came forums like the real estate forum, which were user friendly places to communicate with other real estate professionals. Now people are singing the praises of blogs which are an additional tool to provide people to communicate. Now tie all these forms of communication together, and add the ability to connect with others whom have the same interests and you have the boom of social networking.

So the next question to ask yourself is, how do I take advantage of internet networking. As a real estate agent, I would recommend the following:

• Install a blog on your website and commit to updating it at least once per week. This serves as 2 purposes. First, it allows you to communicate with clients on a weekly basis without having to call them on the phone each week. Second, it increases the overall content on your website which will allow you to generate more traffic to your website.
• Sign-up and participate in these online networking groups focused on the real estate industry. They are listed above but again they are Active Rain, Wanna Network and Real Town.
• Sign-up and participate in some of the older forums on the web. My preference would be the real estate forum which is owned by Site Tutor. We have over 10,000 members and an active community posting between 50 to 100 comments each and every day. (My shameless plug)
• Lastly, look into some of the general social networking websites. I have found great success using Linkedin for my general networking and Facebook for my personal networking.

We are at a time during the year when business historically is slow, so why not take some time and try some of the websites above. I think you will find that after a couple of hours of researching these websites, they won’t seem as daunting and for some like me, they become very addicting. Good Luck and Happy Holidays.

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– Almost three quarters of all home buyers consider a real estate agent’s response time either a “very important” or an “extremely important” factor in their decision when choosing an agent to work with. Nine out of ten Internet home buyers say the same.

– Forty-seven percent of home buyers who use the Internet to select an agent and 43 percent of non-Internet buyers say they select their agent because the agent is either the first or the quickest to respond to his or her inquiry.*

   * All statistics from California Association of Realtors' annual Internet

    vs. Traditional Buyers Survey.

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The next step is to then outline your online marketing plan. This will include some of the online marketing tools below, but will depend on how much time you have to dedicate to your online marketing efforts in addition to how much money you have to invest in this form of marketing. One of the first questions you must decide is how much money to earmark toward your organic efforts and how much to earmark toward your pay-per-click campaign. As a general rule, you should allocate about 20% of your online marketing budget toward your organic efforts and 80% toward your PPC campaign. Over time, these percentages will flip flop with 80% toward organic marketing and 20% toward PPC but this will be a general shift over the course of the first two years. **It is important to note that the cost of developing the website is a separate item when creating an online marketing budget.

Second, It is VERY VERY important to understand that all the calls you receive from all the sales people promising results are products or tools. They are NOT the secret to success. In most cases, these companies are offering a service which offers either very little value to no value at all. The internet is still the wild wild west and as such most companies as attempting to take advantage of a real estate professionals lack of knowledge.

If you are a Site Tutor client, always feel free to email or call for advise if you come across a sales pitch which you want to explore further. In most cases I will know the company or the type of product they are selling and let you know if it makes sense or if it is a scam. There are ocassions when there is something new I have not yet heard about and If I haven’t heard of the product, I will research it for you and get back to you with my review and recommendation.

The TRUE SECRET to success on the internet is to utilizing multiple online marketing techniques. Investing too much in any one technique exposes you to a tremendous amount of risk. The search engines are constantly changing and at any given time, they could change their algorithms and if your marketing is too invested in a strategy which they no longer consider as part of their algorithm, you can loose all your business overnight. So, now that I have written a huge caveat about internet marketing, there are a number of techniques which are well established and I believe that by utilizing these, you will be on the road to building a solid long term business on the internet. These techniques include the following:

• Additional content development – Unique content is the King of the Internet and also the easiest way to differentiate your self on the internet.
• NetworkingOnline:
  • Just as you network offline, you should continually network online. This includes:
    • Forums – You should participate in 2 to 3 forums on a regular basis. Site Tutor owns and manages the real estate forum, and is a good place to get your feet wet.
    • Social Networking Sites: On the success of my space, social networking sites which are industry specific are gaining momentum and I believe will become a powerful marketing tool in the years to come.

• Directory Submission – Careful directory submission will help expose your website to the search engines and generate additional traffic. These include top general websites in addition to popular industry specific directories
• Article Development – Writing articles which are submitted to industry specific websites and article submission services.
• Press Releases – Most companies release information about their companies. If submitted via internet services, this can be a powerful tool in regard to your online marketing.
• Pay Per Click – Bidding for Placement in the search engines. Although this can be very time consuming, if handled correctly, it can also be very beneficial.
• Blog posting – Consistently writing on your website blog and having 1 to 2 external blogs. Each Blog should focus on different areas and be hosted on an industry specific hosting platform. Keep an eye out for our real estate forum blogs which are expected to launch in the fall of 2007.

In addition to these tried and true methods, the internet is a constantly changing beast. New techniques are being developed and tested on an ongoing basis. It is always a good idea to read the online industry magazines to keep updated on the latest marketing techniques being tried on the internet.

Now, what will all this cost you? Well…………..Unfortunately, many of the techniques above are an issue of knowledge and manual labor. As a result, unless you are going to spend a minimum of $5,000 per month on any of the above methods, it makes more sense for you to undertake these efforts yourself. Now you may think I am crazy, but a majority of the calls you get selling you a service are actually tools which cost very little to manage. If a company was to actually contact you to provide you with the services outlined above, they know it would cost them at least $1,000 in labor costs alone. Then they need to add in all the associated costs with running an established company and so to make money, they would need to charge $2,000 to $3,000 per month and most small to medium sized businesses can’t afford this investment on a monthly basis.

I know that is not what you want to hear, but lets deal with facts. The small businesses who have been successful on the web to date have learned and implemented the techniques themselves. Large companies can afford to outsource these efforts, but even as they become more knowledgeable, even the big companies are bringing these programs in-house to maximize their investments.

That is why we at Site Tutor don’t offer a full search engine marketing management plan. Since the focus of our business is to serve small to medium sized businesses, we focus on teaching our clients the process through our consulting services. We know what it takes to be successful and we know that our most successful clients manage their own online marketing campaigns.

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As a result, I thought I would outline some of the general economics and steps associated with maximizing your exposure on the internet. Once a business understands the fundamentals, it is much easier to know what are the best decisions given a companies current financial situation.

When a company is looking to establish a presence on the internet. The first and most important question they need to answer is “What is the purpose of the website”?

• Is it meant to be an online brochure?
• Is it meant to be an income generator?
• Is it meant to be a communication tool?
• Is it meant to be a tool to help facilitate your employees interaction with existing clients?

Most companies will say “I want our website to provide all these functions”. The reality is that answering yes to each one of these questions adds additional expense to your website. That is why a company needs to really answer these questions before they begin researching companies with whom they may want to work.

Is it meant to be an online brochure?

The cheapest solution is to have an online brochure which you put in your offline ads or business cards. If this is your primary need, there are a number of solutions which range from $500-$1,000 to set-up and about $50 per month to host. What is important to note here is that although these companies will claim to be able to generate you additional business, the reality is that without additional SEM, chances are that they will not.

Is it meant to be an income generator?

If you are looking to use the internet as an online brochure and an income generator, then you should budget between $3,000-$5,000 to build a custom website. The cost difference between an online brochure and an income generation website is that the basic structure of the website is fundamentally different and requires significant manual effort on a per website basis to prepare a website and give it the optimal chance to succeed in the search engines. In addition to the above amounts, if your website requires significant database programming or interactive tool integration, you can easily increase the oveall cost by $5,000-$10,000.

Is it meant to be a communication tool?

The communication aspect of a website adds another level of integration when building a website. The popularity of blogs has allowed many small companies to communicate to there clients via the web. The other main communication tool companies use to communicate with clients is newsletters but this tool is very different than your website. They may be integrated in the mind of the average user, they are in reality very different products. A company wanting to utilize drip email marketing campaigns or a traditional email newsletter should consider this as a separate marketing expense when budgeting for their online marketing costs.

Is it meant to be a tool to help facilitate your employees interaction with existing clients

If you are looking at the web primarily to facilitate improving current client relationships, most companies will recommend that you utilize a separate URL to integrate any software to choose to use. The primary reason is that most types of software like customer relationship software is developed fundamentally differently from a marketing website and including these activities on the same url can potentially hurt your online marketing efforts. Costs associated with this type of software can run anywhere from $500 to $50,000 or more.

Once a company answers these fundamental questions, they can then properly budget to meet their online marketing goals.

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In regard to real estate websites, the current uproar started last year after AA (Advanced Access) websites were hugely affected in Yahoo with many of them losing rankings they have had for many years. The issue this year again involves AA websites as due to a recent change in Google, many of these websites have lost their rankings in Google.

In general, this would not affect any Site Tutor websites. However, it is now being recommended by a number of custom real estate web design companies that they not only stop any type of straight linking program between websites, but actually remove these pages with the links all together. When this happens, there will be an affect on Site Tutor websites. It will not have an immediate affect, but it will have an affect over time.

As you all know by know, Site Tutor has always felt that although link marketing is a necessary evil in regard to internet marketing, over the long term, a scenario similar to the one being outlined above would happen. This is not a “told you so” post. I only mention this to emphasize the importance we have always placed on diversifying your internet marketing activities and focusing on the long term approach to search engine optimization.

Site Tutor has always had a linking policy with some of the following guidelines:

• Unless requested by the client, no links with templated websites
• All link partners are verified as established / committed / knowledgeable website owners
• All sites have been indexed in ALL 3 search engines and all link pages have been indexed as well.

Because of this strict policy, we have not been affected by many of the ranking fluctuations that have affected other websites. We also feel that because of this policy, the current structure of our links pages actually continue to help our clients. Not as much as in the past, but more importantly, they do not hurt our clients websites. However, just because we feel we implemented to solid strategy in the past, we were always dependent on the strategies of our link partners. It is that dependence which has forced us to create a proactive approach to these coming changes.

HOW TO HANDLE THIS CURRENT CHANGE AND MINIMIZE ANY AFFECTS

1. First and most importantly, you need to check all your reciprocal links on your website to make sure the sites you are linking to are linking back to you. Over the next 3-6 months, we recommend checking these links once a month. Any links which are no longer linking to your website should be forwarded to tutor@sitetutor.com for removal.
2. If you do not have a blog on your website, we recommend you have one installed. The cost to install a blog on your website is ($100). Customization of the Blog is billed on an hourly basis of $60.
3. If you have a blog on your website, make the effort to post in your blog a minimum of once a week. This will add additional content to your overall website and strengthen the value of your website in the search engines. I will have further posts in the blog to outline how to best use your blog to maximize your efforts. If you would like to have a consultation meeting, this is charged at $75 per hour.
4. If you are not actively a member of a popular real estate forum. Sign-up and begin contributing to the community. Our forum is one of the top real estate fourms on the web and a great place to network online and benefit your search engine optimization activities.
5. If you have been thinking about adding additional changes to your website, now would be a good time.
6. If you have not paid for a Yahoo directory listing, I would consider the investment. It is $299 per year, but depending on the power you may lose from having sites which were linking to you no longer linking to you, the power from one yahoo link could greatly help to offset that loss. For many of you, in the past I had mentioned that Yahoo was something to keep in your back pocket in case we were not able to receive rankings through other sources, now is the time to get that Yahoo link.

These are some of the initial action steps we recommend our clients to implement to combat the loss of links from other websites. As always, please feel free to contact us for clarification and or assistance. The money and time invested at this stage is unfortunate but necessary. The internet marketing process is no different from off line marketing in the sense that there are occasionally expenses which were not in the budget, but are important enough to re-look at the budget and prioritize. This is one of those times.

In future posts, I will outline the contextual linking strategy which is being implemented by many custom website owners. This approach is nothing new, but given the various changes in the search engine community, it is now the recommended strategy. The reason many people delayed implementing this approach is due to the fact that it is very labor intensive and thus expensive to implement.

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1. YOUR WEBSITE: The most cost effective method is having a search engine friendly website. As you all know, by investing in the custom website with custom content and properly optimized, over time your website will generate exposure via the internet.
2. PPC(Pay Per Click): The second most effective source is through having PPC campaigns running on the top 3 search engines which account for over 90% of all searches in the USA.
3. BLOGS:Utilize a blog to communicate to your current, former and future clients. Having a blog only for SEO purposes is NOT an effective use of your time. In that regard, I believe that once you have a website up and running, SEO is secondary, but must be considered in regard to all your online activities. What this means is that SEO is time consuming and you normally will not see the results of your SEO activities for 6-8 months. In regard to a blog, it means that having a Blog can be a powerful SEO tool but that must be a secondary reason for using a BLOG. The real power of a Blog is that by using a Blog and promoting your blog, you are able to communicate your thoughts, ideas, information or activities to a larger audience. Being a small business person, there is only so much time in the day and using a Blog allows you to reach more people with that limited time frame.
4. FORUMS: In the same light as Blogs, Forums are an effective SEO tool, but participating in Forums only for SEO purposes is not an effective use of your time. The primary reason one should participate in forums is from a networking perspective. From a real estate agent perspective, look at forums as your online farm. Just as all real estate agents are told to work a farm in their neighborhood, Forums are an online farm for real estate agents.
5. DIRECTORIES: Before search engines were developed, the best way to find what you were looking for online was through directories. Some of the biggest directories were Yahoo and DMOZ. With the advent of Google, directories have been used for many purposes including SEO, however, SEO is not the primary reason to be listed in directories. Most search engines have reduced the value of being listed in directories, however being listed in a directory is not going to hurt you from an SEO perspective. Once again, there is value of being listed, however the value must be more than only from an SEO perespective, or it is not worth your time. In tihis case, the added value is exposure. As most marketers know, you receive most of your clients from your primary marketing sources. On the internet, that also remains true however, their is a phrase in SEO called “chasing the tail”. What this means is that through the SEO process, you receive traffic from searches you would not think about . For example, last week a client told me that one client found them by typing in the term “claim jumper”. Because of the SEO process, their website came up under that term. It was not a term they were focused on, but because they have a Search Engine Friendly website, the couple found saw their website and liked what they saw, so they contacted the client in regard to their real estate needs. Directories work in much the same way. By being listed on multiple free directories, those websites receive exposure and being listed in those directories allows you to receive additional traffic to your website. Is it significant? In most cases no, which is way you shouldn’t pay to be listed in directories except for a very view.

So This gets me back to the title of the article. Local Exposure Through the Internet. There are a number of ways to gain local exposure. Over the past few years, the search engines have offered a local search as part of their search options. One of the main ways they create these results is by cross referencing their global results with directories they have agreements with. It is important to get listed in these directories. I have listed a number of them below:

• Superpages.com – You can add your listing on this page: SUBMIT
• Yellowpages.com – You can add your listing on this page: SUBMIT
• infoUSA.com – You can add your listing on this page: SUBMIT HERE

Once you have set-up listings with these online phone directories, then go to the search engines and set-up your local account here:

• Yahoo: SUBMIT
• Google: SUBMIT
• MSN: SUBMIT( They Partner with Citysearch.com)
• Local.com: SUBMIT

These will get you started. Remember, no one submission will bring down the house in delivering traffic to your site, but over time, all these various methods add up. Just remember to do a little each and every week or month depending on how quickly you want to see results.

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• Should I contact a lead via the website by phone or email?
• How long should I wait before contacting an internet lead?
• Most of the leads I receive don’t turn into sales. What am I doing wrong?

These are all valid questions and most agents have the same questions. Why? The reason is that the internet buying cycle is different from the traditional buying cycle. Whereas in the traditional buying cycle, an average client will contact a real estate agent 3-5 weeks before they purchase a property, the average internet buyer will contact a realtor 20-50 weeks before they buy a property.

That is not to say that a bell curve does not exist in both those buying processes. I once met a woman who bought their 1 million dollar home off the internet without ever seeing the property. I know agents who have received an email lead on Monday and had a property in escrow by Friday with an all cash offer and 30 day close. The bell curve exists with both these buying cycles, however you build your business based on the middle of the bell curve, not at the ends of the curve.

Having said that lets look at the questions above and outline how the traditional buying process and the internet buying process are similar, and how they are different.

• Should I contact a lead via the website by phone or email?

1. • What is the first rule of real estate……”face time”. You are taught that if you are not selling houses, you should be meeting people, passing out business cards and asking questions. This is the first rule of the traditional real estate buying cycle. The Internet buying cycle is the same. If a phone number is given, CALL THEM!!! Since you are not meeting them face to face, a voice is the next best thing and a positive first step. E-mail a lead ONLY if that is the only method you are given in the lead. A lead is exactly that, The first step to meeting a client face to face.

• How long should I wait before contacting an internet lead?

1. • Most if not all people today multi-task and have a short attention span. As a result, it is critical that you contact a lead within 15 minutes of receiving the lead. There are many reasons for doing this, but the primary reason is that their actions are still fresh in their mind which will give the real estate agent the best chance of creating a re pore with that lead. Think of an internet lead as if it was someone walking into the office during floor time. If they had to wait to speak with you for 30 minutes, would they still be as interested as the minute they walked in the door? NO. They would move on to the next office, agent or activitiy. If someone is taking he time to fill in a form online, they have a need and you as an agent want to fill that need while it is still top of mind for that potential client. (BTW, It also helps that the Florida Association of Realtors did a survey of internet buyers and found that 85% of clients worked with the first agent that contacted them. That alone should get you to contact a lead as soon as possible)

• Most of the leads I receive don’t turn into sales. What am I doing wrong?
  • Many clients I work with feel that because many of the leads they receive via the internet don’t close, that the internet is not worth the effort. In reality, the exact opposite is true. The internet allows the real estate agent to reach beyond their sphere on influence and communicate with potential buyers who they could not reach via traditional marketing avenues. In the traditional real estate buying process, agents are taught to first contact their sphere of influence, second set-up and work their neighborhood farm and third, start networking. All these actions have one aspect in common. They introduce you to maybe 1 or 2 levels of separation from your socio-economic situation. The internet however, opens you up to ALL potential clients, regardless of a persons socio-economic situation. As a result, The process you use to cultivate these clients is fundamentally different.
  • FOR USERS: The internet fundamentally offers 2 services.
    • It is an information source to research, collect and exchange information.
    • It is a tool to allow users to make their lives easier.
  • FOR BUSINESSES: The Internet offers 2 services.
    • It is the business card of the 21rst century.
    • It is a distribution channel to reach additional consumers.
  • Understanding this basic concept gives the real estate agent a basis to know how to contact, cultivate and convert a lead into a client. So the answer to the above question is to understand that leads received from the internet require a different approach. In many cases, you do not have that socio-economic similarity you normally start with in the traditional buying cycle. As such, your approach to contacting them should be focused on building a base of trust, professionalism and service. Once you are able to build a base with the client, they will be more inclined to work with you. Remember, the purchase of a home is the single biggest purchase for most of your clients regardless of their socio-economic situation.

As I mentioned above, the internet buying cycle is fundamentally different from the traditional buying cycle, however if managed correctly is a distribution channel which exposes the real estate agent to clients beyond their sphere of influence. Once you understand this basic concept, you are on your way to converting internet leads into clients for life.

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