4MySales - Viral Marketing with a Real Estate Twist

OMG, I Can't Believe It!

2009-11-06T13:15:00.000-08:00

If you have kids, or are under the age of 20, you know what that acronym stands for. For those of us who remember learning how to type on Electrolux typewriters, it may be foreign. For me, I had to look it up.

Regardless, that was the sentiment that I felt when my friends over at the RedX (Real Estate Data Exchange) gave me permission to offer huge discount on their listing lead, FSBO and Agent Website listing lead service.

As many of us can attest, they have a great product that includes a complete lead management system that interfaces with your MLS as well as multiple databases to give the correct listing contact for every expired and FSBO in your area. Their system then scrubs the data against the DNC registry to provide. Here is a link to a video demonstrating their product. http://theredx.com/demo.html

So here is what they have agreed too. In addition to waiving the $149.00 start up fee, they are also offering a 15% discount for the first three months of membership if you choose either the quarterly or monthly package. You save about $184 with this package which is fantastic.

So anyway, to take advantage of the program, us promotion code 14610 or register through this rather long URL: http://www.theredx.com/signup/4mysalespromo.html

Linkconnector

2009-10-26T10:33:00.000-07:00

This is a temporary post to establish a linkconnector account.

-Barrett

Blogging For Real Estate Professionals

2009-10-15T22:42:00.000-07:00

If you are blogging to attract real estate leads, which many of us are, you know the value of having your content found on the internet. I have been working for some time to get the word out about the Real Estate Lead Generation Software provided through RedX and have learned a great deal about search engine optimization in the process. What I have learned is that if you want to successfully drive leads to your blog, the actual post is only the first step. The steps following your post will truly determine your level of success in attracting traffic and subsequent real estate leads to your blog.

Steps To Attract Real Estate Leads Through Your Blog

Let’s face it. Any time you spend creating a blog is an investment in marketing. However, your return on investment is determined primarily through how many people read your blog and visit your site. Fundamentally, the best way to get your blog read is if it shows up on a search engine. Therefore, getting a high ranking for a given search term is imperative. So what are the steps necessary to search engine optimize your blog post?

Before you even begin writing your post, you should determine what keyword phrase you are targeting. If you have a topic in mind, spend a few minutes on google to see how competitive the phrase you are focusing on will be. To see the level of competition, look next to the search box for the search results information. For example, the competitive information for the term “attract real estate leads” is “Results 1 - 10 of about 4,230,000 for attract real estate leads. (0.55 seconds)” Because this article is competing with over four million other entries, it is unlikely to rank high on the search term “attract real estate leads.” Therefore, optimizing it for that term may be relatively futile and I should probably optimize this post to a less competitive phrase such as “listing leads for realtors”, or even “GRAR” which only has one million competitors.

After you have chosen your search phrase, write your post to include that phrase one to three percent of the time. Be sure to include the phrase as part of your header tags <h1> as well as your subhead <h2>. Back to our example, the phrase Attract Real Estate Leads is in the <h2> tag of this article.

Now Start Your Real Estate Search Engine Optimization

Here is what I do to promote these posts as well as the RedX discount page.

* Ping your entry using a pinging tool to multiple sites. I use pingler.com

* Use an article rewriting tool to create multiple unique versions of your article. Unique versions are needed so that each syndicated site that posts your article is counted as a unique back link to your real estate blog. I now use Magic Article Rewriter as my tool of choice.

* Submit your unique article to as many article directories as possible. I use two tools concurrently for this. The first is UniqueArticleWizard, the second is Magic Article Submitter. Both tools allow you to syndicate your article across the web over time which gradually increases your links and your search engine rank. Their actual sales pages are pretty cheezy, but the tools work great.

* Bookmark the post to StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicous, and the rest of the bookmarking sites. If you are using a Wordpress, Orlywire has an interesting tool that allows you to automatically bookmark your post to your accounts.

* If you haven’t submitted your RSS feed to the multiple feed readers, then now is the time to do so.

* Update the post on your facebook, MySpace, ActiveRain and Broker Agent Social pages.

All of the above sounds like a lot of work, and it does take about an hour to complete all of the steps. However, where you may attract one or two real estate leads from the post alone, you can now expects a few hundred more people to find you from your search engine optimization activities.

Update On Real Estate SEO Tools

2009-09-28T12:54:00.000-07:00

This is an update to my previous post where I described my experiment where I used the automatic article directory submission system, Unique Article Wizard to make a single article unique and to submit it to over 600 directories.

If you read the previous post, what I had done as part of the experiment is to take the actual post and write two additional versions with similar syntax so that the Unique Article Wizard system would be able to randomize the paragraphs to make each article unique. I then submitted my three articles to the Unique Article Wizard system and measured the backlinks to our site that offers the discount on RedX REALTOR leads page. Because I used a pen name as part of the experiment, I included the unique word xyssion in the post so that it could be easily searched. As in the previous post, xyssion did not have any data associated with it on google when I published the first article.

Okay with that background, here are the results of the experiment. Within four days of publishing the article the term xyssion returned 16 entries on google that backlinked to our Agents Online and Lockbox websites. As of today, a search for the term on google returned 87 entries (60 on bing), all of which are links provided back from syndication of that one article. The actual number of links is much greater, but these are the sites that have been actively indexed and rank at an acceptable level.

From an SEO standpoint, the article and subsequent publication of it took about two hours. Eighty-seven active backlinks from two hours worth of work sure beats the thirty hours I spent submitting MLSNI.com to various directories to get fifty active links, so I think this experiment can be classified as a success. Now I’m looking for a tool to speed up that manual process of directory submission. I’ll let you know if I find a good one.

SEO Backlink Tools

2009-09-14T23:12:00.000-07:00

I have been doing a bit of article marketing lately to promote the RedX FSBO and Real Estate Lead service and have found two very effective tools to attract numerous backlinks without a lot of work. The first tool takes your article, walks you through a process to create multiple unique versions of each paragraph, the automatically submits a hundreds of unique versions to over six hundred directories. The service is the Unique Article Wizard, and I found it by reading about various backlink shortcuts on a few different internet marketing forums.

The service came highly rated, and I have been using it for a short time. So far I have published two articles with the identifier “randy xyllion” and one containing the word “xyssion.” In the past two days, I have 106 indexed links from google for the xyllion articles and 16 links from bing back to the xyssion. Overall, not bad for drafting three articles about internet marketing and sending them out to the world.

The other tool that I have recently had success with in building backlinks to increase the search engine position of my agents online website as well as the supra ekey and lockbox sites is a service called the LinkJuicer. Okay, not a great name, but an interesting service. If you recall how a link circle used to work with multiple participants sharing links back to other member’s websites, this service will be very familiar. Essentially, the LinkJuicer is the social network equivalent of a link circle. The beauty of the service however is that backlinks to your site grow slowly and naturally over time as the system places your link into the social accounts of other participants and places links to their site from yours. Because the system limits the addition of only three sites per day and includes fifteen of the popular online social networks, your backlinks grow slowly and reliable which the search engines just love.

Links for 2009-08-15 [del.icio.us]

2009-08-16T00:00:00-07:00

Signs of Pregancy

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Pregancy

New Supra Ekey Lockboxes

2009-08-07T22:59:00.000-07:00

I have been doing some searching recently and found that from an SEO standpoint, there are a few words that may be very easy to get highly ranked. The two words that seem to keep popping up in the real estate realm are lockbox and supra ekey and strangely enough Planet Realtor which is the florida MLS system.

As part of my ongoing learning curve with different types of site optimization and landing page creation, I secured the URL's lockbox.me and PLANETREALTOR.INFO and supraekey.org. I have loaded a temporary page on the lockbox site, but have not determined what I will eventually do with it. The same goes for the supra ekey lockbox and keysafe site as well as planet realtor.

Links for 2009-08-05 [del.icio.us]

2009-08-06T00:00:00-07:00

Period While Pregnant

Links for 2009-08-04 [del.icio.us]

2009-08-05T00:00:00-07:00

Pregnancy Problems

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2009-08-02T00:00:00-07:00

Links for 2009-07-30 [del.icio.us]

2009-07-31T00:00:00-07:00

Gender Predictor

Links for 2009-07-29 [del.icio.us]

2009-07-30T00:00:00-07:00

Ten Twitter Tools Real Estate Agents Can't Live Without

2009-06-18T00:20:00.000-07:00

I have been working with Twitter quite a bit lately, and I thought I would list those that I have found most useful for real estate agents to attract leads. These tools have been great in helping me promote both the discounts on the RedX listing lead service, and single property sites.

Here are the top ten Twitter Tools

EasyTweets: Get notified if someone tweets you, your blog, or any brand you want to engage with

Twellow: If you haven’t registered your Real Estate Twitter account on Twollow, it is time to do so.

Twollow: Take some of the hassle out of searching for your prospects. Twollow automatically follows your prospects based upon your target keywords

Notify.me: Would’t you like to know the instant a prospect needs your services? Notify.me lets you know by chat, SMS, or email when a prospect raises their hand.

TweetLater: Would’t it be great if you had an autoresponder on your account, or could schedule your tweets in advance? Oh yeah, you can…. VacaTweet can be uses for an autoresponder as well

BubbleTweet: Add a personalized video to your twitter account.

PeopleBrowser: The only application that I have found where you can geo-target a keyword search

Twitter Karma: To bulk follow or unfollow your followers

TweetLister: Now you can post your full listings

TweetDeck: Useful desktop management of your twitter followers

http://bit.ly/Cxf6x

Create A Wordpress Blog

2009-06-12T15:41:00.000-07:00

I have been reading different posts on this and other real estate related sites for the past few years as I promote 4MySales and the RedX lead generation service. There has been a lot of discussion regarding the different blog technologies, but and a niche industry has grown up in helping real estate agents create their own custom blogs. I have been working in this medium for a while, and while this may be old information for many of you, I did wan to share the exact process to creating your own Real Estate Blog on your own URL, without the need to hire a consultant. The blog platform that I will be describing is Wordpress, and it is quite user friendly to use.

With that as the background information, let’s begin.

1) Register for your URL. Pick one that has contains your primary target keyword.

2) Register for a hosted account on a Linux platform. Choose a host that has a cPanel interface, which is just a type of control panel. I use resellerzoom’s budget hosting site. It is six bucks per month and you can host multiple sites in one account.

3) On your hosting confirmation, there will be two DNS (Nameserver) addresses that look something like ns1-fannin.nswebhost.com. These are the nameserver addresses that you need your URL to point to. You can update your nameserver with your domain name registrar, either through their website, or by requesting help from the.

4) Now that you have a hosted account with a URL pointing to it, login to the cPanel account that was set up through your host. One of the buttons on the cPanel control panel should be Fantastico or fantastico deluxe. This is a tool that automatically installs blogs, forums or sites to your account. Click it it, and off to the right site, click on Wordpress. Fantastico will ask you for the name you wish to call your blog, the username and the password that you wish to use to access it. Fill out the form and click install. It is just that easy!

5) Fantastic sets up your blog, so now you just need to login and start customizing. Login to your new blog’s adim page, it is usually your blog directory / wp-admin. From your login dashboard area, you can access all of the tools available to customize wordpress. If you are new to Wordpress, my recommendation would be to first choose a theme. Click Appearance area and choose themes. There should only be two on your first install, but at the bottom of the page is a link to the theme directory. Go down, click it and start looking for a theme that will best exemplify your brand. You can also jump on Google or Bing and start searching for wordpless templates.

Depending on where you find your template, you can add it one of two ways. The first is through an automatic install if it is available. The second is to download the template to your website. Use an unzip utility to unzip it to a folder, then use an ftp client (I use filezilla) to upload the template to your website. If you need to upload a template using this approach, save your unzipped template folder to the Themes folder which is a sub-folder of one of the three main folders.

6) Once you have chosen and loaded your theme, go back to the Appearances/ Themes link and your new theme should show up. Click on it and in the top right corner there should be a link to make the theme active.

7) Now that you have chosen your theme, you can add some plugins which add video, social tools, links, pictures, news feeds, and any other resource that you would ever want. Go to the plugins tab. At the bottom of the page are links to get more plugins. Just like the theme, click on the link and go shopping. Install the plugins using the same methods as you used to install the theme. Either use the auto install if it is present, or if not, download the zipped file, unzip it and upload it to the subdirectory entitled Plugins. There is a way to automatically unzip the files in your directory, but it is beyond the scope of this article.

8) Once you have chosen and uploaded your plugins, activate them on the plugins page. Most of the admin functions for these various plugins will be found under the Settings link. Also, once you have activated your plugins, you can make them show up on your blog by clicking the Appearance link and clicking Widgets. Adding them to your blog is simply a matter of choosing and saving them.

That’s about it. Now all that you need to do is add pictures, update text and make your blog look pretty. It is a very straightforward process if you are looking to host a blog on your own URL instead of relying on your Blogger or Wordpress.com account.

TAGS: Wordpress, blogs, fantastico, resellerzoom, web host, web registrar, URL, plugins, wordpress themes

Getting Real Estate Leads With Twitter

2009-06-08T10:59:00.000-07:00

I was looking at this approach to promote our discount offer for the RedX listing lead system, but it’s possibilities are so much greater. The advantage of Twitter for real estate and mortgage professionals is that prospective clients post their needs online all day long. Thanks to this fantastic new technology, you get instant visibility to a prospective client’s needs, the second that he mentions them. It is then just a matter of making contact, offering your services, and working the relationship.

So how would you use this new technology to attract listing or selling clients? Well, getting a new lead is a simple as using one of the many available Twitter mashups that notify you when someone posts a target keyphrase. Combine that with a basic geo-targeted mashup and you have a system that will tell you when someone in your area posts text that could be considered a lead.

In writing that paragraph, it sounds a bit more complicated then it really is. Therefore, I’ll use an example. Suppose you are an agent that specializes in short sales or foreclosure. You would set up a notification service like Easy Tweets to notify you when someone posts the terms “short sale” “list of foreclosures” “home shopping” “looking at neighborhoods” “bidding on foreclosure” “looking for realtor” etc. When any twitter user posts these terms, you will get notified. The next step is to simply Follow these prospects in your own Twitter account and use a geo-targeting twitter mashup (there are a number of them out there) to determine if the poster is local to you. For those posters that are in your vicinity, simply reply by direct message to their post and courting them as an active prospect.

I have been looking for a geo-targeted system that combines the easy tweet notification system with geo targeting so that you only get notified about people in your area. However, I have yet to find that service. Because of that, you may need to sift through potential leads from across the US. If you do know of a system that combines the geo targeting with the keyword notification, let us all know.

Maximize Your Social Real Estate Marketing Online

2009-06-04T10:22:00.000-07:00

I received an email this morning from a company that teaches best practices in marketing. The offer was your standard lead generation tool offering a complimentary e-book download in exchange for an email registration. I have been using a similar method to promote our discount offer on the listing lead and FSBO lead service. There was nothing exciting about the offer, but what was interesting was the use of Twitter and social marketing tools to expand the reach of the offer. Just under the call to action and download button were the following phrases with associated graphics and links:

(I have changed the original links to those of the RedX for demonstration purposes. Try them to see how they interact with each social site. I hope to share how to create each of these links in futue posts.)

Have a Twitter Account? Tweet about this download!

Follow Barrett On Twitter @Leads4Realtors

Follow (company name) On Twitter @(company name)

Read Barrett’s Blog

Share on Facebook

The value in including these types of links into any of your real estate agent online marketing campaigns is obvious. It allows the recipients not only to spread your message, but also create a closer relationship to you. The tweet about this download link actually has a script that inputs the text directly into your twitter text box so you just need to click update after logging in. Overall, this is a nice, unobtrusive way to expand the reach of your word of mouth marketing programs and generate a few more leads.

Real Estate Blog SEO

2009-06-02T11:41:00.000-07:00

If you are using a Wordpress blog, there are a number of steps that you can take to better optimize it for search engines. In fact, for those of you who host your own real estate blog using the wordpress scripts, these optimization steps can be very easy and yield great results. For those of you who are familiar with these techniques, I apologize for re-presenting the basics, but I have found that many real estate bloggers have not taken these step in their own blogs. With that in mind, here is and introduction wordpress blog SEO 101.

Step 1. Under your settings / permalinks tab, be sure to change the URL structure to “custom structure” and include only the string /%postname%/ in the text box. This essentially makes the extended URL of your post the title of the post. If you include keywords in your posts, they end up in the actual URL. For example, in posting on the topic of prenatal vitamin (my wife’s blog) and using the post title Prenatal Vitamins, the blog URL becomes http://www.bloomennutrition.org/prenatal-vitamins which is about as keyword targeted as you can get with sub-directories.

Step 2. Under your settings / general tab, update the Blog address and Wordpress Address URL to include the www as opposed to the straight http://webaddress.com

Step 3. Find the wordpress AutoSocialPoster plugin. This tool allows you to automatically post a link to your new blog entries to many of your online bookmaking accounts. The plugin is not free, but is well worth the money. However, please be sure to check that it is compatible with the version of Wordpress that you are using.

Step 4. For the next step, increase the number of sites that announce / ping your new entries when you add a new post. Go to the settings / writing tab. At the bottom there is a text box with the URL http://rpc.pingomatic.com/. In this area add any other pinging services that you can find. A good list, and a great pinging tool, can be found at pingler.com.

Hopefully for those of you who are actively blogging, this post provides a little help. Separately, to provide an update on our Agents Online lead system for realtors project, the site pops up as number eleven on Google for the Agents Online term and number four for the same term in quotations. The real time SEO demonstration is progressing.

Working on Real Estate SEO on Bing

2009-06-01T21:35:00.001-07:00

I haven’t quite formed my opinion about Microsoft’s new release of their Bing search engine. In reading the reviews, I am not alone. I have spent a little time this afternoon trying to get a feel for what where my real estate listing lead site and associated links lay in the ranking. What I found is that this “because it’s not google” search alternative has a completely different algorithm which will likely require a completely different SEO strategy for your real estate website.

I am not sure if this new search engine will give google a run for its money in search engine terms. As Seth Godin put it, “Bing is trying to be the new Google. Unfortunately Google is the new Google.” However, it does have some interesting features.

Now for those of us who are trying to get our real estate website to the top of the ranking, optimizing for bing may require a different strategy. In fact, in looking up the search terms that index my site well on google, I there is little success on bing. The Expired Listing Lead term did return back my link to the RedX as the top link, but the multitude of other sites that typically show up in reference to me did not. For my Agent Online experiment, the site was not even indexed, and similar to google, real estate country did not return a link to my page, even when I typed in the exact URL. Even my wife’s’ “prenatal vitamins” page did not get indexed.

From what I can determine with the very limited experience that I have had with the site, it uses an algorithm similar to google’s but puts a high weight on sites that have been around a while along with those that are well linked. Unfortunately from an SEO standpoint there is not much that you can do to age your real estate URL.

Real Estate SEO, Getting to the Top of Google

2009-05-27T10:26:00.001-07:00

Those of you that have been reading this blog know that I am using the search term Agents Online and the associated website AgentsOnline.Org to demonstrate in real time how to get your website to the top page of a search engine for a specific phrase. For this specific example, I have chosen the phrase “Agents Online” and I am slowly moving the site up to the first page of google for that respective phrase.

To provide an update on where we are on this experiment, I signed up the URL AgentsOnline.org less than a month ago and created a basic website optimized for the term. Next I added links from this blog and built a Squidoo page which in turn linked to the site. I also created a twitter account dedicated to Agents Online. Currently there are about 16 total sites that are indexed on the search engines and link to this site.

Now for our progress on Google. If you search for the term “Agents Online” in quotes, the page ranks as number seven among the entries on the first page of Google. Not bad for having a site established for less than a month. When you search on google for Agents Online without the quotes, the page pop up as number 21 on Google which is at the top of the third page. While this is not as significant, it does make the point that by building a page optimized to a specific term, and using your target term as part of your URL, you can capture a premium place on the ranks of google very quickly.

Now to move the site rank up from number 21 to within the top ten we just need to add some more high quality, high page rank links. The can be achieved simply by posting comments on real estate related blogs, associated websites and forums.

As you read through this post, you will no doubt realize that this is a very easy way to boost your web traffic without extensive Pay per click. However, as a word of caution, this process doesn’t always work. For example our Real Estate Country site has yet to show up at an acceptable level for the term Real Estate Country.

Lead Generation Program With Twitter

2009-05-21T10:58:00.000-07:00

When I began working with this new technology I was very skeptical. I have had access to my twitter account which I used to promote our discount to the RedX listing lead generation system, but until recently have not spent much time using it. As a result, I am a little late to the game. However, now that I have a good grasp on the technology, I can see how real estate agents online should be utilizing this tool to attract leads.

Now what are the steps to incorporate Twitter into a campaign? Before we get started you need to understand that Twitter is only a single touch point for your prospective clients and that multiple touches are usually needed to attract a client. Also, understand that Twitter etiquette implies that when you follow someone’s tweets, they may in turn follow you.

With that background, what are the steps? The first step is to link your twitter account to any online page where you can be found. If you have a site, blog or online presence, add a “Follow me on Twitter” badge with a hyperlink to your twitter site.

To start using Twitter as a marketing tool, create an auto-responder on your twitter account so that when someone chooses to follow you, they will automatically receive a thank you with a call to action. I useTweetLater.com for my autoresponders. The message should thank the user for following, and include a call to action. Your may choose to make your call to action an offer for a free report, data, or some other offer that allows you to capture more information about your target lead. For example, my call to action is “Thanks for the Follow! Want a discount on listing leads from RedX? Visit me here for more info.”

The next step is to start tweeting. You should routinely tweet, but also be aware that there is a shortcut that you can use when you can’t post directly. If you have a blog that you update often, you can post the feed directly to your twitter account using TwitterFeed.

The next step in your twitter marketing should be to add followers. You can find followers who live in your area simply by doing a keyword search on the twitter user directory Twellow. Just search the twellow list for active tweeters that live in your area and follow those that fit the bill.

There are numerous other ways that you can include twitter as part of your marketing, including mobile messaging and even video. We won’t get into those details for this post, but may address them lager.

Finally, I did want to mention that we are still SEO-ing the term, AgentsOnline but it has not yet been indexed on Google. It should be soon.

Agents Online- Real Time Update and Google SEO

2009-05-19T11:46:00.000-07:00

As previously stated, I am committed to demonstrating how you can use a long tail keyword and some very basic online tools to get your website, or at least its online landing page, to the top of google. To recap, I have chosen the search term Agents Online which receives about 11,000 searches per month according to google’s keyword tool. I have registered for the URL http://www.agentsonline.org and last evening I spent about two hours on Dreamweaver creating a multi-page website. I copied much of the data from the failed Real Estate Country site, but optimized it for the search term Agents Online.

Because the web page is basically an experiment and essentially promotes the RedX expired listing lead system, I didn’t spend a lot of time on the format so it is pretty basic. However, I did employ some very basic SEO techniques including having different descriptions and tags for each page, parsing the data on multiple pages within the site, and including a privacy policy. Anyway, here is the site for agents online.

As we all know, having a website does not mean that traffic will just show up; even if you do have an appropriate URL. Therefore, the next step is getting backlinks and doing some online promotion. In that vein, early this morning I created a squidoo lens focused on the term Agents Online and bookmarked the page on StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us, and registered for the Blogger Blog Real Estate Agents Online The reason for the lens and the blog on blogger is that both have a relatively high page rank out of the gate and both allow for “dofollow” links. Also, every time I post something to a blog, I run the URL through pingler.com so that the search engines know that new content is available.

So this was the preliminary work for this project. Over the next few days, I will be posting links to the Agents Online site wherever I can. It may take two or three weeks for the site to actually get indexed by google, but these links give it a head start. In about ten days, you should be able to google the term “agents online” and at least one, probably more, of the links described above will appear on the first page. Shortly after that, the actual agents online website should appear.

Real Time Update on Getting to the Fist Page of Google

2009-05-18T17:08:00.001-07:00

As I mentioned before, this blog thread is attempting to show you how you can get your site to the top of the search for a given long-tail keyword on google. I am little less confident in this post due to the challenges in getting realtestatecountry.net to show up on the first page of google for the term real estate country. However, I think I will have more success with the term “agents online.”

Anyway, to provide an update, I registered the URL agentsonline.org on Friday with godaddy.com. The URL cost $14.00 which is an insignificant cost in comparison to the traffic that should be seen if this process works out. I have spent two hours today drafting the text that will appear on the agents online website and will be posting it over the next few days. If I have the time and things actually go according to plan this time, the site should show up under the term agents online within the next two weeks.

Keep in mind that the process that I am describing, if it works, should be easily duplicated for whatever long tail keyword you are trying to optimize. For example, if you are trying to optimize for REALTORS in Naples, this methodology should be relatively successful.

It's Reat Estate SEO Time Again with Agents Online

2009-05-15T15:44:00.000-07:00

Okay, the fact of the matter is that sometimes your SEO plans work out and sometimes they don’t. For example, I published the real estate country website with intentions to get it on the first page of google for the search phrase “real estate country.” To date the page has not shown up in the top searches for Google, and is in fact very poorly ranked. I blame lack of planning on my part as United Country seems to have numerous high ranking pages that show up under the Real Estate Country Term.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. This afternoon I registered for another term that I feel will be better suited to demonstrate the SEO strategy that I have been sharing for the past while. This new term, Agents Online, gets between 11,000 and 18,000 searches on Google per month. Obviously the term targets real estate agents, I have been a member of the site for eight years, but there are very few competitive sites optimized for that term.

With this new term, here is the strategy: Use XSite Pro to create a website optimized to the term Agents Online. After that, establish backlinks to the site by posting comments on the many social networks and blogs that cater to the real estate segment. I also plan to the site on the few blogs that I manage myself. In fact, wherever there is the ability to place a dofollow link on a website, do so.

After that, it is a matter of reporting on the success. Hopefully I will have better luck demonstrating how to use this technique to search engine optimize your real estate lead generation pages than I did with Real Estate Country.

REALTOR Marketing With Mobile Messaging

2009-05-14T12:23:00.001-07:00

I attended an online seminar today the topic of mobile messaging. My purpose for attending was to look for ways to promote our expired listing lead service. The data presented was pretty compelling; especially if you have a list of prospects that you are challenged to stay in contact with. The technology has moved to the point that you can now offer your prospects a way to stay continually in touch with you and the services that you provide. The technology is not completely new. There have been online companies that provide listing data in response to a specific mobile text numbers that you can post on your listing. Unfortunately, these systems usually provide a one-off communication with your prospect, and some rudimentary contact information from which to follow up.

This approach which is well known to most real estate agents is completely different than what was presented. The example that was provided was a communication that was sent out from during a concert to those who had registered to receive mobile updates. The communication included a coupon code and an invitation to forward that coupon on to each of the recipient’s friends which essentially made the message viral. Now I know that you are not putting on large rock concerts, and probably don’t have that big of a budget; also, real estate is a completely different animal. However, the strategy remains the same.

As a marketer, here is how I would recommend real estate agents use this technology:

1) Getting leads: contract with a SMS text service provider so that you can put different text codes on different listing signs and advertisements that you place. There are a number that serve the real estate industry, but make sure that they have an autoresponder system so that after the first text is sent, the textee is sent a follow up requesting permission to provide additional updates. You want your list of leads to opt in to the communication.

2) Sending a list of listings may be trite, let’s face it, we all do it as a standard of practice with little differentiation. Instead, send out data that is both useful to your prospective customer and unique to you. If you tie the text numbers to a specific advertisement, you can at least assume some things about the individual who requested the data. From there, you can create follow-on texts that may suite the prospect’s interest. These may include new listings that are similar to what originally prompted the text. For differentiation and the viral spin, you may want to send local updated on local events. You may also go as far as approaching some of the advertisers in the local clipper magazines and mailers and request permission to forward their offer to your target list. Let’s face it, when was the last time you received a free pizza or 20% off dinner at your local Chinese restaurant from your Realtor?

Improving Keyword Search Traffic

2009-05-04T15:25:00.000-07:00

My ideas building squeeze pages is not unique, and is in fact becoming a widely practiced technique for search engine optimization. As a reminder, a squeeze page is a search engine optimized keyword specific landing page to gather leads. An example of this would be my expired listing lead site, realestatecountry.net.

Here is a link to a Marketing Sherpa article on how Jelly Belly has used this technique to grow their online customer acquisition and conversion by 200%. Now for many REALTORs, using an enterprise system to create 500 keyword specific pages is just not economically viable. However, I can tell you that similar results can be achieved with a simple WordPress blog, templates and a godaddy account.

Just to keep score on which of my links are currently getting first page exposure for a search term on Google, “Real Estate country” is still low on Google, but gaining rank. Expired Listing lead and Expired Listing Lead software is dominated by my links. For my wife, “Chewable Prenatal Vitamin” shows up on Google twice with a link to Bloom’en Nutrition, and I just registered PregnancyVitamin.net so we shall see when it finally ranks after I get the pages loaded.

Squeeze Pages to Get to the Top of Google

2009-04-30T16:35:00.000-07:00

If you have read my previous blog, you know that I have been spending time lately developing landing sites for our expired listing lead software that quickly get to the first page of google for a given search term. The benefit of this technique is obvious in that five hours worth of work can result in a torrent of traffic that would have otherwise cost a fortune. Unfortunately, each of these sites takes about five hours worth of work to develop using Dreamweaver, or at least three hours using Xsite Pro.

However, recently I have found a tool that promises to shorten that time investment into about an hour from start to finish, not including the research into the keyword. The tool is simply a Wordpress Theme generator that quickly turns any Wordpress installation into an active and formatable landing page. The actual term for the sites that result from this Wordpress theme are Squeeze Pages (landing pages designed to attract leads online.)

So what is the advantage of this new tool?

Actually, there are a couple. The first is that Google loves Wordpress blogs which gives you a leg up when you get started. The second is that all that is required to create an effective lead generation page is to upload a wordpress blog, choose the theme, and type your keyword-optimized advertisement. As I said before, it is a lot quicker than creating a site from scratch, and once you have modified your template, you only need to make minor modifications to the text to optimize it for another keyword. As I said, this tool promises to save a lot of time.

So just to re-cap, what do you do in order to get a site to show up on the first page of google?

1) Use the google keyword tool to find a search term that your target client would typically search. Find keywords that have a large number of searches, but few sites that are directly optimized for that site.

2) Register for the URL of that keyword. If possible, get the .com version

3) Create a Wordpress Blog (many web hosts that offer the cPanel control panel have an automated installer built in.)

4) Upload your squeeze page theme.

5) Modify the text and images of the theme to meet the needs of your brand. I would recommend making these changes, then downloading the version to your hard drive so that you only need to make the formatting changes once.

6) Publish the blog, place the appropriate links back to your real estate home page.

7) Start placing backlinks.

What you will find is that your site will initially get indexed pretty far down the google ladder, and occasionally won’t get indexed at all. (this happened to me with realestatecountry.net.) Regardless, over the next few weeks, start adding links to the site from any real estate-related websites that you have access to. Place a link back to the site on your ActiveRain blog as well as any other blog you manage. Get as many links from real estate-related sites back to the page as these will ultimately determine where your site ends up on the search engine ladder.

After a few weeks, if you have sufficient links, your site should creep to the top of the search engine ladder. As an example of how this technique works, google expired listing leads. How many entries that link back to 4MySales or Barrett Niehus can you count?

Optimizing Your Page for Real Estate Leads

2009-04-24T13:32:00.000-07:00

I have used a number of them in getting my REALTOR lead system into the top listing on Google. One of the techniques that I have had some success in recently is creating squeeze pages for specific search terms. A queeze page simply being a landing site designed to generate leads that is optimized for a specific search term. To provide a basic example, let's say hypothetically that youwork in Orem Utah and specialize in executive homes. To date your website has not shown up under the search term “executive homes orem” or “orem realtor executive homes” but through your research you know that those terms are often searched and meet your target demographic. How you would develop and use a squeeze page would be as follows:

Register for the url of your given search terms. When registering these URL’s use the specific term that you are targeting. As a side note, I have found more success in not including hyphens, but instead having the word run together in the URL; i.e www.realtorexecutive. com instead of www.realtor-executive.com.

When creating the actual landing page, you have a number of choices. If you are versed in HTML, Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft Front Page are good toolsl. If HTML is foreign to you, then there is a quick site development tool called XSite Pro that makes creating a keyword optimized site extremely easy with no programming involved. When you develop a squeeze page, create multiple sub pages. Generally the site needs to be more than a single page to get any attention from Google.

There are a few basic rules that you should consider following when developing your page. The first is that for google, multiple pages with good keyword content typically ranks better. The second is that a privacy policy is smiled upon by both your visitors and your search engines. The third is that you want the visitor to take action within seconds of hitting your landing page so have a strong call to action. Fourth, if your squeeze page is requesting contact information, keep the amount of information that you request limited, and offer value for that information. All too often I see REALTORS who have six or more qualifying questions on their lead generation pages. In order to optimize your leads, capture just name, email and possibly phone. You can qualify the lead at a later date and the more information you request up front, the fewer leads you will receive. The fifth and final rule is that you want to control your visitor’s experience. For these pages, you want to limit the visitor’s behavior to submitting their information, or learning a little bit more about the offer before submitting their information. Choices equal confusion which results in hesitation and inactivity. Create your squeeze page so that you have two or three good pages that are optimized to your target search term. Include your lead generating offer on each of the pages and be sure to include a privacy policy. Where applicable, also link to your home page so that your prospect can get back to your site. This may sound like a lot of work, but if you do this part correctly, you will likely get much more traffic at a lower cost than trying to PPC advertise for your target search term.

Once you have built your site, upload it to the web and start getting backlinks to it. It is important to know up front that backlinks directly impact the page rank of your site, and that they will be necessary to get to that first page for your given search term. Fortunately, creating the backlinks yourself are pretty easy. First and foremost, create a link to your new site from your blog. Also, it would behoove you to create a blogger blog using the same URL (executivehomesorem.blogspot.com for example) and post a link to the new squeeze page from that blog. (Pleasse note that if you create the blog, you will need to post content to it as well.) Post a link to your page from your ActiveRain account, any HubPages or Squidoo lenses that you may have. Essentially post a link on any real estate related site that you can. Remember that each additional link to the site improves the possibility that it will show up on the first page of google.

Now, as a real world example, I have been spending time trying to get traffic to my wife’s business, Bloomen Nutrition and have used this technique over the past few weeks for the terms “while pregnant”, “chewable prenatal vitamin”, and “what to expect when expecting.” She owns a prenatal nutrition company and I have been focusing my talents on getting her up and running instead of focusing on real estate. Regardless, here is the example. If you google those terms what you will find is that chewable prenatal vitamin results in www.chewableprenatalvitamin.com showing up halfway down the page. For the term while pregnant, the site still needs a few backlinks because the whilepregnant.net site is showing up as the 19^th link on page two of google, and I just completed the site for what to expect when expecting, so we will see where http://whattoexpectwhenexpecting.net/ ends up.

Attracting Real Estate Leads Through Twitter

2009-03-30T09:45:00.000-07:00

I have shifted my focus from getting front page links from google to our expired listing lead software and am instead working with Twitter to do some marketing.. The micro-blogging tool is getting popular and has finally hit mainstream media. With all of those individuals tweeting, how do you take advantage of it to attract new clients and listings? The best way is to garner as many followers that meet your target demographic as possible, and use their initial follow as well as your tweets to emphasize your brand. So how do get followers, and how do you automate the process?

Because effective Twitter marketing means attracting as many followers as possible, setting up an autofollow, auto-responder and auto-reciprocate tool is a great way to improve your reach and campaign effectiveness. The tools that help in this process are Tweetlater.com which allows you to autorespond followers with a direct message as well as automatically reciprocate follows. Combine Tweetlater.com with the keyword autofollow power of Twollow and you can automate most of the marketing with the exception of actually posting content. There are rss twitter autopostng services that allow you to post content as well, but we won’t go into them in this discussion.

As you begin posting to twitter, follow those that have your target keywords in either their conversation or profile. Roughly 30% of those that you follow will end up following you back. After a couple of days, unfollow any of those that have not followed you so that your ratio of followers to followees does not get too far out of whack.

Formalization of Growing the Visibility of Real Estate Country

2009-03-24T15:26:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since I posted to my real time blog of getting my real estate pages to cover the first page of google for a given search word. So Freetrainer.com and associated links are in the first three listings on Google for the term Expired Listing Lead in addition, for my wife’s business, I have five of the first page listings on google for the term “prenatal vitamin chews” The challenge has been that I am still working toward getting the term “Real Estate Country” listed on the first page and it is proving to be more competitive than I had originally thought. Who knew that UnitedCountry would have such a strong presence online?

In evaluating the different strategies to get even more linked sites listed on google’s first page for the given word, I found an online e-book that formalized what I have been describing. I won’t go into details about the book, but the concept is simply that instead of creating a bunch of linked sites that all link together, create a site, add one link to your central page (www.freetrainer.com for example) and one or two links to the next page, blog, hub, squidoo, or other site that you create.

As an example, the Real Estate Country blog links to the home page and will be linking to a Squidoo page. The idea is to create a wheel of sites that have just one or two links to your critical pages as well as a consolidated link to your next creation so that the spiders can follow. By building out your wheel, you can have a very targeted group of sites that focus on your specific niche and keywords, but don’t get penalized for having a large number of outgoing links.

Overall, the link wheel should serve to improve your search ranking for a given site, and if done properly, those additional sites that you create will also show up under that search term on Google.

The Step by Step Domination of the First Page of Google, Continued

2009-03-09T17:06:00.000-07:00

I have been a bit lax in my activities of getting links to realestatecountry.net to cover the most of the first page of google for the search term “real estate country” This is primarily due to a lot of other activities going on such as helping my wire promote her chewable prenatal vitamin website. Anyway, I am making some small progress and thought I would update some of my real time activities to continue to demonstrate how to get your site and sites managed by you to the top of the search engine for a given search term.

When I last posted, I was mentioning creating a number of squidoo and hub pages for Real Estate Country. While these are still a priority as my next step, I decided to create a blogger blog for the topic instead. I posted my first article today which was a very basic introduction to the blog. As time goes by, I will continue to post real estate country related articles on that blog as well as the other real estate blogs that I manage in an effort to get that and other blogs to show up under this keyword. The strategy is to have this blog and the other related blogs show up in the top ten under the search term so regardless of where the searcher clicks, they end up connecting with me.

I chose to create the blogger blog before the sqidoo page because I recently read that both Squidoo and Hub pages provide nofollow links which means that the search engines don’t really count them for backlinks. I have also read that Google may disregard this feature for these sites, so the jury is out. With that in mind, I thought getting at least one of my real estate country sites onto the first page of google should be the priority.

So the next steps in this step by step strategy are to:

1) Create one or two keyword-specific blogs and start populating them with good content. Use blogger as it has a very high PR as part of the google platform.

2) When you have time, start creating squidoo lenses and hub pages on your specific topic and search term.

Step by Step Guide to Cover the First Page of Google, a Small Challenge

2009-03-02T10:12:00.000-08:00

For those of you who have been following along, I am using these posts to go through the step by step process of covering the first page of google with links back to your site. My first demonstration of this was the links to my RedX and 4MySales page under the search term “expired listing leads” The second is the multiple links to Bloomen Nutrition under the search “prenatal vitamin chews.”

Anyway, this newest project was to get as many links on the first page of Google as possible for the term “real estate country” However, I hit a bit of a snag. The site has yet to be indexed by google, and in further examination, I have found that it is an expired URL that was likely has a bad history with google. So here is what I am going to do. For the next while, I will work at the term and see if we can’t get a few of the linked pages indexed by google, even though the target page will likely not show up. This is a little off from the original strategy, but I think it will still work out.

So what are the steps for this week? Two things, bookmarks and sqidoo pages. The bookmarks are pretty self explanatory, add the real estate country link to as many of the social bookmarking sites as possible. The squidoo pages are a little more challenging. As time allows, create a squidoo lens that deals with the topic of real estate country. Make the lens useful so that it will attract traffic, and create a lens group around it. After creating the lens, make five or ten more. With each of these lenses, add content that people searching for the target real estate terms will find, read, and subsequently click back to the original site.

This activity is going to take me a couple of days, so I’ll let you know how it goes.