I must say I had to laugh at the post on Active Rain by Kristine Ginsberg, a New Jersey home stager.
But, her post did raise an interesting question.
And, it illustrated another annoying seller perspective. I hope this seller didn’t also want to list the house for 2X the market value!
If you want a chuckle, or if you haven’t considered whether ghosts are material facts, take a run over to Kristine’s blog.
If you’re not a member of Active Rain, you may not be able to access the post(s) mentioned above. So sign up for Active Rain now. If you’re not a member of Active Rain, you should be anyway.
No, this isn’t a joke. I got an email last Tuesday from BrokerAgentSocial.com. You may never have heard of it. It’s a real estate social site that hasn’t been very successful.
The email announced that BrokerAgentSocial would be unavailable shortly. It is being replaced by CrackerJackAgent.com.
I added a profile to the new site, and posted a blog entry last Wednesday. Right now, the home page isn’t cached by Google, and neither is my blog post. I’ll be interested to see if and when those two things happen.
Just thought I’d pass it along. CrackerJack offers a profile with no-follow links to your websites, a blog with do-follow links you can put in the body of the post. There’s a forum, articles, and a list of events that you can add to.
At this point, it seems like CrackerJack could be another viable place to publish content, interact with others and so forth.
Time will tell.
Wow! How can I say that you should forget the social media hype? Everyone knows that if you aren’t marketing on social media sites, you’ll never be successful. Right?
I must disagree. Sacrilegious, I know.
Imagine yourself watching people at a party, or a charity event – anywhere people gather in a social situation. Would you see everyone acting the same? I don’t think so. You’d notice very distinct personalities being displayed by various people. Pay attention, now, there will be a test later.
- In one corner, you notice a person expounding on some profound topic. This person is surrounded by two or three other people who are desperately trying to catch someone’s eye so that they have an excuse to abandon their lecturer.
- Over there, you notice two people who have just met, gaily exchanging life stories.
- In another corner, you see a person telling their life story to someone who is slowly backing away, saying they need to refresh their drink.
- In another area, you see a person surrounded by a large group of people, and they are all holding their sides with laughter upon hearing the stories the person in the middle of the group is telling.
- And, then, there are a couple people standing along the wall, absorbing it all. They’re enjoying themselves, but they only speak when spoken to, and don’t spend much time with any one person or group.
Now, here’s your test question: Will all of the people described above be successful at social media marketing?
And, the answer is. . . a resounding NO!
Should all of them undertake an aggressive social media marketing campaign anyway? No. What would be the point?
There are many people who are extremely successful in sales, but they would never be confused with social butterflies. For those people, they know where their talents lie and they stay with what works.
So, how do I feel about social media? It used to be that everyone had to have a website because the public expected it. Now, I believe everyone has to have a presence on the social media sites because the public expects it.
But that doesn’t mean that everyone should devote a big chunk of time trying to develop leads on those sites. For some people, it’s enough to have a presence and use other tools to market their business.
If you’re in that category, don’t feel bad. Don’t listen to all the gurus who tell you social media marketing is a necessity. Don’t waste a bunch of time doing something that you know you don’t understand, don’t enjoy and won’t stick with.
My advice. . . make sure you have a presence on the social sites, then do what you do best to make a living.
So, you want to get leads from your website, right? You need to take care of the two sides of SEO.
Many of the real estate professionals I talk to don’t realize that there are two sides to SEO. Often they assume that if we help them set up a real estate website or WordPress blogsite, the SEO is taken care of. And, we do help with SEO, but it’s not all handled with the set up process.
SEO – Side One: On-Site SEO
The purists call side one on-page SEO, but that has never made as much sense to me, so I call it on-site. On-site SEO refers to everything that you do to your website itself. This includes, but isn’t limited to:
- the content of the meta-tags on each page (page title, description and keywords)
- the content of the pages, including the keyword phrases that are used, where they are placed, etc.
- the internal linking structure
Another thing to keep in mind is that you need original content. And, as much of it as you can manage.
Original content refers to information on your website that doesn’t appear anywhere else on the Internet. The search engines give the “credit’ for content to the first website that displays that information. So, copying a lot of information from the Wikipedia isn’t going to work.
Most real estate website vendors provide content pages to get your site going. But, don’t fool yourself. If your entire website consists of standard pages, the search engines will ignore you, and so will your visitors!
Once you have completed step one, your website will be attractive to search engines. Next, you need to get the search engines to rank your site.
SEO – Side Two: Off-Site SEO
You’re right. this side is often called off-page. It is a distressing fact, but it’s true that just setting up your website with lots of good original content and effective calls to action just isn’t enough.
The off-site part of SEO has to do mainly with establishing quality incoming links to your website. Contemporary SEO calls for building incoming links that are content based. Your best bet is to post original content that is optimized for your selected keyword phrases on high-authority Internet sites. If you don’t have the time or inclination to do that, we can assist.
Just keep in mind that once we’ve put optimized original content on your website you’re not finished.
I feel bad sometimes when I talk to people about setting up a website that will produce leads. It can be a real information overload. By the time I discuss:
- Strategy for driving traffic
- Keyword selection
- On-site SEO
- Off-site SEO
Well, very often, I can hear their eyes glazing over through the telephone.
The good news? If you don’t have a lead-generating website right now, but you’d like one, we can help! Call us at 888-716-2418 or send an email below. We specialize in Web-Centric Real Estate Marketing.
Ever wondered why you’re not getting any leads from your website? Ever heard other professionals talk about how they get all of their leads from their website without doing any other marketing? Have you figured out how to make your website a lead generation tool? If you’re anything like the folks I talk to, you’d love to know! It’s not a mystery. You just need to know how.
1. You need a strategy for driving traffic to your website.
As they say, a website with no traffic isn’t a website at all. Well, maybe I just said that. In any event, the process starts with a strategy for driving traffic.
- That’s the first step in getting leads from a real estate website. You get lots of people to visit your website and some percentage of those will become clients if you follow up properly. Without visitors, nothing happens.
I ask people that question a lot: “What is your strategy for driving traffic to your website?” I rarely get a reasonable answer. But, think about it. Just putting a website on the Internet isn’t enough.
Why is this the first step? Because it has a lot to do with how you build your website!
There are really only two online ways to drive traffic to your website. One is to use pay-per-click campaigns. If you want more information about that, contact Ideal Positions. They’re good guys and do good work. Don’t try to run a pay-per-click campaign yourself unless you have a lot of free time.
If you use pay-per-click to drive traffic, you need to build a professional-looking, information rich website that has good calls to action and important offers to get visitors to fill out a form or call.
The second way is to get found on the search engines. And, that’s what this post will focus on. If you want to get found on the search engines, you need to build your website to be attractive to search engines!
2. Choose the right keyword phrases.
If you’re going to get found on the search engines, you need to go after the right phrases. Why? Because if you don’t, one of two things will most likely happen.
Either you’ll be #1 on Google for a phrase no one ever uses, or you will be very old and perhaps retired before you get any kind of ranking at all.
You need to do the keyword research to identify those keywords that have the best blend of the amount of usage of the term, and the least competition.
If you’re going to rely on pay-per-click, it doesn’t really matter if you’ve chosen the right keyword phrases, but I recommend that you set your site up for SEO anyway. It can’t hurt, and it might just get you ranked over time.
3. Set up your real estate website to be attractive to search engines.
There are many things that the search engines, Google in particular, are looking for in a website that they will rank. For more information, see the posts about the Panda update.
For the purposes of this post, we’re going to talk about how you do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website. The most important thing to take away from reading this post is:
There are Two Sides to SEO
Stayed tuned for Part II. . .
