Archive for September, 2007
Newsletter Changes!
· CommentsThe September issue of the Newsletter is now available, but I’ll repeat the contents here.
The Real Estate Results Newsletter has been published since 2005. In 2006, this blog was started. We’ve decided that we can serve you better by combining the two. There are several advantages to that combination:
- All the tools and information we provide to help you establish a competitive edge for your business will be in one place, not split between the blog and the newsletter.
- You’ll have access to new information on a more frequent basis. We’re going to send the new Newsletter once a week on Wednesdays. You’ll be able to quickly scan a handful of topics to see if you want to click through to get more information.
- You can subscribe to the blog through an RSS Feed Reader, but if you don’t use one, you can still get the information via the e-mail Newsletter.
- You’ll have an opportunity to participate with comments, suggestions or questions by leaving Comments on a specific post.
You can subscribe to the new Newsletter on our main site, or using the Subcribe Via E-Mail Newsletter link in the right column here on the blog.
We’re looking forward to continuing the tradition we established with the original Newsletter with the new BRER Real Estate Marketing Blog Newsletter. And, we’re looking forward to your participation, too!
Provide School Information Like a Pro
· CommentsGive Your Visitors the 411 on Schools
Visitors to a real estate website very often want to check out schools in the neighborhood they’re targeting for their move. You can make their life easy, and your site stand out from the crowd, if you provide school information that is integrated into your website.
It’s not enough to publish links to the local schools’ website. Your visitors want to know more than what the school system will tell them. You could publish a link to one of the online school websites, but then you have to take visitors off your site which is never the optimum situation.
Consider GreatSchools.net
GreatSchools.net is one of the online school sites. While it is illegal to frame their site into yours, you can purchase an annual subscription that will provide you with an ad-free frameable solution.
When you look at the frameable solution, you’ll see that it takes on an entirely different look than the public website. If you want to provide school information like a pro, contact GreatSchools.net at businessdevelopment@greatschools.net.
The annual fee for an ad-free frameable solution is $250. A small price to pay for providing a simple way for your site visitors to access teacher and student statistics, parent ratings and other information for public and private schools in your target market.
What You Should Know About Framing Websites
· Comments“Hey, This is a Great Website!”
That’s what a lot of people say right before they frame the site into their real estate website. I’ve seen real estate sites with a range of other websites framed into one of their pages, including:
- School and Board of Education websites
- City and/or County websites
- Chamber of Commerce websites
- Parks and Recreation websites
- “Things to do” websites
- and the list goes on and on
Here’s What You Should Know . . .
FIRST, it is illegal to frame many websites into a page on your real estate site. The fastest way to tell if an organization prohibits framing their site is to look for a link in the small print at the bottom of the site’s pages that says something like Legal, Terms, Terms of Use, or anything else that sounds like information you are agreeing to by using the website.
Read that page carefully. A lot of it will be legal mumbo-jumbo, but somewhere in there you will find the conditions under which you may use the website and the information it contains.
If you’ve never noticed a link like that, just do a search on any search engine for the search term Terms of Use. The search I just did on Google returned 1,480,000,000 results. No, that’s not a typo, it really is 1.48 billion. So, there are just a few sites out there that publish their terms of use.
And, besides being illegal to go against a site’s terms of use, I don’t think it fits into anything you’ll find in the NAR Code of Ethics!
SECOND, you’re not doing your site visitors any real favors when you frame in another informational website. Visitors come to your website for information. They don’t stop in to find out where to spend another 15 minutes trying to find information.
If you want to tell your visitors about things to do in your market area, write an original content page to summarize it. Original content – that means you write it in your own words. It’s not copied from a city website or stolen from the site of another real estate agent in your neighborhood who took the time to write it down.
You can always provide a link to other websites for more information, but don’t expect your visitors to get excited about the prospect of wending their way through your Convention and Visitors website to find out what’s happening in the area.
THIRD, keep in mind that search engines don’t read content that is framed into one of your pages. If you want the search engines to consider your website an expert resource on Smallville, USA, you better have original content pages that talk about Smallville.
It takes more work to create a content-rich website, but it will keep you out of trouble with the law and the regulators, your visitors will love you, and the search engines will, too!
Here’s one that has always amused me:
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” This was said by Thomas Watson, who lead the rise of IBM from the 1920’s to the 1950’s.
It’s got to be a classic. It’s believable to many because when computers were first invented, they were giant things that required care and feeding by individuals who thought in terms of zeros and ones. Forseeing the way computers look today and the number of them around would have been difficult in the 1920’s.
According to the Wikipedia on Watson, that famous quote is actually a misquote because there is no proof that Watson ever made such a statement. But, it certainly does make a good story!
And, have you ever wondered where the term “computer bug” came from? In 1947 Grace Murray Hopper was working at Harvard University on one of the early giant computer systems. Something went wrong, and her staff discovered a moth caught in one of the system’s relays. So, they reported that they had debugged the computer. And, we’ve been haunted by computer bugs ever since.
See How Easily You Can Get Incoming Links
· CommentsCreative Link Building
There are lots of ways to get good incoming links, and many people on the Internet have created lists of them. One of my favorites is on the SEOBook website, and that lists includes 101 ways to get incoming links.
If you look at that list, you’ll notice that #1 under the heading Love for Lists is to write a list of 101 things about a topic of interest. And, you can see it worked for the SEOBook folks, because I and a lot of other people have linked to that list.
You’ll also notice that #5 on the list suggests creating a list of gurus or experts because it will be useful for your Internet audience, and because the people on the list may well link back to the list. If that idea sounds a little over the top, you might want to reconsider.
Creative Link Building Works!
Brian Thibault at International Listings took that idea and ran with it. Brian created a list of Top 100 Real Estate Blogs – and he included the BRER Real Estate Marketing Blog on the list. Then, he contacted me (via a contact form on the main website) to let me know that this blog was on the list. And, now he has one more link to his website!
I wanted to use this as an example of someone being very proactive to obtain incoming links. But, I’d also recommend that you take a look at the list because it does have some interesting blogs on it.
For example, it never occurred to me that Appraisers had blogs. I don’t know why, just didn’t consider that. Brian found blogs by Appraisers, Mortgage Brokers, professionals in the Title business, among a host of others. He even has a category that is just fun stuff related to real estate.
So, the moral of the story is: study those lists of ways to get incoming links. You might be more successful with some of the truly creative approaches than you think!
