Archive for October, 2008
Everyone has a different view of the individuals in the real estate industry. One thing I know for sure, however, is that when an agent’s real estate marketing efforts pay off, they show how much they care about the people in the communities they serve.
And, they don’t just care about the people buying and selling real estate – they care about everyone in the community, and 
they’re really a very charitable bunch.
For example, I have a number of clients who donate a portion of their real estate commission to their clients’ favorite charity. But, I wondered how concerned real estate companies and professionals are in general about helping those in need. I was impressed with what I found.
Doing a search on Google, I found a lot of articles and blog posts about individuals and companies lending a helping hand in their communities:
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A Century 21 office in Michigan took a cue from Oprah Winfrey and started their own version of the Big Give.
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A boy with a terminal disease had his wish fulfilled due to the donations area offices of Realty Executives made to the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Northern Illinois.
Then, I started to notice that a lot of the search results came from an agent’s real estate blog on ActiveRain, so I dropped in to see what was happening. I did a search for the word charity, and was going to use the results as examples in this post. Unfortunately, I was not entirely successful, but I have included a few below:
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An office of ERA in New Jersey was collecting donations for the Make a Wish Foundation.
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A husband/wife real estate team promoted their local charity Duck Race in South Carolina.
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An agent in Michigan talked about the funds he was helping to raise for Habitat for Humanity.
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One agent was even promoting an event that had something to do with Shaving Your Head for Charity!
Are you wondering why I didn’t list the charitable posts on ActiveRain? The reason is because the list is much much too long!!
There are 1000 posts that contain the word Charity, and 490 posts about Habitat for Humanity.
I know that there are going to be a lot of people participating in Blog Action Day who are faced with circumstances much worse than we have here in the U.S. But, when you think about what one person can do, just think about all of the real estate agents around the country that are doing whatever they can to help their clients — and their communities.
This guest post was written by Sam Chapman.
Your Primary Keywords Don’t Drive the Majority of Traffic
Most good real estate webmasters understand that the majority of traffic driven to their sites is not from their most key search terms. For example, the terms Austin real estate, Austin TX real estate, Lake Travis real estate and Austin real estate blog generated only 13% of the visits to my site in September, 2008. That percent would be higher if I eliminated the statistics for visitors who didn’t use a search engine to get to the site, but still, this is pretty interesting.
Use Long Tail Search Terms to Increase Traffic
So what is my site found for? Long tail search terms. If you don’t know what the concept of the long tail is, here’s a good article on the subject.
Some of the long tail terms I get found for are Hamilton Pool, Austin MSA, Circle C homes, Apache Shores real estate and Spanish Oaks. The latter three are all Austin area subdivisions. Getting found for Hamilton Pool is OK, but it nothing compared to being found for real estate related terms.
The Power of Community Pages
Now that you know about the long tail, let me share something about how you can generate long trail traffic. I set up a main page on my site called Austin Neighborhood Listings that links directly from my home page.
On that page are links to neighborhood specific pages, categorized by geographic area. Each page has a few paragraphs of content talking about the neighborhood and then framed IDX search results showing homes specific to that neighborhood. The content before the IDX search frame is critical, as search engines can’t do much with information inside frames.
Here is where things get interesting. Remember that my main terms result in about 13% of page views? More than 10% of the page views on my real estate website are these neighborhood specific pages.
Not many real estate agents optimize for specific neighborhoods, so this is a great way to get long tail traffic. Visitors also navigate to the neighborhood pages from the link on the home page so this is also a great way to make your site more sticky and keep people on it longer.
Adding neighborhood pages can accomplish several things:
- It can give you pages about specific neighborhoods, which human visitors love.
- It can give you more pages of unique content, which search engines love.
- It can give you great internal links to neighborhood pages with appropriate anchor text, which is good for human visitors and search engines.
- It can give you the ability to generate long tail traffic, which is great for you.
In case this tells you anything, I am getting a listing in Apache Shores this week from someone who found my Apache Shores Homes page last weekend.
In order to frame the listings, you need to have a good third party IDX provider that allows customization of the IDX link that will show homes by neighborhood. The IDX vendor also needs to be approved by your Board as a third-party vendor. Check with your Board to see who the approved vendors are and check them out.
If you can do what I did, start building neighborhood pages on your real estate website. You’ll be happy that you did. If you want to see what I am talking about, visit my Austin real estate website.
I saw an interesting post on a real estate forum the other day. The agent talked about an interview she had done for her local media about the real estate market in her area. She wasn’t entirely pleased with what was published based on her comments.
I’m no media expert, but I have had been interviewed for one thing or another a couple times, and I was entirely pleased with the result, either. So, I decided to do some investigation on the topic, and found some extremely reasonable and easy tips for handling the media.
1. Find Out Everything You Can About the Interviewer
We all know that every publication has their own agenda. And, the real estate market is a subject of a lot of press these days – both bad and good. So, your first step if you’re contacted for an interview is to do the following:
- Ask the interviewer not only what the subject of the article is, but what angle is being pursued. If the market in your area is slow, you want to know if the interviewer is interested in finding information to describe how bad the market is, or wants to find the silver lining.
- Ask the interviewer if anyone else is being interviewed for the same article, and if so, get their names. Given this information, you can get a feel for what the other parties might say.
- Ask the interviewer how long the interview will last. That will give you an idea of how many questions might be asked.
- Read other articles written by the reporter you’ll be talking to. You’ll gain insight into their style.
2. Help the Interviewer to Help Yourself
Read More→
Interpreting what constitutes a parking space seems to be a challenge to a lot of people. So, to help all those parking-challenged individuals, here’s a short course on how to figure out where you’re supposed to park.
When you drive into a parking lot, look for painted lines on the ground. You’ll notice that there are whole bunches of them. If you’re lucky, each line will actually be double lines painted very close together. That means that the management of that lot are nice people who will give you a bit of extra room to get out of your car after you park it.
In any event, the idea is to park your car in the exact center between two of those lines, whether they’re single or double lines. Now, we all know that getting your car into the exact center of the lines is going to be difficult. You just need to practice until you can get it pretty close.
Keep in mind that if you park too close to one of the lines – or heaven forbid, if your tires end up on top of or over the line – you have effectively made the space beside you unusable by anyone else until you leave.
Which I hope you do pretty fast.
OK, so one of my pet peeves is people who don’t know how to park their cars so that the rest of us get to use the parking lot, too. And, you can probably guess that I was in a crowded parking lot recently where the only parking spot within a half mile of my destination was rendered useless by one of the “line parkers” among us.
I think learning to park between the lines, and caring enough to do so on a regular basis, is just not that difficult. Now, parallel parking – that’s a different story.
I hate parallel parking. So, it was a challenge when I lived in downtown Baltimore at one time in my life. Downtown Baltimore is a great place to live. It’s one of the truly alive big-city downtown areas.
The only problem is that most of the real estate is made up of row houses. When you live there, you have to park on the street. Parallel park, that is. And while that seems very normal to long-time residents, it’s a challenge for some of the rest of us.
As a brand new resident, I was chagrined when I arrived home one day and my neighbor was sitting on his front stoop, and the only place to park was directly behind his car.
Parking the car turned into an even larger event than usual because I was nervous. But, after several trips back and forth, I finally fit the car in the spot, close enough to the curb, and without touching his vehicle.
As I walked to my door, I laughed about my horrible parallel parking skills. My neighbor was silent for a moment, then said:
“Hmm… so the last place you lived had a driveway, huh?”
Blog Action Day
· CommentsI was almost late! It’s Blog Action Day next Wednesday.
Have you registered your blog? This year’s topic is Poverty.
Everyone in real estate ought to have something to say about that!
Join 5,721 Sites from all over the world
with an audience in excess of 9 million
in writing a post on October 15th about poverty.
