Author Archive
Forget the Social Media Hype
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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. . .
From the Web: WAIT! Don’t Hang Up!!
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Do you get tired of telemarketers? I do. And, I’m on the Do Not Call list, but I still get calls from charities, my bank (or telemarketers trying to sell me some bank service), and so forth.
I had to laugh when I read the blog post on Active Rain written by Jane Peters. Jane talks about her experience with a caller from Active Rain. The caller made the mistake of opening the conversation with “Hello, this is Stacy Smith, how are you?”
I don’t know about you, but whenever someone I don’t know says “how are you”, it is always a telemarketer. I think in this case, Stacy probably felt like she knew Jane from her ActiveRain participation. You’ll have to read the post to figure out what happened in that situation.
The reason I found the post funny, and an excellent reminder, was a recent experience I had on the telephone.
Another sure way to tell if a telemarketer is calling: if it takes several seconds for someone to come on the line. You know how that goes. The computer dials the number and if someone answers, the call is transferred to a telemarketer.
That’s true, right? Well, not always. I have a client in an area where the telephone company moves a bit slowly. The other day, I hung up on him twice before I realized what I was doing and called him back. Luckily, it was someone I knew well and we had a good laugh over it.
If it had been a prospect? Well, it wouldn’t have been a prospect after that!
So, OK, I need to rethink. Maybe I’ll wait a few more seconds the next time there’s a delay on my phone. And, maybe I won’t hang up when someone introduces themselves and asks how I’m doing.
As Jane said, it might be a pleasant surprise.
How to Make Your Online Accounts Secure
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I know you’ve got a lot of online accounts. I do. If I print out the list of all my passwords, it’s about 8 pages long. What a pain in the neck.
You probably also have your own story about someone you know or heard of who has been hurt by a hacker getting into one of their accounts. One of the more recent famous hacking jobs was carried out against Lady Gaga. A hacker sent out a Tweet saying that she was giving away a free iPad to all her followers for the holidays.
And, before she could remove the entry, many of her followers were very excited or angry. One follower posted: “I took your generous offer seriously”. Really? Lady Gaga has over 17 million followers on Twitter. Evidently, some of them aren’t too bright.
In any event, one way that you can increase the security of your online accounts is to make sure your passwords are really, really hard to break.
If you want a chuckle, head over to Forbes and the list they posted of the Worst Passwords of 2011. You might recognize some of yours on that list. The most popular password was “password”. The second most popular was “123456″.
I can’t believe it. Evidently some of us have forgotten the purpose for a password. It’s more than just one more thing you have to remember. It really is there to protect your online accounts.
That Forbes article also listed a set of best practices created by NASA. Those rules address:
- The length of a password, 8 characters or more
- The types of characters, upper/lower case letters, numbers and symbols
- The readability of the password: it shouldn’t be anything that appears in the dictionary, in your name or in your email address.
The article also mentions a suggestion for creating the right kind of password, which is to make a sentence out of it. I heard that suggestion a while back and have taken full advantage of it. Every time I create a password, where there is a “meter” showing the strength of the password, I always rank off the scale.
Here are some examples of these types of passwords:
- Call me at home for the answer silly! [becomes] Cm@h4taS!
- The password for this account equals 9887 [becomes] Tp4ta=9887
- What number should I use that is less than $20 [becomes] W#SIUtilt$20
Interesting idea, huh? Probably using one password for all your accounts would be OK if its that secure. But, I went a step further, incorporating something about the website for which I’m setting the password. For example:
- Facebook – CM@h4taS!fb
- Bank of America – CM@h4taS!boa
If you’re not into figuring all this out, there are also software programs that will assign a password to any account you open and keep track of them. I just don’t like the idea of having to keep track of the amazing password those systems generate. What if the software got sick, or your computer crashed?
Maybe there’s a way to avoid that stuff, but I’m still old fashioned enough to want to be able to at least try to figure out what a password is without depending on technology.
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