Archive for Insider Insight
Sample Room Makeovers for Quicker Sales
· Comments
Everyone talks about how staging homes makes them sell faster. But, it’s often easier said than done. Would it make more sense to you if you saw a few examples?
Check out these before and after photos of 9 Room Makeovers done by REALTORS® from all over the country.
The common theme seems to be neutral colors, removing things that are worn or dirty and packing away lots and lots of “stuff”. But, a picture is worth a thousand words, so take a look and see if you spot some of the same problems in your next listing!
This guest post was written by Sam Chapman who markets Austin Real Estate
The Communication Conundrum
I chaired an American Cancer Event called Relay For Life a couple of years ago. Many of the people on my planning committee were high school students. At one meeting I asked the kids what would be the best way for me to get them information. I asked if email would work.
One of the kids looked me dead in the eye and said; “Mr. Chapman, email is so 90s - you need to learn to text!” Well, aside from everyone cracking up, it told me something that I kind of already knew, but that I didn’t really have a good handle on - yet!
So How Does That Apply to Real Estate?
I got a call from a couple of sisters in college about needing to sell the home of their recently deceased father. I realized pretty quickly in the listing process that they would not respond to phone calls or emails.
So when I needed them to see something or to get paperwork, I would send as an email and immediately send a text stating that I had emailed something important and that I needed them to check email. Guess what? It worked!
The transaction closes next week and I got a call from the title company yesterday telling me that they needed information from one of the daughters. I asked the person at the title company to send a text following an email. I was told that they were not allowed to text.
So I sent the daughter a text message stating that the title company needed information ASAP in order to set up the closing. The daughter called the title rep within minutes.
Here’s My Point
We as REALTORS® need to learn different ways to communicate. The younger generation is all about instant everything. Text messaging is just that.
Would I recommend that we text all clients? No way. The more mature crowd may not get a message and the middle-aged crowds may think we were being unprofessional.
However, if a client communicates on the fly via BlackBerry email or texting, it is perfectly OK to do the same. If you’re working with someone in or right out of college, my feeling is that texting is OK if you do it right. In fact, with some it will be a necessity.
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.
Another View on Internet Marketing Success
· CommentsMike Parker, my partner in crime, or at least SEO, has just published an article based on an interview with a mutual client. Gary Nagle shares his experiences with having a website for several years without much success, and the things he did to turn that situation around.
At this point, more than 80% of Gary’s business comes from his website - and many of his clients are relocating. In fact, there are a few clients he never met until the closing, but he finds that he can establish satisfying relationships via telephone and email.
Learn more about Gary’s experience as an Internet REALTOR® - something that has even given him more free time!
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How to Generate Your Next 200 Deals
· CommentsThis guest post was written by Larry Easto who is a
best-selling business writer, and publisher of Real Estate Marketing Link
What Good Are Regular Marketing Reports?
At one very frustrating stop in my career path, I had to to prepare weekly activity reports. I was required to record and report details of everyone I spoke to. At the time, I thought it was simply something that the director demanded to control her people.
With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I now understand that the reports were intended to track sales and marketing activities. I now appreciate the importance of tracking the results of all marketing activities.
The Benefits of Tracking Marketing Activities
Unfortunately many agents do not track their results. It’s something that they never quite get around to doing. By tracking results you can expect two significant benefits:
- You will learn which marketing activities yield the best results and also which ones need to be improved or even terminated. I’m not sure why sales people continue to devote resources to marketing activities that fail to produce what they seek. Maybe they don’t track their results so they don’t really know which activities are effective and which ones are ineffective.
- By tracking results, you shift your focus from continuing to chase the next deal to developing and maintaining systems that can generate the next 200 deals. In other words, tracking results enables you to run a business that, if properly managed, will generate a sustainable income.
The Bottom Line
Good business management includes tracking and then analyzing your results. This analysis will help you identify effective marketing activities so that you can continue to do these things and do them better. The analysis will also help identify ineffective activities so you can either improve them or stop doing them.
From the perspective of overall business and marketing management, tracking results make so much sense. If only that director had explained the importance of tracking results, working with her might have been less frustrating.
If you’d like to see your guest post (and links to your site) on this blog, contact me today!
