Archive for Insider Insight
This guest post was written by Kevin Kaiser of Military Homes Realty,
connecting military home buyers and sellers.
Why You Need to Distribute Your Listings On Niche Sites
All real estate agents want people to see their listings. The more views you can get, the easier chance there is that they get sold. But still there are real estate agents who don’t worry about putting their listing on other sites.
What I can’t figure out is why? Is it to protect them from being taken by someone else? Seems a little ridiculous, doesn’t it?
The marketing and social media point of view is simple and straightforward:
- Get your listings to as large an audience as possible, while staying specific enough to your niche.
Looking to tap into markets for condos or foreclosure purchases? How about rentals or military homebuyers?
You don’t want to waste a lot of time or money spreading your listing to sites that have little chance of leading to conversions. But landing a few key niche realty sites could really increase the number of times your properties are viewed.
If you are in a hot region for military homebuyers, hunt down some military sites and put your listings on those.
Do you work with rentals a lot? Try listing your property with Rent.com or find a local site such as RentList.net in Atlanta. What about condos? There are some great sites out there for these as well. The key is to find local sites since people search local terms a lot more often than perceived from the outside.
Putting your listings on the MLS is a big plus as well since tons of different websites syndicate these listings, helping you get in front of a large national audience. After that, the key is to supplement an MLS listing by listing on targeted niche websites that will get your properties in front highly targeted buyers.
Paying $30 to get the listing on that San Diego homes for sale website will turn out to be a good investment!
How to Find Hidden Testimonials
· CommentsThis guest post was written by Sam Chapman, who hosts a website where you can
search Austin homes. Sam has lived in the Austin-Lake Travis area since 1987.
Do you need testimonials for your real estate website? If you do, you may already have some that you didn’t think about.
Are you a member of LinkedIn? In case you are not familiar with it, LinkedIn is a social networking site for business professionals. If you are a member, you may have already had people recommend you.
Many LinkedIn members ask for recommendations and some are just offered. They are usually exchanged – I recommend you and you recommend me. LinkedIn recommendations are usually very good because they usually come from people who have worked with you and who know you well enough to write intelligently and accurately.
You don’t need testimonials just from people you have helped buy or sell real estate. Recommendations that you turn into testimonials on your real estate website can add a lot of depth about you, and can help people understand more about you on a little deeper level. Here is one about me:
- “I first met Sam when he was hired as a Kinko’s store manager in San Antonio. Through the years I watched as his career progressed from Branch Manager to Regional Operations Manager to Kinko’s Partner. Sam is intelligent, resourceful and dedicated. He has tremendous integrity and whoever has the opportunity to utilize his services will not be disappointed.” –September 25, 2007 Phil Schlageter, Board of Directors , Kinko’s, Inc.
See what I mean? It doesn’t just have to be about real estate.
This guest post was written by Kevin Kaiser of Military Homes,
specializing in getting military home buyers and sellers connected.
Why Your Leads Don’t Convert
Every real estate agent that has a website knows about SEO and driving traffic to your site. You know that a proper SEO campaign takes a lot of time and patience, but in the end, you’re rewarded with great rankings.
Now you’re getting hundreds of people to your site each day. Great news, but of those 250 people that visited your site today, only 15 filled out your form. And even sadder, none of them became a client.
What are you doing wrong? It’s hard to pinpoint the exact problem without knowing your site and your customers’ demographics. But, luckily you do know that (and if you don’t you need to find out). So here are some tips that have worked for me and can work for you when it comes to optimizing your conversion rate.
The Follow-Up
The biggest problem I found was what happened when I filled out the form on our site. I did it as a test to see how my team responded, yet I sometimes didn’t get a call back the same day. And I would fill out the form at 8 a.m.
This is a big problem. If I’m a customer, I’ve already moved on to the next site and filled out their form and whoever calls me back first will have the best chance of getting my business. This is where I decided that I would try out a little experiment with our site.
The Experiment – It was set up so that we would track:
- the length of time between when the potential client filled out the form and when we called them.
- whether they became a lead or not.
Once we did this for about a month, I had one of my programmers compile the data to determine when the delay in contacting leads turned them into dead leads. Do we need to call them right away? If not, how long can we wait?
What We Discovered – For our site, we found that if we called them within 4 minutes of filling out the lead form on our site they were 90% more likely to do business with us. That’s a great success rate is you ask me.
How to Get More People to Fill Out a Form
The next thing I decided to tackle was how to get more people to fill out our form. Our site now has a new design as were moving in a different direction than before, so you will have to visualize what I’m talking about. But in the end you will have to do your own testing because our customers are not exactly the same.
Using Google Website Optimizer, which lets you do split testing on your website, I drew up a different layout and made our form appear in our right sidebar column on our homepage. This increased conversions from about the 2% we were getting from overall traffic to about 5%. A big increase in leads just by making sure that we had a form on the homepage in plain sight instead of links to a deeper page with the form.
I wasn’t content still and decided that more testing should be done. So I sent half our visitors to a new layout that had a form on the top left side of the homepage and half to the page with the form on the right sidebar. Our conversion was higher by about 6% with the form on the top right column.
Still curious if I could increase it any more, I decided to try split testing one page with a form in the top left area and one page with a call-to-action button on the top left area and a short form in the right sidebar.
We were able to increase our conversion even more, to about 6.75% with a call-to-action button on the top left area and a short form in the right sidebar. I told one of my buddies who runs this great surety bond website. He implemented it and found that it works great for him. As of this date, he’s still using that layout if you want to see it.
Take Action Now
The major point you should take away from this is that you need to be testing your website and your business all the time. You can always make it better. The biggest excuse I hear from people about following my advice is that “I don’t have time”. Great, you must be really busy. But why not hire someone to do this stuff for you then? Often it’s because you don’t want to spend the money hiring someone else.
But, if you make the right hire, and they are able to implement the suggestions I’ve laid out above, the number of clients that start coming in should more than make up for the amount you will pay someone. All you need to do is hire a high school or college kid that knows what they are talking about and you will be set. I know that’s how I got my start.
This guest post was written by Jonathan Benz from ProspectMX
According to ComScore’s latest projections, there are now 222 million users on Facebook, making it the largest social networking website. As the site enters its fifth year on the tubes, have you figured out how to use it to benefit your real estate internet marketing efforts in 2009?After taking some time to introduce the readers of BRER to Twitter, I thought I might take some to offer advice on getting started with Facebook.
A LITTLE HISTORY
The entire Facebook revolution began at Harvard in 2004. Mark Zuckerberg built a site where students could share photos and head shots, putting a “face” on the names in the student directory. Harvard students dug it, and it began expanding to other universities across the country.
By the end of the year, Facebook had nearly one million users (myself included), and Zuckerberg had received some startup capital. He dropped out of Harvard and set up shop in Palo Alto, CA.
Today, Facebook is open to practically everyone and has internal e-mail communication, photo sharing, an advertising network and a constantly updating news feed that updates what your friends are up to across Facebook while you are also on Facebook.
GETTING STARTED
The basic idea behind Facebook is that it is an effective way to stay in touch with friends, family, coworkers, alumni, and other contacts in one convenient location on the internet. Connections start based on existing real-world ties.
When you register for Facebook, you establish your hometown, college, high school, or corporate network from which to select friends. Facebook will then let you survey other users based on your answers to start building a network of Facebook friends.
Lucky for all internet users, Facebook has made the process of finding your friends pretty easy. After you begin building your network based on your location, work experience, and educational background, Facebook begins suggesting people you probably know, creating a virtual sphere of influence for yourself.
Of course, you can also find friends in more traditional ways. Search by name within Facebook and having Facebook dig into your e-mail address book to find contacts is also possible. Just like Twitter, a connection is only cemented when your “friend” confirms that you are, in fact, friends.
WHY FACEBOOK MATTERS TO REAL ESTATE AGENTS
Internet marketing is so effective because ROI is easily tracked and attributed to campaigns. Besides, with over 222 million users, more of your prospects are likely to be online, rather than digging through the pages of your local daily paper. Getting your message in front of prospects where they are most likely to see it and respond is still the first rule of marketing, right?
The most obvious way real estate agents can effectively use Facebook is for prospecting. Creating an online sphere of influence is easy on Facebook. All Facebook users in the real estate industry should be connected to all clients, past and present, in addition to the friends, work contacts, and schoolmates you would already connect to.
As you continue to build your sphere of influence on Facebook, there are tons of options for spreading the word about your business, including:
- Starting a group related to local events or local real estate
- Uploading photos of your most recent listings to a group or photo gallery
- Adding the RSS feed of your blog to your profile or status message
THE UNSPOKEN FACEBOOK RULE
There is no question that Facebook can be an effective boost to prospecting and building your sphere. That said, there are several things to remember when using Facebook:
- While it is okay to link to your blog or company site, it is important to be “social,” meaning you must interact with other Facebook users in a non-marketing manner.
- On social networks, users can “sniff out” marketing, and prefer not to be marketed to!
- Using Facebook merely as a method to promote a free home valuation or as a driver of blog traffic can cause you to lose connections quickly.
Use Facebook the right way – without coming across as a salesman - and creating a productive sphere of influence is definitely possible. Plus, you’ll establish an effective new method for Prospecting!
Jonathan Bentz manages link building for a variety of clients at ProspectMX, a Pennsylvania internet marketing company. Previously, Bentz worked in marketing at a luxury resort located in Western Pennsylvania and managed their website to a substantial increase in site visits and online bookings. He has experience in e-mail marketing, organic search optimization, moderating message boards, and developing site content plans for a variety of web clients.
When a Google Sitemap Hurts Your Rankings
· CommentsIf you’re doing real estate marketing online, you need good rankings in the search engines. One of our contributors, Sam Chapman, wrote about the fact that he had fallen off the first page of Google for his main keyword. Luckily, his website is strong enough that the activity on his site wasn’t really affected.
I got an email from Sam the other day. He’s figured out how to retrieve his high ranking on Google for his main keyword phrase!
And, it’s a pretty weird fix.
When Can a Google Sitemap Hurt Your Ranking?
Sam wrote, “I had a Google sitemap warning in the Google Webmaster Tools. It stated that my RSS feed had too many tags and that I should fix and resubmit. The thing that both puzzled me and troubled me was that I first saw the warning a few weeks after falling off page one for my most coveted search term – Austin real estate.”
Sam tapped the resources at the REW forum by publishing a post asking if anyone knew anything about that error. One of the other REW members posted a link to a blog post that discussed merging two blogs into one.
The owner didn’t mention getting an error message, and his merged blogs were doing OK, but he was frustrated because his pages weren’t getting indexed very quickly. The answer came from another REW member, whose advice was “Delete your Google Sitemap.xml file and make the search engines crawl the site from scratch.”
Once the file was deleted, the owner of the combined blogs saw his indexed pages increase dramatically. So, Sam decided to try the same thing with his website.
Within 10 days, he was back on page one of the Google SERPs for his key real estate marketing term, Austin Real Estate.
The Morals of the Story?
- Having a site map on your real estate website is a good thing. And, in most instances, submitting a Google sitemap is a good thing, too.
- You may or may not get an error message in your Google Webmaster Tools when a site map is confusing the search engine web crawlers.
- There may be times when some issue with your Google sitemap can negatively impact your rankings, and you’d be better off deleting the site map.
- If you have submitted a Google sitemap, you better check your Google Webmaster Tools periodically to make sure that there are no issues you need to be aware of!
