Archive for Sam Chapman
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 Sam Chapman, a Lake Travis real estate agent,
who has lived in the Austin-Lake Travis area since 1987.
People talk all the time about the number of inbound links to a site being important to a website’s Search Engine ranking. And, I’ve found that the quality of the site pointing a link to you is huge. Here are two examples.
The Real Estate Center at Texas A&M is one of the most respected real estate information websites on the planet. They send out a weekly e-newsletter, and recently held a “a vote-for-your-favorite-real-estate-blog contest”. My blog made the top 10.
A link to my blog, using appropriate anchor text, was on a PR 4 page from this site that has tons of respect from Google. That one link had enough juice to get my blog on page 1 of Google for the term real estate blog. Not Austin real estate blog, but just real estate blog. It is difficult to get links from exceptionally well respected sites, but if you can, the result can be huge.
On another note, I am a writer for the Austin Post, a relatively new online newspaper. It is very local, has lots of posts, and a Page Rank of 4 after just 90 days. It has risen to be quite an authority site for Austin. I think the sandbox effect wore off after 90 days and link juice kicked in.
After writing for this online newspaper, my website went from ranking around 13-15 on Google, to number 6 on Google for the term Austin real estate. I have linked sparingly in writing for the Post, but I do include a link back to my home search page in the author bio.
This shows the power of links from a non-real estate, but city-specific, website.
Looks like finding opportunities for establishing powerful real estate or geographically-related links to your real estate website is worth the effort!
This guest post was written by Sam Chapman, a Lake Travis real estate agent,
who has lived in the Austin-Lake Travis area since 1987.
How Do You Try to Standout at an Open House?
Any Real estate agent who has ever held an open house has probably tried to figure out just how the people who come through remember them instead of the other agents they will meet that day.
Some people hand out promotional items with their names printed on them. Many try to befriend everyone who comes through. Some try to impress people with their knowledge. And unfortunately, some simply try to sell people.
Try Taking a New Approach
I don’t have property flyers in the house or in the brochure box in the yard during an open house. While people are looking around, I ask if they are already working with an agent. If they are not, I ask them which real estate websites they use for looking at homes online.
They usually mention some of the ones that are pretty well known and I ask a question. “Did you know that these sites aren’t always accurate and up to date?” That usually gets their attention. Then I hand them my flyer.
The flyer is a printed version of the Austin home search page on my website with my contact information and web address at the very top. I explain that the information is as current as the actual MLS and that they can find all listings within the Austin MLS from this page. I also tell them that if they go to the site and enter the MLS number for the home they are in, which I write in the search box on the flyer, they will see a lot more information and a lot more photos than I could have put on a flyer.
Get a Devotee for Your Website as Well as a Prospect for Your Listing
I go on to explain why this is one of the best search features available. My property search allows people to build searches to come back to any time they want. In addition to entering specific search criteria, it allows them to search by school district or subdivision. It allows users to save listings in a favorites folder. In other words, I promote my website, not myself.
If I go in to my search feature’s back office and see that someone I met at the open house has registered to use my property search feature, I follow up and actually have something to talk with them about. The person has just changed from being a prospect to a lead. Of course, this will not work for you if you don’t have a really good search feature, but if you do, try it!
Insider Insight: Who Cares About Me?
· Comments
This guest post was written by Sam Chapman who markets in Austin, TX
Many real estate agent websites have an “About Me” page on them, but does anyone ever read it? Most people go to real estate websites and don’t look at anything initially except the property search page. That is why agent sites need to have a really good property search feature. However, some recent experience taught me something about the About Me page and other pages on my own Austin real estate website.
I have worked with three sets of buyers within the last 6 months and all of them chose me to work with partially based on my About Me page. The story went something like this with all of the couples: First, they were all 40+ years old. These are people who have bought and sold homes before and who understand the value of a REALTOR®.
They all found my website, registered to look at home listings and were on and off the site almost daily for about 2-3 months. When they had narrowed down the area they wanted to look in, they started jumping to other pages on my site such as the ones about schools and recreation.
One of the most interesting things these folks did was start learning about me. One of the ladies told me that she liked the section on my Meet Sam Chapman page entitled “Some Things Most People Don’t Know About Me.”
I added this personal trivia because I didn’t want people just looking at education, affiliations and the like. The first part of the page was a short bio, but the things most people don’t know about me made me more human to these people.
One of the buyers told me that she read that I was an Eagle Scout and that gave her a trust factor. Another family with kids read that I had been a substitute teacher and loved that. Another thought it was very cool that I had jumped out of a hot air balloon from 10,200 feet outside of Fairbanks, Alaska.
When an initial likeability and trust level was reached, the buyers called or emailed me. That started the relationship that they felt they already had even though we had never talked before. From there, two of the couples purchased within 30 days.
My point is simply that although most people will just look at the property search page, others, especially the more mature ones, will want detailed information. Some will even want to know who that agent is. So if you are an agent with a real estate website, get a little background on yourself out there for the people who want to know you.
A Note from Kathleen: Sam’s post reinforces a couple of my philosophies. First, I’ve always said that the goal of a real estate website is to get visitors to adopt it as their real estate research headquarters. That obviously happened with the visitors in Sam’s examples - they started with the home search, then came back for more over time.
I’ve also always encouraged agents to have an effective “about” page on their sites. You’re not there when your visitors start to wonder who you are. You need a marketing message that explains to visitors why they should work with you as opposed to another agent. Sam’s idea of the “things people don’t know about me” could be a great addition to your marketing message to get more personal with those visitors who want to know!
Using Images to Optimize Your Website
· CommentsThis guest post was written by Sam Chapman who markets Austin Real Estate
If you have a real estate website and want to attract buyers, you will probably have visitors from outside your area. I have attracted many buyers to my Austin Real Estate website and I have yet to sell a home to a local who found me on the internet. Most visitors are from outside of Austin and most of these are actually from outside Texas.
So one thing I have done in order for people understand Austin was to create several photo albums on my site. If you want to do this, take your own photos - respect intellectual property rights and never use anyone else’s photos without permission.
When you load photos, make sure to add appropriate alt image text. This is the text that shows up when you hover a mouse over a photo on a web page (if the alt text exists). Search engines can recognize that an image is on a web page, but can’t tell what it is. Alt text gives the search engines an idea of what the image is showing. The other important thing about alt image text is that it gets your keywords on the page.
Another thing you can do is upload photos to Flickr.com. When you upload a photo, create a good title using appropriate keywords. Write a good description using keywords and use appropriate tags. If you do this well, you can optimize the images to be found for your search terms. You can even point to a page on your website using html with the link embedded in appropriate anchor text.
The links from Flickr are nofollow now, but that’s not a problem. I doubt there would have been much link juice. However, if your images are good and get found, you may get clickthroughs to your site and that drives traffic. Click to see one of the Lake Travis photos I just posted. You will see the title, tag, description and embedded link back to my website. By the way, if you click on my Lake Travis Photos link, look around a while. The Lake Travis area doesn’t look anything like what people expect Texas to be like.
One thing I noticed is that if you use html to embed an address in anchor text, Flickr sometimes does something strange when you save the description. It replaces the http with a #. You need to go in and edit that and save again in order for the link to work. Otherwise, anyone clicking the link just stays on that photo on Flickr.
After your images have been on your website and Flickr for a while, some should be picked up by Google Images. The pages the images are on will show your web address, but it won’t be a live link. However, if someone clicks on an image, it sends the visitor to your website - more traffic.
So get out and take some photographs and get to work!
