I have spent a bit of time working on search engine optimization for our Agents Online REALTOR Lead Generation site and have done a fair bit of reading on the subject.  As it turns out, I was doing a bit of it right, but most of it wrong.  So, after an investment in knowledge, I have the following to share with you on the basics of SEO.  

1.  Your target keywords need to be in the title and metatags

2.  If you can get your primary keyword in the URL before the .com or .net, your rank will improve precipitously.

3.  Include your pimary keyword in your main heading <h1> tag

3.  Inculde your modifiers of your primary keyword in sugsequent heading tags <h2>.  As an example, in your primary heading, include the term Listing Leads as your primary search term.  In the secondary heading, modify the term to by Listing Leads for Real Estate Agents.

4.  Include your primary keyword in the body of the text, but not so much that it appears spammy. 

5.  For those keywords in the body, link those to subsequent pages that relate to the <h2> tags.  For example, link to a page with the term “listing-leads-for-realtors” and have that page discuss in detail the phrase.

6.  Use a dash or an underscore to depict a space between keywords.

Well, that is what I learned today about optimization.  I’ll put my new understanding to work in the optimization of Agents Online as well as our discount offer the REDX REALTOR success system and will see what happens.

Forrester research came up with a great pneumonic to use when creating an online marketing strategy using social media, and it is proving effective as we expand our offering of the redx listing lead generation service.  The approach is known as POST (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology) but what it really boils down to is be everywhere your target customers spend time and be able to provide them with an offer that matches their needs the second that they realize that a need exists.  

Now that sounds great, but a little esoteric, so what exactly does it mean? 

From the prospective of a small business marketer, the first thing you need to ask yourself is what online media are your target clients going to be using?  Older professionals use LinkedIn and email, the younger ones may be on Facebook and Twitter.  What user groups would they be part of?  How about the online social networks?  Is there an ActiveRain or Broker Agent Social for your target client?  Essentially, before you can market to your clients, you really need to understand where they spend their time. 

In addition to where, you need to know what.  More specifically, you need to know what are the needs of your target clients as they participate in these groups?  Not everybody needs a REALTOR 24 hours per day. However, statistics show that they will need a good REALTOR at least once in the next seven years. What needs are being met in your target client when they engage in the online activities of their preference?  

Now that you know where, and have a good handle on what, you need to work on tailoring your presence in each of these communities to closely match the needs of your targets.  If you are an active participant in fulfilling the needs of your prospect, the relationship and their eventual business will follow.  Fortunately, with automation, and carefully crafted profiles, periodic engagement should be sufficient to maintain an active presence in a community and reap the results.  Engage with those who need engaging and be available to those who don’t want to be engaged.  If a client in a community raises their hand, be there to call upon them and address their needs, provide service and get their business.

Still too esoteric?

- Jump on your facebook account and register for all of the goups that service young professionals in your community.

- Update your twitter profile to specifically describe your niche.  Connect on twitter with members of your facebook goups.

- Connect on LinkedIn with the HR departments of local large employers as well as relocation firms.  Use their connections to apply for membership into the groups that they participate in.

- If your city has a group social site, connect with it.  The same applies for any local sport groups, leagues and social groups.

- Set up notify.me so that when a prospect makes a comment about local real estate, you get notified so that you can reply.

- In each network and each communication use it to drive more connections back to you, your website, or a specific call to action.  

If done correctly your prospects will see you everywhere they turn and you will be top of mind when they need the services of a REALTOR.

I have learned that to be successful in marketing your real estate business online there are two basic rules.

1)  Claim as much real estate as possible. 

2)  Continually drive links to those online properties.

When the web started, it was enough to have one site and do a little search optimization or pay per view advertising and even through this is still how many REALTORs operate, this approach is no longer very useful.  Because of the sheer volume of sites, and the competitive nature of the medium, having just one website with no other presence is no longer enough.   In addition, the rules of market now require that you engage your prospects in an online conversation, let them own your personal brand, and lead your value proposition.  These new requirements from your online customers require a completely different approach, and more importantly, a much more pervasive online presence. For example, if you google my our group, 4MySales, about 3600 listings will come back.  Now 4MySales.com has been around a while so it has a number of backlinks, but if you look at the list on the first page of google, you will see that 4MySales has its own website, an independent blog, an active rain blog, a facebook page, a few squidoo and tumblr lenses, a number of social bookmarks, and many more related links. The point is simply that if you are marketing your real estate business online, not only do you need a primary site and a blog hosted on that site, but you need the multitude of associated social and free accounts as well.  Essentially, you need to put your brand everywhere your prospective clients hang out.  A more recent example of how this is applied can be seen on the Agents Online or Real Estate Country sites this I used to demonstrate the basic approach to SEO.

So without spending hundreds of hours online, how do you maximize your lead generation activities online?  The steps are not complicated, but simply require registering and linking to numerous sites.  If you are just a beginner to online marketing, I would recommend that you get started as follows:

1) Choose a set of target keywords and register your website and blog with these keywords in the URL

2) Create a blog in the home directory of your main site to support internal links and SEO.

3)  Create a related, but unique, blog on blogger and wordpress.

4) Install mybloglog on each of those blogs

5)  If you haven’t already, create your corporate facebook page, or tweak your Facebook page to relate to your brand.  Link your facebook page to your home page and blogs.  Do the same for MySpace.

6) Register for an account on ActiveRain, Broker Agent Social, LinkedIn, and WannaNetwork  Put links to your sites and blogs from each account.

7)  Register for a Twitter account and customize the look and feel of your twitter page.  Link your account to your home page.

8)  Go to squidoo.com and tumblr.com and make a few websites dedicated to your personal brand.  Link those sites to your blog and home page.

9)  Register for del.ici.ous,  stumbleupon, mrwong, newsvine, and many of the other online social networks and bookmark sites.

10)  Routinely update your blog and twitter account.  Use the available plugins to automatically post your updates to your bookmarking sites.

11)  Now that you have your basic web presence established, register for google adwords and Yahoo search advertising. 

Depending on your site and your target keywords, you should be expect aggregate web traffic of between 500 and 10,000 hits per day simply by setting up this system.  From there, track how customers find you and how they move through your sales funnel to become active leads.  This approach has been very successful in getting Real Estate Country to the to of Google, Agents Online to the top of the second page, and around 15,000 hits per day looking at our discount offer for online listing leads from RedX.

So here’s an experiment in lead generation. Go to http://monitter.com  and at the top of the page and choose to read posts within 50 miles of your city (type your city into the text box.)  Next, at the top of each column add the words: Bank Owned, Foreclosure, and Investment Property.  What this should do is populate the three columns with the most recent Twitter posts of people within 50 miles of you who have mentioned “bank owned” “Foreclosure” or “Investment Property’ in their twitter accounts over the past few hours.  Granted, many of the posts will be from competing REALTORs, but there may just be more than a few prospective clients in that list looking for the services of a good real estate agent.

I tried this on a national level this morning looking for posts on Listing Leads and new real estate website, to join the discussion about the new lead generation services offered through RedX and was truly amazed at the number of people talking about expireds.  Anyway, for a technology savvy real estate agent, periodically monitoring moniter for prospects may be a good use of time.

I have been working with Twitter quite a bit lately, and I thought I would list those that I have found most useful for real estate agents to attract leads.  These tools have been great in helping me promote both the discounts on the RedX listing lead service, and single property sites.

Here are the top ten Twitter Tools

EasyTweets:  Get notified if someone tweets you, your blog, or any brand you want to engage with

Twellow:  If you haven’t registered your Real Estate Twitter account on Twollow, it is time to do so.

Twollow:   Take some of the hassle out of searching for your prospects.  Twollow automatically follows your prospects based upon your target keywords

Notify.me:  Would’t you like to know the instant a prospect needs your services?  Notify.me lets you know by chat, SMS, or email when a prospect raises their hand.

TweetLater:  Would’t it be great if you had an autoresponder on your account, or could schedule your tweets in advance?  Oh yeah, you can….  VacaTweet can be uses for an autoresponder as well

BubbleTweet:  Add a personalized video to your twitter account.

http://bit.ly/1ACRBt

PeopleBrowser:  The only application that I have found where you can geo-target a keyword search

Twitter Karma:  To bulk follow or unfollow your followers

TweetLister:  Now you can post your full listings

TweetDeck:  Useful desktop management of your twitter followers

http://bit.ly/1ACRBt

I must say that I love the Twitter technology.  Thanks to Iranian elections, it has reached critical mass which means that most of your target clients are not on the network.  I routinely use the technology to offer discounts to the RedX service and to provide updates on dedicated the dedicated listing URL service, and know that for a REALTOR, it can be a very large source of leads.

So as an individual that is new to Twitter, how do you use it to get sales leads?  Well, the service provides a window into your client’s mind, and ancillary services give you instant notification when your client is thinking about real estate.  You can then connect with that prospect online to direct them toward your services.  It’s sort of like someone making the announcement in a crowded room that they are looking for a home, and you responding to them by saying, that’s great because I have one to sell.  So how do you get set up to use Twitter as a lead generation tool?  My recommendations would be as follows: 

1)  Register for a Twitter account, upload your picture, add your website, change the background, and make yourself at home.

2)  Register for notify.me which is a notification service that will let you know if someone adds a post that includes your search terms.

3)  Choose the methods by which notify.me will let you know when a search term comes up.  I use google chat for my desktop and the mobile text function for when I am out.

4)  Set the system to notify you when someone looks for a specific phrase that would be unique to your target clients.  You can also add filters to better limit the notifications that are not pertinent.  For example, use the search terms “moving to” “salt lake” and filter our terms that include words such as “planning rent.”  With that phrase, you will likely get tweets from people moving to salt lake, that are not planning to rent.  You can add multiple search phrases to keep track of and the notices simply popup on your desktop.

5)  When a notice is received, follow that person, reply to their tweet, and offer your services.  It is really that simple.

I spent some time over the weekend looking at the myriad of tools that you can use to drive your real estate business.  Obviously, the RedX is my favorite for listing leads, but there are a few others that look intriguing; especially in their use of multiple technology platforms to generate interest.  For quite a while, REALTORS have been using dedicated listing sites to showcase their listings.  Although these are fantastic marketing tools and a great closer for listing presentations, the previous versions of the technology have looked pretty bad.  

I think I found a tool this weekend that both looks professional, but also leverages some useful technologies, including SMS text, to showcase a property under its dedicated URL (usually the address of the home, i.e. 1388-my-street.com.)  The service is Single Property Sites and what they offer is dedicated website for every listing that you want to feature, along with a few widgets and tools to get traffic to those listings. 

Now the benefit of this service is not that you just get a dedicated URL.  Let’s face it, you could register the URL and create a dedicated listing site on your own.  The actual benefit is in the promotion tools and widgets that are included with the service.   In addition to a professional-looking, properly branded web site that features your listing, you also get a number of social tools including a google maps widget, a listing graphic widget for your blog and site and a few others.   The system also has a SMS interface so that prospects can property details on their phones, and finally, it includes an interface with Craigslist so that you can post your listing details, in different online ad sites.  Here is their URL, www.singlepropertysites.com  

I have been reading different posts on this and other real estate related sites for the past few years as I promote 4MySales and the RedX lead generation service. There has been a lot of discussion regarding the different blog technologies, but and a niche industry has grown up in helping real estate agents create their own custom blogs.  I have been working in this medium for a while, and while this may be old information for many of you, I did want to share the exact process to creating your own Real Estate Blog on your own URL, without the need to hire a consultant.  The blog platform that I will be describing is Wordpress, and it is quite user friendly to use.

With that as the background information, let’s begin.

1) Register for your URL.  Pick one that has contains your primary target keyword.

2) Register for a hosted account on a Linux platform.  Choose a host that has a cPanel interface, which is just a type of control panel.  I use resellerzoom’s budget hosting site.  It is six bucks per month and you can host multiple sites in one account.

3) On your hosting confirmation, there will be two DNS (Nameserver) addresses that look something like ns1-fannin.nswebhost.com.  These are the nameserver addresses that you need your URL to point to.  You can update your nameserver with your domain name registrar, either through their website, or by requesting help from the.

4) Now that you have a hosted account with a URL pointing to it, login to the cPanel account that was set up through your host.  One of the buttons on the cPanel control panel should be Fantastico or fantastico deluxe.  This is a tool that automatically installs blogs, forums or sites to your account.  Click it it, and off to the right site, click on Wordpress.  Fantastico will ask you for the name you wish to call your blog, the username and the password that you wish to use to access it.  Fill out the form and click install.  It is just that easy!

5)  Fantastic sets up your blog, so now you just need to login and start customizing.  Login to your new blog’s adim page, it is usually your blog directory / wp-admin.  From your login dashboard area, you can access all of the tools available to customize wordpress.    If you are new to Wordpress, my recommendation would be to first choose a theme.  Click Appearance area and choose themes.  There should only be two on your first install, but at the bottom of the page is a link to the theme directory.  Go down, click it and start looking for a theme that will best exemplify your brand.  You can also jump on Google or Bing and start searching for wordpless templates. 

Depending on where you find your template, you can add it one of two ways.  The first is through an automatic install if it is available.  The second is to download the template to your website.  Use an unzip utility to unzip it to a folder, then use an ftp client (I use filezilla) to upload the template to your website.  If you need to upload a template using this approach, save your unzipped template folder to the Themes folder which is a sub-folder of one of the three main folders.

6)  Once you have chosen and loaded your theme, go back to the Appearances/ Themes link and your new theme should show up. Click on it and in the top right corner there should be a link to make the theme active.

7)  Now that you have chosen your theme, you can add some plugins which add video, social tools, links, pictures, news feeds, and any other resource that you would ever want.  Go to the plugins tab.  At the bottom of the page are links to get more plugins.  Just like the theme, click on the link and go shopping.  Install the plugins using the same methods as you used to install the theme.  Either use the auto install if it is present, or if not, download the zipped file, unzip it and upload it to the subdirectory entitled Plugins.  There is a way to automatically unzip the files in your directory, but it is beyond the scope of this article.

8)  Once you have chosen and uploaded your plugins, activate them on the plugins page.  Most of the admin functions for these various plugins will be found under the Settings link.  Also, once you have activated your plugins, you can make them show up on your blog by clicking the Appearance link and clicking Widgets.  Adding them to your blog is simply a matter of choosing and saving them.

That’s about it.  Now all that you need to do is add pictures, update text and make your blog look pretty.  It is a very straightforward process if you are looking to host a blog on your own URL instead of relying on your Blogger or Wordpress.com account.

Every once in a while you have a referral client from another city or state that you need to give a presentation to.  In addition, creating evening meetings for prospects in your area are expensive and your return on investment is often questionable.  Well, we have all heard about GoToMeeting and Webex and they are great services if you have the money for fork out for an account, or if your broker has established an account for your office.  However, for those one-off presentations as well as those meetings where you will be presenting to a smaller group, DimDim may be a good alternative.  

A colleague sent me an invite to one of his webinars last week and used DimDim as the event host.  The event was seamless, but I was more interested in the free web conferencing service that DimDim provided.  In fact, I registered for an account and performed a practice listing attraction webinar using the service.  It is extremely user friendly, and you can use the service for free for up to 20 participants.  My recommendation is that it is a great free tool if you need to make a long distance presentation to a relocation client, or colleague.

We all know that Twitter is a useful tool because it provides visibility on prospective clients.  (I use it daily to promote our listing lead service.)  As an extension of the service, there is a mashup that may be useful to automatically connect with prospective clients.  The mashup is Twellow and it allows you to automatically follow a few key phrases on twitter, every time you make a post.  It may be an alternative to Easy Tweets. 

Try this experiment with me. 

    * Create a twitter account if you don’t already have one.  With that account, login to Twollow

     * Choose a free account and add the phrases to watch “looking for a realtor” , “ready to sell”, “home prices”, “comps”, or any other specific phrases that you know your target clients will use.

That’s it. Track who your twitter account automatically follows, and for those that appear interested in buying or selling a home in your area, send them a direct message.  As with EastTweets, the challenge is that this approach is not geo-targeted, but at least it automates one part of searching for leads.