Barrett's Blog

OMG, Search Marketing And Listing Leads

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:44:13 -0600

If you have kids, or are under the age of 20, you know what thae OMG acronym stands for. For those of us who remember learning how to type on Electrolux typewriters, it may be foreign. For me, I had to look it up.

Regardless, I had the same feeling when my friends over at the RedX (Real Estate Data Exchange) offered an additional 15% off the first three months of their already economical membership, along with continuing to waive the $149.00 start up fee. Essentially, that offer brings the daily cost of their service to below that of a bottle of water. Not too bad.

If you are interested, here is the URL that they gave me, or you can use promotion code 14610 if you are signing up over the phone. http://www.theredx.com/signup/4mysalespromo.html

Anyway, that’s not really the reason that I am posting today. I really wanted to share what I have learned over the past little while on the topic of search engine optimization and getting the internet to really work for you to warm up leads and get them closed.

What I have learned is that online, if your goal is to get traffic and convert that traffic to listings, there are two features of the online world that you need to be aware of and balance. These are breadth and depth and what I mean by these terms is as follows:

The bigger your web presence, the better your chances of target clients finding and landing on your website. Those real estate agents that have depth to their site, or a lot of optimized pages with good content that can easily be found by searching terms that target clients commonly use; and those agents that have depth; i.e. a lot of different micro-sites dedicated to specific search terms have the greatest chance of attracting web traffic from targeted clients and closing more sales.

If you think of the web as a literal highway, then the more billboards you have up as people cruise by, the better your chances of getting their attention and making them a client. Unfortunately, web advertising is expensive and in many cases too broad to meet the needs of your average REALTOR. Search engine optimization however, is not nearly as expensive, and if done right, will give you a much more significant return on investment.

How this is done is simply by choosing the list of terms that your ideal client typically uses when searching for a home online. Then create three dedicated pages on your website for each specific term. Because the search engines place a high priority on sites that include the search term in the URL, you may want to consider creating micro-sites that have your targeted phrase in the web address. (A micro-site is simply a small website designed to drive a specific action from the visitors.) After you have created your search term-dedicated pages, or micro-sites, simply get links back to those pages from as many sources as possible. Publishing articles is a great way to do this effectively.

Over time, add more content to improve the depth of your site as well as to expand the body of terms that attract search engine traffic. Monitor your web traffic, and if a specific term seems to attract viewers, post more content targeting that keyword to improve your depth and traffic from that term.

The process may be a fair amount of work when you get started, but after you have established your site or sites, you can just sit back and let the leads roll in.

Attracting Online Real Estate Leads

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:14:52 -0500

If you are blogging to attract real estate leads, which many of us are, you know the value of having your content found on the internet. I have been working for some time to get the word out about the Real Estate Lead Generation Software provided through RedX and have learned a great deal about search engine optimization in the process. What I have learned is that if you want to successfully drive leads to your blog, the actual post is only the first step. The steps following your post will truly determine your level of success in attracting traffic and subsequent real estate leads to your blog.

Steps To Attract Real Estate Leads Through Your Blog

Let’s face it. Any time you spend creating a blog is an investment in marketing. However, your return on investment is determined primarily through how many people read your blog and visit your site. Fundamentally, the best way to get your blog read is if it shows up on a search engine. Therefore, getting a high ranking for a given search term is imperative. So what are the steps necessary to search engine optimize your blog post?

Before you even begin writing your post, you should determine what keyword phrase you are targeting. If you have a topic in mind, spend a few minutes on google to see how competitive the phrase you are focusing on will be. To see the level of competition, look next to the search box for the search results information. For example, the competitive information for the term “attract real estate leads” is “Results 1 - 10 of about 4,230,000 for attract real estate leads. (0.55 seconds)” Because this article is competing with over four million other entries, it is unlikely to rank high on the search term “attract real estate leads.” Therefore, optimizing it for that term may be relatively futile and I should probably optimize this post to a less competitive phrase such as “listing leads for realtors”, or even “GRAR” which only has one million competitors.

After you have chosen your search phrase, write your post to include that phrase one to three percent of the time. Be sure to include the phrase as part of your header tags <h1> as well as your subhead <h2>. Back to our example, the phrase Attract Real Estate Leads is in the <h2> tag of this article.

Now Start Your Real Estate Search Engine Optimization

Here is what I do to promote these posts as well as the RedX discount page.

* Ping your entry using a pinging tool to multiple sites. I use pingler.com

* Use an article rewriting tool to create multiple unique versions of your article. Unique versions are needed so that each syndicated site that posts your article is counted as a unique back link to your real estate blog. I now use Magic Article Rewriter as my tool of choice.

* Submit your unique article to as many article directories as possible. I use two tools concurrently for this. The first is UniqueArticleWizard, the second is Magic Article Submitter. Both tools allow you to syndicate your article across the web over time which gradually increases your links and your search engine rank. Their actual sales pages are pretty cheezy, but the tools work great.

* Bookmark the post to StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicous, and the rest of the bookmarking sites. If you are using a Wordpress, Orlywire has an interesting tool that allows you to automatically bookmark your post to your accounts.

* If you haven’t submitted your RSS feed to the multiple feed readers, then now is the time to do so.

* Update the post on your facebook, MySpace, ActiveRain and Broker Agent Social pages.

All of the above sounds like a lot of work, and it does take about an hour to complete all of the steps. However, where you may attract one or two real estate leads from the post alone, you can now expects a few hundred more people to find you from your search engine optimization activities.

Easy SEO Tools For Your Real Estate Website

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:02:30 -0500

This is an update to my previous post where I described my experiment where I used the automatic article directory submission system, Unique Article Wizard to make a single article unique and to submit it to over 600 directories.

If you read the previous post, what I had done as part of the experiment is to take the actual post and write two additional versions with similar syntax so that the Unique Article Wizard system would be able to randomize the paragraphs to make each article unique. I then submitted my three articles to the Unique Article Wizard system and measured the backlinks to our site that offers the discount on RedX REALTOR leads page. Because I used a pen name as part of the experiment, I included the unique word xyssion in the post so that it could be easily searched. As in the previous post, xyssion did not have any data associated with it on google when I published the first article.

Okay with that background, here are the results of the experiment. Within four days of publishing the article the term xyssion returned 16 entries on google that backlinked to our Agents Online and Lockbox websites. As of today, a search for the term on google returned 87 entries (60 on bing), all of which are links provided back from syndication of that one article. The actual number of links is much greater, but these are the sites that have been actively indexed and rank at an acceptable level.

From an SEO standpoint, the article and subsequent publication of it took about two hours. Eighty-seven active backlinks from two hours worth of work sure beats the thirty hours I spent submitting MLSNI.com to various directories to get fifty active links, so I think this experiment can be classified as a success. Now I’m looking for a tool to speed up that manual process of directory submission. I’ll let you know if I find a good one.

A Couple of Useful SEO Tools

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 01:08:36 -0500

I have been doing a bit of article marketing lately to promote the RedX FSBO and Real Estate Lead service and have found two very effective tools to attract numerous backlinks without a lot of work. The first tool takes your article, walks you through a process to create multiple unique versions of each paragraph, the automatically submits a hundreds of unique versions to over six hundred directories. The service is the Unique Article Wizard, and I found it by reading about various backlink shortcuts on a few different internet marketing forums.

The service came highly rated, and I have been using it for a short time. So far I have published two articles with the identifier “randy xyllion” and one containing the word “xyssion.” In the past two days, I have 106 indexed links from google for the xyllion articles and 16 links from bing back to the xyssion. Overall, not bad for drafting three articles about internet marketing and sending them out to the world.

The other tool that I have recently had success with in building backlinks to increase the search engine position of my agents online website is a service called the LinkJuicer. Okay, not a great name, but an interesting service. If you recall how a link circle used to work with multiple participants sharing links back to other member’s websites, this service will be very familiar. Essentially, the LinkJuicer is the social network equivalent of a link circle. The beauty of the service however is that backlinks to your site grow slowly and naturally over time as the system places your link into the social accounts of other participants and places links to their site from yours. Because the system limits the addition of only three sites per day and includes fifteen of the popular online social networks, your backlinks grow slowly and reliable which the search engines just love.

Advanced SEO - Rapid Article Marketing

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:31:17 -0500

If you have spent time learning about improving your search ranking for your real estate website you know that there are three main drivers that will get your site to the top of Google. The first is a website with a URL that contains your target keyword. The second is a site that is optimized for your target search phrase. Third, and this is the most challenging, is high authority backlines to your website from multiple sources. Regardless of whether you are selling lockboxes, or single family real estate from mlsni, your website needs one way backlinks in order to rank well on the granddad of all search engines.

For this article, I would like to focus on how you accomplish obtaining numerous backlinks to your site, and share some tools that may make the effort a bit faster. For those of us that like to write, drafting articles and submitting them to various directories is a good way to get links back to your website that have a decent level of authority. The challenge however is that submitting your article to more than a handful of websites is time prohibitive, and if your article is the same across the board, duplication penalties may actually count against you in the search ranking. With these limitations in mind, you are stuck either completely re-writing your article multiple times and spending countless hours submitting your site, or you may choose to hire a staffer to continually re-write and submit your site. Unfortunately, neither option is very good.

Up until recently, this was actually the approach I would take. I would draft and article and post is on numerous blogs, and even spend time rewriting the paragraphs. Although cumbersome, it did succeed in attracting backlinks.

More recently however, I have been using a service entitled Unique Article Wizard and I have found that it is a much more effective method of using articles that you write to attract multiple backlinks across the internet. Essentially, the service allows you to take your article, selectively change the text in each paragraph into three versions, while still maintaining the same context and syntax, through a step by step process, then submit the article. The unique article wizard service then mixes and matches the versions of each paragraph to create multiple unique articles. Finally, the service submits your article to six hundred different article directories and blog feeds which results in hundreds of backlinks to your site from an article that you created.

As I mentioned previously, I have just recently started using this tool, but have found it very effective. For example, I plan to use the service with this very article. To track the extent of distribution, I have chosen a unique and searchable word as an identifier. The word xyssion will be used to track where my different versions of this article pop up. The word is unique, so in a few days, search the term xyssion and see how many entries track back to real estate and article marketing.

As I mentioned previously, I have had a lot of success using article marketing to build backlinks to my discounted offer for the RedX expired listing and FSBO lead system, and this new tool has put the visibility of that website into overdrive. Try out Unique Article Wizard and let me know how it works out.

Doing a little more SEO

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 01:32:09 -0500

If you have read my previous posts you know that I have been conducting a few real time experiments in SEO to see if I could target a few specific real estate related keywords that promote the REDX listing lead program and get them to the first page of google. My previous experiments with for the terms Agents Online and Real Estate Country. By using a linking strategy the sites were able to reach number two ranking on google for the corresponding search term. Unfortunately, both sites ended up getting hacked, and as a result their listing on the first page fell down a bit.

I did however learn a lot in conducting this SEO experiment, and I think it is time to start another real time experiment to see how quickly I can get two additional keywords to the top of google. I have purchased three URL's that have to do with specific aspects of the real estate industy. Specifically, I am focusing on our favorite tehcnology, and one of my favorite market intelligence tools, the lockbox. Lockbox.me and Supraekey.org are the sites and I am trying to see how quickly I can get those two sites onto the first page of google for the terms lockbox and supra ekey.

I can tell you right now that the supra ekey site will get to the top much faster than the lockbox site; at least that is what I expect.

So what is next for Lockbox and Ekey?

I have loaded a pretty basic web page for the lockbox site. Because this is an experiment, and does not directly impact the other traning programs that I am doing for various brokers and real estate agents the site is currently just garbage. When I have time to load the supra ekey site, I expect it will be very similar. However because they have a keyword specific URL they may start moving up in the ranking regardless of the content.

Stay tuned...

Additional SEO Strategies

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 19:04:41 -0500

I have been using two SEO strategies to promote our REDX lead program and both seem to be paying off. My AgentsOnline site, which if you remember was part of the real time experiment to get to the first page of google is now the third listing on the first page of google for that term. The same situation applies for Real Estate Country which was our original SEO experiment. So what have I been doing and how did those sites end up on page one of google for the given terms?

Well, aside from including the keyword in the URL which gets you a lot of attention, I have been working with a few wordpress blogs and using linking silos to create little hubs of keyword pages that are linked around a specific keyword. I recently attended an SEO webinar, and they emphasized the point that google, likes directories and sub directories that are linked together using a common key phrase. To provide an example, take my wife’s prenatal vitamin site. There is a sub-page of the site that optimized to the phrase While Pregnant. On that page in the text you will find a link to the while prengnant blog entry. From that entry, you will find links to other entries optimized to variations of the target keyword such as drinking while pregnant, flying while pregnant, exercising while pregnant, etc. From a directory view, you end up with spiders following directory links named after the key phrase to multiple files in a sub-directory also optimized to that key phrase. Essentially, you have a little SEO hub optimized to a single search word. In this instance, it is While Pregnant.

Anyway, that is the hierarchy that I am currently experimenting with in my SEO endeavors. I am also adding headline tags in my blog entries, these are the <h2> html tags that denote a headline, with target keywords in those headlines. So far these activities seem to be paying off as our traffic on the site has jumped about 34% and we are three days into this experiment. Of course the while pregnant landing page is already on page one of google, but that just shows how important a good URL can be.

Real Estate Website SEO

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:32:15 -0500

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.

A New Approach To Social Marketing

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:00:58 -0500

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.

A Cohesive Online Web Presence – Managing SEO. Social, Video, PPC and PPA

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:23:26 -0500

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.

Struck Lead Generation Gold This Morning

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:07:02 -0500

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.

Top Ten Twitter Tools for Real Estate Agents

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 02:16:11 -0500

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

Immediately Connect With Prospects

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:14:01 -0500

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.

A lot more than a dedicated URL for your listings

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:03:58 -0500

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

Make Your Own Custom Real Estate Blog

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:34:23 -0500

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.

A Cool New Free Web Conferencing Tool

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:04:42 -0500

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.

Can You Use Twollow To Follow and Attract Prospects?

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:02:03 -0500

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.

Are you using Twitter to get real time sales leads?

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:43:33 -0500

I was looking at this approach to promote our discount offer for the RedX listing lead system, but it’s possibilities are so much greater. The advantage of Twitter for real estate and mortgage professionals is that prospective clients post their needs online all day long. Thanks to this fantastic new technology, you get instant visibility to a prospective client’s needs, the second that he mentions them. It is then just a matter of making contact, offering your services, and working the relationship.

So how would you use this new technology to attract listing or selling clients? Well, getting a new lead is a simple as using one of the many available Twitter mashups that notify you when someone posts a target keyphrase. Combine that with a basic geo-targeted mashup and you have a system that will tell you when someone in your area posts text that could be considered a lead.

In writing that paragraph, it sounds a bit more complicated then it really is. Therefore, I’ll use an example. Suppose you are an agent that specializes in short sales or foreclosure. You would set up a notification service like Easy Tweets to notify you when someone posts the terms “short sale” “list of foreclosures” “home shopping” “looking at neighborhoods” “bidding on foreclosure” “looking for realtor” etc. When any twitter user posts these terms, you will get notified. The next step is to simply Follow these prospects in your own Twitter account and use a geo-targeting twitter mashup (there are a number of them out there) to determine if the poster is local to you. For those posters that are in your vicinity, simply reply by direct message to their post and courting them as an active prospect.

I have been looking for a geo-targeted system that combines the easy tweet notification system with geo targeting so that you only get notified about people in your area. However, I have yet to find that service. Because of that, you may need to sift through potential leads from across the US. If you do know of a system that combines the geo targeting with the keyword notification, let us all know.

Your Instant Mobile Real Estate Sales Lead Generator... Twitter

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 18:37:14 -0500

I have been spending time on twitter learning about its ins and outs and using the site to promote the RedX lising lead, fsbo and web marketing service, with some success. In my learning about the tool and how it is used to promote your business, it occurred to me that Twitter may be the best lead generation tool in existence for REALTORS. Where else can you get a real time notice from a total stranger that they are looking for a home?

Imaging being at an open house and getting a tweet from a someone that you don’t know or follow that is driving around six or seven miles away. The post in your phone reads “shopping for houses today, doing drive by’s.” Simply by texting them back you can respond and ask them if they need any help, if they would like to stop by and check out your open house, or any number of other appropriate responses.

So what tools are available to get real time notification that a person in your area is looking for a house? In my original search, I couldn’t find an application that would perform these activities. In fact, I was legitimately planning to create the application myself. However, I did find one application that may do exactly what I was suggesting. The wild card in the tool is geo-targeting which I am not sure it does.

The Twitter Application is called EasyTweets. What it does is continually monitor Twitter for a specific keyword and immediately sends you an SMS message with a copy of the text. From there, you can respond to the person that posted the tweet by SMS or through your standard Twitter activities.

Here is the link to EasyTweets. My recommendation would be to set up your account and be very targeted using phrases you know your target clients will use. Every a fresh lead comes in, respond immediately and get the dialog going

Real Time Update, Google Keyword SEO

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 18:17:54 -0500

I have been posting my progress and the actual process of getting my website to the top of google for a given search term. The examples that I was using was “real estate country” and “agents online.”

Well, to bring you up to speed, I registered the URL’s, optimized the sites for the given keyword, got about 50 backlinks to the site from commenting on blogs and posting squidoo and tumblr pages. I gave up on real estate country a few weeks ago because it was not moving. However, I forgot the one variable that you can’t skirt with the search engines; the age of the site.

It is important for google and even more important for bing. Anyway, I think the lesson is complete. When you search “real estate country” on google (no quotes) the realestatecountry.net listing lead for REALTORs site is the second entry returned. If you search for “agents online” in quotes, the agentonline.org fsbo lead for REALTORS site is the third entry; it is number eleven if you don’t use quotes.

So what is the moral to this process? To get your site to the top of the search engines for a given, non-competitive keyword,

Optimize your site for that given term, or create a microsite that is optimized

Use squidoo, blogger, blog comments, and tumblr to get a fair number of backlinks

And that’s it. As long as the sites on the first page of google for your target term don’t have an overwhelming number of backlinks, your site will gradually percolate up to the top. For some of my sites it took five days, for others it has taken two months. Regardless, the traffic that you get from the premium position is worth the investment in time.

Adding Twitter and Facebook Links to Your Online and Email Marketing

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:18:37 -0500

I received an email this morning from a company that teaches best practices in marketing. The offer was your standard lead generation tool offering a complimentary e-book download in exchange for an email registration. I have been using a similar method to promote our discount offer on the listing lead and FSBO lead service. There was nothing exciting about the offer, but what was interesting was the use of Twitter and social marketing tools to expand the reach of the offer. Just under the call to action and download button were the following phrases with associated graphics and links:

(I have changed the original links to those of the RedX for demonstration purposes. Try them to see how they interact with each social site. I hope to share how to create each of these links in futue posts.)

Have a Twitter Account? Tweet about this download!

Follow Barrett On Twitter @Leads4Realtors

Follow (company name) On Twitter @(company name)

Read Barrett’s Blog

Share on Facebook

The value in including these types of links into any of your real estate agent online marketing campaigns is obvious. It allows the recipients not only to spread your message, but also create a closer relationship to you. The tweet about this download link actually has a script that inputs the text directly into your twitter text box so you just need to click update after logging in. Overall, this is a nice, unobtrusive way to expand the reach of your word of mouth marketing programs and generate a few more leads.

Don’t Forget to Optimize Your Real Estate Blog

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 13:39:09 -0500

If you are using a Wordpress blog, there are a number of steps that you can take to better optimize it for search engines. In fact, for those of you who host your own real estate blog using the wordpress scripts, these optimization steps can be very easy and yield great results. For those of you who are familiar with these techniques, I apologize for re-presenting the basics, but I have found that many real estate bloggers have not taken these step in their own blogs. With that in mind, here is and introduction wordpress blog SEO 101.

Step 1. Under your settings / permalinks tab, be sure to change the URL structure to “custom structure” and include only the string /%postname%/ in the text box. This essentially makes the extended URL of your post the title of the post. If you include keywords in your posts, they end up in the actual URL. For example, in posting on the topic of prenatal vitamin (my wife’s blog) and using the post title Prenatal Vitamins, the blog URL becomes http://www.bloomennutrition.org/prenatal-vitamins which is about as keyword targeted as you can get with sub-directories.

Step 2. Under your settings / general tab, update the Blog address and Wordpress Address URL to include the www as opposed to the straight http://webaddress.com

Step 3. Find the wordpress AutoSocialPoster plugin. This tool allows you to automatically post a link to your new blog entries to many of your online bookmaking accounts. The plugin is not free, but is well worth the money. However, please be sure to check that it is compatible with the version of Wordpress that you are using.

Step 4. For the next step, increase the number of sites that announce / ping your new entries when you add a new post. Go to the settings / writing tab. At the bottom there is a text box with the URL http://rpc.pingomatic.com/. In this area add any other pinging services that you can find. A good list, and a great pinging tool, can be found at pingler.com.

Hopefully for those of you who are actively blogging, this post provides a little help. Separately, to provide an update on our Agents Online lead system for realtors project, the site pops up as number eleven on Google for the Agents Online term and number four for the same term in quotations. The real time SEO demonstration is progressing.

SEO for Bing, The Jury is Still Out

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 23:21:37 -0500

I haven’t quite formed my opinion about Microsoft’s new release of their Bing search engine. In reading the reviews, I am not alone. I have spent a little time this afternoon trying to get a feel for what where my real estate listing lead site and associated links lay in the ranking. What I found is that this “because it’s not google” search alternative has a completely different algorithm which will likely require a completely different SEO strategy for your real estate website.

I am not sure if this new search engine will give google a run for its money in search engine terms. As Seth Godin put it, “Bing is trying to be the new Google. Unfortunately Google is the new Google.” However, it does have some interesting features.

Now for those of us who are trying to get our real estate website to the top of the ranking, optimizing for bing may require a different strategy. In fact, in looking up the search terms that index my site well on google, I there is little success on bing. The Expired Listing Lead term did return back my link to the RedX as the top link, but the multitude of other sites that typically show up in reference to me did not. For my Agent Online experiment, the site was not even indexed, and similar to google, real estate country did not return a link to my page, even when I typed in the exact URL. Even my wife’s’ “prenatal vitamins” page did not get indexed.

From what I can determine with the very limited experience that I have had with the site, it uses an algorithm similar to google’s but puts a high weight on sites that have been around a while along with those that are well linked. Unfortunately from an SEO standpoint there is not much that you can do to age your real estate URL.

New Tools for Better Online Visibility

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Sat, 30 May 2009 14:31:28 -0500

To give an update on our SEO experiment, our AgentsOnline site which links to the discount page for the RedX lead generation system is now number eleven on the google search for the agents online term. Three weeks into the project and we are making progress. Real Estate Country is still lagging behind.

In my search for backlinks to improve the rank of the site, I ran accross a new tool, and an old friend (well, actually I am just a fan.) Anyway, for the new tool, I found the site tumblr.com If you are not familiar with it, it is a blog creation site, very similar to sqidoo that has a very high Alexa ranking for any page that you create. Establishing a blog is very simple, as is entering in your RSS feed from your active rain blog. Essentially, it is a great tool to create some additional visibility and good backlinks to your website. Yes, I know it is yet another blog that you need to maintain, but this is all a part of online marketing.

Oh, for the old friend..... I used to read Mary McKnight's blogs religiously. She has some great insights on the fundamentals of online marketing and has a particularly high level of competence in the field of real estate. Anyway, her and her friends can now be found at Sacrilicious Marketing. I know many of you are familiar with Mary and may already be aware of this site, but for me, it was great to get access to her as a resource once again.

Getting Your Site to the Top of Google –Real Time Update

Barrett Niehus (4MySales and Expired Listing Leads) — Thu, 28 May 2009 17:02:10 -0500

To report on the progress of the experiment to demonstrate how to get your website for a given search term, in this instance “agents online” to show up within the first ten listings of Google, we have now achieved position number seventeen for the organic search. This has been about ten hours worth of work.

If you are using these techniques to get a high ranking for your own real estate agent website just think of the number of prospective listings / buyers will end up landing on your website. In addition, you end up with a premium ranking and don’t need to make such a heavy investment in pay per click.

So just to recap the process, again,

1) Use google keywords tool to find a target keyword. High number of searches returning low page rank results. If you are targeting a specific service, REO’s, Short Sales, etc, you can get very targeted.

2) Register a URL using that search term. Our example for this experiment is AgentsOnline.org

3) Optimize your website or landing page to support that keyword and format the site for collection of your prospect’s contact information. For our example I created a thee page site feeding into the Listing and FSBO lead service from RedX.

4) Start getting backlinks to the URL that you have created. I add links from my blogs and created a couple of Squidoo lenses. I also comment often on the real estate blogs that I read and include the URL.

Just to summarize, that is the process. Pretty simple and if you do it three or four times, you can maximize your visibility on google which essentially automates the search engine optimization for your real estate website.