Ok, so you are out shopping for insurance for that nice shiny new Ferrari you just bought yourself off that sweet deal from last month (ok... this is a dramatization) and you want to make sure that your investment is in the right hands. You have a choice of two insurance agents in town (it's a small town...What can I say?)
Insurance agent A: You walk in the office and almost scare the poor guy out of the nap he was taking. He moves his feet off the desk, shuffles papers around and sets to writing an insurance proposal. You notice, while he's fumbling with numbers, that his favorite pair of college tennis shoes is peering out from under the front of his desk adorned by frayed fragments of his dirty jeans and it seems that the last time his team baseball shirt saw a washer machine; he was walking past it at the home depot. As he finishes the insurance proposal, he knocks over what's left of his morning coffee, wipes the stains off the document with his hand, wipes his hand on his pants and then gives you the documents for your review. He then excuses himself, muttering something unintelligible as he walks out of the office and says he will be right back.
Insurance agent B: You start to walk into his office and are immediately greeted by a clean cut gentleman wearing a crisp white shirt, blue tie and black Dockers. His black dress shoes look like he spends the majority of his day obsessed with shining them, but from the looks of the neatly hung pictures of current clients & testimonials, you are quite sure he spends his days dedicated to his clients. He invites you to take a seat, asks you a few questions and quickly prints out a professionally prepared document. He then asks you if you would like something to drink and offers to go over your options with you.
Now... take a quick look at your profile picture and see what first impression you are giving to potential clients that are reading your blogs. Are you agent A or B? Does it look like you were fumbling with your phone when the flash suddenly went off? Kids did a drive-by ‘shooting' while you were working in the yard? (Camera shooting that is) You set the camera to delay on the kitchen table and missed the top of your head?
I have actually seen all of the pics that I mention above on profiles here in active rain, and wondered... what are they thinking? Isn't the purpose of a blog to attract more clients? Who in their right mind would entrust their biggest investment to agent A? ... I mean do you really want to project the image of agent A to potential leads?
In this economy of intense competition, it is easy to get stressed out at the thought of learning new techniques to getting real estate listings and virtual tours out in the public eye. But, there is no need to completely abandon traditional marketing strategies. The best advertising and marketing strategy is to diversify your marketing to reach a larger target audience. In order to do this properly, you must use all available means of marketing to draw potential buyers and sellers to one central place; most favorably, your website.
DIVERSIFY: The efforts of the agent or broker can seem like a monumental chore to undertake, but the benefits far outweigh the effort required in the long run. By diversifying your marketing efforts and funneling leads you can ensure that you are not left without steady business. Using a combination of traditional as well as modern advertising and marketing efforts can pay off for the savvy real estate agent.
LOCAL MEDIA: Many agents who use virtual tours also take out ads in the local paper and include the URL to the virtual tour web site. By using traditional media in the local real estate market area, the realtor can drive targeted traffic to the virtual tour web site, which will feature a variety of homes to choose from as well as virtual tours of the properties. Outlets such as news papers, magazines, local trade publications and free discount magazines are excellent methods of advertising the agent's active virtual tour web site to the world. Once visitors arrive at the agent's site, they can choose from various types of homes and locations to view online and view an interactive virtual tour.
MAKE IT EASY TO REACH YOU: Be sure to include SEVERAL means of contact, regardless of advertising medium. After looking at the virtual tour some users might opt to call the realtor directly for a personal showing. So be sure to leave your phone number in an easily accessible and prominent area on your online AND print media advertisement.
DISTRIBUTE FLYERS: Print-out fliers and brochures that advertise your single property website, your business and the online virtual tour. These fliers and signs can be printed and distributed locally.
USE UNIQUE ATTENTION GETTING MARKETING: Using unique marketing tools such as RTV's PanoRider(tm), emailable HitStats(tm), or even just using a professional photographer service for those dramatic night-time shots can help you stand apart from the crowd. Using these marketing tools not only makes your properties stand apart from the rest, but also says incredible things about your marketing strategy to prospective sellers.
TV and RADIO: The local effort to drive traffic to the realtor's site should include any manner of traditional advertising the realtor can afford to incorporate into his or her ongoing advertising and marketing strategy, even radio and television if the prospective URL isn't too difficult to remember.
OPTIMIZE, OPTIMIZE, OPTIMIZE: Once the virtual tour and the supporting web presence have been established and advertised locally, it is important to concentrate on web site marketing and optimization online. Optimizing your website, your blog and even your virtual tours maximizes your overall traffic and potential leads by allowing search engines to properly index your website and listings. RTV offers free SEO, Blogging, Social Networking, Social Back Linking training by way of our Social Ignition Course too all providers of our technology.
SOCIAL NETWORK: Getting the word out about your website and your virtual tours may seem like a daunting task, but if taken step-by-step, will prove to be quite easy. The trick is to get your network set-up and to get yourself into a routine that is easy for you.
Need help setting up your social network? Check out our 12 week workshop as announced in our last RTV Newsletter. Simply log into your TMS and click on the Social Ignition Course to sign up. Free to ALL RTV providers. A Sure-Fire Way to Beat the Economy!
Are you ready to completely dominate the search engines? Would you like to be the #1 ranking virtual tour company or real estate site in your market? If you answered yes to either of those questions then you are ready for the all NEW RTV SOCIAL IGNITION SYSTEM! We have been very busy testing this system out over the past twelve weeks with BlueLaVaMedia and we are now officially ready to release it to any Full Service or In House provider of RTV technology!
Over the last year while Jim Blue has been in and out of several hundred homes here in Northern Michigan, I have been busy working on something truly unique, that is so powerful, and yet incredibly easy to learn. In fact, every time I show someone what I am about to show you they always wonder why they have not been doing it all along.
I must admit that I used to plug my ears anytime someone mentioned Digg, Delicious, Furl, Facebook, Technorati, Backflip, or Twitter to me. But that was before I realized the sheer potential for literally ANYONE...in ANY business...anywhere in the World to maximize their online exposure. So yes, this does mean YOU!
Like you, I used to hear these new buzz phrases and ignore them.
I used to see little symbols like popping up all over the web and, yes, I simply looked the other way. Do you remember when email was the same way? Back when you could still run your business without a website? Times are quickly changing and once again you need to do the same.
Don't worry because once you learn a few of the basics this will be just as easy for you to do as it is to send an email. I promise! If you would like to find out how you can start to leverage the power of social networking and bookmarking I highly encourage you log into your virtual tour manager RIGHT NOW and sign up per the instructions of our July Newsletter. The course is a 12 week course that you will be able to take from the comfort of your home via the web.
The only thing that our program will require of you is a bit of your time and willingness to make some small changes in the way your conduct business online.
Are you ready for Social Ignition?
Sign up now by logging into your virtual tour management system and find the instructions in our latest E-Newsletter! Once you sign up for our free social networking, blogging, SEO, and back link building course you will receive one email every week for the next 12 weeks. This FREE course is open to all RTV dealers!
Why pay for training like this when RTV gives it to your for FREE
If you're an Inner Circle member you can log into our marketing center and download ALL 12 weeks right away and won't have to wait for them. Why would you want all 12 weeks at once? Because you can do just what Jim and Jason over at BlueLaVaMedia did and that's build an opt in email list incredibly fast! Simply let your current prospects and customers know that you now offer a free course that will teach them how to better use social media sites, build up back links to their site, and teach them the basics of blogging. This is working so well that the Traverse Area Association of Realtors has even asked team BlueLaVa to speak in August to a group of agents on the basics of the course.
Not using aweber yet? Well sign up now at http://www.aweber.com and you can drop our ready to go course in and setup a form on your site! This is a tested and very easy weekly course jam packed with SEO tips, social networking tips, and blogging tips. What a great way to be more than just a virtual tour provider or just an average real estate professional in your local market.
Either way know this: You will NEVER have to pay for this material because we have it all right here for you for FREE! To sign up now join the RTV network or if you are an existing provider of our technology simply login and read our latest newsletter for detailed instructions.
Watch this video below and see Social Ignition first hand:
Business card sized CD's have been around since the late 90's, but just recently they have become a tremendously popular marketing tool for several RTV virtual tour companies. Business card CDs make great promotional tools for trade shows and especially as hand outs for sales and marketing use. These miniature sized CD's hold many advantages over traditional virtual tour marketing tools such as paper business cards, printed brochures and flyers, standard CD's and even DVD's.
Brochures and catalogs are common marketing tools because they are immediate. You can quickly get information about a company's products and services by browsing the printed material. However, because they are so common, those brochures and catalogs sometimes get tossed in the trash with little more than a quick visual browsing. The business card CD is still a novelty of sorts, and therefore attracts more attention and interest. The smaller size makes them easy to carry, hand out, and store as virtual tour marketing tools. The novelty of their size and their visual appeal gives them an advantage over printed material.
The RTV Inner Circle Marketing team is making it easy for you to implement business card CD's as a sales tool for your virtual tour business and for increasing the listing exposure for listings by creating several marketing CD templates. These template projects were created with a program called AutoRun Max Business 2.0 and can be downloaded in the Presentation Section of Inner Circle Marketing. The CD templates contain a wide variety of Inner Circle materials including interactive virtual tour samples, automated slide show presentations, music, and PDF brochures/info packs.
Inner-Circle members can download and customize these amazing presentation templates starting TODAY!
The days of Googling your keywords to measure the effectiveness of your SEO strategy are coming to an end. According to Bruce Clay of PubCon, there are big changes in ranking. In the name of Top Shelp Organic SEO, Google is tuning into the specific behaviors of individual users to serve up more customized results.
What this means to the end-user is better results and less spam.
What does this mean to SEO professionals?
Well, for the good ones it means more business. For those that have been concentrating on ranking without any reference to traffic, bounce rates and conversions it means a serious reality check.
At the end of the day, this is a change for the better. More individualized search results means higher conversion rates for companies that have a well built website. This does not mean that SEO is no longer important; it actually makes it more important! Tracking your marketing efforts will definitely require more diligence.
Q: What should you do?
A: Nothing that you should not have already been doing.
The most important part of a website is the ends result; attracting more leads and increasing business. To get there you have to attract website visitors, keep them interested in your website long enough to stay past the first page and finally get them to convert. By convert, I mean to get them to perform a specific action like sign up for a newsletter or request additional information. Conversions vary by website. A conversion for you may be a request for information about one of your listings while a conversion for amazon.com could be the sale of a bestselling novel.
I, for one, think this is a great lead by Google. It forces website owners and SEO professionals to take a closer look of what traffic is actually DOING when it gets to your website. It puts the emphasis on website content, navigation and functionality.
Sending people to your website and getting XXXXX visitors is one thing, conversion rates are a completely different (and more important) aspect. I mean, you can send all the traffic (paid or otherwise) in the world to a dilapidated home, but if they never get out of the car and go inside... it's not going to sell.
It's time to get your website to do what it's supposed to: SELL!
Wow gang, so many comments and so little time to address all of them here.First off, I would like to say that this is a blog that my marketing department for http://www.realtourvision.com released at the end of last year.If you watch Bruce’s entire video he states that we will see these changes begin to take hold in the first six months of 2009 so this was a perfect time to push this out there again.This is indeed old news but it is happening right now I can assure you that. For the last ten years I have been actively working side by side with my SEO team to make sure both RTV and our national network of virtual tour photographers websites rank well.
To see this change firsthand, you can run a test on your own. It is quite simple to perform. For the next week google your business or real estate website using what I call you “Geo Key-Words”such as ‘Traverse City Real Estate’ or ‘Traverse City Virtual Tours’.If you continually run this search, and click on your site (not necessarily on the PPC ads you might be running) you will see that your results begin to change after a few days or so.
Your site will begin rising to the top of the SERPS.Is your site ranking better?The answer is yes and no.Yes, your site will be ranking better on YOUR computer and yours alone. You will quickly see that a clearing of your private data, cookies and temp files instantly returns your search to your actual google positioning.I try to clear out my temp files at least every day so I can run clean searches and view actual results.You should make habit of doing this too if you take an interest in your sites true google positioning.
At the end of the day, the people who don’t clear out their private data often, will certainly have unnatural search results.What can you do?Do what you have been doing all along and run a light PPC ad campaign, build strong back links to your site (this brings the spiders and the google juice), make sure that the architecture of your site is laid out properly, optimize EACH page of your site for a new keyword, and drive traffic and people to your site by blogging. Finally you should run tools on your site for fine tuning such as http://www.websitegrader.com.
Blog often on sites that give back link power. Active rain no loger does this unless you purchase a rain maker account. Take advantage of using social bookmarking sites. Big site linking to smaller site is good. Install the google toolbar if you don't already have it.
Google juice is now split by both traffic and spiders so you want BOTH coming to your site.The key with traffic is to get them to stay on your site and that is where the term bounce rate comes in.Your bounce rate increases when people come to your site and are not satisfied by their search results so the simply hit the back button.That is a bounce.
If you’re not already running google analytics on your site DO THIS NOW!This will show you your bounce rate and you can start working on it from there.The lower the number the better.My local RTV dealership for the Traverse City Market has a 50% bounce rate which I am pretty happy with. It does not sound good that 50% of my visitors are leaving but a lot of that comes from the thousands of back links that I have established out there. See what your bounce rate is and try to lower it by using some of Bruce’s subtle suggestions.
For example, at http://www.bluelavamedia.com we push nearly all of our virtual tour listings onto craigslist.I also include a small ad on this craigslist posting that goes to a special page on my site. This page educates the home shopper on the value of using online property marketing tools that work such as interactive virtual tours, single property websites, top notch photography and so on. You can’t get to this page unless you come in directly from one of these craigslist ads that I have posted. Here is a link to one of my pages off of craigslist:
You can see that I have video on this page.I use the video to keep people on the page longer and get them to dive into my site more thus reducing bounce rate.Make sense?Finally, YES, content is still king but also you must make sure that the content is relevant to your website.Do you need to have videos all over your site? I don’t think, so but it does not hurt to have a few here and there.Video testimonials are great and so are power point presentations.You can turn all of your power points into video very easily using Tech Smith’s software found here:http://www.camtasia.com
Finally, at RTV we offer free photography, blogging, social networking, and social bookmarking training courses for both real estate professionals and full service virtual tour providers who use our virtual tour system.Check it out and we would love to talk to you more about your property marketing program. Thanks everyone!
No matter what type of information your website presents, it is important to get your website properly indexed by Google. While there are many other search engines on the web, Google holds the lead for searches at 71.86% as of October 2008 (Source: Hitwise).
To get properly indexed, you have to take into consideration two main methods used by Google to index the internet; crawling and indexing.
The Googlebot is a robot used by Google to crawl the internet and find new and updated pages to index. There are two crawler versions used by Google; the Freshbot and the Deepbot. The Freshbot only looks for fresh content, while the Deepbot uses links within your site to index more pages and content.
When the Freshbot or Deepbot finds a new page or updated content on a page, it will then pass that information to the indexer which sorts through the content for indexing by Google. The Google indexer then analyzes the pages, sifts through the content and uses relevant keywords within the page content to index the page in Google's massive database.
So how do you get your pages ready for proper indexing by Google? Create good relevant content with...
If you have been looking for a way to quickly fill your social network with like-minded individuals, look no further than twitter. With small 140 character updates, you can grow your social network like never before possible.
Here are some neat applications and websites to help you get started using twitter to its full potential.
Using tools such as www.twellow.com you can search for people with similar interests and start following them. While you are there, be sure to setup your twellow account and add links to your other social networks.
If you don't want to use your cell phone to send and receive tweets, you can use a desktop application such as twhirl or tweetdeck.
You can use an application like www.friendorfollow.com to make sure that you are following those that are following you and see who is not following you back.
Using www.tweetlater.com you can automate your twitter account to auto-follow new followers and send a follow-up DM (direct message) to thank them for following you. If you are careful (DON'T use follow-ups for self-promotion or even worse to try to sell anything) you can use follow-ups to invite others to connect to you on other social networks.
As a twitter beginner, you may have many questions. Here are a few articles to help you get started in the right direction.
In the article 10 Easy Steps for Twitter Beginners Darren Rowse offers a simple and informative answer to the question, "What do I do with twitter?"
Rently, one of our RTV virtual tour providers sent me an email asking me how to use anchor text in their AR profile and blog.
So what is up with anchor text? Why is it so important?
Anchor text tells robots and search engines what the web page you are linking to is about. It also helps with what is called relevancy. Relevancy, as far as SEO is concerned, is basically a measure of how related content on one web page is to another web page. And it is important. So without getting too complicated, if you have a real estate blog linking to your real estate website, you want to use anchor text to tell search engines to go to your site while at the same time telling them a little about the content of the site. That is how you get indexed properly in Google.
Anchor text is sort of like a little directional road sign on the internet. “Virtual Tours in XYZ city over here” or “Real estate in ABC County over there”.
There are a few more factors involved, like making sure that you are using the anchor text as web page keywords, in the description and in the content of the webpage to which you are linking. That is all part of optimizing your site for search engines. But, I won’t get into that here. RTV Inner-Circle members can check out our SEO guide for more information.
Our new 2009 Exposure Engine is now including our E-Flyer and Smart Phone Tour. The E-Flyer is an HTML email-ready flyer that our customers can easily send out to prospects anytime they wish. You can preview a sample E-Flyer Traverse City Real Estate Flyer. The new Smart Phone tour allows real estate agents and local business owners to carry with them at all times their virtual tour on their cell phones for an on-demand preview. See our new Smart Phone tour TC Cell Phone Tours.
Our virtual tour and listing exposure is so far ahead of our competition that you will be amazed at the traffic you're getting when your weekly hit reports come in. We even send hot leads your way as your listings generate questions and comments from interested parties!! The Exposure Engine allows real estate agents and local business owners to do what they do best and that is list homes, sell homes, and conduct everyday business while not getting their hands dirty with the online promotion of their listings and products. That's where we come in.
•1. Meta Title Create your title using keywords and your farming area. Do NOT use ‘Home Page', ‘Index Page', or just your name in the title of your webpage. Use different titles on different pages to increase your exposure in the search engines for different search phrases. Keep this UNDER 70 characters in length.
•2. Meta Keywords Use your key words in your web page title, in the description and throughout the content of the page. Do NOT use the same keywords for every single page on your site. Target each page to different keywords to maximize internet exposure. Keep your keywords UNDER 10 per page to better target your message.
•3. Meta Description Use your description to tell humans and robots what your webpage is about. Search engines normally use your Meta description under the title of your site in search engine results. Like keywords and titles, your description should be different for each page on your website. Limit your description to 150 characters or less.
•4. Content Your content should closely describe the title, keywords and description. Stay on topic and don't overuse your keywords. Search engines now use what is called semantic indexing, so you do not have to repeat yourself over and over to get indexed properly for your intended topic.
•5. Anchor text linking Whether you are linking to internal pages on your site or pages outside of your site, be sure to use anchor text to let search engines know what the linked page is about.
•6. Internal Linking Make sure that you are opening internal links in the same browser using anchor text. Opening a new window for every page on your website just annoys viewers and detracts from a professional image on your website. Also, limit your use of images as links and try to use anchor text navigation as much as possible on your site.
•7. Website Organization Organize your website into specific topics and dedicate one page per topic. Don't try to explain several topics on one page. Your home page should describe a little about you and your business and act as a ‘link portal' to information on other pages of your site. Do not overwhelm viewers with EVERYTHING about you, your business and your website on the home page.
•8. Website Navigation Website navigation should be simple and easy on the eyes. If you have a lot of pages on your website then group them into categories and provide one heading for every 4-5 page links in your left navigation. This helps viewers quickly understand the content available on your site. If you list too many links in one list, viewer's eyes will strain, people will feel overwhelmed and you will lose visitors.
Cheryl Waller National Marketing Manager RTV, Inc. (866) 947-8687 http://www.realtourvision.com
PS - if you like the tips... sign up for our RTV eNews or connect to me on your favorite social network. My username is cherylwaller (all one word) on all of my networks.
Disclaimer: ActiveRain Corp. does not necessarily endorse the real estate agents, loan officers and brokers listed on this site. These real estate profiles, blogs and blog entries are provided here as a courtesy to our visitors to help them make an informed decision when buying or selling a house. ActiveRain Corp. takes no responsibility for the content in these profiles, that are written by the members of this community.
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