If you've ever wondered how the top real estate websites get to the top of the search engines and generate thousands of visitors every month, wonder no more.

Recognized Expert just created a step-by-step video program that shows you how to do just that through article marketing ... and it's free.

If you do nothing else, watch the first video. You'll be hooked.

Article Marketing Video Guide

Over the past year I've been producting a workshop on the Top 10 Ways To Get Customers To Your Website. One of the newest and most effective way to do that is through Video Marketing. It will throw your website and blog to the top of the Search Engines Results Pages.  Better yet, it has the ability to promote you and your service unlike any other tool.

A mortgage lender friend of mine just sent me a video produced by an Active Rain member. It's one of the best marketing videos I've seen to date. If you want to see how video marketing is done correctly, check it out at Recognized Expert

My son Josh and I just completed a set of 110 Google Blogger Videos demonstrating how to use every tool available in Blogger's arsenal. It is the most comprehensive Blogger video program created to date. But why Blogger and not Wordpress?

Blogger is quite simply the easiest blogging platform on the planet. You can have your own blog up on the Internet in less than four minutes without the help of a technician. It's that easy.

Blogger is spam free. I have over 20 blogs with Google ranging from Likability Marketing to Farming a Community with Blogger. To date I've not received a single piece of spam. Not one.

Blogger is completely free. There are no monthly fees and no set-up fees. Sure there is a "free" version of Wordpress but you pay for "free" by allowing Wordpress.com to place Google Adsense ads on your site. That's not necessarily a bad idea except for the fact that you don't earn the revenue. It goes to Wordpress.com. With Blogger you have a choice. If you want ads on your site you can certainly add them and earn the revenue.

Blogger has some really cool templates. And if you don't like the templates offered by Google you can get some additional cool free templates from sites like FinalSense. I must admit, there are some great templates for Wordpress as well, but not on their free site.

Blogger has a very good help community. If you want even more help you can go to our new Blogger forum and get your Blogger questions answered even quicker. There are very qualified people ready and willing to help at Google and TakeOnTheNet.

Blogger vs. Wordpress
I like them both. We started with Blogger for the above reasons. In the near future we will put together a series of videos on Wordpress and I will write an article entitled, "Why Wordpress and Not Blogger?" Both blog platforms are great. You can't go wrong with either of them.

One of the great features of Wordpress is how easy they make if for you to convert your Blogger blog to a Wordpress blog. It takes about six-seconds. I use Wordpress to back-up the content on my Blogger blog. If you know how to create a blog on Blogger, working with Wordpress is a snap. Thank you Wordpress. 

Learn to blog

TakeOnTheNet.com 

Peter Montoya is the author of the book, “The Brand Called You.” He believes, as do I, that the primary step toward building a successful business relationship is to build a personal relationship at the same time. He is so good at doing it in fact, that he was able to develop a relationship with me over the course of just three days … before he ever knew I existed. Here’s how he did it.

I first learned of Peter Montoya at the Boarders Books store near my home. As I was browsing through the business section looking for an interesting guest to interview for my marketing show, “The Brand Called You” jumped off the shelf into my hands. “If you want to influence how people see you,“ Peter wrote in Chapter Four, “you must tell a story about yourself that makes the reader come away as if he or she knows you.” I was hooked.

I walked to the checkout counter with Peter’s book in hand. Over the next three days he answered hundreds of question I had concerning personal branding. He also made dozens of suggestions as to how I could incorporate those ideas into my business. His answers were straightforward and simple; yet somewhat foreign to the way I had been doing business most of my life. Early on for example, he suggested that one of the best ways to build a bond with a potential customer was to share something personal. Could something so simple and contrary to everything I believed about business really make a difference I wondered?

A few days later I called Peter on the telephone to ask if he would like to be a guest on the Recognized Expert Marketing Show. Within three seconds of him answering the telephone, I had the answer I was looking for. Here’s what happened.

Bob: Hi, may I speak with Peter please?

Receptionist: Certainly, may I tell him who’s calling?

Bob: Yes. Please tell him Bob Sommers is calling?

Receptionist: Of course. Just a moment Mr. Sommers.

Peter: Hi, this is Peter Montoya.

Bob: Peter, buddy, this is Bob Sommers!!! How are you?!!!

Peter: I’m fine. (silence) I’m sorry Bob, do we know each other?

Bob: (After realizing that Peter Montoya had no idea who I was.) Oh Peter I’m sorry. You don’t know me. I just finished reading your book but I feel like I’m calling one of my friends. How embarrassing.

Peter: Please don’t be embarrassed Bob. If anything you’ve just given me a great compliment. It sounds like the personal branding I wrote about in my book worked just as I intended. Thank you.

You bet it worked. It worked so well that for the first five minutes we talked about his mom Denise, his brothers; Mathew, Mark, Luke and John; his wife Lynn and his two dogs Maxine and Molly. We laughed, we joked and chuckled at our similar experiences growing up Catholic. And all the while I was getting more and more comfortable with him because we had these things in common.

Study after study shows that we like people who are like us? The thought process goes something like this. If I like me, and you’re like me, I must like you too. From there it’s an easy transition to; if I trust me, and you’re like me, I must trust you too.

Had Peter not taken the risk to tell me, his reader, something personal about himself, our conversation would not have been the same. Peter made it easy for me to start and carry on an intelligent conversation by giving me the fodder about himself that I would not have had otherwise.
It is so easy to divulge something personal about yourself on your blog or website, but most Realtors don’t do it. They don’t do it because they think it isn’t appropriate. My own experience tells me they’re missing a great opportunity.

Writing about yourself isn’t for your benefit; it’s for the benefit of your customers and prospects. I implore you to make it easy for them to know you, like you and trust you. Take a moment and tell the world something about yourself that makes you human. That’s where relationships … and sales begin.

Bob Sommers
Fireman, radio Talk show host, husband, father, Pisces, Mizzou, 49, The Simpsons, Atlas Shrugged, near death survivor, 1 night in jail, Maui, dreamer, root beer, CCR,The Green Mile.

I love this software. It's simple and produces great interactive flash slide shows without the advertising that accompanies all the free slide show software. Place your mouse over the photos and watch what happens. You can even make the photos clickable links directing customers back to your website from your blog.

If you use slide shows to promote your homes, I think you're going to enjoy SWF&Slide Pro. For the one time fee of $69, you can make as many slide shows as you want. You can even upload them to Google for free and have them play on your website, blog or even on a page you create with Google Page Creator.

The software is available from Vertical Moon for both Windows or the Mac for $69

Learn to blog with Google Blogger

In the future, the most successful real estate agents will dominate communities with the help of the Internet. Success will not be based on the size of a marketing budget, but on the level of the relationship. There is no easier or more effective way to build relationships than with the help of the Internet. Consider Active Rain. 

Here are 21 reasons why you can dominate a community with a blog. 

Communication
The tool that makes a community website stand-out is its ability to allow potential  home buyers and sellers to easily communicate with you and each other. Blogging software including Wordpress and Blogger, the free website tool from Google, gives everyone in the community the opportunity to participate by making comments and posting to your blog.  And as you know … communication creates customers. 

Ease of Use
Building and maintaining a community website couldn’t be easier. If you know how to get on the Internet and make your way around a word processor, this will be a piece of cake. You will be able to duplicate everything you see at MauiMeadows.info without any help. Honest
 
Fun
At first I thought building a community website was going to be work, but I quickly found myself enraptured with every article I created. If you enjoy writing and creating value, you’re going to love the time you put into your community blog.

R.O.I.
If you’re talking in terms of money, you can not find a better return on your investment. Why? Because the cost to create and host your community website is completely free. That’s right, it’s free. You can’t say that about postcards, TV, print advertising or radio.

Relationship Building Capability
A community website is all about building relationships with the people in the community. It allows you to easily communicate with homeowners through your articles, the comments section on your site, email and even over the telephone. A community website done properly is a hive of activity … with you at the center.

Pass-Along / Send to a Friend
How many times have you come across a great website or article and forwarded it on to a neighbor or friend because you thought they would find it interesting? How many times have you done that with a real estate postcard or print ad?

Ability to Know What Your Neighbors Are Thinking
Wouldn’t it be nice to know what your neighbors are thinking when it comes to their thoughts on home pricing, home selling or the value of their home? It’s easy to do with a simple poll on your community site. All you have to do is ask.

Demonstrate Your Technical Marketing Skills.
You don’t have to persuade homeowners in the community how you use the Internet to sell homes, show them on your community site.  Use things like slideshows, Google maps, narrated video tours, full property websites with Postlets, printable brochures and more ... all of which you create yourself. Let your site do the selling for you.
 
Reciprocity
Reciprocity is a psychological principle used in selling every day. If I help you succeed, you will want to help me succeed in return. Use your community blog to promote the people in the community you’re farming. They won’t forget you when the time comes to sell their home.

Time to Market
If you’ve ever produced a postcard campaign you know the value of getting your information out to the community quickly before the situation changes. With a community website you can get your information out in less than an hour. That’s fast.

Free PR
Advertising is expensive. PR is free. The local media is much more likely to do a PR piece on your community website than they are on your real estate business. And every time someone goes to your site it’s another opportunity to sell them on your service.

SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization. When you create a community website, search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL are very likely to push your community site to the top of the search results page. That means when a potential home buyer looks for information about your community, they are very likely to find your community site. Real estate websites can’t compete. This is a huge bonus.

Sell Advertising Space on your Community Website
This may be something you’ve never considered, but it’s worth looking into. Once you’re community site is up and running with the majority of neighbors subscribing to it, you can easily sell advertising space. Hint: Don’t sell ad space to another real estate agent, no matter how much they offer to pay you.
 
Ease of sending home buyers and sellers to your website
Homeowners don’t read postcards and jump to their computer and go to your website. It’s too much effort. It’s much easier to click a link to your website once their on your community blog. It’s as simple as clicking their mouse button.
 
Longevity
TV spots and radio ads last for a few seconds. Newspaper ads, postcards and real estate reports might last for a day. Magazine ads last for a week to a month but an ad on the web lasts forever. When you have your own community website you can advertise your homes until they sell.

Marketing Costs
If you've ever attempted a postcard campaign you know it can be expensive. You must pay for the copy and design, paper stock, printing, postage and the mailing list. TV, radio, newspaper and magazine ads can be even more expensive. The cost to create and publish a community website on the other hand is absolutely free. Here are some ways you can get the word out and market your community blog.  

Reaching Home Buyers
When you farm a community with postcards and real estate reports you’re only reaching potential home sellers. When you build a community website with Google Blogger you're not only farming for home sellers in that community, but home buyers who are interested in moving into that community. If you want to target home buyers for a community, create a website about that community

Status
Traditional farming techniques position you as a salesperson. When you host a community website and take the opportunity to share home selling tips and home improvement ideas along with real estate reports and home listings you’ll quickly be viewed as the real estate authority in that community. Home buyers and sellers would rather work with real estate experts than salespeople. Become the expert.

Interest level in Your Marketing Piece
The majority of neighbors are not interested in receiving a postcard about a home you just sold? They are however interested in learning about an up-coming neighborhood meeting or event, a crime alert, the status of a hot community issue, the local real estate trends and home improvement tips. When you farm a neighborhood with a community website you are giving your target market what they want … including real estate related topics.

Tracking
The extent to which you can track a postcard campaign is limited to how many postcards were delivered and how many people responded.  The things you can track with a community website and blog are limitless. For example:

•    How many people looked at your community blog?
•    Who looked at your the community blog?
•    What pages of your community blog received the most attention?
•    What pages of your community blog received the least attention?
•    Where did your community blog visitors coming from?
•    What time of day or day of the week did they visit your community blog?
•    What topics did they comment on?
•    What was their opinion on each topic?
•    Did they tell-a- friend about your community blog?
•    How did they find your community blog?
•    When are they planning to sell their house?
•    Who requested a home valuation?
•    Who requested a real estate report?
•    Who followed the link to your real estate website?
•    And much, much more

How could you use that information to sell homes?

Branding Opportunities
As I mentioned earlier, if you want to brand yourself and your company you have to get in front of your prospects frequently ... and frequently can be expensive especially with postcards, reports, print ads and radio/TV spots. On the other hand you can get in front of your prospects as frequently as you like at no cost to you with your community blog. Best of all, you’ll be branding yourself as the community real estate expert rather than just a real estate salesperson looking for business.

If you want to learn more about how to use Blogger to create a community blog, please visit our website on How to Build A Community Blog with Google Blogger

Farming a community using a blog is a great idea.  It's free, it's interactive and it's something you can do while you're sitting at an open house or doing floor duty. But, under no circumstances do you want to farm a community using the blog software on your website. Here's why.

1. Website Contamination

When a search engines look at your website, it looks at all of the content before determining the theme of your site. If your website is highly real estate thematic, it is more likely to place high on the search engine results page for real estate related keywords and keyword phrases. This is why you want to keep the content on your real estate site related to real estate. If you use the blog software on your website to farm a community, you will contaminate your site with content that has little to do with real estate. This makes it more difficult for the search engines to determine the theme of your website, which in turn could keep your real estate related web pages from showing well on the search results page.

2. Link Love

Search engines reward pages on your website when they have lots and lots of relevant links pointing to them. These links can come from other pages on your website or from pages on other websites. It is much better to have links come from pages on other websites. The reason for this is simple. Google and the rest of the search engines want to provide searchers with the most relevant content when they search for information. One of the ways they do that is to identify how many links are pointing to a particular page. Each link is considered a vote of confidence. The more links pointing to a web page, the more value Google gives that page. The more relevant the site providing the link, the more valuable the link. And a link from another relevant website to your website is more powerful than a link to your website from your website. So if you can get search engine credit by linking from your community blog (which is not on your real estate website) to your real estate website, do so. Of course you want the link to your real estate website to come from a real estate related blog post. That's just good SEO.

3. Unnecessary Risk

The primary benefit for using a blog to farm a community is the ability for homeowners and neighbors to communicate with you and each other. The tricky thing about allowing interactivity on your blog is that you never know what your readers are going to write. If you allow people to comment on your real estate blog, you're opening the door to both content contamination and a potentially damaging comment for the whole world to see. Not to mention, do you really want another real estate agent critiquing your advice in front of your business prospects?

4. People are Leery

If you lived in the community of Maui Meadows, which website would you be most likely to join: MauiMeadows.info or DaveTrebusheRealEstate.com/mauimeadowsblog? If neighbors get the slightest hint that you're trying to trick them into joining your real estate blog ... they're gone. Don't take that risk.

5. Limiting

Most real estate agents sell in more than one market. Just because you aggressively farm the community of Maui Meadows does not mean that you won't list or sell a home in the Wailea Golf Estates. If you choose to farm a community on your real estate website, you run the risk of turning-off potential customers who don't live in the community you're farming. Save your community blog (or blogs) for a seperate site.

For more information on how to use your own free blog to farm a community for home buyers and home sellers, visit us at http://VisOnTheNet.com 

I'm going to take a risk. I'm going to tell you a few things about myself that I normally don't share in general conversation. It's not that I'm embarrassed or that I'm trying to hide anything, it's just that these are things about me that don't come up in conversations with people I affiliate with on a business or professional level. And that's sad, because the few things I'm going to tell you about myself will give you a better understanding of the person whose posts you've been reading than you could learn about me in 5 years of general conversation.

• Born in St. Louis Missouri into a Catholic family and community.
• 
  Had a father who was fiercely independent. His mantra was, "if you choose to work for someone else, you will never be paid what you're truly worth."
• 
  Went to engineering school and discovered after reading "How to Win Friends and Influence People" that I wanted to learn how people worked rather than how cars worked.
• 
  Started my own customer service company and retired to Maui with my family when I was 38 years old.
• 
  Spent a night in jail for being drunk and stupid when I was 19 years old. I also discovered that I never want to spend a night in jail again.
• 
  Read, "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand and it moved me.
• 
  Read "Black Like Me" and it moved me.
• 
  Read "Oh The Places You Will Go" by Dr. Seuss and had a better understanding of life.
• 
  Quickly discovered that being a father and having a family was the greatest joy in my life...and still is.
• 
  I frequently get swimmers ear even as an adult. Very painful.
• 
  I don't like snakes
• 
  I am a vivid dreamer and find that this is where I find the answers to my most pressing concerns. Every night.
• 
  My best friends are the friends I made in grade school.
• 
  I fell though the ice on a frozen lake when I was nine years old and it completely changed the way looked at life...and death
  
• 
  I am often accused of asking a lot of questions. I do that because I'm uncomfortable with silence and I like to learn about people.
• 
  I am often accused of not talking about myself. Even though I am interested in what others have to say about themselves, I often feel that they are not interested in me. Talking about myself makes me feel uncomfortable and that is one of the reasons I am talking about myself to you.

There you have it. Things about this author you never knew, and never thought you would know. But why would I tell you these things about myself? As I said above, it is a risk for me to talk about myself. Maybe you feel it's inappropriate to publish a post like this on Active Rain. Maybe you're offended by something I told you about myself. Maybe you feel closer to me. I would love to know what you think. How does it make you feel when someone divulges personal information about themselves to you?

I think we will all learn something from your comments as to whether this is a risk we should be willing to take on our own blog posts and in our dealings with customers, prospects and friends.

Prospecting with Blogs

Scammers prey on the weak and the ignorant. They have an uncanny ability to spot a patsy from a mile away. Are they targeting you?

Yesterday I received a call from a search engine optimization company guaranteeing that they could get my website on the front of the search engine results page for 100 search terms (first red flag). According to the salesman, no other SEO (Search Engine Optimization) company had the capability to do what they did because they had a special association with Yahoo (second red flag) and they had their own 30 step proprietary program that no other company could duplicate. (third red flag)

"That's amazing," I said, with the enthusiasm of a boy who was about to learn where the family treasure was hidden from his dying grandfather . "Tell me more."

Bingo! He tagged me for a sucker and openly told me one lie after another. But it wasn't until I asked if he needed access to my website to accomplish this amazing feat that I realized the depth of the scam. Had I not know any better I could have easily been persuaded to invest in their special today only price of $2,500 for six months of service.

"This is the best part of all", he said. "We don't need to access your website. We make a copy of it and post it on our server where we work on it. Then we direct all the traffic back to your website." (forth, fifth, sixth ... red flag)

After a few seconds of letting this concept sink in, I was only able to come up with 54 reasons why this was a very, very bad idea. Not only will it destroy my credibility with the search engines, but the moment I stop paying, all the SEO work I paid for is gone. I would have paid them $2,500 to do SEO work on their duplicate of my website. Hmmmm!

It's important to learn the signals of an SEO scam artist and run like hell when you see them coming. If you want more information read, What's an SEO? Does Google recommend working with companies that offer to make my site Google-friendly? 

If you've ever had a bad experience with a black-hat SEO firm, please comment below. Let's help our Active Rain readers keep their hard earned money in their pockets. Just say No to bad SEO.

Prospecting for Customers on the Internet

I've been critiquing real estate websites for some time now with respect to SEO and usability and here's what I found. There are three common mistakes most every Realtor makes on their website and it is costing them business. Lots of business. I would like to talk about the first of those mistakes in this post.

Google and the rest of the search engines look at each web page on your site individually. They also look at all the pages cumulatively and try to determine the theme of your site, but that's for a future post. Google is looking for a variety of things on your web page to determine its page rank or value. One of the biggest factors Google is looking for has to do with the ratio of links pointing to your site compared to the number of links leaving your site.

If you have more links pointing to your home page than you have leaving your home page, the search engines will tend to see your site as an Authority site. If you have more links leaving your home page than you have coming into your home page, Google will to see your site as a resource site. Now, this is a very general description of a very complicated algorithm, but you get the point. You want more links to your site than you want leaving your site, because in the real estate world, Authority sites rule.

Problem: Most real estate websites have dozens of links leading away from their site and few links coming into their site. This is very, very bad for search engine optimization. But there is a bigger problem.

The sole purpose of your home page should be to direct your visitors to pages within your website. Whether those pages are MLS pages, sign-up for my newsletter pages, get a free evaluation on your home pages ... it doesn't matter. The very last thing you want to do on your home page is give your visitor the opportunity to leave your site. Period.

I know you may have participated in link exchanges with other Realtors or you have a template site or you have a link to the ePro site or to one of a million other sites, but don't do it. Just say, "No". It is killing your chances to rank high on the search engines.

Here are the top three sites for the search term, Maui Real Estate. I am not sending you to these sites for any other purpose than to see how they have removed all external links, and how they've benefited from doing so. You should do the same.

www.kathryntubman.com/

www.mauirealestate.net/

www.mauisales.com/

If you want to see how many links each of the top 3 Search Engines see coming back to your site go to www.linkpopularity.com Don't be concerned if you see few if any links from Google. They see, but don't always show you how the links go to your site. The current top site for "Maui Real Estate" is www.MauiSales.com Google shows 92 links to that site MSN shows 4,407 and Yahoo shows 3,308. Those are some good numbers.

Real Estate Search Engine Optimization