OK, so I've been marketing my real estate services online since 1996 when my dad told me to get with the times and built a website for me... (Thanks again dad!) However, I was reminded just an hour ago that no matter how long you've been in any business, sometimes we need to just step back to the basics to make sure we're not missing anything.

Having been in the business 15 years this month, I've grown my company so large and we cover such a wide territory that it can be hard to remain focused when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy.  Stompernet - a very successful internet marketing education company - just put out a report by one of their 20 faculty members who is a very well known SEO expert; Dan Thies, and it's amazing how such a simple report can be so useful. When reading their sales page, I was hesitant because the message is a little over the top; "On 9-9-09, Internet Marketing is going to change forever..." Gag.    However, after reading the report they sent (in return for giving them my email address) I was surprised to find that there is no hype whatsoever in Dan's report.

It's quite simple actually, and I've forgotten how well it works; Despite the fact that you want to rank for 20 or 30 primary keywords, pick one, layout your optimization strategy for that keyword, and keep working at it until it ranks on the top of the search engines.  Only after that, should you move on to the next keyword.  Picking the right keyword and focusing all of your efforts (on-page AND off-page) on that single keyword will generate far more business for you by next month, than if you were to focus your efforts on several keywords at once.

When I learned a variation of Dan's strategy several years ago, I was able to take a keyword from #78 on Google to #1 within a week. Duh... How easily we forget. Time to take a look at my analytics & get back to basics.

I don't know if Stompernet going to change internet marketing forever, but if the next 8 free reports are anything like today's it should at least be a fun ride: www.Stompernet999.net

Do you fail more often than succeed?  

If you answered "yes" to the above question - I say "Good for you!  Keep it up!" If not, I'd go as far as saying; "If your successes outnumber your failures -- you ain't tryin hard enough."

I was talking with an agent who quit buying leads from an internet lead generation company after 30 days because "most of the leads weren't serious buyers".  I asked her what they she was paying for the leads, and it was about $30 each.   In response, I asked; "At $30 a piece, what would you consider a successful close rate?"  The way I see it, at that price, I could "fail" to close 96 out of 100 leads, and consider that a pretty good success rate.  (At an average commission of $7000, I'd be getting just shy of a 1000% return on my investment.) In other words - assuming a 96% failure rate, and an average commission of $7,000 -- every $3000 I spend buying leads would generate an average of $28,000 in commissions.

Ted Williams - Baseball's 7th best hitting record holder of all time once said; "Those that fail 'only' seven times out of ten attempts will be the greatest in the game." In fact, of all of the thousands of professional baseball players in history, less than 1 tenth of one percent of them have an average career "failure rate" of better than 7 in 10.

Quit being so hard on yourself: If the top one tenth of one percent of professional baseball players consider a 70% failure rate - a mark of excellence, why do we as Realtors set such ridiculously high standards for ourselves?  Instead of looking at our glass as 96% empty and getting frustrated, why can't we focus on the 4% that is full? Especially if all we need is 4% to get a 1,000% return on investment. In fact, if all we do is focus on raising our success rate from 4% to a measly 5% - we'd give ourselves better than a 30% increase in net profits! (100 leads at $30 per lead with an average commission of $7K would be $25,000 in net profits at 4%, and $32,000 at 5%.) Net profits at 4% close rate would be $25

Whether you're working with internet leads, canvassing neighborhoods with postcards, cold-calling FSBO's/expired listings, social networking/blogging, or doing any other form of prospecting - I'm willing to bet that you're being way too hard on yourself.  I have overseen dozens of real estate agents since starting my little Colorado real estate company, and the most common reason I see agents not succeed is because they focused on their rejection rate rather than their acceptance rate, and they didn't fail often enough to start seeing success.

Harland David Sanders, (better known as Colonel Sanders) tried to sell his "Finger Lickin' Good" recipe, and was rejected 1009 times before getting a "yes". Would his secret recipe ever have made it outside of his 142 person restaurant if he drew the line after failing 1000 times in a row?

Woody Allen once said "90% of success is just showing up" and that couldn't be more true when it comes to a salesperson's success. No matter how successful your close rate is, accept the fact that not closing the majority of your leads (however you get them) is simply a part of the business.  A system is not "a system" if you don't use it for long enough.  Do yourself a favor and whatever system you're using -- make sure to stick with it for at least 2 or 3 times as long as you think you need to.  I'd bet dollars to donuts you that if you "just show up" and apply that system in earnest (no matter what that system is) -- you'll be ahead of the other 98% of salespeople who are focusing on the empty part of the proverbial glass.

Every time you don't get business from a lead/prospect - you're one "no" closer to getting a "yes". 

Next week, I've got the privilege of meeting one-on-one for several hours with a very savvy internet marketer.  In addition to getting boatloads of high-quality website traffic in his extremely competitive niche, he is also a high-level internet consultant who operates on a retainer basis.  The area he shares his expertise on include:

• getting more website traffic by dominating niches
• determining the actual value of a lead
• converting visitors into good leads
• prospecting "best practices" to turn leads into sales

I've got a list of things I'm going to discuss with him, but I want to squeeze every ounce of knowledge I can out of the time I have with him.  So I was wondering: If you could ask any question of a knowledgeable internet marketing expert about how to get more business from your online marketing efforts -- what single question would you ask?

PS - I plan on sharing the answers I get, so the more questions, the better! Thanks for your participation.

Ha ha -- made you look...

Whether writing a blog post, a classified ad for your listing, an Adwords Ad, or anything else - the headline is 90% of the equation when it comes to readership. A boring headline (whether relevant or not) could get 99% less traffic than a compelling headline.

I'm on vacation with my extended family, and my brother took a great picture of my daughter and me playing in the waves.  When I shared with my Facebook & Twitter friends, I used a headline something to the effect of "Playing at the beach in North Carolina" I got less than a dozen views in the first hour.

Then, I thought of a funny headline, so for kicks, I deleted the old post and reposted the picture. The jump in response rate was pretty interesting...

Even though it was the same exact picture, and only an hour after the first time I posted, it, my twitter post of "Getting my daughter high at the beach" got over 100 views before an hour had passed. (152 views after 77 minutes, to be exact.)

Next time you're writing an ad that you want to get as many eyeballs on as possible, it might be worth your while to do some pre-testing of a couple titles to see which is the most catchy. Below are a few ways to do your testing:

1. Set up a BudURL.com account to track your clickthroughs, and post a couple different titles to your Twitter account with a budURL link pointing at your blog post.  If one gets a better clickthrough rate than the other, use that title & you're likely to get better readership over time.
2. If you're testing website content, it might be worth pre-testing by running a couple different Adwords ads with different headlines. Whichever ad has the higher clickthrough rate (which Google automatically tracks for you) should be the winner. Take that ad copy, incorporate it into your web copy, and you'll likely see an increase in the number of website visitors that turn into leads! (For more information from me about Adwords as a traffic source, visit TripleYourTraffic.net.)
   
3. Mturk.com is probably one of the best websites I've ever found for testing headlines.  In a nutshell, you can get instant feedback for as little as a few pennies per opinion.  If you're debating between a couple different headlines for your blog post, press release, or classified ad, "just mturk it"!  All you have to do is bid a few pennies per opinion, and ask "Which headline makes you more interested in reading the article that follows: "A) Cute picture of me & my daughter jumping at the beach or B) Getting my daughter high at the beach."  For a total of $2.50 (a nickel per opinion) -- 10 minutes later, you could have 50 "votes" from people around the united states who will chime in with what they feel is the more compelling headline...
   

Next time you want to get traffic to your blog, website, or phone - try adding a little extra zing to your title or headline... I bet you'll see a big difference in response rates.

When you've got an awesome website, or an Active Rain blog that you've put your heart and soul into, but you find that your percentage of visitors that turn into actual inquiries is extremely low, you have to ask yourself -- "Do I own a website, or is it a billboard?" If less than 1% of your unique website visitors are turning into actual leads (either from a phone call, email, or filling out a form), the answer is probably the latter.

To turn your "billboard" into a website that turns visitors into leads - which in turn, turns leads into closings, the most important thing is that you have a lead capture mechanism.

Types of lead capture mechanisms:  Depending on what sort of lead capture mechanisms you have on your site, your mileage will vary, whether you've got a blog, or a website -- having one of the following conversion tools will drastically increase your conversion rates.

1. IDX search tools:
   1. Depending on your source of traffic, and your marketing message, forced registration IDX search tools tend to convert between 4% & 10% of website visitors into leads. (Forced registration means that visitors must sign in and give a name, email address, and maybe some other contact info before being able to search listings.)
      
   2. Open search (buyers are allowed to browse and look through as many listings as they like. Typically, this option converts far lower percentages than forced registration, but the argument is that the leads are much higher quality when they do contact you. (I prefer forced reg.)
2. Free reports: Free reports are a great way to generate interest, and usually involve an auto-responder that sends the reports, and follows up with a drip-email campaign of some sort. Depending on how they are set up, these sorts of capture mechanisms can average anywhere between 5% and 40% opt-in rates.
   
3. "What's my home worth" form submissions. These are a great lead-capture mechanism for home sellers, and also usually involve some sort of follow up. Typically, you'll see between 1% and 30% of your visitors request a home evaluation depending largely on how compelling your offer is, as well as how targeted the keywords you rank for. (ie: "NEIGHBORHOOD CITY home values" will convert much better than "CITY real estate")
4. Subscribe to your blog. If you own a blog, you could count a new subscriber as a "conversion". The key is to continue to write engaging content to entice your visitors to subscribe to your blog (that - and making your subscription links as visible and convenient as possible.

PS - If your webiste is converting more than 1% of your visitors into leads, you're sitting on a potential goldmine... There is no reason you shouldn't be experimenting with driving as much traffic as possible to your website. In that case, you might be interested in this video.

This week, I spoke with two different AHF agents who had drastically different experiences with something we did system-wide, and I can't help but share...

Last week - when a Forbes article came out announcing Denver as the city with the best housing deals in the nation, we sent a quick note and link to every prospect in our system.  With the exception of the prospect's name being inserted, each email sent was identical and went out on the respective agent's behalf to their respective list of prospects. The funny thing is that one agent said he hardly got any response at all, and the other agent called me to say it was the best response rate he had ever seen for a "blanket mailing" (and they were all very positive responses with two of those responses resulting in an appointment being set!)

Why in the world was there such a difference in response rates?  That prompted more digging...

• Now keep in mind that the two agents I spoke with each have a list of between 1300 and 1500+ prospects in their database who have at some point in time expressed an interest in searching for a home.
  
• Both agents have been using our real estate prospecting system for about the same number of years, and have built their list of prospects at about the same pace.
  
• Both agents were within 10% of each other in terms of the median home price that their lead list is searching for...
• Neither of the two agents have a website, and rely predominantly on our system for their marketing/prospecting.
• The biggest difference I found was that the two agents lived in slightly different areas, and therefore served different cities, but that couldn't have been it... Afterall -- they're both in the greater Denver metro area.

Then I found it:

• The first agent mostly relied on auto-emails, and drip email followup to maintain his relationship with his prospects.  He was quick to respond to his prospects when they had questions, and demonstrated exemplary knowledge of the area whenever possible.  
• The second agent used all of the same auto-generated marketing tools our system provides, but in addition:
  
  • He made a point of writing a personalized email to each and every one of his new leads that didn't give a phone number. 
    
  • If he found them on Google, he'd comment about it, and he'd follow them on Facebook or Twitter whenever possible. 
    
  • When they gave a phone number, he personally emailed them, and called them within an average of a few hours of them signing up. 
    
  • I could tell from his contact log notes that he was going out of his way to get to know his prospects as people. In fact, a lot of the conversations that appear to have gone on had nothing to do with real estate!
  • Instead of number of bedrooms & bathrooms a prospect is looking for, I saw notations of how many kids and kids' names. (In one case, I saw the name of a family pet!)
    
  • I saw birthdates and anniversary dates entered in customer profiles.
  • I even saw annotations about whether they're golfers, coin collectors, or outdoor enthusiasts...
  • The only thing I saw that this agent had been doing that actually cost any money was sending thank-you notes to customers who gave an address via snail mail.
  • Needless to say - the other stark difference between the two agents is actual production. Can you guess who is the bigger producer (by a ratio of nearly 4 to 1?)

They might not admit it, but your prospect's favorite subject is themself.  Whether your prospect list is 15 people, or 2000 people, no level of automation is a substitute for a good old-fashioned conversation. What can you do to engage your prospects in conversation and find out about one of their passions today?

Put yourself in a buyer's shoes: You're moving to a new area, and you've signed up with a half a dozen Realtor® property update services.  All of those Realtors send you about the same list of properties, and all of those Realtors appear to be reasonably knowledgeable about the market.  How are you going to choose which Realtor to work with?  When all Realtors send the same properties, and most of them appear to have the same level of competence, a very scientific process must ensue: Eenie, meenie, minie mo...  Unfortunately, that's how many buyers choose their Realtor.

15 years ago, before the days of IDX I used to copy and paste MLS information into an email (and snail-mail that same info to those that didn't have email), and getting new clients was like shooting fish in a barrel.  These days, just about every Realtor out there has a property-update feature on their website -- not to mention sites like Realtor.com, Zillow, Trulia, and buyers can get whatever information they need.  When nothing else differentiates you as a Realtor, you're left to the odds of "My mommy told me to pick the very best one, and you are not it" - 9 out of 10 times.

"No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care." This is why building actual relationships with your prospects (and showing that you care about them as a person) is so extremely important if you want to get their business.  In fact, when it comes to getting them to choose you over your dozens of competitors, it's probably more important than actual knowledge of your marketplace.  One of the most powerful things we enable our agents to do is talk to their prospects about things other than real estate, and one great way to do that is to keep track of who is moving from where.

Let's say you have a large database of prospects, and you happen to know what states those prospects are moving from.  When you see on the news that a category 4 or 5 hurricane is going to hit Louisiana, why not filter for those folks and send a quick email:"Hi <customer>, I see that a category 4 hurricane is likely to hit Louisiana tomorrow. I just wanted to send you a quick note to say that you and your friends & family in Louisiana are in my thoughts and prayers."

When the time comes for those folks to actually pick up and move, who do you think they're going to buy from? One of the agents who have been spewing out tons and tons of property updates with no interaction at all, or you - who actually took time to engage in conversations that allowed you to get to know them as individuals? Not only will you stand out from the crowd because you showed you care, but you'll build valuable friendships in the process.

With our IDX real estate prospecting system, we ask all new buyer prospects where they are moving from for this exact reason. Whether you get 10 leads a month from your system or 500, try adding a "where are you moving from?" field to your inquiry form. If you take advantage of knowing that information, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised -- not only at your increase in conversion rates, but at how much more pleasurable it will be to work with the clients who will naturally gravitate to you because they like you - not because you won the "eenie meenie minie mo" contest.

I've been swamped with the recent expansion of Automated Homefinder, and speaking engagements so I haven't contributed to my blog like I should.   Reading this post from Jason made me feel compelled to re-post it to make sure no one missed it. 

Enjoy!

Last week, I had two conversations with two different Realtors about systems they should use because their current website just isn't doing it for them.  Both agents seemed to think that the grass was greener on the other side of the web, and after a bit of discussion - I suggested that they both try an experiment for a month, and then if they still wanted to get a better website, I'd help them figure out if they really need an upgrade.

The experiment: Call Leads ASAP. Yup. That's it... According to most sources, less than half of internet leads ever get followed up with, and even those that get followed up with don't get a call until more than 24 hours later.  Our company allows for our agents to get text-alerts for each/every lead they get. In fact, they can elect to get text alerts only when certain "hot" prospects sign up so that they're not distracted with leads who don't meet a certain minimum set of criteria.  Not surprisingly, there is a very high correlation between our top producers (who follow up within the first hour), and other agents who don't follow up as quickly.

Do you need a bigger/better/faster website? My answer is "absolutely not".  Whether you have a multi-million dollar CRM tool custom designed to your specs, or a canned solution that hundreds of thousands of other salespeople are using - there is only one thing you can do to exponentially increase your odds of getting a "worthless internet lead" to the closing table. That one thing is calling your prospects as soon as feasibly possible.  Heck -- You don't even have to talk about real estate! Just call, talk about whatever comes naturally, and your odds of getting their business will go up exponentially.

How to improve your conversion rate without changing websites/CRM tools: As long as your CRM tool has the capability of receiving email alerts when you get a new lead, you can convert that to a text alert on your phone so you can follow up with your hard-earned leads ASAP:

To get an instant text message as soon as a lead signs up, all you have to do is find out what your carrier's email extension is.  Once you know your "email to text" email address, all you have to do is enter that email address in your prospect alert system.  For example, if you are with Verizon and your cell phone number is (555) 555-1212, your email address is 5555551212@vtext.com Here are some of the email-to-text addresses for the major cell phone carriers:

• Verizon: 10digitnumber@vtext.com
• AT&T: 10digitnumber@txt.att.net
• T-Mobile: 10digitnumber@tmomail.net
• Virgin Mobile: 10digitnumber@vmobl.com
• Voicestream: 10digitnumber@voicestream.net
• Sprint: 10digitnumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
• Nextel: 10digitnumber@messaging.nextel.com 
• Alltel: 10digitnumber@message.alltel.com

See results by next month.  Before you go looking for a bigger/better system, make a habit of calling your leads as soon as feasibly possible and I promise you'll see a measurable difference in your close rates.  It's that simple. If you don't believe me, take a look at an early version of Automated Homefinder from about 10 years ago. It was only a one page site at the time (and had been that way for 2 years), and it was uglier than roadkill, but it worked extremely well for our sales team for one reason: Because we called our leads as soon as possible.

Of course - a very close second when it comes to increasing odds of getting a sale is having a system for semi-automated long-term followup but without the former, the latter is practically worthless.

I had a great phone call from one of the agents in our Automated Homefinder family last week.  Matt Kolb -- a Boulder real estate agent and owner of Pedal to Properties -- called to say thanks for a recent closing he had from a lead we sent him.  Although I can't take credit since it was he who actually built the relationship with the lead, and earned a fantastic commission in return.  I did a quick calculation, and determined that in this case, the $25 lead he bought from us earned him a 311,300% return on investment.  It's too bad all of them aren't that good.

We had a wonderful conversation about how although the economy is down, it's the agents who choose not to allow themselves to be victims who will look back on these times and be thankful for them.  We also talked about internet leads in general and the fact that success has very little to do with the leads themselves, but instead the systems, followup and attention we give to each of those leads that makes the biggest difference.

Yesterday, he sent a thank you note along with a copy of the check & I thought I'd share:

In addition to being excited about his recent closing, he informed me that this year is going to be his best year yet. 

Slow market? Pbbbbbtt.

Even though it wasn't my closing, I can't help but esctatic for Matt considering he only got his license about 4 years ago. He has since built a team of agents at Pedal to Properties after only 2 years in the business. Go Matt!

Matt, BTW has a very interesting business model at Pedal to Properties.  If you ever have a Boulder real estate referral (Especially in the Whittier Neighborhood), feel free to look him up.