HouseBlogger; blog marketing, social marketing and SEO for real estate

How to Sell in the New Economy

Tim O'Keefe (Spider Juice Technologies) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:04:38 -0500

Eric Lofholm

How to Sell in the New Economy

I recently interviewed Eric Lofholm who is a Master Sales Trainer who has trained tens of thousands of sales professionals nationwide. As a top-producing sales representative for 3 different sales organizations his consistent track record of regularly outperforming his fellow sales reps earned a reputation of success that follows him to this day. Eric has been trained by the top trainers of his time including: Anthony Robbins and Dr. Donald Moine Ph. D. as well as countless others.Many of America's top companies hire Eric regularly to train, motivate, and inspire their sales teams.

I asked Eric to share with you his top ideas and strategies for your success in today's selling environment. He offers a treasury of advice and resources to compete and dominate in this new economy.

Check out our related interview about called Dominate Your Market in 90 Days or Less with Dave Lakhani

How this Florida Realtor gets more tranactions

Tim O'Keefe (Spider Juice Technologies) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:32:45 -0500

The real estate depression recession whatever.
I found a guy who is doing deals despite the fact that he is in the eye of the storm in Florida.

Chris Curry has found a simple system to transact sales. He gave me twenty minutes of his time to record some of his ideas that are making sales right now in this market.

After you listen to his ideas, you can get more of his unconventional tips here.

Find out how he changed with this changing market.

Positive real estate news and marketing

Tim O'Keefe (Spider Juice Technologies) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:55:22 -0500

Facts tell stories sell. We buy with emotion and justify with logic.Use emotion to sell the reasons to buy real estate today. Go to Positive Real Estate to get both the facts and the stories to help you to influence your buyers in this marketplace.

Your Long Road From Google to Escrow

Tim O'Keefe (Spider Juice Technologies) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:08:08 -0500

Majoring in Minors

Your Search engine ranking positions are always what might be.
Your server logs/analytics are what are who might be interested.
Your lead counts are who would like to get to know you better.
Your Signed Contracts are only a potential sale.
Only a closed escrow puts food on the table.

So often the online webmaster community is taught to look at each of these as one singular event. Without acknowledgment of the larger picture. And of course each of the above bullets represents a whole body of disciplines. We are taught to obsess over small singular actions such that our online marketing is nothing but a series of short lived, poorly executed tactical executions.

Some major minors:

Search Engine Positions: Search positions are nice. But a top position and fifty cents will only get you a cup of coffee (well maybe in 1976, I just paid $1.75 for a large at Mickie D's yesterday). A position is only implied traffic. Folks worry about 1 ranking phrase while my clients and I rank for hundreds. Folks worry about keyword density or proximity. They matter, but not much.

Server Analytics: Look at your visitors. Who are they? How many of them are there? Well analytics do not give names, but they give numbers and behaviors based on keywords. So if you are majoring in just one keyword phrase (everyone loves to major in "city + real estate" ) phrase look at your server logs. You will find you can attract a much larger audience by considering your keywords that people use to find you.

Lead Counts: Conversion. Think of the "tootsie roll pop" ratio. This is where you get into visitor values. How many visitors do you need to get to a lead? If a visitor is worth $20. Then, theoretically you can spend up to $19.99 to get that visitor as a client. But you will not know that unless you track.

The above are what lead to sales and closed deals. Within each are mountains of knowledge bases that can easily waste a lifetime.

However, when you start with the end in mind. That is your business plan calls out for x amount of sales, and y generated online balanced by your own values and objectives. Then you have a start. A target.

Instead, so often we live with the delusion that if "I just rank number one for Happyville Real Estate, then I will reach Nirvana."

Did You Forget Why You Came to The Dance?

So often I hear that I blog to give my visitors great information to enrich their lives or at least online experience. Give me a break! You are there to make money. And the sooner you admit that the sooner you will make it. Otherwise stop writing it off as an expense as it isn't a business it is a hobby.

But learning this stuff can be fun and exhilarating. I get that. But you have to stay on focus or the web and vendors will steal your most precious selling time.

The web requires you to grasp the big picture or you will get lost. Not only your time will get wilted away but also your money. In order, to succeed on line you must develop a strategy first before jumping into the next big thing.

At http://www.realestateguerilla.com is an exclusive Coaching club where we will work with you on your top down success strategy. Or if you would prefer a private consult, contact Tim O'Keefe today. 310 533 9145. He consults at $500 an hour/minimum 2 hours.

Some interesting niches?

Tim O'Keefe (Spider Juice Technologies) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 17:30:24 -0500

Next year there will be 2.3 million weddings in the US, at an average cost of $30,000 (we have helped increase the average this year considerably). That is $72 billion on weddings. And many of those new families start with the need to find a place to live, furnish a home, and build their nest.
4.3 million babies were born in the US. Each of them will need all sorts of "stuff" - food, education, and places to live - in (hopefully) 20-25 years.
Gays? This niche is exploding in income and targetability.

More good news at houseblogger.

Subliminal Selling and Brands

Tim O'Keefe (Spider Juice Technologies) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 14:54:31 -0500

Some big stuff going on in HouseBlogger.

First can you use subliminal seduction to gain more favor with your prospective clients? Is it even real?

And what does a mind virus have to do with blogs and more importantly branding.

Microblogs. BS? A waste of time? OR the next big thing? Do you tweet real estate?

How To Dominate Your Local Real Estate Market

Tim O'Keefe (Spider Juice Technologies) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:42:17 -0500

From Recession to Boom

Dave Lakhani
http://www.boldapproach.com
Listen to the whole interview to discover a secret link on Dave's website that contains a ton of free gifts for you. Like an interview with industry great Seth Godin.

(get the online player at my blog-AR would not post it)

What does Jimmy Buffett's Parrotheads, Apple Mac Heads and the Kiss Army, all have in common? They all enjoy a large fan base of zealots for their products and services. Dave shows you how to create your own army of followers that will guarantee your success in any marketplace.

Dave Lakhani has been described as a "Marketing Genius","Business Acceleration Strategist" and "Multipreneur" by his peers and the media.

Dave shares with you million dollar ideas that he charged me a ton of money when he originally taught me these principles. He opens up and shares:

How to get clients to find you.
Building Your own Cult-Would you like to build a list of clients as fanatical as an Alabama Bible Revival?
The difference of manipulation and persuasion.
How to position yourself as the expert in your local market.
Dave actually builds a model to dominate your Real Estate Market in 90 Days or less.
How saying no to business, can actually get you more yeses.
Why facts tell, stories sell.
Building your million dollar expert persona.
A completely unique and wildly effective new way to virtually guarantee that your prospect will buy in your area.
Why money follows action.
How to make your listing irresistible.
Why getting people out of their head and into their emotions will guarantee you real estate selling success in any marketplace.

Belief in your product is the most important thing in sales. So how how do you succeed when your home prices keep dropping? Dave shows you how to deal with what might seem like a crisis of conscious for some.

This is by far the most revealing sales training I have heard in a very long time. In fact, I guarantee you have not heard this from any real estate trainer.

Back to the Future with Stefan Swanepoel

Tim O'Keefe (Spider Juice Technologies) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 16:31:03 -0600

Thanks to Allen for pointing people to the killer interview that we did with Stefan Swanepoel about how the newsmakers of last year will affect 2008. It is all part of their promotion for their New Trends Report. Allen has a deal of 20% off, while Stefan is offering free shipping. So see what works out the best for you.

Good Real Estate News

Tim O'Keefe (Spider Juice Technologies) — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 11:51:13 -0600

I want to give high fives to Robert Lockard for his insistence to prove that the market is not so bad.

Yah we are feeling it for sure as it is an adjustment not a crash. Transactions are happening. NAR just mentioned that the year of 2007 was the fifth highest ever. So I aplaude Robert for not buying into the negativiity.

I have been posting as an anti-bubbler against the bubblistas since almost the start of my blog in 2004.

The bubblistas are flooding the news. As publishers we can flood the news with why real estate is a good investment NOW. It takes work but it can be done and you can look like an all star doing it.

So I have launched an inititative at Positive on Real Estate.com (this is our Digg style good news stories site). What I am teaching over there is that you can change the news because your publishing is the news. Journalists come to blogs and social sites to get news. If you flood your posts with reasons why there is good stuff happening to real estate you will change the news.

You can get onto our strategies here.

SEO is ...

Tim O'Keefe (Spider Juice Technologies) — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 11:59:29 -0500

Dead?

On page optimization matters very little anymore.

Alive?

Optimization has moved into link optimization whereby your inbound links are what will get your pages found/indexed by the engines. And what passes on value to your pages.

No links and your gorgeous website or blog are dust in the digital wind.

Many in this blog community know that SEO can cause traffic. Because they get it from this site. It saves the pain of creating massive links on your own when you can get it from here. You get on the front page and the link value from activerain.com passes down into your blog. Others chat up your blog and you have links from all over the community.

Its not enough in big markets, but it does help and it saves on time.

How Many Eggs and In How Many Baskets?

Many guerillas know this and take advantage of this ability to get traffic from portal communities. But I have warned many times, "Consider what is the value of free".

1.What does the owner of the portal get out of you posting? No one is that charitable.Ads or Offers are inevitable.
2. What happens as in the case of Squidoo when Google comes along and "slaps" the entire network? If your only "blog" was on Squidoo, you were possibly put out of business.

Certainly a network such as this has its value, but again free is free. Call it Karma or the the Google god. But the engines know what can happen with free anything. Just look at what happened with their own free blogging at Blogster.

Web 2.0 to the hypsters is about socialization and human created content. To Internet Marketers, it is another link back to their paid for place of doing business. Perhaps you noticed the link above? It fits within the context of this post. But many are not as kind to the network when they post.

But this network is pretty responsible. However, a logic, understanding and compassion is not always go hand in hand with the cold realities of a search engine algorithm.

Mortgage Politics

Tim O'Keefe (Spider Juice Technologies) — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 12:57:12 -0500

The Battle For Who Cares the Most

Thousands of homeowners are on the brink of disaster. Yes, because of risky/aggressive lending practices of the past few years many of these people are one or two payments from a mess. One jump in the Prime rate or other indexes and these people are out of luck.

Perfect timing for the political season.

On the Right, President Bush has said it is not the Governments job to bail out homeowners who got in over their head. On the Left, Hillary Clinton said the Government should step into help these people. mortgage politics

Do You Suffer From Seven Dollar an Hour Syndrome?

Tim O'Keefe (Spider Juice Technologies) — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 23:42:38 -0500

Do you ever feel like the entire weight of your business falls squarely across your shoulders? Some times as Entrepreneurs we might even carry that weight with pride. This is your baby after all.

After time, if you have had any success at all that baby grows and your shoulders surely grow weary from the added burden and complexity of your business.

If you ever have run copies, typed in addresses, called clients about non-crucial issues, then you just may suffer from Seven Dollar an Hour Syndrome.

Doctors from Harvard University loosely define this as an affliction that attacks fledgling and established entrepreneurs as they seek to build a business. It especially creeps up on business owners when they have immature systems and processes.

We fall into a technical role and act less like a business owner. A role that makes you do $7 hr or lower work, instead of earning an owners wage.

Please join me as I grill Barbara Simmons and Greg Uttal and we discover how Greg has helped Barbara break out of the Seven Dollar an Hour Syndrome.

http://thesurething.info/7hrsyndrome.htm

Barbara will tell you:
-How someone worth $500 an hour gets suckered to do $7 hour work.
-Why Seven Dollar Syndrome Occurs and How it can be eliminated.
-How to find more time to grow your business and enjoy the benefits of your business
-Why you should really have a brokers license
-Why getting there isn't always pretty, but it always ends up pretty if you have a system
-Why it does take money to make money, but it isn't as bad you might think
-Two Powerful Words that are the Secret to Barbara's success. Simple but lethal.

If your lead counts doubled today. What would you do? Could you grow right into it? Or would your office grind to a halt in gummy outdated processes?

http://thesurething.info/7hrsyndrome.htm

In this short but concise half hour interview, you get why it does not matter if you knock on doors or you generate leads online. The ensuing mess that any new business activity makes can either slow your business to a halt or liberate you. Greg teaches how it will liberate you.

Managing 50+ agents is a job in and of itself. But Barbara runs this virtually up and down the State of California. And she aims to get more agents. All the while she finds time to whisk away to her fabulous Vegas and Maui hideaways.

Find out how she does it here. Simply click the exclusive link here. No sign up required to get the mp3's.

http://thesurething.info/7hrsyndrome.htm

See you in the blog,

Tim O'Keefe
http://www.interviewswithrealestateexperts.com/
Spider Juice Technologies

WHO Else Wants an SEO'd page?

Tim O'Keefe (Spider Juice Technologies) — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 18:59:30 -0500

Although a webpage can get 200 elements looked at as Google spiders thru, I mention some of the more important ones below. Even so, it has been proved that you can get into a top position on links alone with even a blank page. So I came up with a few "gotta haves" that should be in all your webpages. ( If you want to position well in the engines that is).

Robots.txt
w3 declaration
Google/Yahoo sitemap
Character Encoding in Header
Language Encoding
Links back to your home page that say your main keyword instead of "home page".
Title &, Description tags.

The Title tag is by far the most important on page factor.

Of course an authority site such as Active Rain (many would argue) can help with your links as it can take less links to accomplish your goal.

Real Estate blogs: truth or fiction?

Tim O'Keefe (Spider Juice Technologies) — Wed, 09 May 2007 10:56:43 -0500

7 Blog Myths

We just finished the blog myth series. Call me nuts, call me the anti blogger-blogger. One thing you will find is that I don't drink the commonKoolaidbeing served up by most of the stuff online. There is a reason my blog, more importantly my websites make money. That is the point right?

One of the great lessons of publishing online is that often it does not take much to get a voice. Often he who barks the loudest is heard.

Traffic, SEO, blogs. GO online and there is a ton of information on how to do fill in the blank.

I have watched a ton of hypsters, and "voices" come and go from the real estate space since our humble beginnings at the turn of this young Century. They were all experts. I have even seen them sway some of my clients away. Selling them on the feel good hype of the quick fix. Yes, I too have fallen for "get rich quick" schemes. They often are short lived and costly.

These people are selling fixes that are based on an opportunity to sell rather than a deep understanding of thier medium. I see Traffic, SEO and Blogging tips bantered all over the web. Little of it based on experience and little of it based on success.

And I see a new set of onliners, many who go online to be able to compete, destined to fail.

These do it yourselfers, DIY because they simply cannot afford the high costs of hiring a firm or consultant such as my company to do their SEO or traffic. That is why, when possible, I try to insert some truth into conversations that I see as flawed. And having been there, it drives me nuts to see the disinformation.

Sometimes, I worry that I am coming off too negative, because it seems I might be always ranting.

But what many don't get is that I too was once a Realtor. Not many vendors can say that. I also interred as a loan officer and worked for my dads development company. In other words I "get" real estate. and I too had to tell the vendors that called or "dropped" by to go away. The easiest way to get my ear was to say what they had to sell would make me a number one lister or seller.Of course 9 times out of 10 it was a thin deal.

HouseBlogger was up in 2004, and my clients have been blogging before it was cool. Back when blog and ping actually worked. We have always been out in front of the trends. We have been doing SEO for a long time. Not too sound like Mickie D's, but we have over several million served-visitors.

Our simple SEO company morphed after realization that came from looking at the metrics of one of our sites.The site was getting 100,000 visitors with a .27 visitor value. YOUCH!

So we learned traffic is not enough. Thats when we started talking about lead conversion, and incubation strategies. Our best lessons have always come from our personal mistakes on our own sites. Our losses have been our clients gain in that sense.

Why am I writing all this? It is not to impress you, but to impress upon you to be careful what you consider as truth out there. Especially, if your budget is on the edge.

I once ran a survey for a forthcoming Coaching Club. I asked what the surveyed would consider a fair monthly price.

One person wrote in, "why would I pay for what I can get for free all over the web". Careful, you might get what you pay for.

virtual assistants

Tim O'Keefe (Spider Juice Technologies) — Wed, 09 May 2007 09:52:14 -0500

A friend who is a VA has just become available. She wrote an article over here:

"Virtual Assistant "

The qustions shouldn't be "What can a Virtual Assistant do for me", it should be "What CAN'T a Virtual Assistant do for me?" Yes, it's a little cliche, but, oh so true.

Virtual Assistants (V.A.'s) have been around since the early 1990's and are gaining popularity in successful North American businesses daily. Used by large firms down to one-man shows, the usefulness of a V.A. becomes clear almost instantaneously. A V.A. can be used for a vast amount of different projects and industries, and for the time only you need, which makes them highly valuable and an affordable way to get the job done (which is often jobs that you don't personally want to do!).

Too Much Information

Tim O'Keefe (Spider Juice Technologies) — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 08:47:41 -0600

Too Much Information Runnin' Thru my Head Sting

That was the 80's and Sting was professing information overload. I believe it was the early 90's that the Boss (Bruce Springsteen) professed that there was "57 Channels and Nuthin On".

I am sure if I sat down we all could come up with a ton more metaphors to illustrate the daily onslaught of information that comes at us daily. Email, blogs, websites. Not too mention the usual suspects, Margazines, TV, Radio, etc.

We are getting hammered with so much information directed our way that after awhile it seems like just noise. It can even induce a state of confusion as we try to understand the communications of which we are the target.

Think about it. We live in a world where it is OK to run the PR campaign of the year in 2006 in order to sell a website that will estimate your value based on faulty numbers. No wonder your consumer is confused.

Jonathon Miller discusses the information overload as it applies to National Housing statistics and the disconnect in a local reality. Inman:

"I think there has always been a real disconnect between housing statistics being presented nationally and their perception of accuracy to local markets. "

I remember listening to a tape on NLP once. They said 2 options are a choice. Too many options are a dilemma.

The web allows us to back up Shakespeear's notion that "nothing is neither right or wrong accept that which thinking makes it so." Thus, one can can argue intelligently that there is Global Warming, while easily counter that argument. George Bush Lied, George Bush is did ot lie. On and On. For every pro there is a con. For every argument a counter argument. Spend enough time on the web and you can find that aliens caused 9/11.

There is so much web noise these days that the information hunter scans, he or she does not read.

Yes, the web has given us all Attention Deficit!

In the end it is the Realtor whom will have to come to the rescue and make sense of it all for the consumer. Shakespear's realitivism cannot work for your consumer because the outcome can be so disasterous financially. A buyer may want to wish that prices are crashing, while basing their notion on faulty property tax records. It will be your job to insert clarity and truth into their decision.

I think this will get more difficult before it gets easy as more and more web sites enter this space in order to capitalize on everyones favorite assett. The noise will only rise into a cacophonic confusion, even risking perhaps irrelevancy.

Happy New Year

Tim O'Keefe (Spider Juice Technologies) — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 21:18:29 -0600

Some news for you to peruse:

The LA Times has declared the Bubble a leak instead of a burst.
A few articles I recently posted on the so called bubble:
Conflicting data // Realtors Making Money // On the Illusion of Bubbles

We have run an ongoing series of the top ten SEO Myths. We are finished except the last two:

PageRank & Metatags are everything
A top ten position will solve all your sales problems
SEO is metatag manipulation
Content is King
The engines love blogs more than regular webpages
Get ranked for the top 20 most voluminous words and you will be successful
If you just get rankings and Traffic you will be Successful
SEO is the single most important action you can do for your website
Its all about more links!
There are magical shortcuts to getting SEO traffic

And finally, Inman asks "Is the Realtor becoming irrelevant in the Internet age?" I give my provocative answer about 2/3 the way down in the comments.

Finally, I name my favorite book of 2006. You will be surprised and perhaps even shocked it you read it.

Blogging For Dollars

Tim O'Keefe (Spider Juice Technologies) — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 11:49:01 -0600

Merry Christmas everyone!

The above title is merily a cheap attempt at a keyword stuff to get real estate keywords and hit tail key words into my blog post about a real Merry Christmas.

SEO is more complicated than this isn't it? Certainly it cannot be as easy as writing about a topic on a realty blog and finding your post rise to the top?

No of course not. Well, maybe for non-specific -hit tail keyword phrases, but for the more competitive words we need some linkage. Some Page Rank (contrary to popular belief PR ain't dead), and some good reputation (link anchor text).

Then, this silly little post might rise for word searches about real estate and SEO.

What is SEO? Is it on page factors? Is it new cool words like LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing-hope I spelled that right-or maybe not)? Does LSI really work? So many experts say it does, but why is it that the engine cannot even tell that dog and dogs is pretty much the same thing. Or is it all about getting links from authority sites (Active Rain is an authority site-hint! hint!).

Is it about a visit from a pinging service like Pingomatic? Or will that get the engine Spiders Over. And then maybe some natural links to this brilliant post will naturally occur. Hmm. Maybe. Is it about being on a bunch of social bookmarking sites and directories like Technorati and Digg? Maybe. Or perhaps it is about all of these.Probably more for a competitive phrase.

SIDEBAR
----And these notions of black and white hat.... Can you get arrested for black hat SEO? Is it a deal with the Diablo? Just get you the traffic right? Black, White or Grey? Who cares as long as you get your traffic? But what happens when the black hat penalty comes? Or is there such a thing? Maybe it is a made up word for SEO guys to sound important.------

So when this post is over, I will take the RSS and ping it thru my pinging software (it hits pingomatic), and maybe link to it from a few Social Sites.Maybe a little feedburner action. And if I feel real black, maybe run this rss into some major blog farms.

So to some who read between the lines will gather that this is my Christmas Present to you. And if you aren't into Christmas? Then it is my (pick one:Kwanza, Rhamadan, Hanukah, etc), present to you. (Andy Rooney moment:Ever wonder how the Major Religions can never agree on anything, but somehow the major holidays land in the late Fall? ) You hopefully can see how this leads to the Blogging Dollars.

For the others who think this is a gibberish real estate blog poop. So be it. But have a very blessed Holiday nonetheless.