How did I post this cool looking property listing advertisement into my Blog?
This is so easy you will laugh. Since I am pressed for time I will place the basic instructions below.
#1. Go to www.postlets.com and create a new account.
#2. Create a free listing ad.
#3. Copy the HTML code available in the "Mini-Postlet" section into your blog using the HTML format.
That's it!
If any of you have trouble loading your mini-listing tour just submit a comment to this post. If I get enough requests I will submit an expanded version of this blog with visuals later next week.
Since writing my previous blog post, "Placing Video & Photos into Your Blog", I have received several inquiries asking how I got these screen shots (with comments) into the blog. Below is the answer.
PRINT SCREEN BUTTON:
The secret to printing, manipulating and posting screen shots from your computer is simple.
#1. Push the "Prnt Scrn" (Print Screen) button on your keyboard. Pushing the Prnt Scrn button will copy whatever is showing on your computer screen.
NOTE: Some keyboards require that you push the "Prnt Scrn" button in combination with the Alt or Shift button to capture a screen shot.
#2. Next step is to paste the copied screen shot into your favorite graphics program (e.g., publisher, photoshop, illustrator or paint).
#3. Manipulate the image of your copied screen as you see fit.
#4. Save image as a JPEG or GIF.
#5. Upload your new image to your Google/Picassa account; see my previous blog "Placing Video & Photos into Your Blog" for details.
#6. Use the appropriate HTML code to reference this new image in your blog post; see my previous blog "Placing Video & Photos into Your Blog" for details.
HOW DID I POST THE VIDEO AND PHOTO ABOVE INTO MY BLOG? READ BELOW FOR ALL THE ANSWERS!
Embedding Photos and Video to your Activerain Blog
Unfortunately embedding photos and videos in the Activerain environment is not an easy task. However, with a little patience and trial and error, you should be able to master this fairly quickly. Please note that there are numerous alternative methods for loading videos and photos to your blog. The following methods are the ones that I found easiest to master.
Essential Tools:
1. Computer w/Internet connection
2. Active YouTube account
3. Active Google and Google Picasa account
4. And if you are planning on shooting your own videos, you will need the following:
*** Video camera or digital camera with video capability
*** Video cable to transfer video or photos from camera to YouTube or Picasa account
Getting Started:
Before you do anything else, sign up for a FREE YouTube and Google Picassa account:
YouTube:
Your FREE YouTube account will be used for storing videos on the web.
(Just follow the instructions when signing up. This should be self-explanatory.)
Understanding the Environment:
Before launching into this next level blog posting expedition, you should first understand the basic principles of posting Video and Photos to a Blog.
1A. Create your own Videos and Photos: If you are going to create your own video or photos you will need some equipment. You can use a video camera or digital camera to take both photos and videos. It is my experience that for the purposes of the web, you can use a quality digital camera for shooting both photos and videos. Make sure the camera has video capability before purchasing.
1B. Copy Videos or Photos: There are millions and millions of photos and videos on the web. If you are planning on using a video or photo from someone else make sure you ask the owner of the photo/video before using. Re-distributing the photo or video could be copyright infringement.
2. Load Videos to YouTube and Load Photos to Google/Picassa:
Once you have created your video/photo, you need to upload them to a website so that your video/photo will be located at a physical address on the web. This is important as you will see in step #3. Please see that attachments below if you need further assistance here.
3. Drop Video and Photo HTML Code into Your Blog Post:
The last step is to place the appropriate HTML Code into your Blog Post. The key thing to understand here is that your blog does not actually contain the video and photo. Rather, the blog pulls the video and photo information from a remote web source and displays that referenced video/photo within the blog. Thus step 2 was required to ensure that your video/photo had a web location for you to reference in this step #3.
VISUAL INSTRUCTIONS FOR LOADING PHOTOS AND VIDEOS BELOW
Now that you understand the general principles behind posting Video and Photos to your blog, below are detailed step-by-step instructions for you to use. I hope these instructions help you improve your blogging.
Having recently gone through the trials and tribulations of purchasing and testing several trial versions of four different live chat technologies, let me save all of you the trouble by suggesting that you go with Liveperson. Although the technology is substantially more expensive than the other providers ($70/mo/seat rather than $25/mo.) the benefits are numerous and measurable.
Liveperson offers extensive back-end lead profiling and visitor tracking that is unmatched. It also offers enhanced cross-platform reliability and most importantly allows for PRO-ACTIVE CHAT INITIATION. That's correct, you can pro-actively initiate a live chat with a website visitor. Furthermore, this pro-active chat initiation can be automated and based on a number of flexible and programmable rules/scripts like "time on site", "click-through activity", entrance to particular pages, etc.
If you haven't already considered pro-active chat, no worries. I am doing the testing for you. Just sit back and subscribe to my blog and tune it for the results of this new use for live chat.
Today I would like to discuss the true value of keyword research. While most people either do not perform keyword research or consider it an “optional” exercise in developing their Internet Business Strategies, I consider keyword research the foundation of all internet business strategies.
Many successful brick and mortar business owners spend ample time and resources, prior to investing in their entrepreneurial efforts, in an attempt to better understand their customers, their competition and industry trends. Doing so is a necessary strategic exercise that helps them minimize costly mistakes; especially for those new to an industry or location.
Would you build a widget factory, manufacture, package, distribute and sell widgets without understanding how many customers are seeking widgets? Without knowing how many other companies are selling widgets? Without knowing what price customers are willing to pay for your widgets? Of course not! Why then do most business owners who are interested in doing business online do just this? Rather then first spending some time and money understanding their online customer and competition, they build their widget factory (website), market and sell their widgets (pay for Google and Yahoo advertising and SEO efforts) and then look astonished when their efforts do not result in sufficient widget sales.
Service providers for developing internet business strategies are disjointed:
When a company makes the decision to do business online, their first business action is to build the company website (their factory). They hire the services of a website designer who is focused on developing a website to meet their client’s needs. They ask the customer how they want the website to look, what content they are going to place on the site and what marketing materials they have to guide the design process. The website designer and client enter into this collaborative process blind to the competitors they will encounter and blind to the clients they have yet to identify. Bottom Line - Without a firm understanding of your online customer and competition, investing in a website and online advertising is an unnecessary risk that can lead to disappointing sales results.
Keyword Research:
Performing keyword research is the first step in rectifying the above mentioned strategic miss-steps. Start by getting familiar with the standard keyword research tools available to get a feel for doing keyword research. The following tools are free and easy to use:
Start with Root Word Structure: A helpful hint to guide you in your preliminary keyword research is to start by using root word structures rather then highly targeted keyword phrases. Yes, I know this goes against conventional wisdom but let me explain.
Our offices are located in Sebastopol CA. In my initial keyword research I started by using the root words “Sebastopol”, “Sonoma County” and “Northern California” rather than targeted keywords like “Sebastopol Real Estate”. Starting with these root structures allowed our company to quickly realize that there were very few people using the word “Sebastopol” in their real estate searches for real estate in our area. It turns out that most users were using wider reaching terms like “Sonoma” or “Sonoma County”. We also discovered that there was substantial interest in real estate in adjacent cities like “Santa Rosa”, “Healdsburg” and “Petaluma” all of which were generating 5-10 times as much traffic as our small town of “Sebastopol”.
“What about conversion rates?” you ask: You may be inclined to think that targeting these terms would result in a lower conversion rate given the less targeted nature of these keywords. You would be correct. However, the largely magnified exposure and large increase in interested buyers has resulted in a huge increase in business while our cost per visitor and cost per conversion still produce a high ROI on our marketing dollar investment.
Check for Misspellings:
Many of these keyword tools will offer you misspellings of your targeted keywords. Identifying these misspellings and incorporating them into your SEO and PPC efforts is a step many of your competitors have likely not taken and will result in very affordable and targeted traffic to your website.
Shotgun Strategy - Track Your ROI:
After your initial keyword research you may be inclined to optimize your website with your new set of targeted keyword phrases. This would be a mistake. Remember, when performing your initial keyword research you are “estimating” the value of any given keyword phrase. It is important to track your conversion rate over time to determine the REAL value of any keyword. Start with a large number of keyword phrases in your PPC campaigns and then give your efforts some time to determine which keyword phrases are generating business. Only then should you invest time and energy optimizing your website for these lucrative keyword phrases.
If you or your team spend any time validating, scrubbing, filtering, ranking and contacting internet leads, in an attempt to turn these leads into closed real estate transactions, you need to read this blog post.
The Challenge:
Here at Domaine Real Estate, we get approximately 400 new registered (VIP) leads per month and over 1600 returning registered (VIP) leads per month visiting our website. Although we are ecstatic about this volume of leads we are constantly put to the task to leverage this volume of opportunity into business revenue.
To manage this large volume of leads we use a variety of multiple sorting methods that hierarchically rank and weight data types such as return visits, saved properties & saved searches. These sorting methods allow us to prioritize our contact efforts on those leads that offer us the greatest conversion potential. Several of our sorting methods have, to date, placed the greatest weight on return visits; e.g., number of return visits and timing of return visits. Leads with greater return visits get higher priority in our lead management efforts.
The Discovery:
Recently, I decided to take an in-depth look at the return visits statistics for our registered leads within our IDX solution. What I found was very disturbing.
Within our IDX solution we have the capability to view individual return visit statistics of our registered leads, including the date of return and the length of visit. When viewing this data I discovered that a large # of the recorded return visits were either 0 seconds or 1 second in length. For example:
After much discussion with our IDX provider it was determined that these supposed return visits were not return visits at all but rather were views of property watch e-mails. Apparently, when a VIP lead opens a property watch e-mail to view the listing, a return visits session is recorded. If the user does not click on the listing the return visits is recorded as a 00:00 time. If the user clicks on the listing but does not choose to re-enter the site as a VIP member it records a 00:01 return visit.
I then took a snapshot of our previous months VIP leads and viewed the return visits statistics for all VIP leads with more than 200 return visits records. In most cases, a majority of these return visits were 00:00 and 00:01 records.
Conclusion:
This new information demonstrated that our previous prioritization of this statistic, in determining which returning registered leads to contact, was no longer valid. A refinement of the use of this statistic must scrub out all 00:00 and 00:01 records to arrive at a true understanding of a VIP’s behavior.
How Does This Relate to You?
Good question! It just so happens that during this discovery process I have been investigating alternative IDX solutions and have inquired as to the handling of this statistical dilemma. It turns out that other IDX providers have the same problem.
Apparently this is due to the inherent nature of the recording of a property view. It appears that inherent within the design of these IDX solutions is a tie between the viewing of property information and the apparent action of returning to the site; a mistaken assumption but an assumption none the less. Thus when a user views a property through a property watch e-mail the IDX solution mistakenly records a return visit.
If there are any programmers out there that can better explain this relationship please feel free to elaborate. For the rest of you I would highly recommend taking a deeper look at this data relationship to ensure that you are not mistakenly relying on faulty data. For myself, I plan on taking a deeper look at all of the registered lead data types
Looking to exchange links with other high ranking realtor/broker websites throughout the country and especially here in California. We have a high ranking site for real estate here in Sonoma California. If you are interested in exchanging links please respond.
If your interested in continually exchanging links, go to the following two Active Rain Blog Groups.
For those of you considering taking advantage of the new XML feed tools that allow you to automatically distribute your listings on portals like Craigslist, Trulia, Yahoo and Google, you may be in for a bit of a surprise. Your local MLS may be highly resistant to allowing third party XML feeds of YOUR listings. That’s right…..you heard me. Your MLS provider may be telling you what you can and can’t do with YOUR listings; whether you like it or not.
Here in Sonoma County California, our BAREIS MLS board is much tighter on their IDX/MLS data distribution policies than other boards around the country but this is changing fast. MLS boards are trying to prevent other more agile and nimble technology companies from swooping in and grabbing their secret sauce. What’s that secret sauce…………YOUR LISTINGS!
The real question is, who owns the listing data?
Isn’t it the brokerage/agent who spends time and money developing a sphere of interest to attract the seller/listing in the first place? Isn’t it the brokerage/agent who has and maintains the relationship with the seller? Isn’t it the brokerage/agent that is spending time and money to list, market and prepare the home (and the seller) for the ultimate sale of that property? Why then should the MLS boards have ultimate say in how, when and to whom that listing information should be distributed?
If your board has not already jumped on the “No More Third Party Feed” bandwagon, I would suggest getting your XML feeds in place as soon as possible. For the rest of us, good luck!
Web Marketing Strategy - Putting the Cart before the Horse
For my first official blog post I would like to talk about the difference between "Internet Marketing Strategies" and "Internet Marketing Solutions". Although at first glance this appears to be self-evident, it is in fact quite deceiving. For example, most people assume that SEO (search engine optimization) is a strategy. It is not. SEO is a SOLUTION; a solution requiring resources and capital applied toward increasing website traffic through enhanced natural (organic) search engine positioning.
Strategy in reference to SEO, on the other hand, is the proper definition of lucrative keyword terms. Keyword terms that:
#1. Define highly targeted potential customers
* Without keywords that represent highly targeted potential customers, SEO efforts will lead to increased traffic that is not likely convert to sales. This will lower your ROI.
#2. Define an acceptable level of natural search competition.
* No matter how hard you try, your agent website will never out-position realtor.com, Yahoo, MSN and the New York Times for the search term "Real Estate".
In other words, the true strategy of SEO is defining those search terms that are used by highly targeted customers AND, at the same time, offering search results that lack highly optimized competitive websites.
Unfortunately gathering this information is much harder than it looks as the tools available to gather this data are limited in functionality. Some of the better SEO companies are using keyword tools like Wordtracker - http://www.wordtracker.com/index.html, Hitwise - http://www.hitwise.com or Googles Keyword Tool - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. These tools can define your potential customer universe by detailing the search terms used by those customers attempting to find your products and services. However, these tools are very limiting as they only return 100-200 keyword results at a time and often pull data from smaller SE's or Meta-engines representing a fraction of the total search traffic. Those SEO companies that have gone to the trouble of building their own keyword tools and pulling their own data through SE API's rarely have the bandwidth to extrapolate the data into meaningful strategies for customers.
Unfortunately, as many of us have discovered, most SEO companies look to their clients to define the relevant keyword terms. This is a HUGE red flag for anyone considering using an SEO company. Although the customer may be acutely aware of his/her brick and mortar customer I have found that the language used in SE searches can be significantly different than that of the brick and mortar customers.
If finding the right keywords isn't hard enough, you then need to ensure that the SE search results for your chosen keywords are not congested with large, well funded corporate websites. Doing this can be equally difficult. For instance, let's say you intend to optimize your website for 10 lucrative keywords, how do you define who your competitors are? Each keyword, placed in each search engine, will result in a unique set of search results where your competitors appear, dissapear and constantly change position. This creates a highly complex assessment in determining who your true competitors really are.
As you can now see, any SEO solution should be built on solid keyword and competitive research to arrive at a set of keywords worth optimizing. Without this research, SEO is a gamble at best.
Unfortunately I am out of breathe. I will pick up on this post this Friday to discuss solutions to obtaining this research.
I couldn't take it any longer; wading through the mile high mound of internet vendors promising the next miracle SEO solution to launch your website to the top of Google Rankings overnight. Or the endless e-mail vendors promising unlimited targeted website traffic......for free. Or worse yet the website design companies that promise you all the above for only $23/month.
It's time to open up a discussion about what works. Real solutions, by those of us that been burned over and over again by these vendors but have managed to emerge on the other side. Those of us who have emerged from the rubble of lost time and money o find solutions that work. Solutions by people who are on the ground implementing, tracking and refining these solutions into profit. yes profit! It can be done.
If you have questions about what works or would like to submit your success stories make your post now.
I will start the ball rolling tomorrow with my first real post on what I consider to be the most important topic of all, "Developing Internet Marketing Strategies".
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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