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How To Use Your Active Rain Blog To Get Listings!

How To Use Your Active Rain Blog To Get Listings!

There are many ways in which agents use their Active Rain blogs for buyers, like in relocation packages and email alerts. Since our focus is on getting listings and Bob Stewart has this contest going on about how we share our Active Rain blog to build existing relationships I thought that I would share how we incorporate our Active Rain blog on a listing presentation over the phone or in person.

We also use our Active Rain blog information with our existing sellers.

Here is the play by play:

1. We take all of our short sale information posts and post them on our website under its' own URL: short-sales-Florida.com. Whenever a person, attorney, prospect, neighbor, buyers agents, whomever has a question about short sales we send them a link to our page that contains all our Active Rain short sale posts all in one place so they don't have to figure out how to use, 'search' or 'tags'. This way they can read at their leisure, book mark the page of even print out the articles to read later on. This is probably our most successful and effective marketing strategy in using our Active Rain blog.

short sales florida

2. Go Google Me! You see, every agent has some sort of website, most are buried in the google sand box never having been indexed so that gives us a huge advantage. We have Active Rain screen shots that we use in our slide show presentation showing us as the point leader for Florida and a slide that shows the most subscribed to blogs on Active Rain. Since we are in the top 4- that is something we can use in our listing tool box! Now I know a lot of people will say so what about the points. Well, I am here to tell you that our sellers know it is a big deal because they read our blog. Not only that, people who don't know us will say to us: I don't know what those points mean but they must be important to be up there like that. Why would I want to market that we are one of the most popular blogs out of 160,000 agents plus? More exposure for their listings of course! Success breeds success.

clustrmaps

3. On existing listings we take screen shots of our Active Rain statistics page along with our Clustermap screen shot to show them how many views their listing got from being posted on Active Rain. I love this feature because it is the proof in the pudding. Like Nestor says, "My favorite license plate is the Missouri, show me state." Show me what is going on with my listing! The sellers love this. We also use this same feature for listing prospects. We will take one of the existing listings and then show this same information to let them know what Nestor and Katerina can do for their property.

active rain statistics

4. Problem short sales: We take a post we write such as Freddie Mac- Does Anyone There Know How To Read- and post it, then ask for reblogs, then take the post along with all the comments and send it to all our Senators and Congressmen, media outlets, etc, to get some action. You can makes these types of posts very viral if they contain a good cause. People like to help with causes. The seller was in tears as she read each of the comments because it meant so much to her that there was support for her.

5. Spreading the word: You know I write a lot of posts from my heart, political, natural health, homeschool, etc. We have our 'subscribe by email' set up through feedburner. You do not need to be an AR member to subscribe to our blog this way. Many of our local moms, families, consumers and agents who are not members of AR follow our blog. Like kind attracts like kind. So we have a lot of readers who follow our blog not because of real estate but because of what we believe and that in turn, turns into referrals from those who know, like and trust us. We have bookmarks and business cards that are just about our Active Rain blog. We pass those out everywhere we go.

6. Surprise: I am working on some fantastic marketing tools to highlight our Active Rain blog and more. Since I got my new mac I have discovered the endless marketing possibilities with the tools that mac has to offer. Already I have cut my time by one third in how long it takes to put a post together now. As I master these tools- I will share them with you but also wait til you see the stuff I am cooking up! Subscribe to our blog so you don't miss out.

If you are using Active Rain as your blogging platform you should look into ways in which to promote your blog to your existing data base, your existing clients and prospects in your community and on line. You can increase your readership, your email subscribers and develop the relationships that will lead you to listings and closed sales as well as making some great contacts along the way.

How To Use Your Active Rain Blog To Get Listings! by Coach Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

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Posted by Nestor & Katerina Gasset Realtors® Wellington Florida Luxury Homes on 10/27/2009 07:16 PM

Comments (80)

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80 Comments on How To Use Your Active Rain Blog To Get Listings!

OCT

I am curious as to the benefits of the Mac vs. the PC on blogging. So, do post the information! Thanks

Thanks for the post. We are just getting into blogging... we've been timid about it so far, but have seen so many positives about it, that we're just going to jump in. Your information is very helpful.

You guys are real pros. No doubt you are making AR work for you by tying it all together.

Katerina - I look forward to your upcoming posts about using the Mac for posting and other marketing activities.

Katerina, these are great ideas. We are doing some of them but not all. Can't wait to read your Mac posts!

Ooh, looks like the pressure is on for Mac tutorials:) I need to get just a little bit better at the manuevering and such. I am taking classes every week at the Apple store and I am a sponge whenever I walk in there! It feels like being back in school again, LOL! Loving it. I will get it together and share what is working for us. Katerina

As always Katerina your have detailed proven techniques that have proven successful. I appreciate the sharing.

Thanks for the helpful information. Is there a fee for using feedburner?

Katerina, reading this, I realize how hard you guys have to work to get a transaction to settlement. I still not done a short sale.

And thank you for your specifics on how you use your blog.

Fantastic ideas. I'm going to try to implement your #4 in my listings. Thank you, as always.

Nestor and Katrina! You guys ROCK! Like Nestor said "MISSOURI SHOW ME STATE," can't wait for you to show us more on the Mac. Thanks for the info, I am also sending you a email.

Hi Katerina. I've already incorporate a few things that you have mentioned but as usual I have picked up a few more from you. Talk about "paying it forward." I can see why you have so many blessings. ~ Lana

Katerina, It's all about leveraging the internet. I have a great Powerpoint presentation that focus the sellers on the technologies and how they are ever changing, in this market it's just what the sellers want to see. It shows the very real exposure that each home gets. Thanks for the tips on the Cluster Maps. Very insightful!

Hi Katerina...Another Great Helpful Post for us all.

Thanks again !

Dan- I have a powerpoint presentation that I am now going to really power up in keynote on my new mac. We do get to use it once in a while but most of our listings are absentee owners. Like we just got a listing today in Port St Lucie and the investors live in California. It is a great niche, the absentee owner. We do those on the phone and through email. Usually they are reading our blog for a while so they have already chosen us as their agents before they call us or they are referred to us by local attorneys here in town and then the attorneys tell the sellers to list with us if it is a short sale. Again, the decision is made before they call us. I think out of the last 22 listings we have taken in, we met about 4 or 5 in person. On the sellers we meet in person, they are mostly not internet savvy here and mostly over the age of 70, we never even get to the presentation on power point. Just listening skills on those appointments and a lot of hand holding and caring.

What I am working on creating is the keynote presentation to be able to be on my mobile me account where the out of town absentee owners can just go to watch online without downloading on their computers.

Katerina

Thanks Fred!

Lana- It took a while before I would spill the beans, LOL! I still have a few up my sleeve:)

Melissa- I am so excited about sharing all this that I am learning, just need to get it down a bit more and of course, practise some more.

Craig- Just take it one step at a time. The journey begins with one small step, and then another...

Patricia- Yes, most of the time we do work long and hard just to get to one closing on some short sales and then on others- it is a breeze. We are getting 2 listings this week that are not short sale, no that is 3 listings signed this week that are not short sales!

Brian- Thanks! I appreciate you reading our blog, too.

Marc- As do I, :)

Sharon- I am having such a blast learning the mac world and what a wonderful world it is. I have been missing out on all of this? WOW!

Kathryn- Gotowebinar sent out invites again, I just noticed. Please ignore that invite and go to the dimdim account for the webinar tomorrow. Thanks!

Melinda- No, Feedburner is free and Google bought Feedburner FYI.

Kathryn Acciari- Thank you for commenting. Your last name looks Italian, is it?

Dona- I emailed you. :)

OCT

Great stuff! I have just started making a presentation - more like flash presentation. And soon I can use the #1 in CO. LOL. ~Rita

fabulous post, as usual, and i look forward to your mac posts.

I hear often that once you go mac, you never go bac

Rita- Yes, the short sales are like a wave sweeping across the country. It starts in Fl and CA then moves out like a fog. LOL, not so funny,but it is a great niche, works for us.

Daniel- you are right, once you go mac you never go bac. That is an understatement! Talk about impressive! Talk about functionality, ease of use, simple and complete. I am learning all of this as fast as I can. They teach great mac classes at the apple store and everyone knows us there now! It is our new hang out,LOL, Katerina

Great information and some good tips. Thanks for always sharing great stuff with us.

Katerina- Excellent ideas, I always get a golden nugget from your posts. Truly appreciated. I have been working also on a powerpoint presentation, but it is not anywhere near complete. Not enough hours in the day! LOL

Katerina, Thanks for expanding my horizon again. Great post. ATB

Nice Post, I am starting to get AR results in my business. The Google me quote is great, I have used it many times.

Nestor and Katrina, welcome to the Mac world! I've been a mac addict since the 80's. If you need any help, feel free to drop me a line. Mac fans love to help each other. And thanks for your wonderful post! It's no wonder you guys are top agents! I wish I could do half of the things you guys are doing, but, as a lender, I'm limited.

Hi Katrina,

Thank you for you post. In the current market I've worked a lot with buyers and my posts over the past year have been geared in that direction. We have our blogs incorporated as a page on our Website. However I like your idea of dedicating indivual pages with blog content for sellers to read to learn what makes you different from the competition.

Thank you, for all that you do to help others. It's really appreciated.

I am looking forward to futur posts on those marketing tools. I havent thought of using my AR blog stats to show clients the exposure they can have. Great idea. thanks for sharing.

Great ideas and will sign up to learn more

OMG - my head is spinning !!! LOL Thank for sharing.

Outstanding and well written post. Thanks for the wealth of information. Looking forward to reading more.

Very interesting info.

Clustermap? What is a clustermap?

Katerina, thanks for the feedburner reference. I'd never heard of it before. I just signed up, now I need to take time to look into what all I can do with the tool.

Chanda

Hi,

Awesome, informative post. FTI, I went to subscribe and it said, "Sorry the user Subscribe no longer exists" Not sure what that means. Then I went and I saw that I already subscribed to you. (It is probably just me, these types of things always happen to me!)

Keith- It may be a broken link. Can you tell me where you clicked, on the right side bar or on the button on the post? Sometimes when I drag and drop or copy and paste the buttons, I break the link. I will send this over to my VA right now to troubleshoot. Thanks.

Great information, thanks, i'm heading to feedburner next

Doreen- I have a screen shot of my clustrmap in this post. You can look under my tags for clustrmaps. I wrote a post about using clustrmaps. It tags all your readers from all over the world. It is the coolest gadget we have. It sits on our side bar on our blog so that everyone coming to read can see how many people read our blog. Katerina

thanks for the great ideas to improve what I am doing.

I find these articles about how to utilize Active Rain for promoting your company and getting business to be very helpful. I'll bookmark this so that I can go back and read it in more detail.

You guys are the Big Kahunas!

You have some really great ideas here that I had never thought of before. Thank you so much for sharing how your blog helps you market!

I use my blog as a resource for my prospects. Sending them links to articles and relevant information.

Katerina -I can't tell you how many sellers found me from Active Rain. Almost every other seller.

Awww cripes, Rita is making a flash presentation? Yikes, I'll never catch up with you guys. I am going to implement the website URL from AR, that's a great idea. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for sharing! These are great ideas.

Thanks- I am new to blogging but am looking forward to using it to its fullest potential.

Very impressive, I like what you've done with your website.

Jeff Burnham, Rosen & Co, Las Vegas, NV

Katerina, I was referred over to your blog by another member. Great article.

Wow! I need to come SHADOW you two!! Excellent, informative blog!

Kathy Opatka

Thanks for the post

Katerina, I am relatively new to AR and I thought this post was awesome. Congrats on using AR to get listings...you're brilliant. I also recently purchased a MAC. I'm a little tech challenged and I'm really looking forward to your future posts of how the MAC can be used to enhance blogging. I also see you mentioned homeschooling--are you a homeschooler by chance? I am that's why I asked. It's always nice to meet new people who are like-minded. I'm subscribing to your blog and am anxious to hear other ways to use AR to enhance my business. Thanks.

Always great information. Thanks!

I'm glad to see that you are getting so much use out of your Active Rain presence! Just writing a blog post does nothing. Using what you wrote to expand your marketing reach is fantastic!

Great article and information.. thanks for all the great tips. I will book mark for later use.

You are a machine! I love these examples of what you're using your AR blog for. Thanks!

Tammie- Yes I am a veteran homeschooling mom. I have been homeschooling for 26 years now. 5 of my kids I homeschooled are grown up now. My baby is now 7 and we homeschool him now. It is my sunshine each day! I love homeschooling and am a super advocate and activist for homeschool and parental rights. I have written a lot of posts about both. Many of our homeschooling families in our area follow our blog. Thanks for subscribing.

Did you get the mac one on one and workshop program? We paid $99 for one year of one on ones and workshops at our local Apple store which is like 7 minutes from our home:) I will go over many of the things I am learning once they sink in and I can do them more than once without asking, LOL! Katerina

Jeffrey- Oh No! Please don't judge me by our website! I like totally neglect my poor website! Except for my short sale page and short sale URL. I just got Diverse solutions so my IDX will be better next week. I have not focused a lot on our website other than having our VA put all our listings on our website which is a point 2 agent site. It gets fantastic google juice because we have a lot of listings and we do the handshake. But we focus on sellers. Sellers don't go to our website until after they sign up to check their listing on our website. We use Active Rain blog to get sellers. Point2 gets a lot of buyers, our website keeps one of our buyers agent very busy and I need to focus a bit more there. But Nestor and I are listing agents so our focus is on getting listings. But I am working on making the site better, I promise:) Katerina

Thanks again for the good ideas. I especially like the idea of the listing statistics page.

Some good ideas Katerina. I'm interested in what you said in your comment above about putting all of your listings on your site, getting "fantastic google juice", and "do the handshake". What is "the handshake"?

OCT

These are more wonderful a=ideas again from you guys! I hope they never end. How on earth do you think of all these things to show your clients?

What a great post. Please continue the idea machine. It is wonderful to see agent (like the two of you) not gaurded with things you learn, but willing to share with your fellow realtors to better our industry. Thank you.

Jirius- It comes from many years of marketing.

There are 2 parts to real estate: 1 part is to market your sellers listing, the second part is marketing yourself.

I started real estate back in the 80's before fax, cells, computers, etc. I would sit there late at night cutting out text boxes from ad copy type books, ( forgot what those are called) to make our own fliers to promote our listings, create ads and to promote ourselves. I also owned Tae Kwon Do schools for 15 years and i learned so much from studying Guerilla marketing techniques. I learned how to do press releases for board breaks, how to create a buz around our school, contests, all kinds of things to create the 'fame' that is needed to become a household name. Real Estate is no different. The problem with agents and those that teach them about how to market themselves, do it all wrong or mostly wrong. Because it all has to tune into the radio station- WIIFM, What's in it for me. ( the customer).

How we come up with these things aside from being creative is to learn to think outside the box and to put those things that worked through the years to work for us. Promotional advantage is huge in this business. Katerina

Don- Handshake is a part of point 2 agent sites. It is the feed coming in from all the other agents listings that are a part of point 2 and we allow each other to promote one another's listings on our point 2 agent sites. It comes in as a feed in the listing feature. This is great for those who don't have a lot of listings because they can make these handshake listings show up in their featured listings so it looks like they might be your listings. The LA info is not on the contact part. Yours is. We have our handshake listings in another tab because we highlight our own listings, which are a lot to have on a site.

Point 2 does a lot of back end SEO stuff, but our website is #1 for lots of keywords we want to show up for because of how I set up the website. The links to our website from AR are good strong links too. Hope that helps.

Anush- Two things:

I believe in the law of abundance. There is more than enough to go around for all agents. So I am never concerned with sharing.

Second- I know our competition reads our blog, most of them are our friends and we hang out together. I would not be able to hide what we do, LOL. But all in all, at the end of the day, most of them will never do all that we do, the 80/20 rule. Only 7% of all agents blog in the first place.

Thank you Katerina! This is a job and a half!

Now featured on the Optimist Group.

Mirela- Thank you for featuring us in the Optimist Group! I was hoping it was fitting for your group.:) Katerina

Great post Katerina, as usual. All six items are very doable. I especially like and want to implement numbers 1 and 3. Thanks so much!

PS Finally got Kompozer downloaded and used it for a blog post. It worked out well.

Katerina -

AS usual your post on the hot topic is right on top of my to-do list.

As Always, some great tips which are always helpful! Thanks a bunch!

Thank you for the post. Now I have more ammunition to work with.

Katerina, Great information..THank you for all your great advise..

Katerina - thank your for sharing your tips, great information as always. I'm interested to learn about how Mac is saving you so much time. Kevin's laptop just crashed (a PC of course) so we may have to look seriously about going Mac. We just bought an i-Touch (i-phones aren't in Montana yet) and love it.

OCT

Thanks for the tips and info and the inspiration as far as why to keep blogging!s

I am always learning so much from you!

Kevin and Monica- Get a mac, it is the best thing we ever did.

I will post about how to get on mls with mac. Mls is the only window based program we need anymore and I will go through what we do to avoid windows in a post soon. Right now I am in the middle of 3 closings and one of them is a major you know what with the short sale side of it. Katerina

I am really excited to read more about the benefits you find of Mac vs. PC with regards to your blogging. I have both computers at home and can't decide which works best for me with regards to working on my blog and online presence