Ta-daaaaaaaa! I finally released my 2nd book on real estate marketing, I took this weekend to clean up the countless number of banker's boxes filled with emails, magazine articles, scribbled research notes, bar napkins and papers that I managed to store away like a pack rat. Two boxes alone were overflowing with phone messages, mostly from people who desperately wanted answers to their own SEO questions stemming from over promising bozos that managed to give their clients nothing but lots of excuses. 

I have to confess -- I've not been a big fan of blogs as I thought they served no useful purpose whatsoever. BLOGs were nothing more than another stupid marketing fad like a pet rock. In a few more months, they'd be history. I waited a year and was amazed that BLOGs were still here. Okay, I thought, it will take two years until the fad runs out. 

Let's get real here. Who wants to read about an agent talking about themselves and nothing else? How good they are with horses, how well they know the local area, blah, blah, blah. The agent photos change, but the words are all pretty much the same thing. It's plenty of boring stuff filled with grammatical mistakes, misspellings and topics that do nothing for helping me get that commission advance from my broker tomorrow. (Or, fill in the important topic for you, here.) I was wrong. BLOGs are important and people DO read them. People DO get benefit from reading them. 

If anyone besides me is a member of the advertising agency community -- another idea emerged recently that thousands of us thought was equally stupid. Consumer produced content. Ads being produced by consumers? What the hell...? What does Joe consumer know about creating an ad that will sell the product or service? It takes years of design, creative direction, college, working at a national advertising agency getting experience in this sort of thing. Letting a consumer produce an ad signaled the Kill the Messenger syndrome in many of us. We spent years developing our skills and now a consumer is going to produce an ad?  There goes the neighborhood. Many of us were afraid we'd lose our national contracts to a consumer that came up with a clever ad campaign. Did you see the movie with Dudley Moore, Crazy People? The movie is about a group of mental patients who actually came up with a set of killer campaigns that well... sold a LOT of product. But this was just a movie. Right?

Well, as it turns out, I'm wrong there too.

Because thanks to social video networks like YouTube -- consumers now have a pretty big stake in helping to create hot new brands. If you have something unpopular to say, if you've done something bad, then a few million people can sink and kill your product or career. If George Lucas does not mind me borrowing a phrase here from Star Wars, That's the Dark side of the Force. 

As a REALTOR, you might be thinking the same thing about the new crop of tools designed to help For Sale by Owners (FSBOs). What consumer knows how to stage the home for a sale, curb appeal and let's not forget about the protection the listing gets by using a brokerage. Did he consumer take the ePro test and get a better score than you? What the hell do FSBOs know about on-line marketing? Sort of makes you mad, right? Are you a little bit pissed off you missed a lot of commissions last year from the arrival of tools that help FSBOs? 

There's FSBO websites, Trulia.com, Zillow.com and there's a lot more change coming. There's a quote I like from General Eric K. Shinseki, former Army Chief of Staff. He said, "If you don't like change... you're going to like irrelevance even less."

So much for my idea on fads. Social networking is here to stay. FSBO marketing is real. BLOGs are not going away, either. 

With that being said, I sound like a hipocrite because my first blog on Active Rain smacks of the same thing. But everyone can change their mind and I think I just changed mine as I can now see the benefits of blogging. 

As I have traveled and spoken to many REALTORS, estate agents and solicitors across three countries -- I have come to re-examine the usefulness of BLOGs as a medium to allow those of us who know things can now be in a position to teach others. For those of you who are familiar with the Holy Bible, there is a passage that reads something to the effect of:

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.

A popular motivational speaker, Anthony Robbins tells us something equally motivational: Success and Failure leave clues. If you find out what the successful person does and if you repeat the same steps you are going to achieve the same if not better results.

EXERCISE: Who doesn't look at Broker Bob's first page visibility on Google and ask the question: How the hell did he manage to land that kind of page rank? If getting there was cheap and easy... then anyone could land a top page rank, right? 

One of the rubs of being successful in this business is this. If we have a system and it works, we do not like to tell others about it. Rule of Thumb: It still takes money to make money. There are no shortcuts. 

As our industry has slowly evolved into a marketing driven business -- as consumers have arming themselves with information they never had before, as leads have been reduced to a trickle coming from real estate guide adversing... we have all woken up to the fact that many thousands of us have zero visibility online. And THAT's where the customers are. But don't just take my word for it. Read the annual home buyer report guides published from the National Association of Realtors. More the three quarters of your customers are coming from the Internet. So if you're still spending 75% of your annual budget on real estate print ads... it's stupid. It's time to wake up and revise your spending. It's time to shift 75% of your annual ad spend on Internet visibility. Not print ads. 

If you're a REALTOR, the axiom Location, Location, Location is hyper critical to your success. With only ten natural page results positions available on the first page of Google, Yahoo or MSN -- the mystery of how agents and brokers GET and maintain one of these coveted positions seems elusive. Yet there are no shortage of over promising bozos that all promise the same thing. They can GET you there for a monthly fee. But how do you tell who's lying or over promising? How do you measure their credentials and effectiveness at their ability to deliver what they say? 

The purpose of my last book was to show you what questions to ask during the Interview process and I included step by step directions how you can help your site get the ranking you crave.

There's a lot more than a few myths out there about SEO. My passion about writing about this area of real estate marketing is to help you understand what the myths are, where the pitfalls are and how to avoid giving your hard earned commissions to the marketing bozos.

My third book on real estate marketing will be published next August 2008. It will come with an audio CD recorded from one of my 2007 SEO workshops. The book will be a collective of actual case studies of what works, and what doesn't work. This BLOG will be my forum for listening to your success and horror stories.  

So let's go. Please give me your good, your bad and ugly stories of your SEO experiences.

 - Bart

P.S. Stop reading my blog and go sell some homes now, okay?