PPC vs Content

Bonnie,

I strongly suggest that if you are using PPC (google adwords) that you turn on conversion tracking and then you can track your actual cost per conversion (lead). PPC in real estate is very tricky and can drain your marketing budget faster than you can say go.

A much smarter marketing methodology is to look at how you can leverage content in a real estate business blog platform that will deliver relevant search engine traffic and rankings.

Search engines rankings is something best left to a reputable company that are experets in your industry and know the proper methodologies for creating sustainable natural rankings for hundreds of keywords... check out www.realestateblogsites.com and their offerings.

Best,

Rodney 

PPC = Pay Per Click

This is a way to advertise on google. It allows your ads to be shown on google and you pay a specific price per click.

http://adwords.google.com

Use Stats
I agree with Rodney. Definitely turn on conversion tracking. You should also get familiar with your web stats program and look at the referrers. The referrers section, depending on your program, will tell you where a visitor came from.

Not All-or-nothing
You can also reduce your budget and "re-target" your ads. PPC is not all-or-nothing. A good strategy with PPC is to use it as a complement to your organic listings.

For example, if you rank high for "denver real estate" turn off search ads for that phrase. But you can still keep it for content ads (these are the ads that appear on third party websites).

You can also use a service like WordTracker to help you to find other cost-effective keywords to target. So instead of using PPC for expensive terms like "denver real estate", you might find that "englewood business community" is highly searched phrase yet no one targets it.

A good strategy with PPC is to use it as a complement to your organic listings.

This is what I do - a combination of both.  I primarily used PPC until my organic rankings improved, then paused the keyword campaigns where my site ranks well.   On the keywords that my site doesn't rank well, I still use PPC.

PPC is too much money for the leads you get. Try downloading webceo at www.webCEO.com  and try optimizing your site and then have fun seeing MORE people come to your site ~~~ and the download is FREE.

webCEO is a website optimisation program that does much more than just the optimization fo your site... download it and see...

BTW I get NOTHING for plugging this great program.... just in case you were wondering.... ;-)

I have a feeling I am going to have a lot to say on this topic.

 "I strongly suggest that if you are using PPC (google adwords) that you turn on conversion tracking and then you can track your actual cost per conversion (lead)."

Rodney, conversion tracking doesn't work at this time for many templated real estate websites.  This is an unfortunate downside that many agents are faced with right now.  In the future companies will most likely work towards that being a doable thing but right now many agents cannot use conversion tracking.

"check out http://realestateblogsites.com/ and their offerings."

RealEstateBlogSites.com isn't cost effective for any agent to invest in.  Especially when realestateblogsites.com is getting the packages at $500.00 a month with a $500.00 set up fee for the package they turn around and sell for $2,000.00 set up and $800.00 a month.

The company uses another companies product.  That company is blogsite.com.  An agent can find prices here:
http://blogsite.com/public/styles/blogsite/Blogsite/content/Blogsite%20Services%20Agreement%20Form.pdf

Sure RealEstateBlogSites.com pre packages the blogging tool with cool features and tools but I'm willing to bet that blogsite.com can assist ing etting those 'extra's' set up.

An alternative FREE product is a program called word press. (http://wordpress.com/).  I've set up my first wordpress in under a weeks time and it can be viewed at http://www.weeklymarketing.net.

Also, an interesting thought... I believe Active Rain uses Word Press.  Unless the 'Tag Cloud' add on works on multiple blog tools, I am positive they use Word Press.  They seem to be doing pretty dang good for using a free tool!

Moving on...

WebCEO is a tool that can give you information on individual pages of your site.  Much like Web Position Gold which I use for running reports on a monthly basis, WebCEO will tell you what % a desired keyword has in a single page, it will compare your site to top ranking sites and tell you how your site differs.

The LARGEST flaw with WebCEO and Web Position Gold is that they give you statistics on your site and then compares your site with the top 10 in the search engines.  This being said, try going to Google every Monday of a month and using the same keyword do a Google search.  Record each week the URL's (websites) that are in the top 10.  You will find that you will ALWAYS be tweaking your site to meet this tools standards even when your site is ranking #1.

This of course is only four years of industry experience trying out every SEO tool made available to me.  My opinion may or may not represent my companies opinion.  You can take all that I said with a grain of salt or as a page out of the bible.  The majority of professional SEO (Search Egnine Optimization) experts will tell you to stay clear away from these kinds of tools.

John F. Jones III

Oooooo... I have lots to comment about this thread; bear with me while step through some of the misconceptions presented here as well as some educational points that should be jumping off the page - I apologize in advance for the length.

PPC vs Organic Search vs Traditional SEO

This is a long debated topic with few clear answers until recently. When Chris Anderson (and the former CEO of Excite) educated the world concerning the long tail of search, it became very clear to all that PPC was incapable of reaching 90+% of all search traffic on the web. If you really study the nature of long tail activity, you'll quickly conclude that organic visibility is by far, more advantageous than PPC campaigns because resonance with the long tail is a sustainable model, whereas, PPC campaigns are both unsustainable and tactical. If you stop blogging, you will sustain your overall visibility for a significant period of time, whereas, if you stop bidding on PPC terms, your clicks will cease. Likewise, if you use traditional SEO practices to focus on specific [predictable] key terms, you are limiting your search audience to the short tail (about 7% of all search traffic) while at the same time, exposing your business to competitive threats by other firms that spend more on traditional SEO games than you do.

Think carefully about this - if you optimize your web site for 20 terms and a competitor steals just five of them from you (thus ranking higher), your traffic may drop by as much as 25% over night.

In my view, PPC and traditional SEO have their place - businesses should seek a balance between tactical and strategic initiatives designed to drive traffic. Ben and Jason have both provided excellent recommendations - they have each recognized the tactical nature of PPC campaigns. Weblogs (on the other hand) currently represent the best opportunity to tap into the long tail of search - no other process [today] trumps a well written blog. If you know of a better one, I'm all ears, but to date, I haven't found a better way to reach out for a sliver of the 90+% of search referrals that are [by definition] unpredictable.

"webceo ... and then have fun seeing MORE people come to your site."

Getting more people to your site should not be the prime objective; getting the right people to your site that want a specific type of property that you appear to be the expert on, is the only clear success metric that you should be concerned with. Ranking well for popular terms (now commonly known as the short tail of search) do not typically produce good prospects. Ranking well for unpopular phrases produce highly qualified prospects because that's the point when searchers have either found exactly what they're looking, or they've given up.

Disclaimer - I work for MyST Technology Partners. We invented Blogsite^TM; it runs on the MyST platform which is also used to provide Enterprise RSS services for companies like Intel and VeriSign. Blogsite^TM is used in a number of industry segments both as an advertorial blogging platform as well as a knowledge management system inside the firewalls of big organizations like Borland International and Intel. A derivative of Blogsite^TM also provides the foundation for Real Estate Blogsites - it is a specially configured version designed for real estate professionals.

"RealEstateBlogSites.com isn't cost effective for any agent to invest in."

If I didn't know better, John Jones makes this assertion as if he's holding a case study that proves his point. However, my hunch is that he's simply misinformed. That's not surprising - most people think a free blog built for personal blogging is every bit as useful for businesses that want to benefit from blogging. Unfortunately, Mr. Jones hasn't realized that most business people don't want to become bloggers - at least not in the sense that bloggers typically work. Instead, lots of market research and hundreds of our own paying customers have shown us that marketing organizations and business people want to benefit from blogging and content syndication. Their requirements are far different from the typical person that uses products like Wordpress, Typepad, and Blogger. As an example, one feature in Blogsite makes it possible to forgo posting for a week while still convincing search engines that the site is fresh every day. This (we found) is extremely important for business people that don't always have time to blog.

Of course, there are many examples of businesses that use and love products like Wordpress and Moveable Type - they're great products, but they're designed to satisfy bloggers, not marketing organizations, and typically not business people that don't have time to blog consistently, can't take the time to learn a template language, or struggle with the many more technical aspects of blogging.

"An agent can find prices here:"

Mr. Jones is also misinformed about our pricing. Real Estate Blogsites [REB] provides a product version that we do not sell directly. It includes various additional features designed for real estate use and more exclusive real estate features are on the runway for launch later this year. The features we provide to REB are exclusive to their marketplace. For example, we currently a special signature plug-in available only to real estate agents - it has features that only agents would appreciate including a Skype voicemail integration. We also have an integration with RealBird (a satellite service). Recently we launched a specialized integration with Real Estate BuzzBox - a vodcasting service that seamlessly integrates video and audio podcasts into a blogsite - it requires no programming or technical skills. Many other features distinguish REB's version of Blogsite from the standard version that any business can purchase.

"Sure RealEstateBlogSites.com pre packages the blogging tool with cool features and tools but I'm willing to bet that blogsite.com can assist in getting those 'extra's' set up."

Sorry John - you'd be leaving the casino empty-handed on this bet. ;-)

"Also, an interesting thought... I believe Active Rain uses Word Press. Unless the 'Tag Cloud' add on works on multiple blog tools, I am positive they use Word Press."

I'm not certain about the underlying platform john, but I think you're 0 for five now. ActiveRain is most likely a Rails application. Why do I think it's Rails? Simple - I'm a Rails developer and I've seen some of the error messages. ;-)

"I've set up my first wordpress in under a weeks time ..."

Bingo - you've proved my point. A real estate agent doesn't have a week to set up any application! And you're somewhat of a geek to boot - how long do you think it would take a non-technical real estate agent to repeat what you've done in 7 days? A blogsite goes live with one hour of effort by a real estate agent. And it goes live with all these differentiating features, most of which are not found in Wordpress. ;-)

"They seem to be doing pretty dang good for using a free tool!"

You're over-simplifying the development time put into ActiveRain. My hunch is the developers have thousands of hours in this platform. But more specifically, your assertion that anything is free is false; nothing is free - there's a cost to using any open-source or free technology. In my view, it's an injustice and poor advice to suggest to non-technical audiences that anything is free; your assertions are misleading at best.

"If the interest is there from realty agents and brokers, I could even match their services in a matter of weeks for less than half what they are charging."

Bring it on William. ;-)

I forgot to mention - Every Real Estate Blogsite comes with its own Technorati-like Topic Engine (there are very good reasons you'll need to build that). Oh, and this feature slipped my mind - every Real Estate Blogsite optionally integrates with Microsoft Office Smart Tags and Office Research Services for those larger real estate firms that require pervasive Office document integration, or for those real estate prospects that simply want to access their agent's weblog in Microsoft Office products. Dang, and there's that pesky little feature that took two people six months to perfect - SlimeGate® -- a blog server shield that eliminates blogspam hacker probes which account for 80 to 90% of all web server load - and endemic to the frequent outages you see on services like TypePad, Wordpress hosted solutions, and other blog systems. Ah, and then there's our patented caching server - a system designed to withstand a popular Digg in excess of a million hits per hour. Crap - I forgot about the presentation architecture - fully XSL 2.0 compliant and responsible for out-ranking tools like Wordpress and MT. Jeeze - I also forgot to mention the MyST Aggregation Server - here's an explanation of what you'll have to build. And of course, there's the 20 years of real estate experience that the CEO of REB brings to the table, and the 50 additional years of technology and real estate agency management experience that his staff provides to their clients. I'll stop now with one last feature - the brand focus that REB applies to every blogsite without additional cost.

William, let's make it interesting, take six weeks - we need a few good competitors to help us educate the market. ;-)

In conclusion, there are many ways to achieve success on the Internet, and I'm not dumb enough to believe that Blogsite is the right service for every agent, broker, or firm. However, I'm smart enough to know that there are many types of real estate agencies that operate in a variety of markets and under a myriad of conditions - some are very competitive; some are resort markets, and some are bedroom communities. Some agents and companies require the features and consultative services concerning content syndication and blogging guidance that REB provides; and some don't.

Anyone looking for blog services should investigate the offerings and determine the true cost of ownership and required operational skills. If you have strong technical skills and a good understanding of RSS and web servers, you are probably a good candidate for going it alone with Wordpress or maybe a consultant like John. If you want to build a brand-greedy weblog designed to achieve intense visibility for your agency and thought leadership, Real Estate Blogsites is probably the right choice. Realty Blogging is a good alternative if you want to create a weblog community in your town (a big job even for experienced online community builders). In any case, if you want guidance, support, and a technical team that's always on the look-out for your future technical requirements, consider paying for a service.

Hi Bill,

 Nice to see you here at activerain. I was already familliar with many of the underlying aspects of blogsite that you mentioned, I actually spent a good hour going through your site just for that purpose.

I do however feel that about 75% of what blogsite is capable of will never be used by 90% of the agents out there, including most of the larger firms and brokerages, so the need is not there to create the same exact model. I was already als familliar with Myst and the XML foundation you developed. Please do not think I was knocking your own or Andys abilities or accomplishment, merely the pricing structure of the hosted blogsite application.

Forgetting Digg for a moment, we have systems able to withstand even the infamous slashdot effect so that point is rather moot, as concerns anything I build. MS Office (shudder) integration for most tasks is also not that difficult t integrate the aspects that the majority would actually care about or use. As for SlimeGate, I would personally love to see that in action, however saying it is 80-90% of server load seems a tad high seeing as the trends we have seen for load increases have been more from ftp/ssh brute attacks, followed by exploit finding robots, proxy fishing, then blogspam scans. So let's agree to disagree on that 80-90%  :)

I like the ability to pull in native RSS from another site and have it shown dynamicly as being an integrated part of the original website, however, the search engines will still see the content as duplicated, which at some point may cause issues (footnote: at this time I have yet to see documented evidence showing it really matters now).

I also fully agree with needing the ability of having its own tag engine and being an internet  marketer at the core, I also agree with your own reasoning of why. Again this is not that difficult a task. I also think full site content syndication is a must, yet once again this is not a difficult trick to integrate.

I made the statement that if the interest is there, this could be done and I will stick to that. If anyone would like to drop me a line and encourage this, please do.

Bill, you and Andy may want to entertain the idea of a joint effort, as you have most of the needed requirements already built, and I have the coders to tie it together in a cut down version that 90% of agents and small firms would be able to both use and afford while still being able to offer what the majority need.

William --

It's nice to hear that you have a good understanding of the platform in spite of the fact that we suck at marketing our own technology. (seriously, we're complete geeks) However, we both have long histories of building technologies that create business value, and to that point, here are some additional comments that might help you and others under why we built what we built.

"... about 75% of what blogsite is capable of will never be used by 90% of the agents ..."

There are two dimensions to this observation; (i) features that you know and use, and (ii) features that you never see, but gain benefit from.

Typically, (with Blogsite) agents only need to know how to write good posts and create link properties (an advanced form of semantic link structure that is simple to use). Blogsite was designed for business people that need to stay focused on their business activities, so companies like REB simplify the task of setup, branding, customization, configuration. In fact, changes and future customizations are all part of the service - you pay one service fee and REB/MyST provide all the agility you need to address even the most difficult requirements.

In category two - features you never see - services such as the aggregation engine, automated briefings, comprehensive ping manager, SlimeGate, Topic Cloud - all these services are being used by every customer (without their complete awareness or understanding) in ways that augment visibility. While you may think these are all "nice to have's", they are each an integral part required to achieve greater visibility - that slight advantage the agent needs to be ultra-competitive in hotter markets where larger firms are typically dominating the search landscape.

Now - consider your comment [paraphrased] "features not needed by 90% of the agents...". I agree - and to be clear, 100% of the real estate market is not the target audience for Real Estate Blogsites. In fact, only the most demanding real estate agents should want or need the capabilities of Blogsite. This is also true of Blogsite that we sell through channel partners to other industry segments. In many cases our channel partners recommend and sell alternative blogging tools that are a better fit for their clients - Blogsite is not designed for general-purpose blogging.

"... so the need is not there to create the same exact model."

Indeed - you are segmenting the market and looking for alternative demand curves; Bravo! Go after that market - your prime competitor in that segmentation is Blogging Systems (Realty Blogging) - they sell a low-end product that's just $100/month. It's based on iUpload and it's probably the right tool for certain agents.

"... entertain the idea of a joint effort, as you have most of the needed requirements already built."

We have entertained the idea of a low-end (tool for the masses of agents), but that's not in the cards and for many reasons. For starters, there are many free (and near-free) blog tools already servicing that segment, a sign that commoditization is at the doorstep. Our strategy has and likely always will be the Lexus of Web 2.0 services - making highly advanced processes magically productive for business and marketing folks. I can't speak for REB though - they are the exclusive provider of Blogsite services for the real estate industry.

We could debate the ease or difficulty of the technical requirements necessary to mimick what's in the MyST platform for many weeks or months. However, until someone actually does it, there's only one system that achieves the results and experiences our customers are demanding.

It's my view that if you're a consultant specializing in traditional SEO services and you're looking for ways to broaden your revenue streams, you should consider hooking up with REB - they offer a share of the recurring revenue to consultants as part of their channel partner program. A smart consultant will sell REB's solution in addition to alternative lower-end products and services for content syndication and business blogging. We have some one-person channel partner consultants that are earning in excess of $100k/yr on Blogsite recurring revenues alone. With additional training and writing services, these folks are making close to $160k/yr just on their Blogsite customer base.

It's clear that the real estate industry is being compelled to do more in terms of search and discoverability - Web 2.0 is just one of many driving factors that are creating Internet earthquakes in real estate. However, one [weaker or simple] tool is not likely to address the broad, somewhat stratified segmentation of real estate brokers and agents. Furthermore, this market segment is looking for ways to defend against encroaching threats (Zillow, Google, Yahoo, Edgeio, MyWeb) - hence our belief that strong integration competence for all forms of content and automation services are going to be critical and significant success factors that translate into real estate business requirements.

Oops - I forgot to address this point...

"... needing the ability of having its own tag engine and ... this is not that difficult a task."

Correct - a tag cloud feature is very easy to build. But that's not what we built. Topic Cloud is a topic map server - a significant leap in terms of semantic mapping technology. It's not apparent why you would want this, but it will be soon. ;-)

Man, was this fun!  Being a Blogsite subscriber for about two years, and knowing Bill French personally, I could not help but read this exchange with a big grin.  I don't have the expertise of either of these gentlemen.  But then, I don't intend to spend ANY time trying to learn what they know.

My Blogsites work.  I know some of the reasons why, but not all.  I just want to compete in my market and will do what I can ethically to get a competitive advantage. 

So, with the original question (from my friend, Bonnie Cox) about PPC in mind, I can tell you that I quit using PPC on my primary website and have saved that cost.  While I pay for my blogsites, the cost is far less than I used to pay for PPC.  So, I could argue that, in spite of the check I write each month, the cost of Blogsites to me is negative. 

In addition, our website produces stronger and more frequent prospects who buy real estate.  Last I checked, that is what it is all about.