I have to thank my parents for teaching me to understand and appreciate the value of time worn items. With my mom, it was dusty old antique furniture that she found, buried in the back of musty junk shops. She would take these battered and often broken pieces of a bygone era and restore them to their former glory. With my father, it was forgotten, neglected old cars that nobody seemed to care about or want anymore.
"They don't make them like they used to." He would say. "A little time, attention, and elbow grease, and you can recreate something to truly be proud of"
I took that philosophy to heart, and as I got older I started to work on my own restoration projects, much like my father had. I thoroughly enjoy the sense of personal satisfaction and accomplishment that comes with bringing relics back to their former glory.
When I got into real estate, I partnered as a team with my mom and brother, and the belief we held was that because we each had different backgrounds and strengths, we would be able to accomplish much more than any one of us could on our own. Without a doubt, my mom is old-school real estate. She doesn't have the internet savvy that I do, but she has worlds of experience marketing and selling homes over the last ten years. Because I am essentially a product of the internet age, I understand how to use the internet and online marketing, such as blogging, to promote our business.
Because of this, I essentially ignored conventional market tactics. Mailers? My mom handles that. Print Marketing? That's right up her alley, and I rely on her to utilize those tools to promote and sell our listings. When it comes to the internet, craigslist, personal websites, blogs, etc.; I'm the one that makes sure it gets done. What's interesting about it is that we see a better rate of return (ROR) on internet marketing than we do through print marketing and mailers.
I've been working on an automotive restoration for some time now, and while I was tinkering one night I came to a very big personal discovery. My blog sees 40-60 visitors a day, and while that's not bad for a fairly new (less than 3 months) blog, I want to find a way to dramatically increase readership. The answer was obvious, and I'm ashamed that I didn't come to it sooner. Here I am, blogging about town hall meetings, development proposals, changes in the daily lives of residents, and I'm relying on being discovered by search terms in Google.
I realized I needed to modify how we market and promote ourselves and our homes. I decided that the best way to increase readership would be to physically put my blog in their hands, and let them see the benefit of the online resources I'm providing. The next day I sent out 400 mailers to a subdivision I had recently blogged about, and decided I would track my website activity to see if it made a difference.
My traffic tripled.
I was astounded by the amount of hits I was getting, and almost all of my increased traffic was coming from local sources! Within that same time frame I started receiving phone calls from residents as well, thanking me for voicing their concerns about proposed developmental changes in their area. I became a resource for the homeowners that lived in that subdivision!
Not only did my readership spike, but the return traffic has increased as well, and residents are consistently returning to get updates on town hall meetings, viewing blog posts about new parks planned for the area, etc. My daily traffic has maintained a daily traffic content of 100+ hits a day ever since.
What I had done was take an outdated business practice (direct mailers) that was providing a dwindling ROR to our business, and restored it to a profitable model for our team. That business model is no different than the antique car I have sitting in my garage. It's still a valuable item in our business model, it just needed "A little time, attention, and elbow grease, and you can recreate something to truly be proud of"!
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