#1 Do *not* over-think yourself!
It's been too long since I updated my AR blog, so my initial reaction is to do a massive everything-under-the-sun post that "perfectly" encapsulates everything I've been working in the year+ since I've been active...
However, I know myself well enough to know that ain't gonna happen... Whenever I start to write a HUGE post, I end up over-thinking myself, writing piece, saving drafts and never hitting the publish button. That's gotta be the #1 reason I really like micro-blogging sites is that it forces me to hit "publish" on an idea even if I told have time to complete it in full.
With that in mind, I'm *not* going to go deep here... but rather, I thought I'd give a brief update on some of the things that have been top-of-mind for me lately. If one of these topics is of particular interest to you, let me know and I'll happily dive into more detail in a future post!
- Social Media Speaking Engagements. In the last year, I've been so fortunate to speak at dozens of real estate events on using blogs and social media to generate business. I've been asked to travel as far as Burmuda and Toronto, at events as large as the National Association of REALTORS annual conference in Orlando Florida and Inman events in both San Francisco and New York. You can see a ton more on my real estate speaker's page, but if you want to see me live, then consider heading to Tempe, AZ on April 22 for Technopalooza where I'll be keynoting a talk on using social media to generate business.
- Facebook Pages. I'm loving the new Facebook Pages as a way to market yourself. I've written a bunch of posts recently on 4realz about Pages (note: these are a VERY different beast than your standard FB profile and actually a very different beast than the FB Pages that existed a year ago when the NYTimes features me for one of the real estate marketing pages I had built), the most relevant of which is "Why bother with Facebook Pages." Check it out, and if you have a Facebook Page, let me know. I've fascinated to see how REALTORS are using Facebook Pages to market their business.
- Eating my own Dogfood. I've been using my Facebook Page as a way to help educate folks on social media and real estate marketing. You can see what I've been up to by becoming a fan of my page here.
- Affiliate Marketing. I've been having a blast building affiliate marketing programs for some of my clients and recently worked with one real estate client to release a product that can help real estate professionals get paid for including a moving widget on their site (I've got it up on the sidepanel of every blog post on Rain City Guide right now). If you'd like to learn more about this affiliate program and other ways you can make money off of your blog with complementary products, let me know and we can explore this area as well! And if you want to see the main place I play with affiliate programs for real estate professionals, check out the 4realz Toolshed where I list a bunch of real estate marketing tools for real estate professionals.
- Promoting Your Blog Posts. One of the things I think a lot of new bloggers expect is that if they write interesting stuff, the readers will come. Reality is that if you're not spending 2X as much time "promoting" your posts as "writing" your posts then don't expect to get the traffic and leads that the big boys get. There's all kinds of ways to promote your posts and I summarized a few of them on this presentation on getting SEO value out of your Social Media efforts. This is something I've been doing for 4+ years with Rain City Guide posts and I think is an under-appreciated how much additional traffic, leads, clients it can drive.
- Using Social Media Tools to get SEO benefits. Related to the previous item, it's possible to get some ridiculously great SEO value out of the time you spend playing in social networks, but you've got to think strategically. I'm so immersed in this world with a few of my non-real estate clients that I'd like to step back and bit and bring this conversations to real estate professionals. If you have any questions on how SEO (i.e. optimizing your website/blog posts so they rank better in search engines), let me know. That might be the best place to start!
- Listing Syndication for SEO. If you're ready to "rethink" the value of listing syndication, then HomeSyn maybe appropriate for you. HomeSyn thinks about listing syndication *not* from the perspective of "how do I get my listings on as many sites as possible?", but rather, "how do I use my listings to get my website and neighborhood pages to rank better in the search engines so I can drive more search engine traffic". It's a bit of a leap of faith for many agents getting into website design, but the tool is ridiculously simple out-of-the-box and can do wonders for driving relevant traffic to your site. You can learn more by becoming a fan of my listing syndication page on Facebook and watching the video below.
Hopefully, you can see that things have been crazy-busy for me, so obviously there's tons more I could talk about... but before I start over-thinking myself, I want to turn things back around to to the AR community and say if you'd like a bit more detail on any of these things that have been top-of-mind, let me know. I've love to dive a bit deeper on any of these topics, so let's start exploring!
Comments(59)