Realtor Email Marketing Tips

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

Email marketing can be an effective addition to your Realtor marketing program. Or it can be a waste of time and energy. The difference is all in the approach.

Here are some Realtor email marketing tips to help you boost your email response rates, invite inquiries from potential clients, and grow your real estate business.

1. Adjust your email marketing program so that it puts your name or your company name (whichever is more familiar) into the "From" line. This will help improve your open rates, which will improve your Realtor email marketing program in general.

2. Use your email subject line to sum up the message of each email blast, with a focus on the benefits offered within. Try to keep your email subject lines to six words or less, whenever possible. If your subject lines are longer than six words, put the most enticing parts up front so they don't get cut off. Aside from the actual message, the subject line is one of the most important items of your Realtor email marketing campaigns. Get them right, and you'll boost your open rates.

3. Keep the design simple and clean. It's okay to use HTML-formatting for your Realtor marketing emails as long as you keep the layout simple. The more coding you put into your marketing emails (or images, for that matter), the more problems you'll have with deliverability.

4. Use plenty of hyperlinks to give readers a choice of things to click on. Remember, the marketing email is just an invitation for the reader to do something else. Your Realtor marketing emails should drive readers toward some objective or goal, and this means people will need links to click on. Give them plenty.

5. Define your objective. All too often, I see Realtors who send marketing emails with no goal or objective. If your call-to-action is "call me to learn more," you need to create a stronger call-to-action. Your Realtor email marketing campaign should be laser-focused on a very specific goal. For example, an open house, a home buyers seminar, a new listing, or some other defined event.

Email Marketing Summary & Conclusion

Realtor email marketing can still be effective, even in the age of anti-spam. But you'll have to work harder at it. You need to build a list based on permission, not on spam. You need to pack your marketing emails with value, lots of links to click on, and plenty of purpose. Do these things, track your results, and seek constant improvement. This is the way to succeed with Realtor email marketing today!

Good luck with your email campaigns.

Real Estate Website Templates - My Personal Pick

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

Somewhere during the course of Internet evolution, website templates got a bad name for themselves.

I think it's because early templates were basically garbage ... and some of them still are. All of these companies referred to their products as professional website templates but, in truth, many of them were amateurish in appearance and functionality.

Most Real Estate Websites Templates are Horrid

As a real estate agent, you've probably encountered many companies selling their real estate website templates (and the hosting services that usually go along with them). But there are significant problems with many of these template-based products:

1. They often use frames that greatly reduce your potential for good search engine rankings.
2. They are usually cookie-cutter templates that cannot be fully customized.
3. They limit your ability to make certain types of edits to your own website, which should never be the case!

I started playing around with website templates about six years ago. I wasn't very impressed back then. Most of them were built with clumsy HTML coding and lots of table structures that made them a nightmare to work with.

Then I "went off" templates for a few years, building my websites from scratch. It takes a heck of a lot more time to build a site that way, but I thought it was the best way to go.

Boy Meets Templates - A Relationship Renews

About a year ago, I started researching professional website templates again. I looked at all the big template sellers, such as TemplateMonster.com, but I was never really excited about any of their offerings.

Eventually, I stumbled across a website called 4Templates.com. Since then, I've built a half-dozen websites by customizing their professional templates -- for myself as well as for clients. I've become a template "junkie" again ... and with good reason.

I'll get to the reasons I like these templates in a moment. For now, here are a couple of the more recent websites I've built by customizing the professional website templates offered by 4Templates.com:

• Far West Capital - I created this company's website by starting with a template and doing some basic customization with colors, graphics, etc. I also added a blog to the site, but that's another article entirely.


• Top Ten Agent - This is the website I use to sell my step-by-step guide to real estate search engine optimization (which you should purchase, by the way!). Once again, I started with a template from 4Templates.com and did some basic design customization with colors, graphics, etc.

With content aside, each of the websites above took me about a week to customize (and that's mainly because I'm anal-retentive about details).

If my clients at Far West Capital had some high-end design firm build their website from the ground up, it probably would have taken 1 - 2 months. But by starting with a professional website template and customizing it with unique content and graphics, I was able to produce a good-looking, highly functional and professional website for my client in a quarter of that time (and for far less money).

3 Things I Like About These Websites Templates

My background is in creating highly successful websites from a visibility, traffic and sales standpoint -- not in creating "pretty" websites that fail in the other areas. So when I experiment with a so-called professional website template I want to know ... is this thing going to harm or hurt my chances of good search engine rankings and traffic?

This is the primary reason I like the website templates offered by 4Templates.com. When you select and download one of their templates, you will probably get two versions of it. One folder will be labeled "HTML" and the other folder will be labeled "XHTML."

Now this might not mean much to you, but any web designer will tell you that XHTML code with cascading style sheets (CSS) is the more modern way to design websites. This approach makes them easier to maintain and gives your website greater flexibility, usability, and coding longevity. 4Templates.com is one of the only website template companies I've encountered who offers their templates in this more modern coding method.

That's the main reason I like their templates, because to me it's the most important aspect of any website template. In fact, I would go so far as saying that any company that claims to offer professional website templates had better offer clean-coded XHTML versions as well. Otherwise, they should call their product "outdated" website templates.

Cost and reliability are the other two reasons I prefer this company. You can get some really nice design layouts (modern, clean, versatile, etc.) for under $35. As for reliability, I've used their online ordering process at least a half-dozen times over the last year, and I have never had a single problem. You get an email within five minutes or ordering online, and it gives you links to your website template files and other "goodies" such as fonts and graphics.

I hope you look at website templates in a new light after reading this article, and I hope you find these products as useful as I have. Related article on free blog templates for various platforms.

Good luck, and good marketing.

-Brandon

House Flipping Game - Cool Product Alert

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

As many of you know, I publish a website geared for first-time home buyers. This website also has a section for real estate investors, including a lot of tips on flipping houses.

I do a lot of research for this website, and as a result I'm always coming across new real estate resources -- websites, books, tutorials, etc. Some of them are truly superb, others are mediocre, and some are just plain awful.

So it's refreshing to come across a product that fits into the "superb" category. I just did a trial run on a computer "game" that teaches you how to flip houses, and I thought it was one of the coolest real estate products I've seen in some time.

The game [the software makers refer to it as a game, but I call it a real-life lesson in flipping] is called Flip That House, and it's available for PC. Sorry Mac fans, it's only out on PC for now.

I am bringing this to your attention (as I did the last investment trainer) because I know a lot of real estate agents and brokers get lured into the world of flipping. But as my sources tell me (a friend of mine who flips), the world of house flipping is dramatically different from the world of "ordinary" real estate sales.

So if you're thinking of venturing into the world of house flipping as a side business to your real estate career, you'll want to school yourself on all the lessons learned and flipping techniques you can find.

But if you're like me, reference books on a subject like this would bore you to tears. I like to learn in a hands-on fashion, if at all possible.

That's the hidden value of the house flipping "game" -- it takes you through the flipping process as if it were the real deal (or as close as you could get without spending actual money on an actual flip property).

Another cool thing about the game is that it keeps track of your budget, like a little "cyber accountant" following you around on your flipping project. So you will learn tips on flipping a house as if you were conducting an actual flip.

At $40 (at the time of this writing), I thought it was reasonably priced too, especially when you consider that the real world of house flipping could cost you -- and hopefully earn you -- thousands of dollars.

Bottom line -- a $40 piece of software is a much safer environment to practice your flipping skills in, rather than the real world of big bucks. But that's just my take on the subject.

So that's my review. I hope you found it helpful. And if you're thinking of becoming the world's next great house flipper, I hope this "game" serves you well.

Learn more at the Flip That House website.

Robert Allen's Real Estate System

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

I've been working my way through Robert Allen's Ultimate Real Estate System (there's a lot of material to get through!), and I wanted to share my thoughts on this real estate investing guide.

Personally, I usually cringe when I hear the word "system" used in combination with a real estate topic. Oh no ... here comes another system.

But I've got to tell you, if ever there was a real estate "system" worth looking into, this is it. Now let me be very clear about the nature of this product. This is not geared for real estate agents, per se. But then again, it's perfectly suited for real estate agents.

You see, Robert's system (which includes a variety of training guides on money-making through real estate) is created for real estate investors. But I ask you this. Who better to invest in real estate than a real estate agent or broker who (A) knows the local market, (B) can spot a good investment, and (C) can streamline the paperwork and expedite the purchase process?

In fact, I would say that a real estate agent who is not investing in real estate is a real estate agent who has not yet maximized his or her profit potential.

So if you've been representing buyers and sellers for a long time, but you've never taken the plunge into real estate investing for profit, Robert's educational system is the perfect place to start.



Have I convinced you that it's a product worth purchasing? If so (and you can afford to part with 39 bucks for a potentially life-changing educational experience), I encourage you to visit Robert's website to learn more about his Ultimate Real Estate System.

Good luck, and good investing!

~Brandon

Real Estate Podcasts - Agent's Guide to Podcasting

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

If you keep up with the latest real estate technology and marketing techniques, then you've probably heard about real estate podcasts. I think it's going to be a long time before agents on a broad scale embrace the use of real estate podcasts as a marketing technique, but it does seem to be growing in popularity (albeit slowly).

So what is a real estate podcast and how can it help you grow your real estate business? Here's a quick overview for you:

The Podcast Explained

The podcast is often associated with the iPod because they both have "pod" in them. Sure, you can listen to a podcast on an iPod, but they go beyond that as well.

A podcast is simply a digital media file that can be distributed over the Internet through a syndication feed (like the RSS syndication feed that this blog produces). If you subscribe to a podcast you can play it back on a portable media player (like an iPod) or on your computer.

The Real Estate Podcast

So by extension, a real estate podcast is an informational program in digital media format that can be distributed over the Internet and subscribed to by anyone interested in the topic of that podcast.

For example, let's say that an Austin real estate company purchased some basic audio recording equipment in order to create a real estate podcast for folks in Austin. They could treat it just like any other radio program, but with a focus on the Austin real estate scene.

They would then make their real estate podcast available on the Internet -- probably starting with their own website -- and begin to promote it. If I were a home buyer in Austin, and I wanted to keep tabs on the local real estate market, I could subscribe to their podcast and listen to it via my home computer, or perhaps download it to a portable media player like an iPod.

These are obviously just the basics of creating a real estate podcast for marketing and communication purposes. But I hope now the veil of "mystery" has been lifted from real estate podcasts, and that you now have a better understanding of what they are and how they work.

Recommended Reading:
Real Estate Podcasts - How Realtors Benefit

Creating a Real Estate Business Plan

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

So you have done some brainstorming (and some soul searching), and you've decided to start your own real estate company. That's excellent. But before you do anything else, you're going to need a good business plan to get started on the right foot.

A real estate business plan is a key piece of the puzzle when striking out on your own, and the effort you put into it up front will pay off in success later on.

I just posted a new article on our "sister website" -- AdviceForAgents.com -- that explains the real estate business plan in greater detail. Why do you need a business plan? How do you create one? What are the benefits? It's all covered.

At the end of the article, I've listed some related resources to help you create a business plan of your own.

Check it out here:
Your Real Estate Business Plan - How to Plan for Success

Brand Imitation - Is it flattery, or laziness?

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

I wanted to share a new section of my postcard marketing website that I was forced to create recently. I thought at the least you would find it amusing ... or maybe saddening, I don't know.

I won't go into much detail here because it's all spelled out in the story linked below, and I don't want to tarnish this blog with any kind of negativity. But click the button below to read this partly amusing, partly pathetic story about sheer laziness and spitefulness among a real estate marketing vendor.

Content Management Systems and SEO

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

Many agents with real estate websites employ content management systems (CMS) to simplify the maintenance and content updates on their websites. But there might be a downside to this, depending on the type of CMS you use on your website.

Some content management systems make it really hard for search engines to crawl the website, mainly by generating complex URLs and website structures. When this happens, a large amount of your website content could go unnoticed by search engines. This would obviously have a negative effect on your search engine visibility in general, and by extension your website traffic levels and overall success.

Is there a way to enjoy the best of both worlds? Can you use a content management to simplify your website maintenance, without sacrificing search engine visibility? The answer is ... sometimes.

CMS programs have come a long way. Modern content management programs offer a lot more features and capability. But they're also being developed to perform their roles in a more search-engine-friendly manner. The term for this is "SEO friendly CMS" and it has become a hot topic in real estate web development circles.

Today, in fact, there are quite a few website CMS programs that can help you manage the content on your real estate website while also maintaining the SEO friendly nature of the website.

Here are a couple of articles and a forum thread to help you learn more about the subject:

• An SEO Choice for Content Management System
• Choosing an SEO Friendly CMS
• The Agent's Guide to Real Estate Software