Real Estate Blogging Q&A

Has the market slowed to a crawl in your area, because of the economy? Have a little extra time on your hands? Why not channel that extra time and energy into your real estate blogging efforts?

Right now, all across the United States, some smart agents are gearing up their websites for the next upswing in the economy. Sure, 2009 will probably be a slow year for most agents, but it's bound to start picking up beyond that. And those agents who prepare for it now will take the lion's share of business later on.

This is why I always stress the importance of a strong web presence. If you work hard to expand your website and increase your search engine ranking here in the present, you'll be primed for a steady stream of web traffic in the future. Real estate blogging is a great way to achieve these things. Start growing your blog now (by adding plenty of content, features, etc.), and you'll be thankful for the effort later on.

Need help getting started? Here are some real estate blogging FAQs you may find useful:

Q: What is a blog?

A blog is simply a content-management tool that makes it easy to publish information onto the web. Real estate blogs are typically arranged in reverse-chronological fashion, with the most recent entries up at the top.

Beyond that technical definition, a blog is also an opportunity for real estate agents to be more active online and to grow their websites -- without the need for web coding skills.

Q: What is blogging?

It is the act of publishing information through a blog. Real estate blogging has been around for several years, but it started to become extremely popular around 2006. Today, there are thousands of agents publishing blogs, all over the United States and beyond.

Q: How do blogs work?

A blog is designed to be operational immediately after you set it up. The features will vary depending on the blogging program you use, but most of them perform the same basic functions. To publish information onto your blog, you simply log in to the admin area, type your message into a box, and then click the "publish" button. Your blogging program does the rest. It will convert your plain text into HTML code so it can be displayed online. It will also render any formatting you've included, such as bold text, italics, hyperlinks, images, etc.

Q: How do real estate agents use blogs?

There are endless ways to use real estate blogging as a marketing / communications tool. I see new ideas and techniques all the time. Here are five good ideas to consider. You can use real estate blogging as a way to keep your audience informed about local events. You can use it to showcase properties by posting digital pictures and descriptions. You can use it as a Q&A tool. You can even use it to generate a steady stream of real estate leads to support your business.

Q: What are the benefits of blogging?

Publishing new content on a regular basis makes your website more relevant and useful. It also helps with search engine visibility, because you can add endless amounts of keyword-rich content. Real estate blogging can also become an online conversation between you and prospective clients, because blogs have a reader-commenting feature built right in.

There are also some intangible benefits that real estate blogging can deliver. For example, a blog can make people more inclined to trust you (and contact you) because it's a showcase of your knowledge and abilities.

Q: How do I start a real estate blog?

My advice is to get help from somebody who has launched one before. If you publish a real estate blog under the domain of the blogging company (as opposed to publishing it on your own web domain), things will be much easier. But I recommend putting the blog onto a web domain you own. In this case, you will need to install the blogging program onto your web server. This is where an experienced assistant will come in handy.

I recommend using either Blogger or WordPress for your real estate blogging ventures. Blogger is easier to install on your web server, and you never have to update it. WordPress offers a few more bells and whistles, but it's also trickier to install onto your web domain. This blog is published using the Blogger program. I also have a few that are powered by WordPress. I like them both, but for different reasons.

It doesn't matter to your audience what blogging program you use. All they care about is the quality and timeliness of the information on the blog. You might want to experiment with both of these programs to see which one suits you best.

Q: Where / how do I host my blog online?

You can publish a blog onto your existing website, if you prefer. This is the publishing method I recommend. For example, if your website is www.AgentBobSmith.com, you could create a sub-domain for your blog such as www.AgentBobSmith.com/blog.

To put a Blogger blog onto your website, you would choose the "Advanced Publishing" options when setting the blog up through their website. To put a WordPress blog onto your website, you would actually need to download the WordPress blogging program (for free) and then upload all of the files to your server. You can find plenty of tutorials online to help you through either option.

Q: What do I write about?

This will depend on your real estate blogging strategy. I recommend you spend some time developing a content plan, or at least putting some ideas on paper. There's no limit to the topics you can blog about. In fact, here are 21 content ideas to get you started.

Q: How do I promote my new blog?

I would wait until you have a good base of content before you start promoting your real estate blog. If people visit for the first time and see that you only have two or three entires, they might not be inclined to come back. But if they find dozens of blog entries, and the newest entry is only a day or two old, they'll be more likely to bookmark the blog and visit often.

I've always thought the best way to promote a real estate blog is by publishing great information on a regular basis. When you do this, people will begin to recommend your blog to others. You might even land an interview with your local news networks. This has happened to a couple of my clients.

You can also use online press releases to promote your new blog. But again, I recommend you focus on blogging for a while before you announce it with the world.

Do you have a real estate blogging question?

If you have a question that hasn't been addressed here, feel free to send it to me. I plan to expand this Q&A over time. Just type your question into the Q&A box at the top of this blog.

How to Reduce Your Real Estate Marketing Budget - Without Quitting

Reader Question: I feel like I need to reduce my real estate marketing budget because of the economy (fewer clients, spending cutbacks, etc.). Any suggestions?

Without knowing what your marketing budget is, it's hard to make any recommendations. So let me use this opportunity to offer some general advice on real estate marketing budget matters...

We are certainly having some touch economic times right now, and agents are feeling it more than most. One of the biggest problems is that many buyers can't get mortgage loans right now. All of the banks are nervous, and they have tightened up their credit criteria quite a bit.

In most market areas (but not all), real estate agents are really feeling the squeeze. Business is down, so they are now examining their marketing budgets in an effort to control spending. Here are some ways to reduce spending without scrapping your real estate marketing program entirely.

1. Focus on Your Top-Performing Techniques

Identify your strongest marketing channels, and focus you energy on those. Actually, this is something you should do on a regular basis, to ensure you are spending your time and money on the right techniques. But it's even more important when looking for ways to reduce your real estate marketing budget in pace with the economy.

2. Eliminate Costly Marketing Techniques

If you use direct mail letters or postcards, and you outsource the printing and mailing to a vendor, consider scaling back or putting the program on hold. Of course, you'll have to consider your ROI before doing this. I just know from experience that direct mail can be a real money drain when used wrong. If you want to continue using it, check out my postcard marketing book for tips on improving your ROI.

3. Use Guerrilla Marketing

Use more networking and word-of-mouth techniques. It doesn't cost you anything to be more active in your community, except time out of your day. But this can also be a great way to gain new clients without spending extra on real estate marketing. Earlier this month, I blogged about buyer seminars and how they are a great marketing idea for the current economy (for many reasons). This is a classic example of doing more with less.

4. Prepare Now for the Next Upswing

I often get questions from agent who ask, "Why does this other agent's website do so well in the search engines? What does he / she have that I don't?" Usually, it comes down to the fact that the person started working on their real estate SEO long ago, and thus they are now reaping the rewards. This illustrates the need to plant seeds in the present that will grow in the future.

If you have some extra time on your hands, start working on your website to boost its ranking in the search engines -- and to reap the rewards when your market picks up again. Here is some step-by-step SEO advice that will help you get started.

Improvements to the Free Article Center

I'm happy to announce some changes to the Free Articles Center that will make it much easier to use. There are also several new articles to choose from that address recent changes in the housing market, the economic crisis and other current events.

Publishing Articles Just Got Easier

The first thing we did (after repeated requests) was add a link to the top of every article that gives you easier access to the HTML code for that article. In fact, this is the way we recommend publishing the real estate articles, because it offers several benefits. The image below shows this new feature.


When you click on the link that says "Get the HTML code," a new browser window will open. From there, you can copy the code to republish the article. It's pure HTML code too, which means you can put it wherever you want on your website (the article will take on whatever font and color styles you have in place).

There are no advertisements of any kind within the separate HTML code -- just pure content for your website. The mandatory citation / author links have already been included as well. In other words, we have done all the work for you ... all you have to do is copy and paste the code provided onto your website. Easy!

Featured Article - The Housing Crisis Explained

I've also added some new articles recently, to keep pace with economic developments. The latest piece offers an explanation of the housing crisis, as it relates to home buyers. It's a must-read for anyone planning to buy a home in the near future, so it will make an excellent addition to your website.

More Article Details:

• Length - Approximately 1,100 words (it's very in-depth)
  
• Audience - People planning to buy a home in the near future
  
• Date created - October 14, 2008
• Read or publish the article
• Review our publishing guidelines if you are new to this process
  

I hope you find these articles useful in your web publishing efforts. If you need help putting them onto your website, please refer to our free tech support.

Real Estate Prospecting Tips - The Unprospecting Method

I have to goals for this blog post. The first is to create a disturbing image of an "old school" prospector panning for people. Mission accomplished! My second goal is to offer some real estate prospecting tips that will help you save time and energy down the road. Specifically, I want to explain how you can use the Internet to make your prospecting efforts much easier.



For those of you who are new to this jargon, real estate prospecting is the process of generating leads and inquiries from potential clients in your geographical area. For example, if you send letters or postcards to certain neighborhoods in your area, then you are prospecting for clients in that area. It's also commonly referred to as real estate farming.

Like the old-timer shown above, you are dipping your metaphorical pan into the "waters" and hoping to come up with something of value -- new clients.

Common Prospecting Techniques

I've already mentioned one of the most common prospecting tools used by real estate agents, and that's direct mail. Many agents send letters and postcards to residents in a certain area as a way of generating leads. The concept behind these prospecting letters is simple. That logic is that, if you send out enough direct mail pieces, you're bound to get some phone calls eventually.

Easy enough. But if you go about this the wrong way, you can end up wasting a lot of time and energy. That's why I'm offering you these tips for a smarter real estate prospecting system. There's a better way to go about it!

Before we get into this any further, let me admit that it's a long-term strategy. I would plan on getting real results from this prospecting system about a year out. So you might have to stick with your current methods while developing the one I'm proposing.

Real Estate "Unprospecting"

When you get down to it, real estate prospecting is an in-your-face approach to marketing. You are thrusting yourself in front of strangers in the hope that they contact you. But what if you had a steady stream of emails and phone calls from people who found you personally? That would be worth the effort, wouldn't it?

There's really no secret to all of this. What I'm talking about here is Internet visibility. Or more specifically, search engine visibility. I will say this from experience -- if you can earn maximum visibility for your real estate website, you'll never have to use traditional prospecting methods again.

I have former clients who operate under this kind of business model. Through my SEO consultation services, I've helped them achieve top search engine rankings within their respective cities. And now they focus most of their effort on sustaining (and even improving) what I helped them build.

In the past, they had to exhaust themselves with the usual real estate prospecting methods. But now the process works in reverse. Instead of thrusting themselves in front of potential clients, they let the prospects come to them. When people visit Google or Yahoo and type city-specific "homes" and "real estate" phrases, they often find my clients' websites right up top. One of my clients here in the Austin area gets 85% of his new leads in this way.

This is why I refer to this as "unprospecting" -- it reverses the dynamic. And it saves you a lot of time and energy in the process. You are still real estate prospecting in the sense that you are dipping your pan into the stream. But in this case, the pan is your website and the stream is the Internet. Big difference.

Yes, it takes a lot of work to reach this point. Boosting a website's rankings in the major search engines takes a lot of work, especially in a big city with a lot of real estate competition. I know, because I do it for a living. It's not rocket science ... it just takes a lot of time and persistence.

Here's a checklist of what you'll need to achieve real estate prospecting success via the Internet:

1. A website, obviously. It helps to have a professional, nice-looking website as well. In other words, spend the money to do it right. Don't have your neighbor's sister's niece design it to save money. This is the centerpiece of your online prospecting system.
2. Plenty of great content. This is the building block for your future search engine visibility. The more keyword-rich content you have on your website, the better!
3. A link-building program. By this, I mean you should consistently seek new links to your website (from other websites). This will help to increase your website's ranking in search engines, especially in Google. Publish articles online. Submit your website to real estate directories. Do whatever it takes to gain links from relevant, quality websites. Just avoid reciprocal linking schemes.
4. Lead generation tools. The goal of this web-based approach to real estate prospecting is to generate inquires through your website. Traffic alone is not enough. You have to convert those visitors into leads you can follow up with. Here's some help with this one.

There you have them ... the four primary components of your new-and-improved prospecting system. Build a great website and fill it with keyword-specific content. Add some useful tools while you're at it, such as property listings, local market news, etc. Improve your search engine rankings by adding new content often, and by conducting a link-building campaign. And set up some lead generation channels to convert your visitors into leads.

I began this article with two goals -- to create a funny image and to offer some solid advice. Hopefully, at this point, I've got a check in both boxes. If you have questions about this article, or about real estate prospecting in general, type it into the Q&A box at the top of the blog.

A Better Real Estate Marketing System With Buyer Seminars

Now is a great time to expand your real estate marketing system by offering seminars to first-time home buyers. In this blog post, I'll explain why this is a good strategy for the current economy, how to conduct a buyer seminar in your area, and how your real estate marketing system can benefit from it.

A Timely Marketing Technique

The current financial crisis has a lot of would-be home buyers confused and intimidated about buying a home. I know this for a fact, because I receive their questions and concerns constantly through my home buying Q&A blog over at the Home Buying Institute.

So my question is, why aren't more real estate agents using buyer seminars right now? Not only it is a worthwhile community service, but it can also help you strengthen your real estate marketing system with a timely technique. Now more than ever, consumers need help making sense of the economy as it relates to the home buying process.

People are afraid of making the same mistakes they hear about on the news. They think mortgage lenders are out to get them. They fear that the sky is falling.

But as you and I both now, a well qualified home buyer can still purchase a home in this market, and can often get a great deal in the process. Sure, you need a better credit score these days to quality for a loan and get a good rate. But that's the way it should be. The lending standards today are exactly where they should have been for the last decade, during the heyday of "easy money" lending. So a qualified buyer with good credit should have no trouble getting a loan.

The trouble is, many buyers don't realize these things. And that's why I feel that a real estate buying seminar -- if properly planned, promoted and delivered -- could be the perfect addition to your real estate marketing system and business promotion.

This article on how to conduct a seminar includes such things as planning the venue, promoting the event, delivering the presentation and more.

This is just one example of adjusting your real estate marketing system to reflect changes in the economy. You have to stay on your toes in this kind of market. You have to come up with creative ways to attract clients, and this is a perfect example.

Like many things in business, a real estate marketing system that doesn't change is one that's doomed to fail eventually. Be flexible and open minded. Look at what's going on in the world and ask yourself, "How can I adjust my marketing program to reflect consumer fears and concerns? How can I encourage qualified buyers to come out of hiding? Is my real estate marketing system well suited for the current and future economy, or is it outdated?"

Internet Marketing Ideas for Real Estate Listings

Reader Question: What are some Internet marketing ideas I can use to get more people to see my real estate listings online?

Somebody asked a similar question a couple of weeks ago, regarding real estate listings. But that question wasn't Internet specific like yours, so I'm happy to take another crack at it.

There are plenty of Internet marketing ideas you can implement to drive qualified traffic to your online listings. In this context, "qualified traffic" refers to people who are using the Internet to search for homes for sale in your area (i.e., the best kind of web traffic).

Here are some online marketing strategies for real estate listings that you can start working today:

Search Engine Marketing for Real Estate Listings

I just did a quick experiment using Google's keyword tool. I started with the phrase "Austin homes" and then ran a query to get some search history on that phrase. According to this tool, there were approximately 246,000 searches for this phrase in September alone! There were also plenty of searches for other versions of this phrase, such as "Austin homes for sale" and several others.

When you add it all up, that's a lot of potential website traffic for anyone who ranks well in the search engines for such phrases. Let's say you're a real estate agent in that city, and your website ranks within the first five Google listings for those phrases. You would have a steady (and significant) stream of web traffic. Each day, hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of people would visit your site looking for information on homes. So your real estate listings would receive excellent exposure thanks to the Internet.

You could also use that as a selling point for potential clients: "Your listing will receive maximum exposure on a top-ranking website..." Only a handful of your competitors would be able to say the same thing. Talk about differentiating yourself!

This is why I stress the importance of search engine visibility as part of your overall real estate Internet marketing strategy. If you succeed in this area, you wouldn't have to do much else in terms of marketing. You'd have a constant stream of leads, courtesy of Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. So this is one marketing idea for real estate listings that every agent should pursue.

When it comes to search engine marketing, you have two options for increasing your website's ranking and visibility:

• Search Engine Optimization -- This is the act of improving your website for better "organic" or natural rankings. These are the main listings on a search engines, and they rank websites in terms of content, link popularity, and other factors. This is the long-term approach to search engine visibility, but it's well worth the effort. The Austin homes example above clearly explains what you stand to gain. We offer SEO services to help in this area, and the Top Ten Agent book offers step-by-step instructions.
  
• Sponsored Search / Pay-Per-Click -- This is the quicker path to search engine visibility, but you'll pay for the privilege. With this option, you would bid on certain keywords or phrases related to your business, and your bid would partly determine your ranking for the phrase. These are the sponsored listings that appear down the right column (and sometimes the top) of search engine results. You pay a certain amount each time somebody clicks through to your website.
  

Both of these search strategies can help you drive traffic to your website and the real estate listings it offers. The first one, SEO, is the long-term approach to Internet marketing and visibility. The second one, PPC, is the short-term (but paid) approach to search engine visibility.

Submitting Your Listings to Other Websites

The Internet marketing strategies listed above will increase the exposure of your real estate listings on your own website. But you can also submit your listings to other high-traffic websites for even more exposure. This is an Internet marketing idea used by many agents.

There are dozens of websites that allow you to add your listings, but the process is usually the same across the board. You pay some kind of listing fee in exchange for the exposure it brings you. In other words, you are paying to leverage the traffic of a popular real estate website. The NAR website offers services like this, as do many of the big real estate search websites like Trulia.

Try it for yourself: Feature your listings and your brand on Trulia.com. Get Trulia Pro today.

Other Internet Marketing Ideas

These are by far not the only ways to showcase your real estate listings online. They are just two of the most popular ideas among modern agents. In truth, any Internet marketing strategy designed to increase web traffic can be adapted for real estate purposes.

For example, online press releases can drive targeted traffic to your website. And if your site offers real estate listings, then you've just increased the number of "eyeballs" on those listings as well.

Are You Ready for Internet Traffic?

This is a good time to touch on another important aspect of real estate Internet marketing -- website usability. If your site is difficult for people to use, then it really doesn't matter how much traffic you generate. Many of your visitors will leave in frustration if they can't find your real estate listings, or if the listings don't offer enough information (property details, photos, virtual tours, etc.).

So keep this in mind when using any of the Internet marketing ideas presented above. Make sure your website is easy to use, and your property listings are easy to find. You'll get even better results when you work from both ends of the spectrum like this.

Best Way to Mail Real Estate Letters

Reader Question: What is the best way to mail out real estate letters?

That depends on what you mean by "best." The most affordable way to mail real estate letters is to print, address and mail them yourself. Of course, that's also the most time-consuming way to do it.

The most convenient way to send out real estate letters would be to use a direct mail company that handles the logistics for you. Of course, that's the most expensive way to go about it as well.

So it's a question of cost versus convenience. If you plan to send letters to a big list, I would outsource the printing and mailing to a direct mail company. I used to work for Ginny's Printing in Austin, TX, and letter mailings were a big part of what we did every day. But not all direct mail companies handle letters -- some specialize in postcards and other "self mailer" formats. So you'll have to look around.

Related articles:
Real Estate Letter Writing 101
Real Estate Farming Letters

Hope that helps you some. Good luck.