Real Estate Blogging Versus Supercharged Blogging
February 1, 2010
There is having your own real estate blog to add content to your website, then there is supercharging your blog for maximum search engine optimization and security. Why have a real estate blog integrated into your IMCD Web Design (IMCD) website if you have other “free” options available? Simple, IMCD not only integrates your blog into your real estate web design, it supercharges your blog with proven plug-ins necessary for to field the most effective real blog.
Realtors that have an experienced real estate web design company, IMCD in particular, set up their blog realize several benefits. The first one, of course, is that by integrating the blog into your website you get all the SEO benefits of easily adding keyword-rich content and driving to your personal agent website. However, a supercharged real estate blog has more than just the integration benefits.
IMCD’s standard blog option includes all our supercharging steps to make your blog an effective and powerful online real estate marketing tool – not just drawing more traffic, but generating more sales leads.
A standard blog is set up for adding content and saving your posts under nondescript titles. IMCD’s supercharged real estate blog package includes the latest search engine optimization tweaks, the ability to add video and multiple images to your posts. As real estate agents know, when it comes to getting home buyers interested in a property – a picture is worth a thousand words and a professionally photographed house is worth a few thousand dollars more in the listing price.
The only missing ingredient from your IMCD real estate blog is your creative writing. Even with writing, IMCD prepares your blog to overcome any writer’s block. When your blog goes live, you already have enough categories set up to keep your creative juices pumping out the relevant real estate market information. Usually, agents find that the categories give them an outline that helps the creation of several blog entries at one writing session.
Whether you are a pro at creating blog entries or a novice, your real estate business will benefit from an IMCD real estate web design with the supercharged blog option. Contact our real estate web design team today to get your online marketing in the fast lane to higher return on investment.
Driving Traffic To Your Real Estate Website
January 25, 2010
At the recent National Association of Realtors conference, the topic of building your online market with your real estate website, blog and social media outlets was a hot topic. Driving the subject’s popularity is the fact that more agents are acquiring more than half of their clients and home sale lead generation from their online real estate marketing.
Spencer Rascoff, Zillow’s COO, gave online marketing advice to agents – important in that Zillow found that only 10% of their visitors left for a top brokerage site, most are attracted to an agent who made a posting. Instead of competition to agent sites, Zillow is proving to be part of an agent’s sales funnel to their personal real estate website.
In step with other real estate agents’ experiences, online marketing is planned and does consume some time, however the pay-off is proving to be worth the investment. Having a real estate blog is an essential part of the online sales funnel. Spencer’s advice is “Read [blogs, online forums, etc] twice as much as you comment and comment twice as much as you blog.” If you are blogging twice a week to keep your clients and search engines visiting your website, comment four times.
Each Realtor comment becomes a soft sell – establishing a real estate expert image by providing information and advice while presenting their email and a link as the portal to the real estate website.
Comments on blogs and forums are written much like your real estate blog entries – conversational. The audience is different, however their search for real estate information is the same. Spencer found that the key to building trust through your blog and your online comments is having transparency in acknowledging any bias and be consistent and thoughtful. Flippant advice repels potential clients since it is usually new home buyers or sellers that ask the “stupid” questions – potentially the same market you want to attract.
Reading before commenting is important since NAR presenters found that information that is provided as part of an online conversation is well received, whereas hard-sell comments are seen as out of place and often ignored or receive negative feedback. In the online market, hard sell in the comment section does not lead people to visit your website.
For real estate websites providing a solid foundation for your online social networking, IMCD provides semi-custom and custom websites with integrated blogs. Your real estate blog is user friendly, search engine optimized and ready to go – you do not need to set up anything, just add your content!
Real Estate Websites For New Agents
January 18, 2010
Having a successful real estate website presence may be the make it or break it strategy for new agents. With over 50% of current real estate agents only getting their licenses within the last three years, having an online presence can be critical to early success.
Getting your services seen on the main search engines in competition with the older established agents puts your website in a good position to be seen by 80% of your real estate market that is searching for property and agents online.
With your own agent website with an integrated blog, you have a real estate marketing platform that allows you to:
- Continually add content from anywhere there is an Internet connection that alerts the search engines to new content,
- Comment in real estate forums and link people to your resourceful articles on the subject,
- Add multimedia video or voice-over slide shows of your featured listings, and
- Target your blog entries to the hot market segments – foreclosure opportunities or home going on the market in neighborhoods that are popular regardless of the economy.
In today’s market where properties are on the market from 60 to 120 days, Internet marketing is the most cost-effective way to show the property. More expensive marketing avenues, such as posting adds in the next most popular media, the newspapers, are only seen by 14 – 20% of the market. For extended periods of time, the print media costs add up and are not as effective in reaching most of your market’s active buyers and sellers.
The Internet has been described as the great market leveler – a place where large companies with greater marketing budgets have little advantage over the new market entries. By following tried and true online marketing techniques, IMCD assists agents in getting their personal real estate websites operational and visible leading to greater profitability earlier in the game. Contact us about our sophisticated, yet entry-level priced, real estate agent websites and claim your place in the online market.
Real Estate Website Blogs Can Build Content Twice
January 15, 2010
Real estate agents can use their real estate blog websites to create content twice – without risking a search engine penalty for duplicate content. The benefit is the second use of your content can drive traffic to your site and generate greater sales leads.
Realtors know the benefits of having a real estate blog on their website, primarily as an professional way to consistently add keyword-rich content and draw search engine and web visitor traffic. Each article is a nugget of your hard-earned wisdom about your niche real estate market. After a time, your Realtor website has quite an inventory of information in several categories.
How to double your blog entries? Learn from a master marketer. In the early days Apple made sure to get its computers into colleges so educators and students learned how to use computers on a Mac. When the students graduated, they were loyal Mac users. How to apply this to real estate sales?
By editing your blog entries into a real estate handbook customized for your market, you now have a tool to use both in giving real estate seminars for bank or credit union customers and a free e-book to give away on your real estate website…to people who fill out and send your contact form.
Market research has shown that web visitors are three times more likely to fill out a form if they are getting something in return versus filling out a form to have someone contact them. With this marketing strategy, you use the work you put into your blog twice to gain more clients from your real estate website without having the duplicate content problem!
An added benefit of holding a real estate seminar is that the press release that you or your sponsoring bank or credit union sends out should have your website listed. This creates another beneficial external link as well as driving traffic to your website from any email alerts that are sent out at the same time as the press release.
All IMCD real estate website designs have the integrated blog option so Realtors can make the best use of their online marketing opportunity. Contact our web design specialist to see how your business can benefit with more sale lead generation from your personal real estate agent custom or semi-custom real estate website.
Four Major Pitfalls of Real Estate Template Websites
January 13, 2010
Real estate template websites can be a great investment and fast-track way to establish an Internet presence, especially for real estate agents launching their personal agent website. IMCD is a real estate web design company that brings the best of two worlds – attention-arresting custom designs and cost-effective template websites – together in semi-custom real estate template websites.
When building an online marketing presence, better to start with a proven system of getting your name out in a professional manner as well as with a website that has the search engine optimization (SEO) built into its structure and layout. Over the years, IMC has had many agents turn to us to build their online marketing after having earlier attempts misfire, usually due to their first attempts getting caught in these pitfalls:
- No proofreading. Bad grammar and misspelled words convey a less than professional image. With IMCD real estate template websites, professionals handle copywriting and final edits for you.
- Tomorrow never comes. The template fill pages with “under construction” or “your information goes here” text seldom get revisited. Due to time or manpower constraints, many websites are one-shot deals, so the pages left undone will probably still be without content and remain a keyword opportunity missed 18 months down the road.
- Static brochure instead of lively news site. Real estate websites treated the same as a sales brochure become dated too quickly. Just as markets change, information you provide your clients must stay up-to-date. Mixing the graphical design expertise of IMC with the ease-of-use of a blog integrated into your real estate website allows maximum control over updating your website. If your real estate blog is linked to your template websites and hosted for free by a blog company, you lose many of the SEO benefits of having your real estate blog integrated and hosted with your website.
- Homegrown graphics. Real estate websites built with professional graphic design expertise boost your professional image. When potential clients see amateur images selling your services, they figure their home will suffer the same photographic indignities – not the way to sell the sizzle!
If you need a real estate template website with tremendous return on investment potential, contact the web design pros at IMCD. We will get your real estate website template built with your information and our SEO, graphic design and marketing layout expertise.
Create Content For Your Real Estate Website
January 12, 2010
Creating content for your real estate website is an important step in creating your online marketing presence.
Even if you are not a professional writer, the following guidelines can help you create content for your web design that will improve the performance of your home page in retaining visitors and optimize the content in your real estate website for search engine indexing.
- Create a “call to action”. For a real estate agent, contacting you to use your services is the action step.
- Emphasize the buyer’s or seller’s benefits. Instead of listing the features of enlisting your Realtor services, list the benefits they will receive. Third party testimonials are a great boost to selling the benefits of your real estate services.
- Reinforce your corporate and personal brand. If you have a memorable and catchy phrase to promote yourself, use it early in your content and end with it.
- Use your first sentence – it may be the only one your visitor reads. Your first sentence should also have your keyword phrase also. Your first sentence is marketing you to both the web traffic as well as the search engines’ indexing programs.
- Break it up. Unlike writing as taught in school, paragraph breaks are used to keep the text from repelling readers by the sheer density of words. Rule of thumb: two to four sentences per paragraph.
- Write for your market. For real estate agents, writing in a colloquial way, as if your are in a conversation with your web visitor is great – let your website be a carry-over of the way you build relationships when you are face to face.
- Bring up a common problem buyers or sellers have and one or two ways you have helped people solve them. Remember, it does not matter if all the real estate agents you know solve the problems in the same way – in marketing it’s the first person to tell people what they do that becomes the consumers’ hero. If people know how easy it was to solve, it wouldn’t have been their problem to begin with!
The best place to begin is the content for your home page. This sets the tone for your entire real estate website. The secondary pages to tailor to your market are your bio page (more benefits and testimonials) and the pages directed to the home buyers, sellers and investors in your market. Investing in extra content pages always pays off by creating market-specific keywords and content that casts a wider net of keywords for search engine queries.
What Is Your Real Estate Website’s Marketing Pitch?
January 10, 2010
Does your real estate website‘s marketing pitch need a tune-up? In a competitive economy such as real estate sales, your marketing pitch is the item that helps you stand out. In the online market place, you need two marketing pitches – one to the customer and one to the search engines.
To market to the home buyers and sellers, your real estate website‘s marketing pitch should explore all the ingenious ways that you solve their problems.
Marketing Principle #1 is “Love your customer”.
Your web visitors read your web page content to see if you are putting their real estate needs first. If you give your customer what they want, then real estate referrals and warm sales lead generation benefits flow from the advantageous relationship.
To “market” to the search engines, the discipline is to keep your marketing pitch divided up so a different web page addresses one of your markets. Do not rely on your home page to pitch to sellers – who want the best price, buyers – who want the lowest price for the nicest home, and investors – who are looking at the real estate sale from a whole different perspective.
Keep your marketing pitch on the home page to those benefits everyone in the real estate market wants: top notch communications, comprehensive knowledge of the residential and/or commercial market – whatever your market niche is, and guidance all the way through the closing process.
Part of your search engine strategy is following Marketing Principle #2:
Know your competition. Check your competitions’ websites to see if there is keywords or markets you have overlooked or could market to better. Late entry to market can be a benefit to a real estate agent’s website, since the market positioning and keyword usage can take into account all the successful strategies at play in the online real estate marketplace.
Place your real estate website order with IMCD Web Design and take that beneficial step towards establishing your powerful online real estate marketing presence. Our web designers work with you to create the best keyword strategy and content presentation to get your website ranking on the search engines and generating home buyer and seller leads.