Ten Profitable Real Estate Blogging Tips
November 1, 2010
Your real estate blog can vastly improve its sales lead-generating ability by using these profitable marketing techniques used by top non-profit fund-raisers.
Blogs integrated into your business website add content to your site, alert search engines to your new content, and bring your blog traffic to your site.
Since “time is money”, asking for a potential client’s time to read your entry uses the same selling principles as asking for a patrons donation.
- Use captivating headlines, if you see a headline that grabs your attention, keep it and modify it for your use.
- Focus your entry on a particular market segment and address their particular housing buying or selling needs. Don’t try to be all things to all people – that’s called writing a book. Blog entries are well-suited for reaching your short-attention span, specific interest, online market.
- Following on #2, outline and schedule a series of articles by defining different markets (by buyer, seller and/or area of town) and client benefits for each market.
- Illustrate your real estate successes with detailed stories, help your audience identify with your past clients. One great story is more effective than three general stories.
- Show results from your past selling performance. People buy and invest with proof of a successful track record and show more trust in businesses that measure and track their performance.
- Introduce any call to action in the first paragraph and reinforce it at the end. Remember you are dealing with what amounts to an Attention Deficit Disorder readership – many read the beginning and end of the article.
- Bolding the sentence that carries your major point makes sure your reader’s eye is arrested in their fast travel from article beginning to finale.
- Occasionally use the PS at the end of your blog entry – habit and the curiosity factor make the postscript one of the most read parts of any letter or blog article.
- Develop your own real estate online community of local appraisal, home inspection and mortgage experts that you “converse” with or quote in your entries. This can have a secondary benefit of opening guest blog opportunities that draw traffic to your real estate website.
- Build your case for the timeliness and homeowner’s benefits of buying or selling at this particular time – don’t let national financial trends eclipse the reality of the benefits currently available in your real estate market.
Contact IMCD Web Design for your real estate website complete with a real estate blog. You do not need to be technically proficient to transfer your real estate skills to blogging – we consistently help our real estate agent clients quickly adapt to using their new real estate blogs as effective market expanding tools.
Cut To The Chase Web Design
August 30, 2010
A successful real estate web design addresses two competing desires: the web visitor’s intent to quickly view property or homes for sale and the real estate agent’s desire to capture web visitor contact information. If superb search engine optimization and marketing steps have brought web visitors to your real estate website, too many navigation steps (or mouse clicks) can undermine your marketing.
In a good real estate web design, two mouse clicks to the information is generally the limit before visitors bounce off to another website or web search. IMCD Web Design, with the experience of creating web sites for real estate agents that consistently bring in sales leads, has found the balance between customer satisfaction and the agent’s high return on web design investment.
In online real estate marketing, clients often spend 75% of their time searching for property and real estate agents – so in a typical home buying cycle, six weeks are spent looking online and then two weeks with an agent with the clients highly refined search parameters. This means that the client may be using the real estate agent’s website for searches for five or six weeks before they contact the agent to go visit properties.
Successful contact gathering methods center on providing market updates and ongoing information, such as through a real estate blog, rather than forcing users to sign in before accessing properties. Part of this market adjustment is driven by an agent’s competition with real estate websites that are simply property review portals that do not offer real estate agent services, but exist only to collect online advertising revenue. They use property listings simply to drive traffic, not as their primary business purpose.
IMCD Web Design offers real estate website design packages that position Realtors to be very competitive in their local markets against national chain websites and home listing directories that offer no services. Our market-tested web designs have a “triple crown” track record of high search engine ranking, graphic design that attracts and keeps visitors attention and web content that leads to successful harvests of visitor contacts.
If your real estate agency is looking for that competitive edge in your market, contact IMCD Web Design for that professional real estate website that will put you on the Internet map and generate a consistent stream of sales leads for your business.
Successful Real Estate Blog Copywriting Secrets
March 1, 2010
Writing a real estate blog website entry can be considered a success if you have a hard time just getting one written. There are online real estate marketing secrets to successful real estate blog copywriting. The success is measured in increased real estate sales activity as well as increased traffic to your agent website. Internet Marketing Consultants has researched the best online marketing minds to bring you a few secrets that will improve your blog entries.
1. Capture your creative ideas.
Ever notice that some of your best ideas come when you are driving, taking a shower or listening to a seminar (not all at the same time)? Be ready with 3 x 5 cards, a note book or your cell phone’s memo capacity to capture your thought. These little sparks of genius often lead to blog articles that capture your audience’s interest.
2. Rewrite your entry’s title.
By rewriting your title three or four times, you can hone down the most captivating, short, keyword-rich way of introducing your article. Your title is the primary tool you have to capture your real estate website visitor’s attention and move them to read your article. Time spent perfecting the headline is well worth it.
3. Give information through a story.
Possibly we have all been jaded by getting bored sitting through lectures in school, however, whatever the reason, people tune out when presented information in a lecture dry fact way. Introduce a story and you capture your audience’s attention. Do you remember getting captured by Reader’s Digest articles on a dry subject (“I AM Joe’s Adam’s Apple) only because the article started with a riveting story and then withheld the resolution of the story until the end of the article? It is a formula that the magazine still uses effectively.
4. Provide a safety net for your call to action.
Two elements in a call to action increase the safety factor and improve your lead generation: third party testimonials and a guarantee of success. Testimonials have two benefits – a third party authentication of your real estate services and a story element.
Add these marketing success tips into your next real estate blog entries and benchmark your ability to improve your visitor’s response to your call to action. Is your real estate website still limping into the twenty-first century without a blog or article manager? Contact the experts in effective real estate web design at IMCD to accelerate the effectiveness of your online real estate marketing campaign.
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.
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.