Shawna Ebersole’s iShopGreenwood.com is very rich in content — but it may be just a little bit too rich in color

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

My apologies for my recent absence. I came down with a cold — a warning from god about going to Seattle in the Winter — then got bit in the ass by a long-standing Real Life Dilemma. I missed all of the vendorslut “news,” so I don’t even know how deeply inspired were the attendees by being yelled at by Gary Vaynerchuk. (“C’mon! People! It’s not customer service unless you emote from the throat!”)

Am I being hypercritical? I don’t think so. We’re all of us victims of bullshit now and then. The trick is to scrape it off your shoes before you track it all over everything.

Meanwhile, Brian Brady shot this to me by email:

Shawna Ebersole asked us to critique iShopGreenwood.com and give her some ideas for promoting her weblog.

Well. At the risk of seeming hypercritical, I will say that the site seems to me — a male specimen — to be girly and cluttered. The overarching them is High Concept — which means you have to figure it out. No, that’s not a collection of girly-colored boxes, it’s a mall, a big-city indoor shopping mall.

Even so, I don’t care. I don’t care for the colors and I didn’t like having to figure out what was going on, but I don’t think that hurts anything. I also don’t think it helps anything. There are a zillion much-less-clever real estate weblogs, and they probably do just about as well as this one.

But here’s something I really, really liked: The site is very rich in content. My take is that Shawna Ebersole predates real estate weblogging by quite a while, and she seems to have retained every bit of the content she had developed before she took the plunge with a blogsite from Jim Cronin’s RealEstateTomato.com.

Isn’t that a bad thing? I don’t think so. I’ve written before — and should write more extensively — about the idea of satisfaction — feeling full. When people are sampling any of your marketing, they need to be able to consume enough to “feel full.” No one acts before they’re ready to, and you have to hang on to them long enough for them to achieve that feeling of satisfaction — or they will move on. Having lots of good, consumer-focused content is essential to converting visitors to prospects to clients.

In light of that, here is a real defect in the site: The contact form is thrown off onto another page. Brian and I know from testing that the more difficult you make it to buy your product, the fewer people will respond. I think code to make contact by phone, by email or by form should be available on every page of a consumer-focused real estate weblog. I’m starting to think I want to plug the idea of contact at the bottom of every post and page in the weblog. You cannot make making contact too easy, but it is much too easy to make it too hard.

I don’t like all the Javascript widgets, and, at least on Safari, they slow the site down a lot. My take is that anything that is not focused on converting visitors to clients is a waste of space, bandwidth and mindshare.

As for promoting the site, this is what we talk about all the time. Shawna’s clients are not other real estate webloggers, so she should stop trying to engage or entertain them. Her clients are buyers and sellers in Greenwood, Indiana, and her weblog is her best way of connecting with them by passive means. She promotes the site very well in her collateral pieces — and here the graphic richness seems to pay off better.

The next step is to make connections with other local webloggers. There are a lot of ways to do this, but one quick way is to create a Scenius scene of local news and information, and then make that available for free to other local blogs. This is useful both for forging relationships with bloggers who can actually send her business and for enhancing her SEO profile.

Shawna’s a hard-working dog, and that shines through in her site. I’m betting that my typically-male reaction to the colors and the clutter is offset by the response of typical females. In any case, the weblog gets a lot right, and I doubt it is hurt very much by what it is getting wrong.

Here’s the fun part: Your thoughts. Shawna volunteered for this scrutiny, so I’m hoping she can bear up to it. In your opinion, what should she be doing differently?

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing