There’s always something to howl about.

In the world of internet marketing, Realtors and lenders have to know how to solve their own on-line marketing problems

Cathleen encouraged me to take exception to Jeff Brown’s most recent post, and, by the time I was done, I had a whole new post.

Quoting from Jeff:

If you honestly believe your income is higher with you spending time changing your own hi-tech oil, then continue along that path — it’s obviously working for you. On the other hand, if you think putting yourself in front of 50 more serious prospects a year might be more productive for your bottom line, AND that would make you happy, you may want to modify your approach.

This is a false dichotomy.

First, you do not have to change your own oil, so to speak, but if you don’t know how to change your own oil, you are at the mercy of every money-hungry automobile service writer on the planet.

Second, assiduous hi-tech marketing, going forward, is the best path to belly-to-belly appointments. This could our best year ever in volume of sides (not, alas, volume of dollars), and much of it — and all of the multi-home buyers — came from our web presence. There is room to be impressed by lo-tech success stories, but the two details left out are these: Buyers and sellers are increasingly shopping on-line, and the cost-per-conversion of old-school lo-tech marketing is comparatively very high. It’s not how much you make, it’s how much makes it all the way home.

Third, as should be obvious from everything I talk about, the kinds of chores Realtors and lenders need to keep a fat thumb on are those that would be too costly, too onerous or too error-prone if done by vendors.

As an example: Cathy and I made more than 1,400 engenu pages last year. The end result is work product that was done faster and made a much better impression on our clients than trying to communicate by other means. This stuff knocks the socks off clients, which I consider to be our most important sales function in everything we do. But those pages also put 1,400 new, permanent breadcrumbs on the web, so that other clients can find us in the future. As against twittering or making phone calls or handing out business cards at the Circle K, in servicing our existing clients, we “prospected” passively and blindly — but in perpetuity and with no additional effort — for any number of future clients.

Now here’s the cool part, which I talked about in Seattle: Late last year, I decided I wanted to make a change to each one of those 1,400 pages. I wanted to add my “Phoenix Area Headlines” scenius.net scene to each one of those pages. This would serve to make them seem to be dynamic to search engines, which would get them indexed more often, giving each one of those pages more search engine “juice.”

Surely that’s a worthy objective. But if we had to pay to have it done, we could not have afforded it. Nor could you, nor could anyone smaller than a company big enough to pay a full-time body to do nothing else for six weeks — not counting breaks, sick days and goofing around on the internet.

So I changed my own oil. I wrote a little spider in PHP to traverse my entire web server, domain by domain, looking for particular files and editing them, all by software. I don’t remember how long it took, but it was just a few minutes, maybe an hour total, allowing for my time to write the spider.

I don’t recommend that most people learn to write software — though some should, and I worked at bit with Scott Cowan on this in Seattle. But if there are jobs you should be doing, but cannot because the cost to have them done is prohibitive, you need to learn to work my way. Real estate professionals have a publishing problem. Going forward, what is going to matter most is creating the content your clients will need in a timely, efficient and economical fashion.

We know that we are moving from push to pull marketing. If push-based practitioners continue to prosper, good on ’em. But the future belongs to Realtors and lenders who figure out how to maximize their investment in pull marketing. This does not imply that you don’t meet people. All sales is belly-to-belly. But it does imply that, no matter what we might want or hope for, new business is going to be developed on the internet, not by old school tactics.

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