Dear Large Broker/Owners,
Are you ready to enter the web publishing business? You should be. Because the required investment is relatively low, the potential returns are staggering, and you’ve got a huge team of columnists who will help build your asset, pretty much free of charge, if you play it right.
Huh?
In other words – If you build yourself a company blog and properly incentivise contribution from your agent partners, you will slash advertising expenses, recruit cream o’ the crop producers, –(even would be Mom & Pop Publishers) — and quite possibly dominate your marketplace … all while substantially increasing the resale value of your business.
Or, maybe this is a better way to put it: If you start viewing your company website as an online newspaper whose potential subscriber base is as large as your entire service area, a lot of good things will follow.
Grab Those Orphaned Newspaper Subscribers!
We all know the newspapers are dying–especially the small local rags providing info about local events, trash pickup schedules, and the obituary of ole Mr. Babbit. And I think that large Real Estate Brokerages and their agents are in a unique position to pick up where these joints are leaving off. Whether they already live in the neighborhood or they’re relocating from accross the country, people really do care that there’s an easter egg hunt at the local park tomorrow. They always will!
So why Real Estate Agents? Well, to put it simply, real estate agents are everywhere, sorta like roaches. Take exception to this if you want, but really, we’re like walking talking RAID evaders and though we’re being forced to evolve, we’re never going to go away. Why? Because we existentially gather, digest, and verbal diarrhea hyper local info. We just can’t help busy body-ing around and opening our mouths whenever possible, because our very livelihood depends on it..
And love us or hate us, we exist because people really do want the nitty gritty local info (real estate related and otherwise) that’s in our heads. So…for you Dead Dinosaurs Walking out there…think about it. Your fear of that 25 year old tech geek down the hall is totally unjustified paranoia. All he has is some more efficient method of delivery than you do. And even if you’re not ready to get on your ass and do a little book (or rss) larnin, all you really need is a broker who’s willing to make it dead simple for you to spread your local knowledge to the open inboxes of hungry subscribers considering a move to or within your hood.
Enter The Savvy Broker:
Wake Up Savvy Broker! This is for you.
Think about this story.
Chapter 1- The Dark Ages: You pay huge bucks to newspapers in return for the right to promote ourselves and our listings on their pages.
Chapter 2. – Renaissance. You shift this money (but not all of it) over to online outlets and start buying Pay Per Click Ads and paying for (and spending time on methods) that allow you to syndicate your message online.
Chapter 3. – Deliverance!.
You stop paying for web/print advertising! Instead, you invest in growing some organic traffic For a while, commit to picking up the subscribers the local paper is leaving behind, and eventually control your own darn “paper.” (Ah…How Sweet will it be when that ad rep who use to milk you for thousands on a weekly basis comes a knockin’ for a job selling ads on your Broker Site?)
A Recruiting Tool?
Or…and here’s where it could get really good. recruiting may become pretty much automatic. After you tell the ad guy where to shove it, think about who will come knocking on your door next. Yep. Mr. Mom & Pop Top Producer who dominates the farm/subdivision/neighborhood Down The Road. The Conversation: “Hey, I noticed you’ve been giving agents from your office blog pages focused on local areas, but you don’t have one for my area. If I join your company, what’ll it cost me to control the page for my farm on your site?”
Or perhaps your growth plan will involve reaching out to agents and matching them to neighborhood sections on your blog? Whatever your approach, here’s one thing that’s for sure. You can provide a lot more value to your agents than Active Rain can.
[Digression: Come On! “You give us $39 a month and we benefit from your juicy content? “ Mr. Broker Pimp. Are you just gonna stand there and let them treat your whores that way? After all, isn’t it your right to get your rightful share of all the hard work being done by your agents?]
What do I mean? Look. If you’ve got an office with 30 or more agents and you’re not making it dead simple for them to all contribute juicy Niche focused content to a Web Property that you own, you’re missing out big time.
And really, so far I’ve only touched on a few of the benefits here. Here are some Others:
1. Your Agents Will Eventually Rely on Local Knowledge Of Your Blog To Close More Listings
2. With proper guidance, your agents effectively enhance Your brand and their bottom line By “Plugging” (and impressing) local businesses and their owners with free testimonials on your publication.
3. Once it’s getting 10,000 or more visitors monthly. Your Site Will Have Serious Intrinsic Value. If you think you may ever sell your company, your site will be looked at as an asset.
4. There will be buyer and seller leads, lots of them. (But if this is all you care about, go ahead and fund your Google Adwords Acct some more.)
5. And…If for no other reason, you need to build a Mega Monster Multi Agent Niche Focused Broker Blog because it’ll make that competing broker down the street stain his underwears with fear. Or at the very least, you’ll force or distract him into spending mad cash trying to keep up with you. [Yeah, I knew you’d smile at that one. — I know how you guys think 🙂 ]
All right, so I know you’ve got a lot of questions. Like…”How The Frack Do I Go About Doing This?”
Well…launching and sustaining one of these things is a fairly complex process that requires a good bit of committment and consistency. So…
Can You Stomach 365 Days Of “How-To-What-To-Do” Blog Posts?
Assuming Greg doesn’t mind my upping my posting frequency around here to 1 little how-to-what-I-did article a day, I’m going to spend the next year telling you step by step how to create, enhance, and leverage your MMBB for maximum effectiveness.
If you follow along, day by day, word for word, I guarantee that by judgment day ( 4/15) next year, you’ll own a valuable web property that generates at least 5000 (probably more like 10,000) visitors monthly and provides incredible value to current agents, prospective agents, and anyone your company does or wants to do business with.
Now for my pitch:
I need a test case…If you become the test case, I’ll be building, growing, and promoting your shiny MMBB for you and you won’t need to fire up Bloodhound Blog every day to get the goods. In fact….you’re MMBB will be the goods!
(Come to think of it — a nice side benefit will be that your company will get naturally get lotsa juicy PR5 type exposure…And thinking about it a little more, another nice benefit is that a bunch BHB commenters will probably rip me a new one if I’m not doing the job right.)
But the catch:
I’d like to get paid for the venture. After all, there’s value here. I’m going to build you something that generates leads, recruits, and has intrinsic value for years to come.
So.. if you’re the broker/owner of a large 30+ agent brokerage and you think you might be seeing an opportunity here, get in touch by clicking this link . I’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have.
But before you reach out, please consider…. This is going to require a considerable investment. There’s not only going to be the (reasonable I promise) fees for my services, but among other things, there’s also going to be costs associated with acquiring some solid hosting, an awesome IDX setup, and properly incentivizing your agent contributors. If you’re not in a position to make a substantial investment in the growth of your company and if you’re not genuinely in this game to help your agents help themselves it’s not gonna work…
And yeah, I understand…these aren’t the best times for a “spend a lotta money” message, but hey…if you happen to be strong and your competitors are weak, why not take a solid step toward squashing them…
So if you’d like, get in touch. I look forward to speaking with you….
Otherwise, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to subscribe to BloodHoundBlog’s feed. 364 more days of fun starts this coming Thursday, 4.16…
jay seville says:
You’ve got a great way with wordz saying things most people couldn’t get away with. Love it!
Yeah, this vision is right on. I get 10,000-12,000 visitors a month and my teammate and I are too busy to follow up with any of the website registrations–about 30/day.
If I was broker who wanted to corner his local market and set up win win with my agents to help them generate business while making a contribution to our content and search engine rankings this would be the way to do it and would be a great recruiting tool.
The big issue I see is how do incentivize (sp?) the agents to add truly useful or enjoyable to read content? Most agents will not have much to offer and will be boring….Or will it be a handful of agents at a brokerage who really step up and contribute? will agents that post most often get the most warm leads (registrations) to call asap or will agents whose articles get viewed the most often get 1st dibs on calling new registrations? Tough questions and issues to figure out in terms of disseminating leads or collar grabbers.
Can’t wait to watch this evolve so I can learn from it on a smaller scale with team members and new bloggers on my domain locally….
j
April 11, 2009 — 2:33 pm
ryan hartman says:
Thanks Jay.
Funny you should mention the incentivi(z)ation. (I actually had it with a z originally and wordpress had me change it up to an s.
Anyway…I’ve got some ideas for how to properly incentiveyes. A lot depends on the existing commission models at play.
For rental/remax type arrangements — why not $10 bucks (or whatever works) off the monthly bill per post? (With a limit of course.)
For splits…how about a 5 or 10% bump in return for 5 or 6 posts/month.
Or how bout this one- Blog or your fired! 🙂
As to how to properly distribute leads? Part of the trick will be configuring the idx tie-in so that leads “brand” to the agents.
But even without magic lead distribution tricks — the best leads (direct emails and phone calls) will naturally go to the agent partners who demonstrate the most competence and consistency with their efforts….
By the way, it’s nice to hear your REW site is pulling in traffic and converting registrations so well. We’re about to fire one up as soon as the dudes in Canada get around to completing our setup…(I mean, who’d they outsource our stuff to, Terrence & Phillip?)
April 11, 2009 — 3:19 pm
Greg Swann says:
Utterly brilliant, Ryan. I’m eager to see how this plays out.
April 11, 2009 — 8:35 pm
jay seville says:
You’re right, the collar grabbers will be able to contact directly whichever agent they are so impressed by w/ direct email and calls—collar grabbers.
The IDX lead management system of the REW site is amazing and great for team members and assigning leads to multiple agents who can then see what listings the customer has been viewing. It will provide branding of the individual agent who has been assigned the lead….Maybe an upgrade or small worker but doable.
April 11, 2009 — 8:43 pm
Teri Lussier says:
Cool! Note to self: get that broker’s license.
So us little guys get to play along somehow? I love my broker, but I don’t want to be dependent on anyone.
>Blog or your fired!
See. I’m an independent contractor, and what about content ownership? And who owns the leads? And… I’m not trying to pee in the flakes here, but I’m looking at this from a lowly agent status. If I’m thinking like this, won’t other agents? Or not.
It’s awesome Ryan, dang it. 😉
April 13, 2009 — 6:20 am
ryan hartman says:
Thanks Teri,
I’m with you on the content / lead ownership concerns.
Thing is, this is a strength-in-numbers proposition that can benefit both the novices and the bloggy vets. The idea is that the broker provides value to the independent agent by helping them establish their own rockin, lead generating web presence on the cheap (and with lotsa guidance provided by an in house tech guy or gal.)
But even if you are a heavy hitting blog monster doing a fine job on your own… When it’s time to switch brokerages and you see that broker A down the street is gonna let you guest post / plug your blog on his mega monster PR11 joint, while Broker B is still partnered up with an outside web vendor in an obvious profit sharing venture, Broker A’s going to win every time, I think.
And…I still cheat on myself a bit and grab a little “strange” (kinky link action) from Active Rain every once in a while, but this is only because it I think it’ll make my own site stronger. So I guess the point is this. If you’re concerned about controlling your content and the leads that come as a result, participate on the broker’s site in a way that brings them onto your site.
Here’s a good example of this in action on the site where I first attempted this big ole scheme… Getting company agents to build their own little nichey sites and promote them via the company site like Rachel does at the end in this example is perhaps the biggest part of the trick here?
April 13, 2009 — 6:47 am
Teri Lussier says:
>Getting company agents to build their own little nichey sites and promote them via the company site like Rachel does at the end in this example is perhaps the biggest part of the trick here?
You might be right. The way the broker/agent relationship works right now is hardly conducive to symbiosis, unless, until, you are a big time top producer. Okay fine. Money talks, always.
But for a broker to encourage agents to go it alone and compete against them, or for an agent to pump content into a broker’s site, competing against themselves, I’m still struggling with the pros and cons.
Having said all that, I know this site-model is coming to a town near me, probably just a matter of time, I’m simply working out my own thoughts about this. I’m still going watch and learn. Then adapt and conquer. 😉
April 13, 2009 — 7:32 am
jay seville says:
Most agents do want to be dependent on somebody though, Teri, which is why this idea has wheels. That’s why most agents work for 50, 60 or 70% commissions. Those that are truly independent work for 95 or 100% commissions or are fighting like mad to be in that scenario.
j
April 13, 2009 — 3:25 pm