No doubt. Real Estate agents (and arguably all biz people) should be creating content and publishing it to self hosted blogs that syndicate anywhere and everywhere on a regular basis. At the very least, the act itself makes us all better, (more thoughtful) practitioners at whatever it is we do. At the very best, google blesses us with huge amounts of juicy, free, profitable, organic traffic.
From a practical point of view, I understand that most folks can’t spew out 500 words of relevant original stuff over a cup of coffee like the folks around BHB can, but I’ll argue that thanks to video it takes almost no real effort or talent to generate interesting online content that yields a high Return on (Time & Money) Invested!
For The “Record” : Writing = Crappy Relative ROI
I’ve got proofs empirical from managing and watching the analytics on a nice handful of blogs: Visitors spend much more time on and are more likely to interact with sites that offer a gallery of videos. How much more time? How much more interaction? Try double… YEAH DOUBLE! No poop. Not kidding. You can double the amount of real live interaction you generate from your social media efforts if you finally embrace this video stuff.
Video’s been the next big thing for years, I know…
So why aren’t more real estate agents leveraging video to generate lots more biz for themselves?
1. They don’t know what to record.
2. They perceive a technical barrier to getting ready for consumption video onto a web page.
3. Broker Owners still just don’t get it. Put simply, this stuff should be encouraged, enabled, and rewarded by ownership… but it’s not. (yet…)
Over the next few days, I’ll try to show how easy and profitable leveraging video can be by providing what should be an easy to follow technical roadmap for any agent who chooses to drink the kool aid.
In the meantime… in order to get some more eyeballs on this venture, here below is “Smoking Mr. Potato Head.” It took 5 minutes to record and get him live on this page. He’s also set to autoplay and loop. Plus Youtube’s default title line has been stripped from the top of the player. He’ll also talk to you a bit, and tell you to do something. So be sure to follow his instructions.
Sam Ingersoll says:
That’s hilarious Ryan. I did watch it about 5 times, unintentionally.
For automatic account creation and video submission to hundreds of web 2.0 sites, I recommend people use http://www.ContentBuzz.com
You can pay someone overseas $18 to create more than 250 web 2.0 accounts or DIY in about 4 hours. Then, if you have a video, you can automatically submit your videos SEO optimized using their content juggler to many of the video sharing and free blog sites automatically all day long.
One submission to all the sites takes about 5 minutes of your time and the computer handles the rest, whereas manually, the submission one at a time could take about 30 hours.
I do hope this is something helpful to help agents generate traffic – and not against the “spirit” of BHB.
P.S. The pingFm plugin for WordPress works pretty well too.
August 23, 2009 — 7:04 am
Joe Strummer says:
This video starts when I load the BHB page. A better approach would only have it start once someone clicks on the video.
September 1, 2009 — 9:04 am
Joe Strummer says:
I don’t understand what the point of the video is, even after reading the post. I do understand that I avoid websites that autoplay and especially loop video, so that every time I go to the site for an update, the video plays.
September 1, 2009 — 9:08 am
Jim Duncan says:
That freaked me out a little bit. I opened the page in Firefox via my RSS reader then started doing something else. Then I had to tab through 35+ tabs to find what was making the bizarre noises.
Odd.
September 1, 2009 — 10:36 am
David Black says:
Very good article. Video is definitely the big thing at the moment. Specially if it becomes viral.
I think the problems do come because people are unsure how they can use video in their business. Tho I am sure of they think long enough they will be able to come up with good ideas.
Embrace the video. Something I will hopefully be doing more in the future.
David
p.s The potato head video was what caught my eye on this post. Nicely done 🙂
September 3, 2009 — 5:33 am
Whitney Pannell says:
How did you get it to loop? I don’t know how to do that. thanks
September 3, 2009 — 7:12 am
James Boyer says:
I believe you, now I just need to find my video device. have not seen it in a few months now. 🙁
September 5, 2009 — 11:02 am