BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 96 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

June 27, 2008

Project Bloodhound: How to make Google your weblog’s best friend

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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[This is one of the all-time most popular posts on BloodhoundBlog. I’m reprising it for Project Bloodhound, first because it’s a nice leveraged SEO solution, and second because it’s a painless introduction to customizing the PHP in WordPress. –GSS]

 
Who can probe all the mysteries of Google? Not me, and I don’t even do referrals on the subject. But I can give you a 93% solution to the problem, and you can worry about the other 7% when you’re not too busy handling incoming traffic.

What’s the secret? Like this: Relevance equals Title plus Headline plus Body Copy. If those three elements are in close correspondence, to Google the article is what it says it is. If that sounds like a Zestimate of a burned down house, it’s because it is. Software cannot evaluate objectively, it can only draw inferences from trusted indicators. If you leave a trail of indicators that Google associates with highly-relevant content, then it is highly-relevant content.

I’ve talked about writing headlines and body copy that are long-tail keyword rich. If you have a WordPress weblog, here’s a way to get your post’s title to correspond to its headline:

<title>
<?php wp_title(" "); ?>
<?php if(wp_title(" ", false)) { echo " | "; } ?>
YourBlogName | 
Your blog's tagline...
</title>

Here is what that code says:

If there is a headline, show it as the title of the page. On your main page, there is no title. On archive or category pages, the archive or the category will be the title.

If we did show a title, lay down a vertical bar as punctuation.

Then show the weblog’s name and tag line, separated by a vertical bar.

Altogether, the code means that when your post is shown as a standalone weblog entry, the title of that page will be the headline of the post. This is the way Google will see it for indexing purposes. And what that means is that Google will regard your post as being highly relevant.

You can snag a copy of the code you see above by clicking here. The file you need to edit is named “header.php”. You’ll find it in the folder for Read more

June 27, 2008

Project Bloodhound: How to write headlines for your real estate weblog posts that deliver the goods — and deliver Google results

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A headline on a weblog post is a differentiator — this entry is different from all the others — but that’s not a very useful lens for understanding headlines. A serial number — A37592x — is a differentiator, too.

A headline can serve the same purpose as a headline in the newspaper, as a brief summary of the succeeding content — “Man kills wife, kids, self.”

That’s a useful function, but it’s not really doing the job we want a headline on a blog post to do.

Here’s a better way of understanding the communicative purpose of a weblog entry’s headline:

A headline is a testament from the writer to the reader than the content described in the headline is accurately reflected by that headline and that reading that content will repay the effort it entails.

But that’s still not enough. A headline on a weblog post, and on any persuasive copy, has to ensnare and entice the reader. The headline has to promise a substantive benefit that the reader will realize by pursuing the copy. Writing an effective headline is very much a Direct Marketing problem.

And we’re not done even yet. In addition to all the jobs it must undertake in the reader’s behalf, a well-written weblog headline should also engage horizontal search engines in meaningful ways.

So a properly-crafted weblog headline will:

  • Summarize the content in an interesting way
  • Promise the reader a practical benefit for reading that content
  • Search well on the most-significant keywords in that content

That’s a big load to carry, but a good headline can make a post, where a bad one can break it.

I don’t want to represent myself as a good example, because I will frequently opt for clever rather than good, but the headline of this post is a nice example of a good headline: It tells you what I’m going to talk about, it tells you how you will gain by reading this post, and it is strong on keywords that are likely to be searched by people who may have an interest in BloodhoundBlog’s ongoing content.

The latter point is important. It’s easy to score well on long-tail search terms, but Read more

June 26, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: The marketing power of a custom yard sign is not the color, not the photography, not even that it is custom-made — it’s the text on the sign that stops traffic

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’ve been making custom yard signs for two years now, but that represents the third generation of our sign philosophy. The second generation featured a huge picture of Odysseus the TV Spokesmodel Bloodhound, and that was a real traffic stopper when it was new. The first generation sported a huge rendition of our corporate logo, which we moved, in smaller form, to the riser on top of the post for the second and third generation signs.

What BloodhoundRealty.com signs have always had in common, going back to 2003, is that paragraph of small text in the middle of the sign. With our custom signs, we can rhapsodize each house, but we knew from the very beginning that that paragraph of text would stop traffic, and that this would win attention for our homes that we could not achieve with an ordinary real estate sign.

We knew back then that we wanted custom signs, we just couldn’t do it then. (Richard Riccelli suggested that we mount a metal frame on our signs so that we could swap in other text.) We knew then, as we we know now, that good marketing sells houses — but that exceptional marketing would set us apart from the Realtors we compete against with our sellers and with their neighbors.

Here’s how to understand the Bloodhound marketing strategy: Everything we do goes into selling the house — into inducing the behaviors necessary for the home to be sold. And selling houses the way we do accomplishes the objective of selling everything we do to those homeowners who are paying attention. In that respect, all of our marketing is integrated — all one thing.

This is adapted from a comment I posted earlier today.

What matters most about custom yard signs is not the color, not the photography, not even that they are custom-made for the house. What makes them sell is that paragraph of text in the middle of the sign. As you could easily predict, there is a philosophy behind everything we do, including our custom signs:

Forever and always, Realtors have treated their yard signs like billboards. After all, the traffic Read more

June 26, 2008

Project Bloodhound: How to write a question post that gets answers

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Our new contributors are true Bloodhounds, equal to all the others. We don’t have rules, we don’t play status games and we don’t want for anyone to feel less than perfectly welcome here.

But: We do recognize that the new Bloodhounds are going to have questions. We want for them to have questions, since their questions will kick off great discussions of how to manage the world of Social Media Marketing.

However: The question post can be the death of weblogging. You set something up and then you say, “Does that makes sense?” or “What say you?” or “Am I wrong?” Sounds harmless enough, but, for some reason, posts like that tend to die a commentless death. It’s plausible to me that you see them so often on weblogs where the host is desperate for comments that that trailing question comes to seem like desperation in the flesh — like a blind date who turns out to be a sweaty Trekkie with Asperger’s Syndrome.

Here’s a way to put together a question post that will spark a conversation rather than languish in perpetuity, unremarked on and unloved.

First, instead of ending with the question, start with it: Just exactly how do you establish a following on Twitter without looking like another pushy Realtor?

Second, take some responsibility for yourself: Here’s what I was thinking. I thought I might just go in and start talking about the things that fascinate me in the neighborhoods I work in.

Third, give your readers the respect they deserve: I know there are a lot of people out there who have been successfully tweeting real estate for quite a while, so I was hoping someone could give me some direction.

Fourth, get right back to the questions: Am I all messed up in my thinking? Is there something I’m missing? Is there a better way of going at things?

Fifth, go one down, graciously: I know you guys know so much more about this than I do. Thanks for taking the time to hold my hand.

Like this:

Just exactly how do you establish a following on Twitter without looking like another pushy Realtor?

Here’s what I Read more

June 26, 2008

Estately.com in San Diego: Map-based search in a land without rain

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Estately.com starts operations in San Diego today, the third city to be served by the Seattle-based map-based real estate search start-up. Considering that the company has so-far only raked in a modest six-figures in venture capital, this would seem to argue that Estately’s software scales easily. No news on finances, but, seriously, there must be some boot-strapping money to permit this rapid growth.

This is from an email from Estately.com co-founder and BloodhoundBlog contributor Galen Ward:

Estately.com is expanding into a new market. Beginning on Thursday, June 26th, over 19,000 San Diego homes and condos will be added to Estately.com’s 105,000+ properties for sale. Given the rapid changes in San Diego’s market, we are especially excited to give consumers the ability to track price changes on individual homes and across searches and areas.
Here are some example searches Estately makes into a snap:

  • Homes in La Jolla priced between $500,000 and $1,000,000 and sorted from cheapest to most expensive
  • Homes between $350,000 and $450,000 in Chula Vista
  • Homes including the words “motivated” (as in “motivated seller”) in the San Diego area

Additionally, we have revamped our “nearby information” information, plotted local schools and school scores, parks and transit stops on a map, and integrated it into the listing page.

I tried to run a search on “smug, slow-talking beachbums bragging about all the money they scam off of Arizona tourists with trained fish acts” — but that turns out to be everybody in San Diego.

Next stop: I’m betting on Oakland, but that’s only because I peeked. What’s not next: Phoenix — more’s the pity.

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June 25, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: Apprehending all of the marketing objectives of single-property web sites

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Trace Richardson wrote just lately on the technology of building single-property web sites, and, while he got almost everything wrong, from my point of view, I’m willing to cut him some slack. First, he’s a very thoroughgoing weblogger, and that buys a lot of credit in my bank. And second, he went after the topic as a technology problem, rather than as a marketing problem.

That’s a mistake, but hardly an uncommon one. It’s natural for us, when we think about doing something, to think about the doing, rather than about what it is we hope at the end of the process to have done. Build a web site? That’s easy: Step 1. Step 2. Step 3. Build a web site that sells a house? That’s a harder job. Build a web site that thrills the sellers, slays the neighbors, sells the house and promotes you as a Realtor forever? That’s a Bloodhound job.

Here’s the thing: A single-property web site is not just another bullet point in your listing presentation. If it is, you might as well just buy yourself a Showing Beacon and be done with it. If you’re just shining your sellers on, just promising them yet another gimmick to get the listing, you might as well pick an easier gimmick.

There’s more: There is no way a third-party vendor is going to produce a single-property web site that will achieve what I consider to be the essential marketing objectives of the endeavor — not, at least, at a price you can afford to pay. You have to learn to do this in house, either yourself or with staffers you control directly.

And still more: Of all of the marketing objectives we can attain with a single-property web site, SEO is pretty low on the list. Even so, there are long-term SEO benefits to be reaped from doing a single-property web site properly.

This is our way of thinking about this issue. Your mileage may vary, and I entreat you to remember that a single-property web site is just one piece of an overall strategy that we use to market a listing.

Start here: Read more

June 24, 2008

Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: A marketing quiz to shed light on the full value of the Coffee Table Books we make for our listings

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve written about the Coffee Table Books we make for some of our listings, and I talked about them briefly at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. I wanted to go into the idea in greater detail, because I think this is a case where, if you don’t understand all of our thinking, you could easily miss the big picture by focusing on the pixels.

Cathleen Collins invented the idea of doing Coffee Table Books for listings. She knew what we wanted, and then she searched the internet to find a way to do it. (We use Apple’s iPhoto, but you get get similar products from Shutterfly. H/T Cheryl Johnson.) We’re not always this lucky. We knew what we wanted in custom yard signs years before we were able to find a vendor who could do it.

To understand our marketing objectives, we need to start at the top. A Coffee Table Book is an objet d’art. It is only secondarily a book. It is primarily a statement about the subject of that book. By its nature, a Coffee Table Book says, “This is important. This is no mere casual, ordinary thing. This is an object or event that deserves to be heralded, celebrated, honored.” That’s why these books can only work for certain homes, and, why, incidentally, I think it’s a mistake to violate the format. If you turn your Coffee Table Book into a hard-cover version of the kind of comb-bound listing books produced by title companies, you cheapen your impact — possibly to the point of anti-marketing — and frustrate your objectives.

So the sine qua non of a BloodhoundRealty.com Coffee Table Book is an exceptional home. The book says, “This home is extraordinary,” so the home has to be extraordinary enough to justify the existence of the book.

And this comes back to the knock-their-socks-off idea of marketing a listing. The Coffee Table Book expresses your total commitment to your sellers, and it makes the same kind of impression on potential buyers. A Coffee Table Book will not paper over the defects in an ugly, dirty, decrepit home, but it will make your listing stand Read more

June 23, 2008

If you commit yourself to delivering a premium listing, trying to cheap it out will instruct you in the previously-unknown 23rd Immutable Law of Marketing: Anti-marketing is worse than no marketing

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Idea-by-idea, house-by-house, we are writing the book on the art of listing premium-priced homes for sale. The things we do are often beyond useless at lower price points, and we’re not a part of the canapes and cocktails circuit where high-end homes are sold. But for executive homes, luxury homes, historic and architecturally-distinctive homes, the kinds of marketing tools we are perfecting are very effective.

Effective at what? At selling the house, of course. Everything we do is about selling the house. If we happen to make a strong impression on the neighbors or on other people who see the work we are doing, so much the better. Even so, that’s not the point. People should be impressed by the commitment we make to selling our listings, but our purpose in making that commitment is to get the house sold.

Here’s a true fact, apparently known to everyone except real estate agents: Consumers — the people we hope to make our clients — see us as being lazy and cheap. They think we’re overpaid, but it’s probably less that they think our paychecks are too big and more that they don’t see any effort on our part to justify those paychecks.

A typical listing is a lockbox and a sign. Is there a flyer? Or is there just an empty flyer box? Has the flyer been edited with a ballpoint pen to reflect price reductions? How many photos are there in the MLS listing — and are they any damned good?

The marginal cost of everything I’ve talked about so far is essentially nothing, amortized over a few dozen listings. The one exigent out-of-pocket cost might be the post for the sign, and I have seen real estate signs nailed to trees. I wish I were joking.

If consumers see us as being lazy and cheap, it’s only because far too many of us are lazy and cheap when it comes to servicing our clients. It’s comical, actually. The Realtor who pisses away $5,000 acquiring a client worth $10,000 in gross commission income can’t bring himself to spend fifty bucks out-of-pocket on that client.

There’s a Read more

June 23, 2008

The just-exactly-how-dumb-are-you Realtor-spam of the day: Showing Beacon not only cures that nasty excess income problem, it makes you look even dumber than your clients had feared

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is magazine spam, but it came from an RIS magazine called — wait for it — Real Estate that is nothing but spam. Every ad turns into two ads, the ad itself plus the puff-piece editorial copy of the just-exactly-how-dumb-are-you products being pimped in the ads. This kind of thing might be offensive to real estate professionals if we had not been putting up for it for years from Realtor magazine and the Inman “News”.

Anyway, this dumb product, called Showing Beacon, is a strong contender for Dumb Product of the Year:

I can’t figure out how much this stupid thing costs, but it doesn’t matter: Nothing would be too much. But don’t get the idea that you’ve milked this joke of all its yucks until you stop in at the Showing Beacon web site. Scroll down the page and click on the celebrity photos. What should you do when you come to fear that your product might be too cheesy? Add more cheese…

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June 22, 2008

The world you find is the world you’re looking for…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Associated Press has a story this morning on on how weak and powerless people feel when they spend too much time obsessing over the news and not enough time pursuing their values.

I thought I’d share with you a photograph that seems to me to be a perfect expression of how weak and powerless humanity really is:

(Many more here.)

The universe, by definition, is everything there is. But your every experience of the universe starts and ends inside your mind. Your experience of life will be precisely as splendorous or as squalid as you want it to be. Do you want to change the universe, forever, for the good? Start by changing the way you think.

June 21, 2008

Technorati 599? Now they’ve got my attention…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We stopped running the Technorati widget a while ago. They went through some kind of hosting nightmare, and they were dragging us down on page loads as we waited for their software to time out. But they did some kind of recalculation this week, and suddenly I’m loving them a whole lot better.

We might not have Google right now — not that that matters — but we’re within striking distance of being one of the top 5,000 weblogs in the Technorati universe. How cool is that?

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June 21, 2008

Investors are coming back to the Phoenix rental home market — and with the right business plan they’ll make money

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Investors are coming back to the Phoenix rental home market — and with the right business plan they’ll make money

Rental home investors are coming back into the Phoenix real estate market, and this is a good thing.

The last time we had a substantial run on rental housing, results were not so sweet. Investors came to Phoenix with the idea that price appreciation would make up for any monthly losses they might take on their rental homes. It’s plausible they were right — in the long run. In the short run, negative cash flow and declining values, coupled with adjustable-rate or negative-amortization loans, drove many of these homes into foreclosure.

And this accounts for much of the inventory the new wave of investors is drawing upon. The difference is, the prices for these homes have declined enough that they can be — at least potentially — cash-flow positive.

Why only potentially cash-flow positive?

Because too many investors adopt the worst of the cartoonish characterizations of capitalism when they resolve to become landlords. They pick the cheapest properties in the worst locations and rent to the least-qualified tenants, living through one eviction and repair nightmare after another.

Here’s a strategy for making more money from a rental home — much more peacefully.

There are dozens of costs associated with rental housing, and your business plan should take account of all of them. But your biggest potential losses are always going to be vacancy, tenant acquisition, repairs and resale value.

It makes much more sense to me to buy a property that can command premium rents and will sell at a premium price when you’re ready to move on. Location matters, as do the livability and lifestyle factors of the specific home. You want to pick a home that will stay rented.

I think it’s a good idea to charge something less than the market rent. This will give you a broader array of tenants to choose from, which will enable you to select tenants with good credit who will treat your property like their own.

With the right house Read more

June 20, 2008

The just-exactly-how-dumb-are-you Realtor-spam of the day: Effection might come at a high price, but at least it’s fleeting

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This one came to me as real-world spam, and it has a cloying kind of plausibility to it:

Hmm… That’s almost kindasorta a good idea, isn’t it? Laptop in the car? Maybe not so much. Wi-Fi-enabled PDF? They’re out there, but the iPhone.2 is going to EDGE every other hand-held device to the sidelines. In fact, both types of iPhones are Wi-Fi-enabled, but we know that Wi-Fi is going to be Wi-ped out within a few years.

Even so… Let’s go to the videotape:

I don’t actually hate this idea, but the pitch to the consumer boils down to this: “Your Realtor is too lazy to service your flyer box, so let’s sell him a high-tech gimmick so he can express his laziness in a different way.” I like the idea of doing more to sell listings, but I hate every variety of the brains-not-included plug-n-chug solution.

But that’s as may be. How much does it cost for an effectioNet.com eLapTopTour web site?

Holy cow! They might be plug-n-chug, but they’re cheap: $65, $85 or $95.

But wait. As Tom Waits says, “The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.” Witness:

effectioNet’s pricing schedule is very simple: we lease the device for a fee of $50 per month.[…]

We do require a $150 deposit, fully refundable on return of the device intact, and, we offer a 6 month minimum lease.

The program works on a first month’s lease of $50 + $150 deposit. Then an auto deduction will be taken each month for the balance of the term. We take PayPal and/or all major credit cards.

Townes Van Zandt said, “If you want good friends, they’re gonna cost you,” and effectioNet’s affections are going to run you $365 minimum. Per listing. What will you have at the end of your six month minimum lease? Fond memories.

So let’s say this is demi-semi-sorta plausible. The idea behind the product is kind of half-baked, especially since we already know how to do much better single-property websites than this plug-and-chug upchuck. If we’re committed to the idea but not the execution, what might work better instead?

You can buy new-in-box Mac Minis for $600 Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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