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Category: Marketing (page 43 of 191)

October 26, 2009

A/B Testing Unleashes Creativity

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

One of the things that I truly dig about Ryan is his utter willingness to try anything.  Goofy?  Serious?  Whatever?  It’s all in play for him.  What keeps people on pages longer he’ll do.

I’m now free to do that.  I was constrained by subordinating everything to someone else’s “best practices.”  The Caples stuff, other people’s methods, best practices, and the Fortin stuff that you see working.  I am Japan.  Like Bawld Guy. Take ideas, appropriate…make ’em mine, lather rinse repeat, and knock out another 5 of my 10,000 hours.

No more need simply copy.  Enter A/B Testing.  You can create a loop that corrects itself.  By not having your ego involved, by subordinating EVERYTHING to effectiveness, you can try ANYTHING and see what’s what. Wanna see if pink hippos sell?  Go.

Blog Consultant Michael Martine pointed this killer video out, and for those of us using WordPress and a Theme of some type that allows page level layout changes (for color scheme and suchlike) this is the cool.

Now, I can do 2 things: see if pink hippos sell , and see what sells better than what else.

Questions I am going to address:

  • Does a highly produced video sell better or worse than a “Garage bandy” deal?
  • Does 16×9 kill 4×3 like I think it does?
  • Does asking for a sale work better than asking for an opt in?
  • Does asking for a sale AND an opt in lower the chances of either one happening?
  • Does leading or closing with testimonials work better?
  • Do testimonials work at all?
  • Should I have dense or sparse sidebars for the purpose of getting opts?

Heady stuff, and stuff that can let us run experiments to test it, and guard our marketing dollars.  This is an utter blast, if testing is part of what you do on a regular basis, you can constantly improve your marketing.

When you learn what people respond to in marketing…

…you can improve your salesmanship.

That’s why we do what we do.

How to do A/B Testing with WordPress from Carsonified on Vimeo.

October 14, 2009

The passive path to active real estate investment marketing

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I was talking with Jeff Brown on the phone yesterday about how much we depend on passive marketing devices — our Phoenix real estate weblog mainly — to generate new business.

We don’t even do all that much. By now there are much better resources to turn to than me for advice on how to do real estate weblogging. But what we do is consequential, because we are constantly adding to our inventory of hard-headed real estate information.

As an example, I wrote a post this morning on the factors that contribute most to the profitability of Phoenix-area rental home investments. That post in turn supports a basic guide I have prepared on rental home investing in suburban Phoenix.

What am I up to? I’m pre-conditioning future clients, for one thing. I’m sharing a lot of hard-headed information, but I’m also letting them know what it’s going to be like to work with me. In addition, I’m splitting the herd, isolating the people I will want to work with and sending the others packing.

The weblog post will have a future in other locations. I can use the HTML to make a very compelling Craigslist ad. And, in the long run, that post will add to the content on our static real estate investments page.

Here’s the best news: The people I hear from who will have pursued all of this information will come to me pre-sold. I won’t have to cover as much of the basics with them on the phone. They will not have picked up the phone to call me until they had already committed to hearing more of what I have to say. They won’t be slam-dunk conversions, necessarily — investors never are — but their business will be mind to get — or to lose — with no significant competition.

I am not diminishing more active prospecting strategies — much the contrary — but this is the kind of thing that I can set up once that will pay me over and over again. And as others here have noted, the climate for rental home investors in Phoenix just keeps getting better Read more

October 10, 2009

The news media may insist that the real estate market has turned the corner, but my attitude toward work is simple: “Just say yes!”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):

We represented the buyers for a million-dollar house, our first, that closed this week. A week from now, we will be listing a million-dollar home, also a first for us. We are carrying two listings at $450,000 right now, with another to come, and we will be listing another home at $800,000 shortly.

But also this week, I sold a property for $65,000. Just a few weeks ago, one of my listings sold for $27,000.

Am I schizophrenic? I hope not. But I am scared to death to say no to anyone right now.

Salespeople like to say yes. It’s not in our nature to turn people down. We like to make people happy if we can.

But I have no idea when this recession is going to end, so I don’t want to pass on any opportunity that might present itself.

Here’s the funny part: We’re living with a foxhole mentality, but 2009 is going to be our second-best year since we came into the real estate business. We’re not rich by any means, but we’re making more money than we have in the past three years.

But here’s the unfunny part: Virtually all of our income for 2009 is coming to us in the second half of the year. Our business was all-but-moribund in the first two quarters, and we came much too close to losing our own home.

So I am not proud, bashful or shy. If you have a real estate problem, I’m ready to talk about it. We’re working sixteen hours a day, at least, seven days a week. We haven’t taken time off in three years, and I don’t know when we will take our next vacation.

The job is survival right now, and I know we’re not alone among Realtors in thinking this way.

I’m nobody’s bear, and I would love to believe all the cheerleading I hear in the news about the real estate market. But my strategy for now is to just say yes to every opportunity I get to earn a living.

 
Spread the word: Click here for a printer-ready version of Read more

October 9, 2009

Flying beyond flyers, here is our first full-color brochure for our first million-dollar listing

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A week from today, we will list our first million-dollar residence. (The web site is a placeholder as I write this. We’ll begin to populate it next week.)

But the home is a spectacular specimen, and we wanted to do something more to bring that out. So yesterday we put together our first full-color brochure for a home.

That’s the outside face. Full-size is 17×11″, with a fold in the middle to permit it to fit into our flyer boxes. You’ll have to imagine where the fold will split the image.

And here is the inside face. If you click on either image, you can see the full-size, full-bleed pre-press files. Fair warning: They’re 87 megabytes each.

Here’s the text from the inside front panel:

True luxury, true elegance is not a
vast accumulation of shiny trinkets,
a mass of dazzling distractions.
The artifacts of genuine wealth are
streamlined, refined, stripped down
to the essence. Simple. Unaffected.
The best expression of your limit-
less lifestyle is a home that serves
as the jewelry box for the precious
treasure that is your family…

And that’s why god made Lord & Taylor…

This is going to be a fun one for us, a chance to put every idea we’ve been playing with to the test.

October 7, 2009

Stopping Horse Fraud

by

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

Author website

In addition to a criminal law practice, I’m building an equine law practice.  This is where the real money might be made, and real good might be accomplished.

Each year, tens of millions of dollars are swindled from horse owners.  Unlike the real estate industry – which has its share of fraud and corruption, and brokers serving as “agents” on both sides of the deal – the equine industry has very little transparency, no mandated disclosure forms, and no independent verification of price or value.

Agents, acting on behalf of the buyer or the seller, will sometimes pad the price, will sometimes simply tell the other side that the buyer is looking for a horse in such-and-such price range (which will signal to the seller to raise the price of the horse), will not disclose important health or soundness issues, and will engage in strawman purchases, where the agent buys the horse and flips it to the true buyer days later.

Because there are no mandated disclosure forms, and because so many deals are done on a handshake, the buyer may never realize she bought a horse for tens of thousands more than the seller sold the horse.  The agent in the middle pockets the difference, in addition to the agent’s stated 10 or 15 percent commission.

If you’ve been around hunters, jumpers, eventing horses, or dressage horses, you know what I’m talking about.

The goal of my practice is not just to clean up a mess after the fraud has been done (which is a very difficult thing to uncover), but to stop the fraud in its tracks.  I’ll be launching EquineSurety in January, 2010.  In the meantime, I’m taking some lessons’ out of Phil Hodgen’s book, building out a website, starting the marketing, creating videos, building out content, and networking in the industry.

Here are the first videos…

Stop Horse Fraud

…a series of which I’m creating, which are simple, clean, and ask provocative questions.  I have a sign-up form on the website to start to collect names of interested horse owners who can later been contacted once the project is launched.

Already, I’ve gotten some good Read more

October 2, 2009

Is it time for a second Vook at Brad Inman’s latest brain fart?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Believe it or don’t, just yesterday I was telling Cathleen that I felt remiss in not having made fun of the Vook lately. The Vook, as you will recall, is Brad Inman’s latest attempt to prove that he stumbled onto half a billion bucks by accident. The trouble is, as he is discovering, pissing away that kind of dough isn’t easy, no matter how clueless you are — and Inman takes a back-seat to no one at cluelessness.

Even so, I need to issue a mea culpa of my own: The Vook has actually made it to the marketplace, a feat I would have bet against. Simon and Schuster — which has always made all of its profits from crossword puzzle books — turns out to be possessed of its own Inmaniacal cluelessness: The New York publisher is issuing Vook content, apparently because its printed books are not already selling badly enough.

But: Don’t despair. Even though there are very few people who are stupid enough to buy this stupid gadget, the Vook will still serve a purpose in the history of marketing: It will make the Zune look popular by contrast.

October 1, 2009

DocuSign may be the best friend Realtors have ever had

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Okay, so all the Realtors know that short sales are like a jack-in-the-box: You crank and crank for weeks or months and nothing happens, then everything pops all at once.

Happened to me today, with the Sphinx-link bank suddenly lurching to life in order to issue two must-rush-now documents that reiterate terms my buyers have already agreed to.

That doesn’t matter. Must-rush-now! Must-have-today! Must return to hibernating state no later than 5 pm.

So Mom is at home and Dad’s at work — and both of them are 35 miles away from me.

We could trade faxes, but the originals are already barely readable.

But: No worries: We’ve got DocuSign on our side.

I set up the whole workflow: I sign, Mom signs, Dad signs — and then the whole package goes back to the lister, all untouched by human hands.

Note that I set everything up so that I could leave if I needed to, once I had signed, and the rest of the job would percolate through the ether on its own. I love this feature, since I no longer have to nurse documents.

But, as it works out, the whole job, Tinkers to Evers to Chance, was done in seven minutes flat.

I plan to write more about DocuSign when I have more time, but for now: If you don’t have DocuSign, get it. Your time is your money, and, in consequence, this is some of the best money you will ever spend.

And now the bank can roll over and go back to sleep…

 
P.S.: Just got confirmation that the lister has the documents. Twenty-two minutes total.

September 29, 2009

BHB-style lawyer marketing – from the trenches

by

International Tax Lawyer

Author website

This is a long-delayed post. A thank you to BHB. A clue for others to see, use, follow. This post is about marketing techniques. A case study. A “you can do this, too.”

Apology in advance

Gregg, please pardon the backlinking to myself. I don’t like to pee in the pool by hyping myself, but the project I’m backlinking to is almost over, and will be worthless by the 15th of October, so I have no long term benefit from this. I’m deliberately not linking to my main website.

The world we live in

BHB is interesting to me. The philosophy (treat your customers like humans, get ’em smart, treat ’em right), the approach (use the tools that Teh Interwebs give ya), the people.

The real estate world is hidebound and burdened with useless historical debris. But the law world is worse. Lawyering is a closed shop industry and the State Bar is hellbent on protecting union members. Using ideas imported proudly from Elizabethan England.

BHB-style thinking and action to me is what the individual can do — constructively — to rage against the machine. (Hmmm. Good name for a band, I think.)

The opportunity

First, background. The IRS announced a voluntary disclosure program in late March, 2009 — people with money hidden offshore could Come to Jesus and avoid criminal prosecution for tax evasion.

I’m an international tax lawyer. Ding-ding-ding.

Seizing the opportunity

With help and coaching (ha! Chris hates that word!) from GenuineChris I launched www.foreignbankaccountamnesty.com. Simple WordPress install, various plug-ins, no biggie.

With me so far? Yep. All of you have launched blogs. Ain’t but a few of you who have made money on them. Listen up.

Get to work

Here’s what happened next. Chris Johnson harangued me. “Write!” he commanded. I wrote like an SOB. I remember one time when he said “It doesn’t matter what you write, just write.” As if content doesn’t matter. My “A” student overachiever feelings were hurt. But I wrote. Brute Force SEO. That’s what we Read more

September 27, 2009

iMovie lets me produce six short real estate videos in three hours

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve never loved video as a means of promoting real estate listings. I much prefer lots and lots of really big, really detailed photographs.

But: The SMS marketing we’re doing with DriveBuy Technologies makes video a necessity. The integration of YouTube into smart-phones is simply too compelling an opportunity to pass up.

Hence, on Thursday I pounded out six videos for three of our listings, all in about three hours total labor. That’s everything, from set up to sequencing to background music to recording voiceovers.

How is that possible? I used iMovie, the more basic movie-making software for the Macintosh. I also have Final Cut, but iMovie makes making basic plug-and-chug videos a breeze. Even better, it integrates directly with YouTube, so I can publish from within the app.

I’m promoting houses, so I’m using photographs, not full-motion video. Assembling these little films is quick and fool-proof.

How’s the quality? You tell me. I think these are more than adequate to the task.

Let’s take a look:

For 5415 West Hasan Drive:


The house…


And the neighborhood…

This is just plain vanilla Ken Burns stuff, and you can take it the way the software does it or manipulate the effect yourself.

Here are two more, made for 1946 East Vista Drive:


The house…


And the neighborhood…

These two were done using iMovie’s Scrapbook theme, and all the transitions were done automatically by the software.

One more: 5708 East Paradise Lane:


The house…


And the neighborhood…

These videos used iMovie’s Photo Album theme, again with no manual intervention.

Without doubt you could do even cooler stuff by intervening with the software, but these results seem pretty sweet to me without my having to do a lot of manual tweaking.

September 26, 2009

Looking for a reason to buy real estate? How about free ice cream?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):

When I was a kid, my Uncle Jack, my mother’s oldest brother, told me a story I’ve never forgotten. He was at a little county fair way out in corn country. Nothing special, just beauty contests for hogs, cheesy little rides and sticky, sugared confections.

Late in the day, the ice cream vendor decided to pack it in, announcing that he was giving away what was left of his inventory. People elbowed their way to the front of the crowd, so eager were they to get something for nothing. They walked away with the ice cream piled into their bare hands, rushing off to their cars, leaving a trail of melted drips behind them.

The lesson I took from my uncle’s story was that those folks didn’t really want ice cream. They were willing to get themselves dirty, and to get their vehicles dirty, just to have something for free. Most of them probably didn’t even eat the ice cream, and they certainly couldn’t have enjoyed it. Imagine trying to inhale a glutton’s quantity of chocolate-fudge-swirl before it melts all over your clothes.

Could that be what’s going on right now with the $8,000 first-time home-buyer’s tax credit? I happen to be carrying three listings that are undeniably “investor’s specials” — which means they’re a good buy, but they need a lot of work. Even so, my phone is ringing off the hook with agents trying to sell those houses to owner-occupants — folks with very little cash trying to get an FHA loan so they can buy a house, thus to get $8,000 in “free” money.

Do those buyers really want homes, or do they just want that free money? What will happen to the properties when the $8,000 is spent? Should we dial the clock back to 2006 to see if anything looks familiar?

Meanwhile, the National Association of Realtors is campaigning for even more “free” money to bribe even more otherwise-unmotivated buyers. The only thing that could make the deal sweeter would be a double hand-full of “free” ice cream.

 
Spread the word: Click here Read more

September 25, 2009

An educated consumer is someone’s best customer

by

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

Author website

Having been a BHB devotee since nearly the blog’s birth, I’m honored to be here.

If you grew up in the Northeast, you probably recall Sy Syms, owner of Syms clothing outlets, with his ubiquitous television commercials. Sy would end each commercial by saying: “An educated consumer is our best customer.”

Greg’s description of me – an educated consumer – called to mind Sy’s trademark phrase.

I was fortunate to buy my first home through BloodhoundRealty.com. Fortune got me a lovely home in central Phoenix, and an education in how a real estate transaction ought to be handled. The home I sold (with Cathleen and Greg’s help) when my wife and I moved to North Carolina. But the education is forever.

I do not believe the three North Carolina realtors we unceremoniously rejected for not meeting BHB standards thought that an educated consumer was their best customer. C’est la vie.

In thinking about marketing my law firm and how to apply various insights from BHB, it occurred to me that my realtor friends don’t know how good they’ve got it. I know there are plenty of gripes here about the NAR. But it could always be worse: You could be operating as a licensed attorney, subject to the stultifying and onerous limitations on marketing and business development imposed by state bars.

So with that in mind, I expect to get more out writing here than I can possibly offer: bringing insights I learn here from your world to help remake my world.

September 25, 2009

Three new dogs for the Bloodhound pack — Damon Chetson, Robert Worthington and Greg Dallaire — and a reminder about transparency

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Yesterday I had mail from a Realtor who had proposed the idea of custom yard signs to a listing prospect. The client’s eyes lit up, and he saw not only the immediate possibilities but the future portents. Here’s what the Realtor had to say about it all:

One thing I found so interesting is that any time you mention custom signs, all the agents who don’t use them make comments about how worthless they are, but this guy, the client, the seller, got it immediately. Got the reason for it, could see how it would stop traffic, understood it all — without me selling him on it.

Funny how you have to sell agents on stuff that would make perfect sense to their own clients.

We’re adding three new contributors today. Two of them are envelope-pushing Realtors, but one is a certified, bonafied real estate client, an educated consumer who can tell a hawk from a handsaw — and who isn’t shy about speaking his mind about the utility of either one.

That consumer is Damon Chetson, a BloodhoundRealty.com client from way back and a long-time contributor to our comments threads. Damon is a newly-minted criminal defense attorney in Cary, NC, but he will be talking to us here about how he perceives the real estate industry as an informed outsider.

Robert Worthington is another frequent BloodhoundBlog commenter. He’s a hard-charging Realtor in Manitowoc, WI, and he spends all of his spare time looking for technobabble bubbles to burst.

Greg Dallaire is another Wisconsin Realtor, working out of Green Bay. Not only does he have a first name that rings sweetly to my ears, he sings a song very dear to my own heart: “I’m passionate about implementing technology into my business to increase productivity, improve efficiency, and increase profitability.”

As you might have inferred from my absences, punctuated by brief bursts of brevity — the wit of soul — I’m a busy boy. I’m about to become a busier boy, because I want to undertake a task for the ages. In the mean time, this was my response to the email cited above:

The actual message of Read more

September 24, 2009

Yes, there are Good and Honest Loan Officers in Florida!

by

Mortgage Technologist

Author website

Two weeks ago, I attended the Miami REBar Camp to witness for myself what I had been hearing and reading about. While I found the event educational and interesting, what I enjoyed foremost was getting to meet and know Chris Brown better.

Being on the Mortgage Revolution Education Committee, I had spoken to Chris, however had not had an opportunity to get to know him well. Being the information gathering Ninja loan officer I learned Chris is, he conducted marketing intelligence and reviewed the attendee list and who he would like to meet. Upon seeing I was attending, he called and told me he “would love to meet me and talk shop.” When he discovered I was planning on driving from Atlanta to Miami, he asked if he could catch a ride with me as I drove through Orlando. Being that we had several mutual friends and they assured me Chris was stand-up guy, I agreed to meet and pick him up at one of the Orlando I-75 exits.

For the trip, my Mother also decided to tag along for ride, as she had never been to Miami. Needless to say, Chris and my Mom hit it off immediately and for the first hour of the trip, they discussed and shared their favorite Bible passages. As for me, if my Mom likes someone, that is normally a good sign. For the last three hours of our journey, Chris and I engaged in a Socratic learning experience that truly impressed me. Quite frankly, Chris loves learning and implementing strategies that put his clients in the best overall financial position, even if that means he makes a lesser commission or recommends NOT getting a home loan (no commission). Having been in the mortgage business for twenty-three years, believe me; I can spot and smell a bull shitter a mile away…Chris’ sincerity and concern for his clients and referral partners is genuine.

In addition, Chris was aware of my background and the success I had experienced as a mortgage originator, sales manager and mega-bank executive. In a nutshell, he maximized his time with me asking questions on Read more

September 22, 2009

Making the Numbers in Real Estate Marketing Add Up

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

In a recent Bloodhound post about Twitter (only Brian Brady could write the third post in just over a week on the same subject and generate so many comments!) there was a comment on marketing numbers that so intrigued me I felt compelled to respond in a post rather than a comment.  It’s been my experience that many of us do not accurately calculate the numbers when it comes to our marketing.  This should really come as no surprise – numbers and especially statistics can be beguiling and even misleading.  But if we’re not tracking and calculating our marketing efforts correctly, we’re just shooting into a dark room hoping we’ll hit the target.

The numbers quoted (or maybe it was just the idea) are credited to Larry Kendall, but they provide an interesting opportunity to work a real world example of marketing in general and Twitter specifically.  For this exercise I am pulling some examples from the actual comment, but just about every one of us has made this type of calculation before.  I follow each with a slightly different view.

I want 50 local people that I can really connect with (on Twitter).  If I have 50 people and they each know 50 people, I have a pool of 2,500 people.  Not quite.  It means you have the potential to reach 2500 people, but it’s unlikely.  For the purpose of calculating marketing numbers… you’re reaching 50.  This is akin to speaking at a seminar filled with 50 people from the neighborhood and assuming you’ve reached all 2500 people in the neighborhood – you haven’t.  If, on the other hand, you send a direct mail piece to all 2500 people in the neighborhood, then we say you’re working from a pool of 2500 potential clients.  Is it realistic to think all 2500 read that mailing?  Of course not.  But our expected conversion numbers take that into account.   The expected conversion numbers are simply based on a pool of 2500.  A pool of 50 will generate no usable statistical model from which to base a marketing campaign.

If the *normal* turnover rate in my local Read more

September 21, 2009

List of People Real Estate Agents MUST Follow on Twitter

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

1-

2-

3-

4-

5-

Sorry to go all Mike Ferry on you but at the end of the day, your time is better spent following would be home buyers, driving from open house to open house, with a carefully designed plan to  “run into them” at the 7-11, every Sunday.

PS:  Been there, done that, got the twee-shirt

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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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