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Category: Marketing (page 83 of 191)

March 11, 2008

How do you get visitors to come to your home’s custom weblog? Shoe leather works well. Search engines? Not so much…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

 
How do you get visitors to come to your home’s custom weblog? Shoe leather works well. Search engines? Not so much…

Okay, so you’ve built a custom weblog to help sell your home, and you’ve dressed it up with photos, a map, a floorplan — every bit of content you could think of. Now what?

Your home now has a twenty-four-hour salesperson on the internet. How do you go about getting potential buyers to visit your blog?

Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is not search engines. For one thing, your site is brand new. The search engines don’t even know it exists. Even if you manage to get indexed, you won’t have the kind of popularity to bring you to the top of search results for your keywords.

But there is an even more compelling reason why search engines won’t be much help to you: Visitors brought in by search engines are very loosely motivated. Many will have been looking for something else entirely, so they will bounce right back off your site in seconds flat.

Your objective in promoting your weblog is to target people who are motivated to buy your home — or who know someone who is motivated to buy your home. Your job is not to broadcast your appeal to everyone but to narrowcast to just those people who can do you the most good.

You’ll put notices about your weblog anywhere online that you can — Zillow.com, Trulia.com, CraigsList.com, local weblogs supporting nearby schools, little league teams, etc. But your primary promotional strategy is going to be offline — person to person.

We print business card-sized promotional pieces to advertise our open houses. These are distributed to every house in the neighborhood, since the neighbors may know someone who wants to live nearby.

During the school day, there will be more than 100 cars in the school parking lot, most of them driven there from out of the neighborhood. Some of those folks are sick of commuting.

Most local retailers will have some kind of bulletin board. Your cards belong there.

Your buyers probably won’t Read more

March 10, 2008

NAR and the Use of MLS in a URL

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

I’ve written about this before. This is an issue that just isn’t going to go away. Like most oppressive rules and laws this bad rule (at least as it is currently interpreted and practiced) was a sincere attempt to solve a problem. Unfortunately, the current rule creates a whole new type of problem. The solution is the new problem.

Should any misleading or deceitful statement statement be permitted on a website? No and the NAR Code of Ethics already covered that. But this issue – at least as it now stands – is a good example of “an innocent dolphin caught in a tuna net”. The very idea that an NAR committee came up with a restriction for Realtors that our competitors – who are trying to put us out of business – don’t have to follow is just absurd.

NAR will have no ability whatsoever to stop, inhibit, or prevent anyone BUT Realtors from using the term “MLS” in their URL. So why would it be alright to inhibit a Realtor while other companies are using the term and will continue to use the term (both as a meta tag and as part of the URL)?

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Here is another letter Steve Westmark passed along to me.

From: Jim Lee

To: gary@garyashton.com ; steve@stevewestmark.com

Sent: Friday, February 15, 2008 10:35 AM

Subject: Fwd: Letter to NAR VP Cliff Niersbach

Gentlemen, Another Realtor friend of mine, Bill Holt who is in the Outer Banks area of North Carolina, has a URL with those troublesome magic letters “MLS” (www.obxMLS.com) and is having the same issues we are.Fortunately Bill has a member of his board who is on the NAR Professional Standards subcommittee, Policy and Interpretation, or some such name. He has talked with her and another long time member of that subcommittee named Ted Kelly. They both seem to feel that to be in violation of the new COE’s Article 12 that a member’s intent would be very important, i.e. are you trying to pass yourself off as ‘THE’ MLS. Mr. Kelly gave Bill Cliff Niersbach’s name who is some sort of NAR VP to talk with. Bill is sending him Read more

March 10, 2008

Save $100 If You Are Going To Starpower This Year

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

This year it is July 23 – 26, in Orlando. Here is the email I received from Howard. I think you know I want to be a hero.

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Greetings to our Stars!


It’s hard to believe that we’re only about four months away from this year’s STAR POWER Annual Conference! Obviously, in today’s market, your fellow REALTORS® need the ideas, insights, and inspiration from top producers like you now more than ever! That is why attached you will find a very special Star Referral Credit that we encourage you to share with as many real estate professionals as possible. It will save them $100 off their Annual Conference registration and make you a hero in their eyes! You
certainly are a hero to us!

Thanks for helping to make the 2008 STAR POWER Annual Conference the most important event in the lives and careers of so many of your peers! Together, we’ll thrive in these changing times!

Have a positively productive day!

Your partner in success,

Howard Brinton

2008 Conference Star Coupon - Russell Shaw

March 10, 2008

The Odysseus Medal: A breathtaking Daisy in the deserts of the mind

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I was talking to Teri Lussier in email last week about Desert Daisies, an annual wildflower you find in the Sonoran Desert. People harvest the seeds and bring them home, and the flowers will eventually take over the whole yard — for the few weeks they’re around.

Beautiful little clarions of Spring, announcing in advance the blossoming of the citrus trees — when Phoenix is at its ultimate perfect best and god himself is green with envy.

When I picked Teri to be my partner in last Spring’s ProjectBlogger competition, I chose better than I knew. I admired her spark, her spunkiness — what the Irish might call the soul of a poet. But I could not have foreseen her depths — although I have been more than delighted to discover them over the last year. I hope BloodhoundBlog has been good for her. I know she has been very good for BloodhoundBlog. Working here and at TheBrickRanch.com, she has blossomed into a powerhouse weblogger.

So it’s a delight for me to announce that Teri Lussier is the first person to win The Odysseus Medal, The Black Pearl Award and The People’s Choice Award all in the same week.

The winning entry? Zillow creates the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine, of course.

I know some poor benighted soul will have to go digging for evidence of corruption, so I will tell you now that the fact that Teri and I happen to be on the same side of the issue of real estate licensing had nothing to do with my choice. She hit not just a home run but a grand slam with her essay, and the position she took says nothing at all about the quality of her work — except insofar as writing the heartfelt truth puts the writer at one with the gods.

I normally quote from winning entries, but, in this case, I want you to go and read Teri’s whole post. Print it out and tape it to your monitor. Inscribe it into your mind as a particularly worthy example of the truth Read more

March 10, 2008

Hyper-Local Blogs — Mr. Purcell? You’re Officially Outed

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Last Friday an agent and fellow blogger wrote a post about hyper-local blogs. Spencer Barron decided the subject needed a Devil’s Advocate. His post was a fair one. I commented then called Spencer. His most salient comment was this — “I’m still looking in vain for the agent out their dominating with a hyper-local blog.” (paraphrased wildly) There are already those out there who claim to have one, and are do well with it, very well. I disagree however with their assertion the blog their maintaining is a bona fide hyper-local. I’m a purist on this subject, and not only drink the Kool-Aide but mix it. 🙂

Last October I wrote a piece on hyper-local blogs. I essentially claimed outside of owning a printing press with the original plate for $100 bills, that was one of the best ways to earn money as a real estate agent. I haven’t changed my mind. In fact, Brian Brady introduced me to another local San Diego real estate guy — Sean Purcell. Turns out Sean’s office is just down the street from my satellite office. (I allow them to bill themselves as Starbucks, but they know the real scoop.) 🙂

So we’ve met a few times now. Sean is technologically ahead of anywhere I ever hope to be. I like him, among other reasons ‘cuz he agrees with my thinking on hyper-local blogs.

While at lunch I told him I thought the first agent who set up 4-5 hyper-local blogs in La Mesa, a San Diego suburb, would print money. After some back and forth he totally agreed.

Fast forward to the other day. We’d met for coffee and were revisiting our above mentioned conversation. And that’s when he did it. He said he was gonna launch the La Mesa blogs himself. He said it while looking me right in the eyes. He never even blinked.

After that we went back and forth about how to cordon off the different neighborhoods based upon our local knowledge of the city. It’s not a large city — its population is about 50,000. The blogs won’t cover every single Read more

March 9, 2008

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

by

Marketing Provocateur

Author website

Book Recommendation

He had me at “The Economist.”

He being Dan Ariely, author of the new book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. It’s about the buying and marketing choices we make and why we make them. And why the seemingly rational path to a purchase is often the road less traveled.

Chapter one opens with an example drawn directly from the subscription promotions of my sometimes client The Economist. Which is why you’ll also find this article posted here.

Mr. Ariely’s second example involves real estate. Showing why most buyers choose the more expensive, and yet demonstrably less valuable property among the three houses he presents.

As a “behavioral economist,” Mr. Ariely organizes the book using the scientific method. In successive chapters he postulates a theory. Devises a controlled experiment. Tests his hypotheses. And reports the results … which are fascinating as well as illuminating. (Conduct a few tests on yourself: The door game. Easy-hard game. The circle illusion. Table illusion. Jastrow illusion. Stroop illusion. Line illusion. Checker board illusion. And Koffka illusion.

Predictably Irrational reveals that many best practices in marketing may, in fact, be predicated on myths. And it gives the lie to some long-held, fiercely-defended beliefs about customer behavior. But its greatest contribution is helping you achieve what I think is most missing in sales—whether real estate or subscriptions: The ability of sellers to think like buyers in accurate and advantageous ways.

These “hidden forces” will help you understand the true meaning of free. The concept of price anchors. The power of social motivation. If you’re in real estate, I think you’ll find it easy to take what you learn and apply it to the pricing of properties, the showing of homes, the marketing of listings. If you’re selling magazines, it may cause you to re-frame your offers, re-cast your benefits, and re-position your brand.

Now fair warning: Mr. Arieley has a grander vision than I. So he doesn’t draw the same conclusions from his data as I do. As a result, he tends to airily end chapters with sweeping pronunciations on the implications of his Read more

March 8, 2008

Another record-breaking week: Is 2008 the Year of the Bloodhound?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

BloodhoundBlog has had one record-breaking week after another in 2008, but this week was the first time we had more than 14,000 unique visitors, an average of 2,000 “uniques” a day.

Nothing exceeds like excess: We add new subscribers every day, our Technorati links are on the upsurge, and we are pushing 100,000 backlinks. If the RE.net is like the Roman Republic, then we are like Gaius Marius, Caesar’s uncle: New on the scene, rude, crude, vulgar — and very powerful. That’s a role that suits me just fine. I’m happy to leave the Patricians squabbling amongst themselves over emoluments and honors. I’m much more concerned with the work-a-day Plebeians — and with the Barbarians at our gates.

Why are we the biggest? Because we deliver the goods to hard-working grunts-on-the-ground like you. How are we going to grow even bigger? By delivering the goods to hard-working grunts-on-the-ground like you. It ain’t rocket science.

Russell Shaw is convinced we have reached the “tipping point”, the point past which everything we say here can have an impact on the way our business is conducted. I retain my doubts, but I do not doubt for a moment that our words have a deep, a penetrating and an enduring reach. And to that notion, I cannot but shout out some slightly edited sentiments from latter-day America’s greatest satiric philosophers, Matt Stone and Trey Parker:

America! [Heck] yeah!

In the Web 2.0 world — in the disintermediated world — in the world without middle-men — delivering the goods is all that should matter. The BloodhoundBlog idea is simple enough — keeping the wealth that you alone produce in your own pocket — but it is in a sense a very ancient idea, a very Greek idea. The Hoplite Greeks were their own men, and this is why they fought better — and why they thought better — than any human beings who had come before them. The BloodhoundBlog idea is but a small reflection of the Hellenic revolution, but it is an idea that should win, that should prosper in a world where no middle-man can squelch an idea or Read more

March 8, 2008

Real Estate Web Site Extreme Makeover: If we help Russell Shaw get even richer, he might buy us drinks at BloodhoundBlog Unchained

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As I mentioned on Real Estate Radio USA yesterday, Mary McKnight of RSSpieces.com will be joining us at BloodhoundBlog Unchained for a session called Real Estate Web Site Extreme Makeover. What we’re going to do is take a look at web sites and weblogs of audience volunteers and talk about how they might be improved — to be more attractive to visitors, stickier, better-optimized for search engines, etc. It should be a very robust, fast-paced overview of what does and doesn’t work in real estate web sites.

Here’s a news flash: The purpose of a real estate web site or weblog — the purpose of real estate marketing in general — is to sell houses. Pull-based marketing is still marketing.

With that much as preface, consider this: Russell Shaw is one of the biggest newspaper publishers in Northeast Phoenix. By way of Custom House Publishers, Russ prints and distributes almost 50,000 newspapers a month — distributed as the 85022 News, the 85024 News, the 85028 News and the 85032 News. These are the zip codes of Russell’s geographic farm, of course, and the newspapers are one way he has of “dripping” on sellers in his farm.

Russ also has four domains for those four zip codes, each one running a templated web site built and hosted by Superlative Web Systems, one of our local — and lame without exception — IDX vendors. These are the four sites: 85022News.com, 85024News.com, 85028News.com and 85032News.com. As with all templated web sites, if we examine everything with a critical eye and then work up every ounce of salesmanical enthusiasm we can muster, we can dig deep and bring forth a hearty: “Eh…” Not absolutely awful, but nothing that is insanely great.

Now it could be that Russ has that kind of frail and fragile ego that regards every bit of professional criticism as a grave and grievous insult — but not on this planet! Instead, Russell Shaw is the kind of phlegmatic, pragmatic, practical guy who understands that, no matter how well he might be doing today, he can always do even better tomorrow. My kinda guy. So instead Read more

March 8, 2008

The Wile E. Coyote School of Mosquito Extermination — and why you need to put a condom on your trusting nature

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

That headline is lousy for Googlization, but it got your attention, didn’t it?

First, Russell Shaw unearthed an ugly little bug in WordPress that permits malware mechanics to hi-jack certain features of a weblog. If that sounds vague, you bet it is. I’m not going to tell you what happens, where, or how. It is sufficient to say that the exploit is possible in any currently-running hosted version of WordPress. Why did we get hit? Despite the scare stories in the newspapers, malware is almost-always devoted to some kind of quasi-legitimate commerce. Basically, the bug that bit us was trying to use our hosting and our traffic to conduct its business at our expense.

Not cool.

The exploit is recurrent. I can kill any particular instance of it, but since the trapdoor is in WordPress, the only way to keep this little mosquito from coming back is to keep slapping it dead — with the only alternative being to kill WordPress entirely.

Enter cron, the Unix utility that will run any Unix process on the schedule you set. With luck, this exploit will be fixed in WordPress 2.5, which is due to be released shortly. In the meantime, once a minute we’re swatting that mosquito, leaving not so much as a bloodstain. Most of the time, it’s not there, of course. When it is, it has 59 or fewer seconds to suck our blood before it dies again.

That much was easy, but I’ve had plenty of time to watch this little critter in action, and in consequence I’ve learned a ton about malware theory, as it were. So once every 15 minutes, cron is running a different job that combs our whole file server looking for suspicious files. And if anything else pops up, I already know how to kill it and keep on killing it.

All of which leads me to say: I love the Apache web-server technology. Where else can you drop a ton of Acme DDT onto one little mosquito once a minute — like Wile E. Coyote at his most frenzied — without even breaking a sweat?

Alright, that’s the first thing. Here’s Read more

March 8, 2008

Kevin Kelly will teach you everything he knows about the economics of abundance — for free

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Mike Farmer is the gift that keeps on giving. Last night at his place, and today at our place, he takes us deep inside the mind of Kevin Kelly.

I’ve been catching notices of Kelly’s name in the tech blogs, but I haven’t made time to read him. Big mistake on my part, corrected at some length this morning.

Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans forms the basis for a survival manual for exemplary-service Realtors and lenders.

His Technology Wants To Be Free is a much deeper discussion of the “free” economy than the Chris Anderson essay I talked about last week.

I may go into greater detail later, but you don’t need to be bottle fed. Get yourself to the Technium and drink from the fire-hose.

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March 7, 2008

Do you want to know the best Black Pearl of all? When someone offers you a valuable jewel, show up to collect your prize!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

During the ProjectBlogger competition last Spring, I advised the contestants to enter a writing contest Problogger.com was hosting. Of all the apprentices, only Teri Lussier entered, with the result that she finished the competition with a huge number of Technorati links and a Page Rank of 4 — truly astounding results for almost no effort.

Say that again: “Truly astounding results for almost no effort.” That’s like a BloodhoundBlog mantra. That’s everything we’re looking for, the leveraged opportunity that produces the best benefits for the least effort at the lowest cost.

Even so, I knew when I announced the BloodhoundBlog Black Pearl Diver’s contest that few people would enter. The effort was nothing, really, just another blog post. The Grand Prize is a full scholarship to BloodhoundBlog Unchained, but every winning entrant would get a link back to their site on our side-bar. This is possibly the most powerful link in the RE.net. It’s certainly the most powerful link anyone is offering you for free. And we had — count ’em — four entries.

The good news is, they were four great entries. But before we get to them, I’d like to cite three honorable mentions:

  1. Mike Farmer brought us This is not for the contest — just tipping my hat, discussing his plans to create single-property weblogs for his listings.
  2. Teri Lussier took on the entire Social Media Marketing universe with Does the RE.net mean Real Estate or Resist Everything?
  3. And Todd Carpenter knocked my socks off last night with this simple Google search. For now, Todd is dominating the keyword zillow mortgages by sheer blog-power. It will be interesting to see if Zillow is able to take that keyword away from Todd, but, no matter what, he is demonstrating the search-engine leverage of weblogging.

And now… on to the winners:

Kevin Warmath weighs in with If A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words, A Video Must Be Worth a Million, a discussion of his odyssey through visual marketing media for his listings.

Brian Miller offers up “…Vee have our vays. You vill sign zee papers…”, which details how he learned how to get more by demanding less.

Colleen Kulikowski Read more

March 7, 2008

My Real Estate Radio USA debut — and a reminder that the price for BloodhoundBlog Unchained tickets goes up at midnight tonight

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

You can go to Real Estate Radio USA to hear the MP3 of my appearance today. I went into it expecting to kind of goofy and fun, but we actually ended up covering a lot of nuts-and-bolts real estate techniques.

As Brian Brady announced when he made his own appearance on Real Estate Radio USA, the price for BloodhoundBlog Unchained tickets will be going up at midnight tonight. If you want to get the whole package — a $350 value — for the Guerrilla-only special price of $149, you need to make your purchase now.

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March 7, 2008

Fred Flintstone speaks: Listen to me today on Real Estate Radio USA

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As a reminder, I will be on Real Estate Radio USA this afternoon at 2:30 pm MST. I’ll be talking about everything I can remember about BloodhoundBlog Unchained, plus, presumably, a lot of other stuff. I’m full of ideas and light on sleep, so I should be a fun listen. You can snag the MP3 later if you miss the show live.

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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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