Monday, March 30, 2009

Attracting Real Estate Leads Through Twitter

I have shifted my focus from getting front page links from google to our expired listing lead software and am instead working with Twitter to do some marketing..  The micro-blogging tool is getting popular and has finally hit mainstream media. With all of those individuals tweeting, how do you take advantage of it to attract new clients and listings?  The best way is to garner as many followers that meet your target demographic as possible, and use their initial follow as well as your tweets to emphasize your brand. So how do get followers, and how do you automate the process? 

Because effective Twitter marketing means attracting as many followers as possible, setting up an autofollow, auto-responder and auto-reciprocate tool is a great way to improve your reach and campaign effectiveness.  The tools that help in this process are Tweetlater.com which allows you to autorespond followers with a direct message as well as automatically reciprocate follows.  Combine Tweetlater.com with the keyword autofollow power of Twollow and you can automate most of the marketing with the exception of actually posting content.  There are rss twitter autopostng services that allow you to post content as well, but we won’t go into them in this discussion. 

As you begin posting to twitter, follow those that have your target keywords in either their conversation or profile.  Roughly 30% of those that you follow will end up following you back.  After a couple of days, unfollow any of those that have not followed you so that your ratio of followers to followees does not get too far out of whack.  

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Formalization of Growing the Visibility of Real Estate Country

It has been a while since I posted to my real time blog of getting my real estate pages to cover the first page of google for a given search word. So Freetrainer.com and associated links are in the first three listings on Google for the term Expired Listing Lead in addition, for my wife’s business, I have five of the first page listings on google for the term “prenatal vitamin chews The challenge has been that I am still working toward getting the term “Real Estate Country” listed on the first page and it is proving to be more competitive than I had originally thought. Who knew that UnitedCountry would have such a strong presence online?

In evaluating the different strategies to get even more linked sites listed on google’s first page for the given word, I found an online e-book that formalized what I have been describing. I won’t go into details about the book, but the concept is simply that instead of creating a bunch of linked sites that all link together, create a site, add one link to your central page (www.freetrainer.com for example) and one or two links to the next page, blog, hub, squidoo, or other site that you create.

As an example, the Real Estate Country blog links to the home page and will be linking to a Squidoo page. The idea is to create a wheel of sites that have just one or two links to your critical pages as well as a consolidated link to your next creation so that the spiders can follow. By building out your wheel, you can have a very targeted group of sites that focus on your specific niche and keywords, but don’t get penalized for having a large number of outgoing links.

Overall, the link wheel should serve to improve your search ranking for a given site, and if done properly, those additional sites that you create will also show up under that search term on Google.

Monday, March 09, 2009

The Step by Step Domination of the First Page of Google, Continued

I have been a bit lax in my activities of getting links to realestatecountry.net to cover the most of the first page of google for the search term “real estate country This is primarily due to a lot of other activities going on such as helping my wire promote her chewable prenatal vitamin website. Anyway, I am making some small progress and thought I would update some of my real time activities to continue to demonstrate how to get your site and sites managed by you to the top of the search engine for a given search term.

When I last posted, I was mentioning creating a number of squidoo and hub pages for Real Estate Country. While these are still a priority as my next step, I decided to create a blogger blog for the topic instead. I posted my first article today which was a very basic introduction to the blog. As time goes by, I will continue to post real estate country related articles on that blog as well as the other real estate blogs that I manage in an effort to get that and other blogs to show up under this keyword. The strategy is to have this blog and the other related blogs show up in the top ten under the search term so regardless of where the searcher clicks, they end up connecting with me.

I chose to create the blogger blog before the sqidoo page because I recently read that both Squidoo and Hub pages provide nofollow links which means that the search engines don’t really count them for backlinks. I have also read that Google may disregard this feature for these sites, so the jury is out. With that in mind, I thought getting at least one of my real estate country sites onto the first page of google should be the priority.

So the next steps in this step by step strategy are to:

1) Create one or two keyword-specific blogs and start populating them with good content. Use blogger as it has a very high PR as part of the google platform.

2) When you have time, start creating squidoo lenses and hub pages on your specific topic and search term.

Monday, March 02, 2009

Step by Step Guide to Cover the First Page of Google, a Small Challenge

For those of you who have been following along, I am using these posts to go through the step by step process of covering the first page of google with links back to your site. My first demonstration of this was the links to my RedX and 4MySales page under the search term “expired listing leads The second is the multiple links to Bloomen Nutrition under the search “prenatal vitamin chews.”

Anyway, this newest project was to get as many links on the first page of Google as possible for the term “real estate country However, I hit a bit of a snag. The site has yet to be indexed by google, and in further examination, I have found that it is an expired URL that was likely has a bad history with google. So here is what I am going to do. For the next while, I will work at the term and see if we can’t get a few of the linked pages indexed by google, even though the target page will likely not show up. This is a little off from the original strategy, but I think it will still work out.

So what are the steps for this week? Two things, bookmarks and sqidoo pages. The bookmarks are pretty self explanatory, add the real estate country link to as many of the social bookmarking sites as possible. The squidoo pages are a little more challenging. As time allows, create a squidoo lens that deals with the topic of real estate country. Make the lens useful so that it will attract traffic, and create a lens group around it. After creating the lens, make five or ten more. With each of these lenses, add content that people searching for the target real estate terms will find, read, and subsequently click back to the original site.

This activity is going to take me a couple of days, so I’ll let you know how it goes.