Aggressive Pricing to Move Short Sales

I talked to a colleague who relies on the RedX Real Estate Lead System the other day and he told me that in general he expects, and gets an offer within 30 days of listing a short sale. In fact he is so confident in those results that he makes it part of his listing presentation. So after hearing that statement, I had to learn more.

Here is how he does it…

First and foremost he explains that because the owner is taking a bath on the property and that the bank will do their due diligence when an offer is received, it is best practice to price the property at and just below market comps.

After getting the owners agreement, he goes about listing the property on numerous online sites. He posts the property on Zillow, Trulia and even lists issues a dedicated URL through Listing Producer. The benefit of the dedicated URL is that he minimizes the nosy neighbors who generally can just go online to snoop. Here is an example of one of his recent listings: http://www.1059greenway.com/

Next he schedules an open house, always a great way to farm an area and expand your listing base. I think he has added six listings in that neighborhood in the past month.

Finally, as part of his approach, if after the first three weeks there has been no activity, he convinces the homeowner to reduce the listing price by $10,000. This is done every two to three weeks until a magic price and buyer is found.

Obviously with a short sale getting the offer is just the beginning of the process. However you can’t argue with getting an offer that may be accepted by the banks within 30 days of every short sale listing.

Mobile Optimize For More and Better Leads

I was working with a colleague the other day and he showed me one of his new flyers. What was weird was that he had a two dimensional bar code printed next to his name. Being the technophile that I am, I grabbed my Iphone and scanned the code. Where I ended up was a great video of him introducing his services, the benefits that he offers and an exclusive invitation to join in one of his weekly conference calls. The video was an apple compatible .mov file so it was compatible with my phone.

Well, I have to tell you that I was blown away. What a great way to instantly create a personal relationship with prospective customers. Not only that, but by inviting them to call into an exclusive weekly event, prospects get engaged without feeling pressured to list or sell.

Apparently I was not the only one that was impressed. My colleague mentioned that his listings have doubled since he started putting this bar code on his cards and flyers.

This approach leverages new and novel technology to get prospective customers engaged with a REALTOR’s personal brand. Although the technology is relatively new, it is becoming more and more widely used which means more and more customers are turning to use it.

It will likely never replace real time listing lead services such as the RedX FSBO and Expired service, but it may be a great marketing tool to increase your reach and grow your number of active listings.

RedX and The National DNC Registry

If you cold call as part of your sales process, especially if you are in real estate, you have to be conscious of, and in compliance with, the national Do Not Call registry. This registry was produced to care for consumers from aggressive telemarketers and sales people, and much like the CanSpam act, it has done its job plausibly well. However, for small business people such as REALTORS, and real estate brokers, persistently read-through this registry previous to making a telephone call costs time, money and assets that are in rare supply.

In spite of the cost, real estate pros must adhere to this law. Aside from being the ethical thing to do, violations of the do not call registry can result in swift and heavy fines as well as large lost business.

Luckily, for real estate broker that actively prospect on the phone, there is a simple solution. Real estate lead generation services such as the (Real Estate Data Exchange) include DNC verification as a fundamental part of their service offering. Services like the automatically scrub their listings against the countrywide Do Not Call registry before providing the information to the real estate agent. This added service protects the REALTOR from accidentally violating the registry and allows them to cold call prospective clients with the assurance that they are in full compliance with this law.

It is important to note that the RedX is only one numerous tools that include a DNC verification as a fundamental part of their service. Services vary and the quality of the various marketing and lead generation services are widely different. Therefore, as a real estate agent or small business professional, you should always look for services that include automated processes that address the legal limitation of prospecting such as the DNC registry or the CanSpam act.

The onus of compliance is on you, and the consequences of violating the law can be severe.

If you are a REALTOR and looking for a way to repeatedly enlarge your client list, then visit RedX realty. This great software provides you with the resources to beat out your competition. Have more leads, more listings and more free time with the Real Estate Data Exchange now.

My Gift To My Colleagues

As a thank you for all of your support this holiday season, I would like to offer each of you a complimentary copy of my Residential and Retail-Commercial Investment Analysis Software. This software has been a great asset over the past few years and normally retails for $149.99. It is now my gift to you.

My friends at the RedX are also in a giving mood and wanted me to remind you all that their double discount special will only be going on for a few more days. Their Double Discount is an up-front $149.00 discount as well as a 15% discount off of the first three months of service. Overall, it is about a $185 savings. Here is the link to their offer: http://www.theredx.net

Here is the download link to the software: http://www.freetrainer.com/tem/IPWare.exe

Have a very happy holiday season.

Final Discount For A Full Lead Prospecting System

I have been busy over the past few weeks looking at different marketing automation software program. As such, I forgot to let everybody know that the Real Estate Data Exchange (RedX) has EXTENDED THEIR DOUBLE HOLIDAY DISCOUT (15% off the first three months along with waiving the $149.00 start up fee) until December 31.

If you have read my previous posts, you know I hold their listing lead and FSBO products in the highest regard and am happy that they have chosen to maintain a commercial relationship with me. With that in mind, here is the link to their DOUBLE DISCOUNT PROMOTION: http://www.theredx.net

Now, the Real Estate Data Exchange aside, I have been fascinated by the potential application of some of these marketing automation programs for automating all of your lead generation and prospecting activities. Currently I have narrowed my evaluation down to two programs, InfusionSoft and Active Conversion. So far, InfusionSoft is in the lead simply because it is more applicable to BtoC marketing (as in Realtor to Client) and has a number of pre-designed forms that eliminate a lot of the design work that would otherwise be required.

So what does a marketing automation software do? Well, it allows you to create a long term relationship with a prospect or client without having to continually and personally follow up with a client. To give you an example, say you had a lead capture form on your website. Without a marketing automation and lead scoring system, you would typically just follow up with a call. Now, you may still choose to do that, but what if instead, the prospect received a personalized email from you during business hours within 20 minutes of them filling out the form?

Okay, that sounds like an autoresponder. However, what if your marketing automation system also automatically left a voicemail, sent an SMS text, or mailed out a hard copy of an appropriate market report. Now, what if you call the prospect and they say they are just keeping tabs on the market? Well, your automated marketing system can be set up so that once in a while it sends a personal email to “just check in” periodically invites your prospect to a seminar, webinar, or video that you are hosting. Essentially, the marketing automation system allows you to continually market to a prospect and warm them to the point that when you make the call, they are ready to give you the listing.

Take a look at InfusionSoft. Currently, they seem to be the best value with the most applicable features. Also, don’t forget to take advantage of the double discount on the listing lead and FSBO lead system from RedX

OMG, I Can't Believe It!

If you have kids, or are under the age of 20, you know what that acronym stands for. For those of us who remember learning how to type on Electrolux typewriters, it may be foreign. For me, I had to look it up.

Regardless, that was the sentiment that I felt when my friends over at the RedX (Real Estate Data Exchange) gave me permission to offer huge discount on their listing lead, FSBO and Agent Website listing lead service.

As many of us can attest, they have a great product that includes a complete lead management system that interfaces with your MLS as well as multiple databases to give the correct listing contact for every expired and FSBO in your area. Their system then scrubs the data against the DNC registry to provide. Here is a link to a video demonstrating their product. http://www.theredx.net

So here is what they have agreed too. In addition to waiving the $149.00 start up fee, they are also offering a 15% discount for the first three months of membership if you choose either the quarterly or monthly package. You save about $184 with this package which is fantastic.

So anyway, to take advantage of the program, us promotion code 14610 or register through this rather long URL: http://www.theredx.com/signup/4mysalespromo.html

Linkconnector

This is a temporary post to establish a linkconnector account.

-Barrett

Blogging For Real Estate Professionals

If you are blogging to attract real estate leads, which many of us are, you know the value of having your content found on the internet. I have been working for some time to get the word out about the Real Estate Lead Generation Software provided through RedX and have learned a great deal about search engine optimization in the process. What I have learned is that if you want to successfully drive leads to your blog, the actual post is only the first step. The steps following your post will truly determine your level of success in attracting traffic and subsequent real estate leads to your blog.

Steps To Attract Real Estate Leads Through Your Blog

Let’s face it. Any time you spend creating a blog is an investment in marketing. However, your return on investment is determined primarily through how many people read your blog and visit your site. Fundamentally, the best way to get your blog read is if it shows up on a search engine. Therefore, getting a high ranking for a given search term is imperative. So what are the steps necessary to search engine optimize your blog post?

Before you even begin writing your post, you should determine what keyword phrase you are targeting. If you have a topic in mind, spend a few minutes on google to see how competitive the phrase you are focusing on will be. To see the level of competition, look next to the search box for the search results information. For example, the competitive information for the term “attract real estate leads” is “Results 1 - 10 of about 4,230,000 for attract real estate leads. (0.55 seconds)” Because this article is competing with over four million other entries, it is unlikely to rank high on the search term “attract real estate leads.” Therefore, optimizing it for that term may be relatively futile and I should probably optimize this post to a less competitive phrase such as “listing leads for realtors”, or even “GRAR” which only has one million competitors.

After you have chosen your search phrase, write your post to include that phrase one to three percent of the time. Be sure to include the phrase as part of your header tags <h1> as well as your subhead <h2>. Back to our example, the phrase Attract Real Estate Leads is in the <h2> tag of this article.

Now Start Your Real Estate Search Engine Optimization

Here is what I do to promote these posts as well as the RedX discount page.

* Ping your entry using a pinging tool to multiple sites. I use pingler.com

* Use an article rewriting tool to create multiple unique versions of your article. Unique versions are needed so that each syndicated site that posts your article is counted as a unique back link to your real estate blog. I now use Magic Article Rewriter as my tool of choice.

* Submit your unique article to as many article directories as possible. I use two tools concurrently for this. The first is UniqueArticleWizard, the second is Magic Article Submitter. Both tools allow you to syndicate your article across the web over time which gradually increases your links and your search engine rank. Their actual sales pages are pretty cheezy, but the tools work great.

* Bookmark the post to StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicous, and the rest of the bookmarking sites. If you are using a Wordpress, Orlywire has an interesting tool that allows you to automatically bookmark your post to your accounts.

* If you haven’t submitted your RSS feed to the multiple feed readers, then now is the time to do so.

* Update the post on your facebook, MySpace, ActiveRain and Broker Agent Social pages.

All of the above sounds like a lot of work, and it does take about an hour to complete all of the steps. However, where you may attract one or two real estate leads from the post alone, you can now expects a few hundred more people to find you from your search engine optimization activities.

Update On Real Estate SEO Tools

This is an update to my previous post where I described my experiment where I used the automatic article directory submission system, Unique Article Wizard to make a single article unique and to submit it to over 600 directories.

If you read the previous post, what I had done as part of the experiment is to take the actual post and write two additional versions with similar syntax so that the Unique Article Wizard system would be able to randomize the paragraphs to make each article unique. I then submitted my three articles to the Unique Article Wizard system and measured the backlinks to our site that offers the discount on RedX REALTOR leads page. Because I used a pen name as part of the experiment, I included the unique word xyssion in the post so that it could be easily searched. As in the previous post, xyssion did not have any data associated with it on google when I published the first article.

Okay with that background, here are the results of the experiment. Within four days of publishing the article the term xyssion returned 16 entries on google that backlinked to our Agents Online and Lockbox websites. As of today, a search for the term on google returned 87 entries (60 on bing), all of which are links provided back from syndication of that one article. The actual number of links is much greater, but these are the sites that have been actively indexed and rank at an acceptable level.

From an SEO standpoint, the article and subsequent publication of it took about two hours. Eighty-seven active backlinks from two hours worth of work sure beats the thirty hours I spent submitting MLSNI.com to various directories to get fifty active links, so I think this experiment can be classified as a success. Now I’m looking for a tool to speed up that manual process of directory submission. I’ll let you know if I find a good one.

SEO Backlink Tools

I have been doing a bit of article marketing lately to promote the RedX FSBO and Real Estate Lead service and have found two very effective tools to attract numerous backlinks without a lot of work. The first tool takes your article, walks you through a process to create multiple unique versions of each paragraph, the automatically submits a hundreds of unique versions to over six hundred directories. The service is the Unique Article Wizard, and I found it by reading about various backlink shortcuts on a few different internet marketing forums.

The service came highly rated, and I have been using it for a short time. So far I have published two articles with the identifier “randy xyllion” and one containing the word “xyssion.” In the past two days, I have 106 indexed links from google for the xyllion articles and 16 links from bing back to the xyssion. Overall, not bad for drafting three articles about internet marketing and sending them out to the world.

The other tool that I have recently had success with in building backlinks to increase the search engine position of my agents online website as well as the supra ekey and lockbox sites is a service called the LinkJuicer. Okay, not a great name, but an interesting service. If you recall how a link circle used to work with multiple participants sharing links back to other member’s websites, this service will be very familiar. Essentially, the LinkJuicer is the social network equivalent of a link circle. The beauty of the service however is that backlinks to your site grow slowly and naturally over time as the system places your link into the social accounts of other participants and places links to their site from yours. Because the system limits the addition of only three sites per day and includes fifteen of the popular online social networks, your backlinks grow slowly and reliable which the search engines just love.

New Supra Ekey Lockboxes

I have been doing some searching recently and found that from an SEO standpoint, there are a few words that may be very easy to get highly ranked. The two words that seem to keep popping up in the real estate realm are lockbox and supra ekey and strangely enough Planet Realtor which is the florida MLS system.

As part of my ongoing learning curve with different types of site optimization and landing page creation, I secured the URL's lockbox.me and PLANETREALTOR.INFO and supraekey.org. I have loaded a temporary page on the lockbox site, but have not determined what I will eventually do with it. The same goes for the supra ekey lockbox and keysafe site as well as planet realtor.

Ten Twitter Tools Real Estate Agents Can't Live Without

I have been working with Twitter quite a bit lately, and I thought I would list those that I have found most useful for real estate agents to attract leads. These tools have been great in helping me promote both the discounts on the RedX listing lead service, and single property sites.

Here are the top ten Twitter Tools

EasyTweets: Get notified if someone tweets you, your blog, or any brand you want to engage with

Twellow: If you haven’t registered your Real Estate Twitter account on Twollow, it is time to do so.

Twollow: Take some of the hassle out of searching for your prospects. Twollow automatically follows your prospects based upon your target keywords

Notify.me: Would’t you like to know the instant a prospect needs your services? Notify.me lets you know by chat, SMS, or email when a prospect raises their hand.

TweetLater: Would’t it be great if you had an autoresponder on your account, or could schedule your tweets in advance? Oh yeah, you can…. VacaTweet can be uses for an autoresponder as well

BubbleTweet: Add a personalized video to your twitter account.

PeopleBrowser: The only application that I have found where you can geo-target a keyword search

Twitter Karma: To bulk follow or unfollow your followers

TweetLister: Now you can post your full listings

TweetDeck: Useful desktop management of your twitter followers

http://bit.ly/Cxf6x

Create A Wordpress Blog

I have been reading different posts on this and other real estate related sites for the past few years as I promote 4MySales and the RedX lead generation service. There has been a lot of discussion regarding the different blog technologies, but and a niche industry has grown up in helping real estate agents create their own custom blogs. I have been working in this medium for a while, and while this may be old information for many of you, I did wan to share the exact process to creating your own Real Estate Blog on your own URL, without the need to hire a consultant. The blog platform that I will be describing is Wordpress, and it is quite user friendly to use.

With that as the background information, let’s begin.

1) Register for your URL. Pick one that has contains your primary target keyword.

2) Register for a hosted account on a Linux platform. Choose a host that has a cPanel interface, which is just a type of control panel. I use resellerzoom’s budget hosting site. It is six bucks per month and you can host multiple sites in one account.

3) On your hosting confirmation, there will be two DNS (Nameserver) addresses that look something like ns1-fannin.nswebhost.com. These are the nameserver addresses that you need your URL to point to. You can update your nameserver with your domain name registrar, either through their website, or by requesting help from the.

4) Now that you have a hosted account with a URL pointing to it, login to the cPanel account that was set up through your host. One of the buttons on the cPanel control panel should be Fantastico or fantastico deluxe. This is a tool that automatically installs blogs, forums or sites to your account. Click it it, and off to the right site, click on Wordpress. Fantastico will ask you for the name you wish to call your blog, the username and the password that you wish to use to access it. Fill out the form and click install. It is just that easy!

5) Fantastic sets up your blog, so now you just need to login and start customizing. Login to your new blog’s adim page, it is usually your blog directory / wp-admin. From your login dashboard area, you can access all of the tools available to customize wordpress. If you are new to Wordpress, my recommendation would be to first choose a theme. Click Appearance area and choose themes. There should only be two on your first install, but at the bottom of the page is a link to the theme directory. Go down, click it and start looking for a theme that will best exemplify your brand. You can also jump on Google or Bing and start searching for wordpless templates.

Depending on where you find your template, you can add it one of two ways. The first is through an automatic install if it is available. The second is to download the template to your website. Use an unzip utility to unzip it to a folder, then use an ftp client (I use filezilla) to upload the template to your website. If you need to upload a template using this approach, save your unzipped template folder to the Themes folder which is a sub-folder of one of the three main folders.

6) Once you have chosen and loaded your theme, go back to the Appearances/ Themes link and your new theme should show up. Click on it and in the top right corner there should be a link to make the theme active.

7) Now that you have chosen your theme, you can add some plugins which add video, social tools, links, pictures, news feeds, and any other resource that you would ever want. Go to the plugins tab. At the bottom of the page are links to get more plugins. Just like the theme, click on the link and go shopping. Install the plugins using the same methods as you used to install the theme. Either use the auto install if it is present, or if not, download the zipped file, unzip it and upload it to the subdirectory entitled Plugins. There is a way to automatically unzip the files in your directory, but it is beyond the scope of this article.

8) Once you have chosen and uploaded your plugins, activate them on the plugins page. Most of the admin functions for these various plugins will be found under the Settings link. Also, once you have activated your plugins, you can make them show up on your blog by clicking the Appearance link and clicking Widgets. Adding them to your blog is simply a matter of choosing and saving them.

That’s about it. Now all that you need to do is add pictures, update text and make your blog look pretty. It is a very straightforward process if you are looking to host a blog on your own URL instead of relying on your Blogger or Wordpress.com account.

TAGS: Wordpress, blogs, fantastico, resellerzoom, web host, web registrar, URL, plugins, wordpress themes

Getting Real Estate Leads With Twitter

I was looking at this approach to promote our discount offer for the RedX listing lead system, but it’s possibilities are so much greater. The advantage of Twitter for real estate and mortgage professionals is that prospective clients post their needs online all day long. Thanks to this fantastic new technology, you get instant visibility to a prospective client’s needs, the second that he mentions them. It is then just a matter of making contact, offering your services, and working the relationship.

So how would you use this new technology to attract listing or selling clients? Well, getting a new lead is a simple as using one of the many available Twitter mashups that notify you when someone posts a target keyphrase. Combine that with a basic geo-targeted mashup and you have a system that will tell you when someone in your area posts text that could be considered a lead.

In writing that paragraph, it sounds a bit more complicated then it really is. Therefore, I’ll use an example. Suppose you are an agent that specializes in short sales or foreclosure. You would set up a notification service like Easy Tweets to notify you when someone posts the terms “short sale” “list of foreclosures” “home shopping” “looking at neighborhoods” “bidding on foreclosure” “looking for realtor” etc. When any twitter user posts these terms, you will get notified. The next step is to simply Follow these prospects in your own Twitter account and use a geo-targeting twitter mashup (there are a number of them out there) to determine if the poster is local to you. For those posters that are in your vicinity, simply reply by direct message to their post and courting them as an active prospect.

I have been looking for a geo-targeted system that combines the easy tweet notification system with geo targeting so that you only get notified about people in your area. However, I have yet to find that service. Because of that, you may need to sift through potential leads from across the US. If you do know of a system that combines the geo targeting with the keyword notification, let us all know.

Maximize Your Social Real Estate Marketing Online

I received an email this morning from a company that teaches best practices in marketing. The offer was your standard lead generation tool offering a complimentary e-book download in exchange for an email registration. I have been using a similar method to promote our discount offer on the listing lead and FSBO lead service. There was nothing exciting about the offer, but what was interesting was the use of Twitter and social marketing tools to expand the reach of the offer. Just under the call to action and download button were the following phrases with associated graphics and links:

(I have changed the original links to those of the RedX for demonstration purposes. Try them to see how they interact with each social site. I hope to share how to create each of these links in futue posts.)

Have a Twitter Account? Tweet about this download!

Follow Barrett On Twitter @Leads4Realtors

Follow (company name) On Twitter @(company name)

Read Barrett’s Blog

Share on Facebook

The value in including these types of links into any of your real estate agent online marketing campaigns is obvious. It allows the recipients not only to spread your message, but also create a closer relationship to you. The tweet about this download link actually has a script that inputs the text directly into your twitter text box so you just need to click update after logging in. Overall, this is a nice, unobtrusive way to expand the reach of your word of mouth marketing programs and generate a few more leads.

Real Estate Blog SEO

If you are using a Wordpress blog, there are a number of steps that you can take to better optimize it for search engines. In fact, for those of you who host your own real estate blog using the wordpress scripts, these optimization steps can be very easy and yield great results. For those of you who are familiar with these techniques, I apologize for re-presenting the basics, but I have found that many real estate bloggers have not taken these step in their own blogs. With that in mind, here is and introduction wordpress blog SEO 101.

Step 1. Under your settings / permalinks tab, be sure to change the URL structure to “custom structure” and include only the string /%postname%/ in the text box. This essentially makes the extended URL of your post the title of the post. If you include keywords in your posts, they end up in the actual URL. For example, in posting on the topic of prenatal vitamin (my wife’s blog) and using the post title Prenatal Vitamins, the blog URL becomes http://www.bloomennutrition.org/prenatal-vitamins which is about as keyword targeted as you can get with sub-directories.

Step 2. Under your settings / general tab, update the Blog address and Wordpress Address URL to include the www as opposed to the straight http://webaddress.com

Step 3. Find the wordpress AutoSocialPoster plugin. This tool allows you to automatically post a link to your new blog entries to many of your online bookmaking accounts. The plugin is not free, but is well worth the money. However, please be sure to check that it is compatible with the version of Wordpress that you are using.

Step 4. For the next step, increase the number of sites that announce / ping your new entries when you add a new post. Go to the settings / writing tab. At the bottom there is a text box with the URL http://rpc.pingomatic.com/. In this area add any other pinging services that you can find. A good list, and a great pinging tool, can be found at pingler.com.

Hopefully for those of you who are actively blogging, this post provides a little help. Separately, to provide an update on our Agents Online lead system for realtors project, the site pops up as number eleven on Google for the Agents Online term and number four for the same term in quotations. The real time SEO demonstration is progressing.

Working on Real Estate SEO on Bing

I haven’t quite formed my opinion about Microsoft’s new release of their Bing search engine. In reading the reviews, I am not alone. I have spent a little time this afternoon trying to get a feel for what where my real estate listing lead site and associated links lay in the ranking. What I found is that this “because it’s not google” search alternative has a completely different algorithm which will likely require a completely different SEO strategy for your real estate website.

I am not sure if this new search engine will give google a run for its money in search engine terms. As Seth Godin put it, “Bing is trying to be the new Google. Unfortunately Google is the new Google.” However, it does have some interesting features.

Now for those of us who are trying to get our real estate website to the top of the ranking, optimizing for bing may require a different strategy. In fact, in looking up the search terms that index my site well on google, I there is little success on bing. The Expired Listing Lead term did return back my link to the RedX as the top link, but the multitude of other sites that typically show up in reference to me did not. For my Agent Online experiment, the site was not even indexed, and similar to google, real estate country did not return a link to my page, even when I typed in the exact URL. Even my wife’s’ “prenatal vitamins” page did not get indexed.

From what I can determine with the very limited experience that I have had with the site, it uses an algorithm similar to google’s but puts a high weight on sites that have been around a while along with those that are well linked. Unfortunately from an SEO standpoint there is not much that you can do to age your real estate URL.

Real Estate SEO, Getting to the Top of Google

Those of you that have been reading this blog know that I am using the search term Agents Online and the associated website AgentsOnline.Org to demonstrate in real time how to get your website to the top page of a search engine for a specific phrase.  For this specific example, I have chosen the phrase “Agents Online” and I am slowly moving the site up to the first page of google for that respective phrase.  

To provide an update on where we are on this experiment, I signed up the URL AgentsOnline.org less than a month ago and created a basic website optimized for the term.  Next I added links from this blog and built a Squidoo page which in turn linked to the site.  I also created a twitter account dedicated to Agents Online.  Currently there are about 16 total sites that are indexed on the search engines and link to this site.  

Now for our progress on Google.  If you search for the term “Agents Online”  in quotes, the page ranks as number seven among the entries on the first page of Google.  Not bad for having a site established for less than a month.  When you search on google for Agents Online  without the quotes, the page pop up as number 21 on Google which is at the top of the third page.  While this is not as significant, it does make the point that by building  a page optimized to a specific term, and using your target term as part of your URL, you can capture a premium place on the ranks of google very quickly.  

Now to move the site rank up from number 21 to within the top ten we just need to add some more high quality, high page rank links.   The can be achieved simply by posting comments on real estate related blogs, associated websites and forums.  

As you read through this post, you will no doubt realize that this is a very easy way to boost your web traffic without extensive Pay per click.  However,  as a word of caution, this process doesn’t always work.  For example our Real Estate Country site has yet to show up at an acceptable level for the term Real Estate Country.

Lead Generation Program With Twitter

When I began working with this new technology I was very skeptical. I have had access to my twitter account which I used to promote our discount to the RedX listing lead generation system, but until recently have not spent much time using it. As a result, I am a little late to the game. However, now that I have a good grasp on the technology, I can see how real estate agents online should be utilizing this tool to attract leads.

Now what are the steps to incorporate Twitter into a campaign? Before we get started you need to understand that Twitter is only a single touch point for your prospective clients and that multiple touches are usually needed to attract a client. Also, understand that Twitter etiquette implies that when you follow someone’s tweets, they may in turn follow you.

With that background, what are the steps? The first step is to link your twitter account to any online page where you can be found. If you have a site, blog or online presence, add a “Follow me on Twitter” badge with a hyperlink to your twitter site.

To start using Twitter as a marketing tool, create an auto-responder on your twitter account so that when someone chooses to follow you, they will automatically receive a thank you with a call to action. I useTweetLater.com for my autoresponders. The message should thank the user for following, and include a call to action. Your may choose to make your call to action an offer for a free report, data, or some other offer that allows you to capture more information about your target lead. For example, my call to action is “Thanks for the Follow! Want a discount on listing leads from RedX? Visit me here for more info.”

The next step is to start tweeting. You should routinely tweet, but also be aware that there is a shortcut that you can use when you can’t post directly. If you have a blog that you update often, you can post the feed directly to your twitter account using TwitterFeed.

The next step in your twitter marketing should be to add followers. You can find followers who live in your area simply by doing a keyword search on the twitter user directory Twellow. Just search the twellow list for active tweeters that live in your area and follow those that fit the bill.

There are numerous other ways that you can include twitter as part of your marketing, including mobile messaging and even video. We won’t get into those details for this post, but may address them lager.

Finally, I did want to mention that we are still SEO-ing the term, AgentsOnline but it has not yet been indexed on Google. It should be soon.