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.

Squeeze Pages to Get to the Top of Google

If you have read my previous blog, you know that I have been spending time lately developing landing sites for our expired listing lead software that quickly get to the first page of google for a given search term. The benefit of this technique is obvious in that five hours worth of work can result in a torrent of traffic that would have otherwise cost a fortune. Unfortunately, each of these sites takes about five hours worth of work to develop using Dreamweaver, or at least three hours using Xsite Pro.

However, recently I have found a tool that promises to shorten that time investment into about an hour from start to finish, not including the research into the keyword. The tool is simply a Wordpress Theme generator that quickly turns any Wordpress installation into an active and formatable landing page. The actual term for the sites that result from this Wordpress theme are Squeeze Pages (landing pages designed to attract leads online.)

So what is the advantage of this new tool?

Actually, there are a couple. The first is that Google loves Wordpress blogs which gives you a leg up when you get started. The second is that all that is required to create an effective lead generation page is to upload a wordpress blog, choose the theme, and type your keyword-optimized advertisement. As I said before, it is a lot quicker than creating a site from scratch, and once you have modified your template, you only need to make minor modifications to the text to optimize it for another keyword. As I said, this tool promises to save a lot of time.

So just to re-cap, what do you do in order to get a site to show up on the first page of google?

1) Use the google keyword tool to find a search term that your target client would typically search. Find keywords that have a large number of searches, but few sites that are directly optimized for that site.

2) Register for the URL of that keyword. If possible, get the .com version

3) Create a Wordpress Blog (many web hosts that offer the cPanel control panel have an automated installer built in.)

4) Upload your squeeze page theme.

5) Modify the text and images of the theme to meet the needs of your brand. I would recommend making these changes, then downloading the version to your hard drive so that you only need to make the formatting changes once.

6) Publish the blog, place the appropriate links back to your real estate home page.

7) Start placing backlinks.

What you will find is that your site will initially get indexed pretty far down the google ladder, and occasionally won’t get indexed at all. (this happened to me with realestatecountry.net.) Regardless, over the next few weeks, start adding links to the site from any real estate-related websites that you have access to. Place a link back to the site on your ActiveRain blog as well as any other blog you manage. Get as many links from real estate-related sites back to the page as these will ultimately determine where your site ends up on the search engine ladder.

After a few weeks, if you have sufficient links, your site should creep to the top of the search engine ladder. As an example of how this technique works, google expired listing leads. How many entries that link back to 4MySales or Barrett Niehus can you count?

Optimizing Your Page for Real Estate Leads

I have used a number of them in getting my REALTOR lead system into the top listing on Google. One of the techniques that I have had some success in recently is creating squeeze pages for specific search terms. A queeze page simply being a landing site designed to generate leads that is optimized for a specific search term. To provide a basic example, let's say hypothetically that youwork in Orem Utah and specialize in executive homes. To date your website has not shown up under the search term “executive homes orem” or “orem realtor executive homes” but through your research you know that those terms are often searched and meet your target demographic. How you would develop and use a squeeze page would be as follows:

• Register for the url of your given search terms. When registering these URL’s use the specific term that you are targeting. As a side note, I have found more success in not including hyphens, but instead having the word run together in the URL; i.e www.realtorexecutive. com instead of www.realtor-executive.com.
  

• When creating the actual landing page, you have a number of choices. If you are versed in HTML, Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft Front Page are good toolsl. If HTML is foreign to you, then there is a quick site development tool called XSite Pro that makes creating a keyword optimized site extremely easy with no programming involved. When you develop a squeeze page, create multiple sub pages. Generally the site needs to be more than a single page to get any attention from Google.

• There are a few basic rules that you should consider following when developing your page. The first is that for google, multiple pages with good keyword content typically ranks better. The second is that a privacy policy is smiled upon by both your visitors and your search engines. The third is that you want the visitor to take action within seconds of hitting your landing page so have a strong call to action. Fourth, if your squeeze page is requesting contact information, keep the amount of information that you request limited, and offer value for that information. All too often I see REALTORS who have six or more qualifying questions on their lead generation pages. In order to optimize your leads, capture just name, email and possibly phone. You can qualify the lead at a later date and the more information you request up front, the fewer leads you will receive. The fifth and final rule is that you want to control your visitor’s experience. For these pages, you want to limit the visitor’s behavior to submitting their information, or learning a little bit more about the offer before submitting their information. Choices equal confusion which results in hesitation and inactivity. Create your squeeze page so that you have two or three good pages that are optimized to your target search term. Include your lead generating offer on each of the pages and be sure to include a privacy policy. Where applicable, also link to your home page so that your prospect can get back to your site. This may sound like a lot of work, but if you do this part correctly, you will likely get much more traffic at a lower cost than trying to PPC advertise for your target search term.

Once you have built your site, upload it to the web and start getting backlinks to it. It is important to know up front that backlinks directly impact the page rank of your site, and that they will be necessary to get to that first page for your given search term. Fortunately, creating the backlinks yourself are pretty easy. First and foremost, create a link to your new site from your blog. Also, it would behoove you to create a blogger blog using the same URL (executivehomesorem.blogspot.com for example) and post a link to the new squeeze page from that blog. (Pleasse note that if you create the blog, you will need to post content to it as well.) Post a link to your page from your ActiveRain account, any HubPages or Squidoo lenses that you may have. Essentially post a link on any real estate related site that you can. Remember that each additional link to the site improves the possibility that it will show up on the first page of google.

Now, as a real world example, I have been spending time trying to get traffic to my wife’s business, Bloomen Nutrition and have used this technique over the past few weeks for the terms “while pregnant”, “chewable prenatal vitamin”, and “what to expect when expecting.” She owns a prenatal nutrition company and I have been focusing my talents on getting her up and running instead of focusing on real estate. Regardless, here is the example. If you google those terms what you will find is that chewable prenatal vitamin results in www.chewableprenatalvitamin.com showing up halfway down the page. For the term while pregnant, the site still needs a few backlinks because the whilepregnant.net site is showing up as the 19^th link on page two of google, and I just completed the site for what to expect when expecting, so we will see where http://whattoexpectwhenexpecting.net/ ends up.

Yet another Way To Increase Your Search Ranking

I spent a fair amount of time reading message boards a few nights ago trying to find new ideas to get backlinks to the RedX expired listing lead service when, after a lot of reading, I ended up on Yahoo Answers. As an individual with a background in real estate, marketing, and strangely enough nutrition, I started answering questions about short sales, foreclosures, bank owned properties, etc. On every answer, I put a link back to my 4MySales.com site and a keyword-rich description of my area of expertise as part of the source box. After about two hours of answering questions, I went to bed.

Anyway, I checked my backinks yesterday, and a number of my answers showed up as indexed by google. These indexed pages were short lived, but they may have had an effect on my overall rank.

With that in mind, here’s the approach and possible benefit. If you do not yet have a yahoo answers account get one. Spend some time with your profile as it is an extension of your professional bran. Do a search for a real estate topic that serves both your area of expertise as well as your local geography. Start posting answers to questions, and in the resource box make sure to include a link back to your site, with a keyword rich description of your qualifications.

The benefits are that many people read the questions and answers so you may get quite a bit of traffic from the post. In addition, it looks to me like the links do get indexed which should help with your overall search engine ranking.

Finally, if you want an application that runs on your desktop that will notify you when a question that you can answer is asked, answersniper or answereye may be something to look at. Both can also be configured to be abused, BUT DON’T USE THEM THAT WAY.

Leads, Listings and New Activities

My friends at RedX are busy for the holidays and they have sent some great tools to help educate REALTORS about how to attract clients and listings through the RedX expired listing lead service. Personally, I am glad that they now include FSBO listings as a component of their service because it does expand the pool of potential new clients. After all, in today's market, you need as many active listings as possible, just to survive.
On the viral marketing front, I am implementing a number of touch programs to hit contacts multiple times through multiple media. For example, I am in the process of setting up auto-responders so that those REALTORS that attend a webinar receive three follow up communications with additional information, discounts and calls to action. I am going to start fully leveraging the signature function of my email with an active call to action, as well as begin posting educational videos on the 4MySales section of YouTube. Finally, the webinars themselves are going to be better utilized to educate real estate agents about how to attract leads and convert them to listings.

Real estate farming letters are just the beginning

Real estate farming letters have been the mainstay of most agent’s marketing programs since the industry began. These, coupled with other online and off-line initiatives can be a great resource in the continual fight to differentiate yourself from the competition.
A lot of agents search for free real estate farming letters, or templates that they can modify to suite their own needs. This approach may have some benefit, but if you are trying to differentiate yourself from every other agent out there, I would recommend approaching your farming letters and your entire marketing plan from a completely different direction.

Most agents do not realize that it takes more than five exposures to their name and offer before a mail recipient will even recognize their name. If you don’t believe me, just think about how you answer most of your junk mail. In order to stand out from the crowd, take a much more strategic approach to your direct mail and incorporate it into a much larger marketing campaign. If you have an area that you are farming, try to find a way to expose every target client to your message at least five times in a relative short period. A simple way to do this is to send everybody on your list a direct mail message in an envelope. I recommend including a piece of candy or something in the envelope to ensure that it gets opened. The next week send out a postcard with an offer or raffle as your call to action. Next place signs at the entrances of the communities that you are farming (be sure to get the proper permits, or plan to have you signs taken down by the city.) For the next week, send out another round of envelopes and place your flyers on the bulletin boards of the local grocery and library. Follow that week with door hangers that have another call to action and offer.

This is a very basic approach to marketing, but it will start the ball rolling. The goal is to get everyone in the community that you are farming with your letters to recognize your name. After that, you just need to remain active enough in the area to maintain your brand awareness in the minds of your target client. By maintaining a top of the mind awareness with your prospects, you will ensure that you will be their first phone call when it is time to call upon the resources of a REALTOR.

FSBO Leads are Available Now

It’s been a month full of challenges and I have been asking all of my colleagues for a do-over for 2007. So far nobody has taken me up on the offer. In spite of the challenges, we do have some great news to share. Our FSBO system has been upgraded and expanded to provide even more leads. In addition we have set our new FSBO lead system up so that all our visitors need to do is request that the For Sales by Owner leads be emailed directly to them on a weekly basis.

The new tool is pretty slick. Just sign up for your weekly FSBO emails on the home page of http://www.4mysales.com/ Now on our home page you can create your own podcast to email to your clients and get a weekly list of FSBO leads.