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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Agents Online- Real Time Update and Google SEO

As previously stated, I am committed to demonstrating how you can use a long tail keyword and some very basic online tools to get your website, or at least its online landing page, to the top of google. To recap, I have chosen the search term Agents Online which receives about 11,000 searches per month according to google’s keyword tool. I have registered for the URL http://www.agentsonline.org and last evening I spent about two hours on Dreamweaver creating a multi-page website. I copied much of the data from the failed Real Estate Country site, but optimized it for the search term Agents Online.

Because the web page is basically an experiment and essentially promotes the RedX expired listing lead system, I didn’t spend a lot of time on the format so it is pretty basic. However, I did employ some very basic SEO techniques including having different descriptions and tags for each page, parsing the data on multiple pages within the site, and including a privacy policy. Anyway, here is the site for agents online.

As we all know, having a website does not mean that traffic will just show up; even if you do have an appropriate URL. Therefore, the next step is getting backlinks and doing some online promotion. In that vein, early this morning I created a squidoo lens focused on the term Agents Online and bookmarked the page on StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us, and registered for the Blogger Blog Real Estate Agents Online The reason for the lens and the blog on blogger is that both have a relatively high page rank out of the gate and both allow for “dofollow” links. Also, every time I post something to a blog, I run the URL through pingler.com so that the search engines know that new content is available.

So this was the preliminary work for this project. Over the next few days, I will be posting links to the Agents Online site wherever I can. It may take two or three weeks for the site to actually get indexed by google, but these links give it a head start. In about ten days, you should be able to google the term “agents online” and at least one, probably more, of the links described above will appear on the first page. Shortly after that, the actual agents online website should appear.

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.

Grow Links to With a Black Hat Tool

I am learning about the sneaky world of black hat marketing, and there are a number of tools that can be used to ethically promote links and traffic of your own website.  As before, this is all in an effort to promote my relationship with the RedX expired listing lead system and the discounts.   I am also saving money with some of this software by promoting my wife’s prenatal vitamin company, Bloom’en Nutrition as well. 

Anyway, a few posts ago I mentioned an interesting software that automatically submits your entry to a couple hundred article and e-zine websites.  Using the software quite a bite over the past few weeks and have found that duplicate content is a major hindrance to increasing my rank on the search engines.  In doing some reading on the SEO and black hat forums I learned that Google may actually penalize your site for having duplicate content spread across the web.  This leads to a conundrum, on the one hand you have at least hundreds of backlinks per article of various page rank, but on the other hand the penalty for duplicate content may bring your ranking down.    

The solution, interestingly enough is another black hat tool designed specifically to increase SE rank.  The product is known as a word spinner and what it does is takes your article posted on blog and randomly modifies the text to make is unique enough to make the resulting text 40 to 80 percent different than the original.  The specific product that I found was WP Spinnner and it is a simple Wordpress plugin.  To use it, you simply add an article and some alternative text or sentences to your article and post it to your wordpress blog.  Each time you refresh your blog the WP Spinnner will change the article to read differently enough to appear as a new article.  This is great for search engines because it makes the spiders think that there is new content on the blog each time it spiders the site, regardless of your posting schedule.  

The real power of the spinner however is the ability to create multiple unique articles that can be submitted to the 300 plus article directories.  It adds a little bit more time to the submission process, but instead of having 300 submissions that count as one link on google, I now have over 300 quality backlinks from unique articles every time I sit down to write and post.  

Now if I can only find a software that combines the article submitter with a spinner, I will be set.

Increasing Traffic via YouTube

Understand that the software that I am about to describe is considered black hat, and as such carries the risk of having your IP address banned from YouTube. However, for those of you that are interested, here we go.

Before I begin, let me tell you that this is a software that I have not used and don’t plan to, but have read extensively about. My approach for my discount offer on the RedX expired listing lead system it to remain above board so this YouTube software doesn’t quite fit my model. However, it keeps popping up on the black hat promotion groups as a way to explode site traffic through YouTube so I thought it may be interesting.

The software is TubeIncreaser and what is does is takes any video on YouTube and adds thousands of fake page views over a set period. As I understand it, after videos have been posted a while, those videos with few views naturally fall to the bottom of the categories. However, those with a large number of views, or those with rapidly increasing viewership actually increase in visibility on the site and subsequently get more and more traffic. Apparently the TubeIncreaser software tricks the YouTube algorithm into thinking that more and more people are viewing your video over time. Subsequently, real viewership of the video rises as does the corresponding web traffic.

Increasing SEO With Automated Article Submission

This week I was focused on finding a few new techniques that could be used to increase search ranking and web traffic. What I found in my research was that there are a number of affordable tools that are designed to automate the backlink process.

I am one for occasionally writing an article and then submitting it across the web (google Barrett Niehus) as part of my linking and web promotion strategy. I generally end up manually submitting my articles to around twelve article directories for republishing. This works great for me because the resource box for the article is always included which gets my name and links top the discount for the RedX Expired Listing Lead System in multiple places.

In my reading this weekend, I found a great new tool that is really going to streamline the process for me. The tool is a software package that automatically submits your article to over 350 different article directories. The software, Article Submitter, has a video that walks through the submission process, but essentially once you enter your article, author information and category data, the software goes to each directory website and populates the required forms and automatically submits the entire article. There are a few directories that require you to enter the captcha verification codes as part of the process, but it is pretty straightforward. Overall, the Article Submitter software allows me to increase the number of directory submission from around 15 to over 350!

Tags: SEO, Article Submitter, RedX, Expired Listnig Software, Automated Article Submission, Black Hat, White Hat, Blue Hat

Working With a Search Engine Loophole for MSN Live

I am still exploring and learning about the world of blue hat to promote my 4MySales Site and the $149.00 discount to the RedX expired listing leads system and discovered a few new tools that look promising. I recently learned about a loophole that a black hat group claims to in MSN Live’s search algorithm. I found an pdf e-book that details exactly how to exploit loophole and went ahead and bought it. The e-book “The Ultimate Search Engine Loophole” describes in great detail how to create a single landing page that funnels visitors into your main site and uses blog multiple blog links to increase the page rank of that landing page in the MSN Live search engine to a high level.

The approach that the e-book describes is straight forward, but does require a single landing page that is light on text, a keyword specific URL, and a number of blogs, preferably Wordpress, that you can update with a linking algorithm or plugin. This weekend I put up two landing pages for two targeted keywords and started updating my blogs as well as convinced a few of my friends to add the plugins with my links to their blogs. It is probably too early to tell if I have been successful, but hopefully the approach recommended by the Ultimate Search Engine Loophole will result in a huge increase in traffic.

If you are thinking about using this approach yourself, I do feel that I need to mention that the loophole e-book was designed for the web group that exploits these loopholes for black hat programs, so the actual e-book does make reference to other more nefarious approaches to SEO.

A New Apporoach to Creating Backlinks

In looking at the various web promotion techniquest that are out there, I have come across a few that seem to save a lot of time. I have been spending time posting bookmarks to the various social bookmark sites and I found a software, Bookmark Demon that has saved me hours of work.

Bookmark Demon is the one tool that I found that is actually very useful and completely automates the process of posting your real estate blog to all of the social bookmarking sites is Bookmark Demon the software is relatively simple to use and shows results within hours. For the social bookmarking sites, and there are a lot of them, it creates a user account, or use those that you have established, on the myriad of social bookmarking pages, then post the blog, website, or URL that you are working with on that site. For example, the tool will create a reddit.com and furl.com and del.icio.us, and stumbleupon account etc.and bookmark your site to each of those accounts.

I was trying to do this manually to get some attention to my site that features a discount for the RedX expired listing lead service. However, this is a far more simple way to save time and complete the task.

Let’s face it, in 2009 we need to save as much time as possible while increasing our real estate lead generation.

Expanded Expired Listing Lead Service

My friends at the Real Estate Lead Generation Service, REDX have just launched their FSOB service into Canada! The number of services that they provide and the number of MLS’s that they cover has certainly expanded in recent years. Recently, they have added FSBO leads in addition to their expired listing leads, and are now actively expanding their coverage to include more of North America. Below is the press release announcing their new expansion.

As always, you can waive the $149.00 start up fee by signing up here: http://www.theredx.com/signup/4mysales.html

The RedX Launches Expansion Into Canada

Real Estate Data X-Change (RedX), the industry leading provider of
Expired and For-Sale-by-Owner (FSBO) lead generation and management solutions, today announced the expansion of its services into Canada, with the opening of 35 areas of its low-cost FSBO service.

The RedX launched the FSBO product to meet the specific needs of the
Canadian real estate professional. RedX FSBO leads service is very unique from other FSBO providers because we the FSBO leads are delivered directly into a very user friendly lead manager system, which is included with a subscription to the RedX FSBO service. The lead manager system gives the subscribers a tool for more than just prospecting FSBOs. The lead manager gives the subscribers the ability to write notes, set tasks, create marketing campaigns and flag leads, and much more.

The RedX utilizes advanced web and database technologies to deliver the highest quality and quantity FSBO lead in the market. The RedX scours local and national newspapers, real estate publications, and other public online sources to extracts the lead in its entirety.
In addition to interfacing with the lead manager, RedX FSBOs include:

• Real time FSBO lead delivery seven (7) days per week
• Customizable FSBO database search tool
• Reverse phone look ups performed on each FSBO lead
• No duplicate leads
• Free online training and scripts

“RedX FSBOs is a powerful enhancement to any real estate
professional prospecting, by providing them a tool that delivers new leads every day” said Curtis Fenn, Vice President of Sales for Real Estate Data X-Change.

About Real Estate Data X-Change, Inc.
Real Estate Data X-Change, Inc is a leading software technology and leads service provider for real estate professionals. The RedX assists real estate professionals in accomplishing their professional goals by providing them with accurate, timely and reliable data to aid them in building their business. We have designed powerful technology-based tools to help them access, manage, and utilize their real estate leads. Simply stated, the RedX's products and services help real estate professionals sell more homes while saving both time and money. http://www.theredx.com/

For more information about the RedX or to purchase RedX FSBO lead service, please visit http://www.theredx.com/signup/4mysales.html, or contact a RedX sales representative at
800-731-7339.

Four more ways to attract real estate buyers in this down market

I have posted the new rules of real estate survival a couple of times in this blog, and the basic rule is to secure as many listings as possible. However, I have not yet touched on the demand side of the equation. Sure, if you prospect effectively for expired listings you will have a selection of properties to offer the new demanding client, but where do you find that New Demanding Client?

1) Opportunistic investors: Although many feel that we have not yet hit bottom, the investment market is starting heat up again. Many real estate investors (including me) are looking for that next great deal, foreclosure, or short sale. For real estate agents that can help investors with the minutia of buying a property with less than full equity, there may still be business to be had. Consider marketing your services and expertise to the investment market, either for direct real estate services, or even consultation and guidance.

2) Movers looking for a deal: It is true that it is now a buyers market, but that does not mean that there are no more buyers. The truth is that in contrast to three years ago, buyers today have their choice of what to buy and who to buy it through. To capture the attention of these clients, position yourself as an aggressive savings manager with expertise in helping buyers get the best possible deal and the home of their dreams. As for attracting these clients, place ads, co-op market with your local coffee shop, fitness club and small businesses, and host how to buy foreclosure webinars and seminars.

3) Business relocation: If you haven’t explored the opportunities with relocation specialists that service the companies in your area, now may be the time to strike up a conversation. The internet, yellow pages, or HR department of your closest multinational may be able to connect you with the right people.

4) REO Specialist: Both on the buying and selling side, the agents that deal with the banks have a ready-made inventory on discountable properties. Loss mitigation departments may be able to help you out with a listing or two. Also, if you are familiar with the requirements of the banks to purchase REO, you can position yourself as a specialist for both the investor and the movers looking for a deal.

Finally, don’t forget about the 30% discount on Expireds from RedX.

Back Online and Expired Listing Leads

I received a call today from the expired lead listing company that I have been working with for some time. They offered me a great promotion to share with all of the readers of this blog; a complete waiver of the $150 startup fee for anybody that signs up through this link: http://www.theredx.com/signup/4mysales.html Not a bad offer considering that the only way to survive right now as a Realtor is to attract as many listings as possible.

I’ll talk about viral marketing at a later date. I gave a seminar this evening and used the YouTube video entitled “Cool Wedding Dance” that is making the rounds on the mainstream media (Today Show, daily news, CN?N, etc.) Either way, there is a big world of marketing out there to explore…..

Expired Listings in California

I have been working with expired listings in California for some time as part of my own training and my relationship with RedX expired listing lead service, and it is becoming quite apparent that as the market has softened, clients are looking for and expecting much more from the REALTORS that they employ as agents. In my area of San Diego, California, listings are expiring at a rapid rate as houses spend much more time on the market. These expired listings in San Diego as well as the rest of California are presenting a great opportunity for enterprising REALTORS who have the skills necessary to close these listings and sell their properties.

Currently, I am seeing a lot of agents that are trying to use direct mail and introduction letters to prospect expired listings. My feeling toward this approach is that the prospects that are receiving the message are already disillusioned with real estate agents. Therefore, you need to be very careful about your value proposition and speak to the needs and expectations of your prospect in any form of communication. If you choose to use a letter of introduction to prospect expireds in any market, I would recommend that you use an approach that does not dismiss or diminish their current agent, but solicits them to think about, or learn new information that could help them overcome the difficulties that they may currently be experiencing. For this group, webcasts, podcasts, mailed reports, and learning programs work well to place you ahead of your competition. If you are up for the risk, a sell-by guarantee does wonders as well.

Personally, I would bypass the canned introduction letters for expired mls listings and make a personal introduction instead.

TAGS: expired listings, expireds, expired listings California, mls listings, letters of introduction expired listings, solicit, direct mail