For your real estate marketing, you probably know that  you get more online traffic to your real estate website, blog, and social media pages when you use the same keywords in your page titles and text that people use in their online searches.  But… how do you know what keywords your prospective real estate clients are actually using?

(After all, our real estate prospects don’t always think like we do!)

Well, Google Trends is a great free tool that helps you quickly choose the best keywords and keyword phrases.  Here’s an example, using a screenshot I took when I was deciding on the title for this post:

By typing these keywords into Google Trends I can quickly see that ‘online traffic’ is searched for on Google more frequently than ‘web traffic’ or ‘website traffic’, so ‘online traffic’ is the term I should prioritize in my title and text.

You can do the same thing when preparing your real estate website, blog and social media pages.  For example, if you’re writing tips for home buyers, check to see if more people search for ‘home buying’ or ‘buying a home’ so that you can prioritize either the term ’home buying tips’ or ‘tips on buying a home’.

(Bonus!  Click here to see those two keyword phrases compared for you on Google Trends.)

(A slight caveat:  If you really delved into research, you might find that while the general public uses one term most frequently, your prospective clients use another.  However, this would take a ton of time, and if you just start thinking more about optimizing your website text and page titles with keywords using Google Trends you’ll be miles ahead of where you were.  Plus, it takes just a few seconds!)

To see how easy it is, check out our video showing how you can boost your real estate marketing using Google Trends:

Like this video? Subscribe to the Tools For Real Estate YouTube Channel!

Yesterday I had to call ValueWeb to help out a client who needed his domain name pointed to a different server.  During my over half an hour on hold (starting out as caller number 44 – the horror!)  I was reminded of how important it is to choose a reliable company for domain names and hosting.  Here are the companies I use:

Buying Domain Names

Godaddy is where I buy all my domain names.  It’s easy to search for them, and at around $10 per year per domain name it’s a good deal.  More importantly, they make it easy for you to manage your own domains.

(Yesterday I was calling ValueWeb because we were not able to change the domain settings ourselves, and the request we submitted 4 days previously had not been carried out.  This cost me an additional 45 minutes on the phone.)  If the domain name had been held by GoDaddy I could have done it myself in about 2 minutes.

Tip:  You can often find discount codes for GoDaddy by simply Googling ‘GoDaddy coupon codes’, or if you just click on the graphic above you should get a domain name for $7.49.

Real Estate Website Hosting

I’ve tried a number of different companies, and I really like Hostgator.  They’re big, reliable, they have good pricing, and their technical support has always been able to help me without being snarky.

One of the main reasons I choose them?  They have phone support!  Many hosting companies these days only allow you to submit support tickets by email or online chat.  If you’re shopping around for website hosting as a real estate agent, I HIGHLY recommend you go with a service that allows you to also call in, like Hostgator.  Unless you’re in the top 5% to 7% of techie agents, you’ll end up wanting this option.

(For the record, I have one website hosted with GoDaddy and have never had a problem with them either.)

Tip:  When you’re setting up hosting you’re usually asked if you want Windows or Linux hosting.  Linux is usually a good default choice unless you know for sure your site runs on ASP.

And…  Hostgator often runs a special via a coupon code shown on their home page.

Think you need to spend a lot to market yourself effectively online?  Think again!

This video shows how one smart agent, Yuno Marioni, is using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Biznik and Active Rain to create a strong online presence.  (Without a fancy website, and virtually for free!)

Important Social Media Links from the Video:

www.Biznik.com

www.LinkedIn.com

www.Twitter.com

www.Facebook.com

www.ActiveRain.com

The number of U.S. Twitter users more than doubled in March 2009, jumping to 9.3 million users.  What’s really interesting is this demographic tidbit reported by the internet measurement firm comScore in the Puget Sound Business Journal:

“…45- to 54-year-olds are the most likely to use the service at 36 percent above the average. They are followed by 25- to 34-year-olds, who are 30 percent more likely.”

In other words, these are your past and current clients, and their first time buyer aged children.

If you’re not familiar with Twitter, it’s a micro-blogging service that lets you instantly create a free page and post short blurbs of 140 characters or less.  This makes it easy to quickly share a link or fact, without having to compose an entire article (like this one.)

Check out our Twitter feed here, and be sure follow us too.

Bottom line?  Twitter can work well for business because it’s highly functional.  Don’t  get distracted by the people who feel the need to Tweet every time their dog sneezes, there are plenty of others using it to share useful information about real estate.

Tip:  If you often feel like sharing a quick bit of information with your clients but you’re intimidated by the time and energy it takes to blog,  you might be surprised – Twitter could be right up your alley.

When you’re blogging for real estate it’s often interesting to quote a news article or some text from another realtor’s blog in order to demonstrate a point.  But when does a quote cross the line and become copyright infringement?

Here’s a good article about copyright law that explains in detail what you need to watch out for.  I’ll skip right to the part about posting content online, since that’s at the very end.  The author says:

“Generally, you can claim a fair use right for using a very small portion of text for commentary, scholarship or similar purposes.”

Like that quote, for example.

So remember, real estate bloggers, it’s great to spice things up with content from other sources – just be careful out there!

Do you hate your real estate website?  If you’re like 80% of the real estate agents I talk to the answer is a resounding “Yes!”  Here’s why you should consider making your next website a nice, clean blog-based site.

1.  Your Blog Can Look Just Like a Website

A blog is really any website designed on a blog platform.  By ‘platform’ I mean the code behind the pages, the stuff you don’t see. Did you know that you can have a blog-based site that looks like a normal website, with a non-changing home page and a separate ‘Blog’ page for the blog posts? 

For an example, check out this nice site we did for Jeanne Gorder.

2.  Search Engines Love Blogs

Google and other search engines crawl through the code of your website to find relevant content.  The easier it is to crawl your website, the more ‘search engine-friendly’ it is.  Blogs are very easy to crawl through and the result is that your content is more likely to show up in the results of online searches.

3.  You Can Create and Edit Your Own Pages

Blogs are set up so that creating and editing your own website pages is pretty much as easy as creating a Microsoft Word document.  You don’t have to know a thing about html, coding or web design.  Talk about power!

How to get started:

If you currently have your own site or plan to have one, getting a blog-based site is as simple as telling your designer that you want a new site based on WordPress, the gold standard for blogging platforms.

We’ll be offering options for agents soon, but in the meantime check out the blog design guys at Men With Pens.

Want to get started for free?

Here are some places that are designed for you to be able to do everything yourself, so they’re free or nearly free:

WordPress.com
Typepad
Active Rain

The best way to get the hang of how these work is to just go there and play around a bit.

I was cruising around the Yahoo real estate section the other day and stumbled upon an interesting research study about how home buyers and sellers choose real estate agents.  I definitely think it’s worth your time to read, especially since it’s pretty recent, from April of 2008.

The report is called “Online Engagement Affects Agent Selection Process”  and it’s here, on the Broker page – it’s the second report in the list at the bottom of the page.

Here are a few facts I picked up from the report:

• Most people (74%) rely on word of mouth to initially choose an agent for consideration, then they follow it up with research for confirmation.

 

• People use an average of five sources to research agents.  (See the graph on pg. 9 of the report, which breaks the five sources down further.)  Seventy-seven percent use the Internet.

 

• Of people who use the internet, 50% spent 4 to 20 hours researching agent information online (pg. 10.)  Hey, that’s a lot of time!  (How did your website fare?)

 

Page 19 starts off a really interesting quadrant analysis using this format:

Keep in mind that while topics in ’3′ are less influential in selection, they are still highly researched, so having information about them on your website or other marketing increases your chances of people finding you in the first place.

There’s a good section about how people use real estate agent websites in hiring an agent.  I just want to point out, regarding page 24 where it says that 31% of people used the agent website only to get the agent’s contact information:  I think in a lot of cases that’s because the agent uses a generic company site and the only pertinent information on there is the contact information. 

(In other words, the 31% is not a reflection of the fact that websites are unimportant.)

There’s more interesting stuff on there and it’s definitely worth your time to look over.  (Plus, lots of graphs – it’s a quick read.)  Another good one on that page is “Embracing the Online Real Estate Market.”

Here’s a link to the Yahoo Broker page with the reports again.

I’m trying out the Smart Youtube plugin for WordPress, by Vladimir Prelovac.  It makes it super simple to customize the size of the Youtube player, add borders and change border colors.  It also makes the code simpler to copy and paste over, since you just use the straight link and add a ‘v’ after ‘http’ in the Youtube url.

Here’s a sample, using a video that I just love.  (If an ad comes up in the bottom you can just click the ‘x’ button to close out the ad.)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWUrj22pRD0

Another nice thing about the Smart Youtube plugin is that you can choose to not show related videos at the end, which is often a good idea for a business blog that needs to be appropriate for all audiences -- just to be on the safe side.

Here’s the link to the Smart Youtube plugin download at WordPress.

By the way, plugins are just add-ons that you download and install in your WordPress blog to be able to do all kinds of cool things in addition to what the blog normally lets you do.  Amazingly, plugins are generally free, although you can often donate to the developer (and we do when we use a plugin a lot.)

Jill Olkoski of Aldebaran Web Design in Seattle just did a great post on her blog about when backlinks to your website are useless.  Here’s the link to the post, which I highly recommend reading:

http://aldebaranwebdesign.com/blog/when-is-a-backlink-worth-nothing-to-your-websites-search-engine-ranking/

A backlink, by the way, is when another site links back to your site.  Google is really trying to make this based on the quality and content of the websites involved, which is why it is cracking down on websites that do heavy link-swapping simply as a way to trick the search engines into sending them traffic.

Jill’s article goes into more detail, and some of things she points out will probably surprise you.

By the way, I’ve hired Jill for some telephone consulting and she is a sincerely good egg, as well as as extremely knowledgeable.  The only bummer is that a lot of people know this, so she’s also usually pretty busy.   Regardless, if you’re in the market for web design or consulting I recommend you give her a shout.

It’s been 6 weeks since I launched my ‘daily topic’ theme for blog posts as a strategy for posting on this blog regularly.  As some of you have noticed, I was cruising along pretty well until December 31, when I inexplicably fell off the wagon.

OK, not completely inexplicably – in fact, you may relate to this.  We’re working on a website overhaul for the Tools For Real Estate site and since we didn’t expect it to take too long we unofficially put some other things (aka, blog posting) on hold until we got the big push over with.

Big mistake!

So here’s the thing:  I see real estate agents do this kind of thing all the time!  Usually it takes the form of ‘waiting until my website is done/ordered’ or “needing to organize my database’ before implementing a business improvement like a new marketing push.

Worse, this mindset frequently causes us to skip smaller, more mundane but extremely important tasks that need to happen consistently, like calling previous clients to touch base or sending out complimentary market analyses.

Zig Ziglar tells us that it’s the little things we do every day that determine our success, and everything I’ve seen proves him to be right.  With that in mind, I’m ‘coming clean’ here about my posting flub-up in the hopes that at least one person will remember, the next time they’re tempted to throw all their energy into one big project, that the big danger lies in neglecting the little things.

(And time flies!)  Three weeks already since my last post.  I’m going to try to recoup some of it.  Here goes.