BE PART OF THIS AMAZING OPPORTUNITY TO
GROW YOUR REAL ESTATE BUSINESS!

This one-day Marketing Planning Seminar for Realtors, Title Companies and Mortgage Professionals will help you focus on the activities that will help you establish your brand, grow your business, get new clients and generate leads for your business.

You WILL leave the class with a detailed plan for how to grow your business!

SEATING IS LIMITED TO 25 ATTENDEES – Don’t miss your chance to change your business!

PLUS – As a bonus, everyone who attends will get a FREE copy of “How To Service Your Listings” AND the special report “100 Things To Do To Sell Your Listings” (A $30 Value)!

When: February 6th from 9-1
Where: Integrity First Funding Group
1237 Lady Marion Lane
Dundedin FL 34698
Cost: $25

Related posts:

1. How To Increase Your Real Estate Website Hits – What Does A Girl Have To Do To Get Noticed?
2. Real Estate Marketing To A Farm Area
3. Realtor Marketing – Real Estate Newsletters

STOP – Think about this BEFORE you spend a ton of money on Adwords or paid search engine listings!!!

The first thing you want to think about when trying to increase your website hits is are you going for quantity or quality? You can get great traffic to your site but if it is wrong kind of traffic (ie people who don’t care about what you have to offer and who will not turn into readers or use your services) what does the number matter? I know people with HUGE numbers of visitors who don’t have the volume of sales that should go along with those numbers. Just make sure that you are fishing for the right kind of traffic.

You can now resume your reading….

I don’t pay for websites hits very often. I did when I started my site just to get going and also do currently when I am trying to sell a specific product or service (like the 33 Touch Program). But in general I use the power of the internet to bring people to me.

I get hits on my Google Analytics that say my readers come the most from Active Rain (54 in the last month), Google (53 in the last month) and triiibes (20 in the last month). I also got clicks from 33 other sources in the last 30 days.

What does all that mean to me and how does it affect my readership and business? I have great readers and quality traffic. My average time spent on my site for the last month is 3:40 (3 minutes, 40 seconds), the average number of pages per visit is 2.39 and 49.31% of the people are new visits.

I did NOT have a million visitors (I had 361) but the ones that I do have come, stay and talk to me. I am a trusted source for information about marketing to realtors and have built a strong business with good customers.

So what can YOU do to increase the hits to your real estate or small business website?

1. Name your blog and blog posts something people will search for or something you want to be known for. I wrote an ezine article about Niche Marketing For Realtors which drives traffic to MA. It ranks #2 on page 2 for google and #2 on page 1 for yahoo. Marketing Artfully ranks #1 on Google and not in the first 10 pages of Yahoo for Niche Marketing For Realtors. Which leads us to…
2. Do not put all your eggs in one basket! Spread the love around!!! Make sure you have multiple streams of traffic to your main website. You can write articles at www.ezinearticles.com, set up a squidoo lens on a certain topic like I did for Real Estate Marketing Pro, or just post your Craigs List listings with a link back to your website.
3. Join some social media websites like Linked In, Twitter or Active Rain.
4. Comment on other peoples blogs, they will visit yours and may sign up to get your emails or feeds!
5. Last but not least, be interesting! Do not make your stuff one long sales pitch. Think “what if I was reading this? Would I be interested if I did not own the company?”. Give value, link back to people you enjoy reading about. Answer readers comments, show them that you appreciate their readership. And ALWAYS talk about something you like! If you do not like your topic it will be PAINFUL to write every week, let alone every day!

 

Oh, did I mention, every one of those items are FREE!

Related posts:

1. Marketing Planning Seminar for Real Estate
2. Realtor Marketing Most Real Estate Websites Let Realtors Down
3. How Can You Get More Blog Hits

In this day and age, the line between Business To Business (B2B) and Business To Consumer (B2C) has gotten blurred. Many consumers are small business owners (like realtors) and all companies are made up of consumers. The internet has leveled the playing field for many but has also allowed us to get complacent about making sure we know our focus.

Business to business is generally based on the model that the good of the many outweighs the good of the few (my last star trek quote I promise!). With this model you try and make/market you product so that it appeals to most types of businesses. Business to consumer is the good of the few – they want to know what is in it for them and do not care about anything your product has that does not relate to their world view.

Does that mean that we have to develop a product for each and every one of those people. That we need to limit our services to a niche that we have chosen and smite everyone that comes along who does not fit into that niche – NO!

What we need to do is market to those different groups differently. The nice thing about this is that it basically costs thought, paper and time. No big development budget, just lots of brain cells.

Let’s look at Listingbook first (I contract with them to teach – I did this for free before I came on board because I SO believed in the product). They already have a niche, providing MLS internet services to realtors for their clients.

They also have a problem. One of the focuses of their niche is B2B, contracting with MLSs to use their data and then working at the broker level to provide additional value added services at an office level. Their other focus is B2C (realtors are consumers at this point rather than businesses).

What works for B2B is hard to extrapolate to the individual agent level. BUT WAIT! They can’t be everything to everyone you say, they have to build something that will have enough bells and whistles to sell to the MLSs and the brokers you say. This is where the brain cells and marketing come in!

Realtors have problems to solve. How to get more buyers, how to get more sellers, how to keep those sellers happy over a long sales cycle, how to market themselves while still conducting business. Here is the crazy thing – they all think they are unique. They all want to know what is in it for them and making it personal is a niche thing that is relatively easy to solve.

Instead of trying to market to all the different agents, segment them into groups and only show them the features of the product that are relevent to their lives and businesses. Have a class for buyers agents, have a class for sellers agents, have a class showing how to use the product for FSBOs and Expireds, for investors, for lead generating.

BUT WAIT AGAIN! Listingbook does more than that you say, it can revolutionize your whole business you say. Well CONSUMERS don’t want revolution. They want solutions – to their problems!

Now let’s take a peek at Keller Williams (another great company – I am an agent there). They also have a B2B level where they are working with business owners who have market centers (offices) and team leaders (managers). Their consumers are also realtors. What I think they do particularly well is rely on user generated content to reach their customers. The market centers allow KW agents to teach classes and conduct training in their specialty (I teach marketing, John Dietz teaches FSBOs, etc.). They also provide support on a micro level by having the team leaders coach the agents individually.

What they do have is a problem with perception. There is a perception in the minds of non-KW agents that there is A LOT of unsolicited micro managing and that they HAVE to go to classes. What KW doesn’t understandd is how to frame their message so that it is not a sales pitch for KW but a solution for how to do business in the information age of real estate.

Homebuyers and Sellers need something different from realtors today. They HAVE access to the MLS for the most part. The information is there for them and they are using it freely. What realtors bring to the table is knowledge and experience and that is the message that KW helps their agents to get out to the public through training, coaching and systems.

So Realtors, now is my time to take a shot at you! Are you aware of what your focus is? Are you B2B or B2C. Are you both? Could you be both?

In today’s market there are scads of opportunity to be B2B. Banks need help selling their inventory through REO sales. That is a message that you could send. Your vendors are hurting too, could you work with them to cross sell to your databases? Handymen know people who are getting ready to move, bug guys know people who need a bigger house, and banks know who has gotten a home loan approval.

On the B2C front, are you framing your message to “what’s in it for them?”. Are you talking to niches like sellers, buyers, first timers, baby boomers, dog owners, condo dwellers and water lovers? Are you saying it in a way that makes sense to you OR are you saying it in a way that appeals to them? You do not have to change your services, just frame them in a way that will provide a message that consumers can understand and appreciate.

Related posts:

1. Website and Blog Design – The Wrong Things
2. Listingbook and new people!
3. What Are You Trying To Sell?

Today Seth Godin posted a PDF about the record industry and how they HAVE to change their model. It got me thinking about what they are trying to sell (records that we can’t copy and the fact that we should maintain their industry just as it is). Seth said what they SHOULD be trying to sell is the cool stuff that we actually like and will pay for – information about our favorite artists, backstage passes, concert tickets and other things that have NOTHING to do with paying $20 for a CD.

So what ARE you trying to sell? It really does make a difference because then you can give everything else away for FREE!

Why am I giving away all this information about how to do things for your niche? How to set up a blog, how to market your services or products and how to brand yourself. I am VERY clear about what I am selling so I can give everything else away for free. I like to figure out what other people are selling and tell them fun ways to do it. I like to talk to Realtors and find out what makes them special and then help them find ways to express that special-ness. I like to sit with people I like and talk about how to position their paintball business to get more corporate clients. I am selling IDEAS so anything that requires implementing those ideas I can give away for free!

I have a bunch of photographers in my family. They take pictures ALL the time and they have captured HUNDREDS of great images (the header features pictures by my husband John Jacobsen and my MIL Linda Jacobsen – thanks guys!). They post their pictures online and lots of people we know “borrow” them for their blogs or websites. I am sure that people we don’t know borrow them also. I sent one of my clients to John’s blog the other day and she fell in love with his style. She wants a print. THAT is where John can SELL something. The images on the internet are not large enough to print well. He should let EVERYONE use his images for free with a link to his blog so that they can buy prints of the ones that they like.  He is not going to do that right now because photography is a hobby and that feels like work to him BUT HE COULD! If I were a photographer this would seem like a much better way to make money than to schlep around taking pictures of weddings or dogs or families. It would let you take pictures of whatever you like and market them to people who like them too!

Because I am in the real estate business I read a lot of real estate blogs. Currently there is a huge controversy going on in the blog world and on TV about DOM (days on market). Consumers want to know how many days a property has been on the market – not just how long the current listing has been in the MLS. I think they should have that access. The National Association of Realtors is trying to hang on to the way it WAS instead of focusing on how to make the industry better. In the past Realtors provided access to information that everyone didn’t have – that is not true anymore. What Realtors provide now is the knoledge and experience that consumers do not have, THAT is what NAR should be selling NOT trying to hang on to an outdated business model that puts limits on the information that the public has access to.

If you are reading this post because you are thinking of starting your own business or trying to learn how to market your currrent company, focus on what you are trying to SELL. It will make firguring out what to DO so much easier!

No related posts.