By sending a press release you had the potential to gain additional exposure from new sources. Whether it be from radio, TV, or print, the more exposure you got the better chance you could increase your business.

Print media who picked up and liked your press release would likely either run the information in the release, or contact you for an interview. The additional benefit from print media, especially those online, was the backlink potential to your website from the publication of your press release.

But recently in the United Kingdom, Google has bared its fangs at the linking process of major online news publications. Through the natural selection process of consumer demand, newspapers have been forced to shut down much of their paper distribution and create a news website where readers are picking up most of their news nowadays. But to pay the bills and to keep their website content free to readership, newspapers have practiced selling ads and accepting paid links for their article pages.

This practice of selling links is frowned upon by the search giant, Google. According to Google, links on another site to your website should be legitimate, not paid. Google blogger, Matt Cutts, says about the practice:

“Whether the paid links are in an “advertorial” or somewhere else on the page, that would violate our quality guidelines and Google would take action on those violations, both so that the link buyers wouldn’t benefit and so that the link sellers wouldn’t be trusted in the future by Google.”

Unfortunately this process of selling links has landed newspapers in hot water. Thus, they are removing these links to stay in good graces with Google. And, unfortunately, press release links seem to be categorized as a “paid” link and are also being removed. If this is true and Google continues to demand and enforce press release links to be removed from online news sources, real estate agents will have a much more difficult time indeed with public relations SEO.

Real estate agents used to work on the paradigm of “pounding the pavement.” There was much driving, walking, and handing out of brochures and business cards in order to drum up business and make a sale. However, the internet changed how real estate professionals get exposure and ultimately get listings.

Here are a few reasons internet exposure is essential:

Buyers are shopping online – Home buyers are shopping for homes online now more than ever. 87% of home buyers start with internet listings, up from about 70% in 2005. Will they find your listings?

Web Site – A professional web site with your realty background and listed properties is mandatory. This works not only as your online business card, but also as a digital brochure for each of your listed properties. This is the place where a property seller may choose you as their listing agent, and a home buyer will call you for a home viewing.

Agent SEO – Home buyers (and sellers) will most likely find you from a query performed through a major search engine. Will your name be among the search results? The more you practice and perform optimization of your website and your services online, the better chance you will be at or near the top of search results.

Internet advertising – SEO is part of a successful internet exposure strategy, but paid advertising will help get even more exposure. Real estate agents can use pay per click advertising, banner ads, and other paid advertising on other websites to drum up leads,

Gather leads – Selling agents don’t sit by the phone waiting for a home seller to call them. An agent must find leads and convince a seller that he or she is the agent for them. Through the internet you will be able to drum up leads from sellers who are shopping around for a selling agent.

It is clear that the internet is an essential marketing place for any real estate broker or agent.  With internet technology continually advancing with data rate speeds and increasing disk space, online video is now becoming one of the biggest marketing tools for agents.

Here are several ways video can help an agent:

Viewing Videos – Of course, the most widely accepted notion of real estate videos is to get a quality impression of a listing to a potential buyer. A professionally produced listing video will have quality views and even narration to describe a home as it is viewed online.

Agent Profiles – Real estate agents and brokers can use video to briefly introduce themselves and explain the reasons a property seller should choose them for their listing agent.

Educational/Informative Videos – Agents can drum up leads and gain expertise exposure by producing informative and educational videos about important real estate topics and posting them online.

Video has many advantages over a listing description and even a photo. Here are a few other benefits of real estate video marketing:

• Helps a buying decision – Home buyers who like a video tour will want to view the location in person. And it can be even more helpful for buyers who are moving from out of town. The video can also be reviewed again and again when making a final buying decision.

• Narration – A good video will have descriptive narration about the property, construction, land, schools, and other amenities to aid a buying decision.

• SEO potential – Videos can be extremely helpful with SEO and internet searches using tags, descriptors, and keywords.

• Cut above the competition – While video marketing is growing it is still not used by all agents. It gives you the cutting edge over the competition with technology.

A good and successful agent will have a system for following up leads. It doesn’t have to be a sophisticated system, just one that serves as a method for turning every meeting into a potential sale. Remember, leads can come by the thousands in a thousand different ways. It is what you do with those leads that converts them into sales.

Here are a few follow up methods most employed by real estate agents:

Phone Calls – You almost never see an agent without a phone, or not on the phone talking to a client or lead. The direct approach is one of the first steps in following up a lead. Did a friend tell you about a neighbor who is planning to sell their home? Get that number and make a phone call. Sometimes being “Johnny on the spot” can get you a good listing before a property owner ever starts looking for an agent.

Email – Gather emails for your contact database. This is essential to staying in touch with a short email message to prospective clients, and for your newsletter.

Email Newsletters – You should have an electronic newsletter that you send to all your contacts. These contacts don’t have to just be past clients, but friends, family, people you’ve met – anyone who can benefit from your message and send along your name to someone who can use your services.

Follow Up Rules:

• Disqualify – Not all leads will convert. Disqualifying a lead will help you focus on the ones with the best potential.

• Take no for an answer – People will have an easier time trusting someone who is not a high-pressure salesperson. Besides, getting a no answer allows you to move on to better, more qualified prospects.

• Go for the appointment – For qualified leads, book that appointment to meet or to show a home.

Let’s first consider the facts: more than 71 percent of homebuyers now use the Internet to find their next home; Internet buyers have been found to be better, more informed clients; and online marketing has proven to be incredibly cost effective when compared with more traditional forms of marketing.

The Internet has proven itself to be a highly useful tool for homebuyers who are looking for properties information, or both. If the majority of your buyers are hitting the Internet then it only makes sense that, as real estate professional, you must concentrate most of your efforts on this lucrative source of real estate leads.

Why Internet Buyers are Great Clients

Homebuyers who use the Internet to find a home have been found to be younger, wealthier and better educated in terms of real estate. In fact, according to the California Association of Realtors, the median home price for an Internet buyer is $452,000, versus just $310,000 for a traditional buyer.

The Internet serves a very useful purpose in today’s society, as buyers are looking for convenient, practical ways to conduct their home search. With this in mind, real estate agents who assist Internet buyers find themselves spending much less time with their clients, thereby freeing up their schedules to attract new business. In other words, Internet buyers know what they want; they are simply looking for a real estate professional to facilitate the process.

Buyers with more knowledge, thanks to the wealth of information available on the Internet, are certainly more attractive clients for real estate agents, so it only makes sense that real estate professionals are setting their sights on Internet buyers.

If you are a real estate professional looking to increase your business but not your workload, consider concentrating your efforts on online marketing.

How We Can Help

We know that there is not a “one size fits all” approach to SEO services. Your real estate business has specific needs and desired outcomes, as well as particular competitive constraints and challenges. We have developed a series of various SEO techniques that can be customized to your specific needs.

Here are just a few ways we can help:

• Website Audits – We will take a careful and thorough look at your current website. We will observe your themes, navigation, keyword usage, content, and all other information.  Then analyze everything to determine what works and what could be improved. We will provide you with detailed advice and steps you can take to improve your website SEO in order to get noticed by more major search engines and achieve higher rankings.

• Keyword Research – We have the experience and tools you need to get the right keywords for your website content and paid search advertising. Choosing keywords can be tricky. You may think a specific keyword is exactly what you need to attract customers, but your chosen keyword could get lost in the midst of millions of search results, or have a very high bid from other paid search marketers. We can help you narrow down your choice of keywords to the ones that fit your needs and budget.

• SEO Copywriting – We can provide you with unique, original, and pertinent SEO content in the form of articles and blogs that help you attract more visitors and convert more leads into clients.

• Web Design – We can also design the perfect website for you using themes you like that make your website stand apart not only visually, but has all the SEO elements to ensure maximum traffic from search results.

If you think we can help your online SEO efforts, contact us today and let us help you get started improving your online presence with immediate results.

Marketing your real estate business online can be easy – if you have the right tools and knowledge. Though it is impossible to fit the entire online marketing for Realtors guidebook here in this short post, we are pleased to share a few of our top secrets for successful online marketing.

Website SEO – Your online presence must contain constantly updated material. Blogs, articles, and link building are great ways to keep your website fresh and highly trafficked, however, your fresh material must contain the right keywords in order to get seen by your customers.

Keywords are the specific words and phrases that your customers use to make queries through search engines. Finding the right keywords to use for your new posts and for paid search advertising is critical to your success

While keywords are critical for blogs, articles, and search advertising, your website must be optimized to be found by major search engines. That means incorporating important and strategic keywords in the right places, like in text, image <ALT> tags, and META tags. It also means designing your site to be easily found by search engine ‘bots’ who can categorize and rank your website for future searches.

Search Advertising – As mentioned, you have the opportunity to use effective advertising strategies though pay per click and pay per call on major search engines. You pay only when a qualified lead clicks or calls your link, and your sales can soar with the right search advertising strategy.

Email – Through strategic contact gathering techniques you can build a marketing email list. Sending regular newsletters, email articles, and promotion notices via email can greatly enhance your online marketing.

Social Networks – One of the biggest growing forms of online marketing is social media. With social media you can gather friends, fans, and followers who become leads, spreaders of your marketing efforts, and ultimately customers.

Although there are no tried and true answers for this common real estate question, there are several pros and cons that may make your decision a bit easier to make.

If you have established yourself as a successful real estate agent, your team may consist of just you, or perhaps one or two other agents or professionals. Most of us start the real estate business as a do-it-all kind of person: making copies, taking photos, arranging marketing and calling leads – and that’s just for starters.

However, when does this become simply too cumbersome? If you establish a successful real estate career, handling these kinds of day-to-day tasks can bog you down and inhibit you from getting out in the field and closing deals.

A good place to start when examining whether it is still feasible to be a solo agent or to contract some tasks out is to decide which areas are simply consuming too much of your time. Perhaps you might want to break your tasks into three categories: marketing, administrative and physical.

Underneath these categories you will want to organize your daily tasks and decide which ones to keep and which ones to pass off. Some of your daily and weekly tasks may include:

• Lead generation

• Writing newsletters

• Advertising

• Writing blogs

• Process closings

• Follow-up contracts

• Create virtual tours

• Take pictures

• Keep drop boxes full

• Handle signage and lock boxes

• Show Houses

• Write Contracts

• Attend inspections

• Make follow-up calls

Once you have decided which tasks are important and which ones may be best left to another individual, you can better develop a vision and a game plan for taking your real estate business to the next level.

Called Google Buzz, this social media spin-off of sorts will soon begin appearing in about one percent of Gmail user accounts. The rest of the Gmail community, according to Google, can expect to receive Google Buzz shortly thereafter.

So, what is Google Buzz and what can it do for your real estate business?

Google Buzz, which features a social media outlet, is part of Gmail. There are currently approximately 150 million Gmail users that may jump into the Google Buzz ring. If you are a real estate professional, the numbers are quite impressive, considering the Internet leads you can snag as a result.

Many industry experts expect Google Buzz to eventually integrate with Facebook, thereby opening up the flood gates in terms of users. There are currently over 400 million Facebook users.

How does Google Buzz work with my Gmail account?

A small tab in an individual’s Gmail account will take users directly to Google Buzz. Once inside Google Buzz, users can post and read, updates, photos and videos. Your “friends” in Google Buzz are the 40 people you communicate with most frequently in Gmail and Gchat.

Does Google Buzz work with other channels?

Yes! You can communicate with Flickr, Picasa and You Tube in Google Buzz. You can even pull in tweets from Twitter, although you can’t send your Buzz updates onto Twitter and other social networks.

How do you send private updates to your Google Buzz followers?

Your real estate private updates are immediately sent off to your Buzz followers, or you may choose just a select group. Real estate professionals may find this feature quite attractive, as you can sort your clients into particular categories and then send Google Buzz updates to only those followers that apply to your message (buyers vs. sellers, for example).

What about sending public updates?

Public updates are immediately posted to your Google Profile and are indexed for Google Search. How’s that for getting your word out to the masses?

The word is that Google Buzz may become quite useful for Internet marketing purposes, provided it evolves into a social media site that communicates with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

On average, about 80 percent of buyers and sellers head straight to the Internet during the first phase of their buying or selling cycle. As an agent, this is, of course, the most valuable time to snag them as a customer, as they will likely not have made any firm decisions yet.

However, it is important to note that there are still those buyers and sellers who don’t use the Internet to research the buying and/or selling process. These buyers are typically called traditional Buyers, as they utilize the services of an agent from beginning to end. traditional buyers, on average, take about three times as long to purchase a home as internet buyers and preview more than two times as many homes as internet buyers.

What many real estate experts have learned from this data is that traditional buyers are simply more work to obtain and to keep than internet buyers.

In comparison to traditional buyers, internet buyers seem to know what they want and they seem to have a more firm game plan. They also do most of their research before calling an agent. Overall, they are also happier with their agent than traditional buyers.

To sum it all up: you owe it to yourself to focus on internet buyers!

What you need to know about internet buyers:

• Traditional buyers interview three agents, while internet buyers interview only one. What does that mean? It means that if you make a good impression, via your website and your blogs, you can gain the trust of a customer, without having to fight it out with other agents.

• Most internet buyers are first-time homebuyers and younger buyers. Because internet buyers are comfortable with using the Internet to search and research, they will likely have done their research ahead of time, thereby saving you a great deal of time and resources.

• More than 97 percent of internet buyers use the same agent for their next home transaction, versus just 50 percent of traditional buyers. This means that all your hard work will likely pay off in the form of future sales.

• Internet buyers know what they want, and they expect quick response times and clear communication.

• You must have a strong presence online if you expect to procure internet buyers as clients. In particular, develop a presence on search engines, as more than 63 percent of buyers find their agents using them. Consider developing your own blog to increase search engine traffic.

• Include your profile on your blog and other Internet directories to lend more credibility and value to your posting. Internet buyers want information and they want it upfront, so providing them with this information before they even contact you will help produce solid leads.