Are They Worth It?

The only way you will be able to tell if an email campaign is worth it for you is by implementing one on your site. But you will close more leads. The number though depends on how much effort and thought process you put into it. The campaign will allow contact to be made with prospects for as long as you need after they sign up. Also, they automate the process of growing your client base, so you can spend more time actually helping clients, rather than finding them. And, it’s been shown that the sooner you follow up with a lead, the more likely they will turn into a client.

How to Implement One

First, you will need to come up with a plan for your business. Some of the first questions you should consider are whether or not you want to set up a single email campaign or create a couple different campaigns that are more specific to a particular niche in your real estate business. The advantage of doing the latter is that there should be a better conversion rate than the former, but the former will be less time consuming and a little easier to implement.

Another important part is to make sure that your email campaign is personalized to each person and uses their name. This process is easily done with email campaign managers, so don’t worry too much about it. Then it’s all about creating unique and engaging emails that your leads will benefit from. Don’t make it a newsletter and don’t make it purely a sales call. Just let them know that you are always there to meet their needs and use it to keep the lead fresh.

Try to get users to sign up for the specific campaign that will be most relevant to them immediately. But as that won’t be foolproof, be sure to have a non-focused campaign that is in place to capture leads. After receiving messages from the leads, move them into a category that is much more focused to their needs.

If you are looking for an email campaign manager, some good ones to check out are MailChimp and Aweber.

This guest post was written by Kevin Kaiser of Military Homes Realty, where military home buyers and sellers are connected.

He’s already begun on a new design which will still include great internet marketing content and a social media aspect as well. So be on the lookout for a new look to the site sometime here in the next few weeks.

I’d also like to personally thank a few Realtors for all there contributions to RealtyRankings.

Manitowoc real estate

Greater Raleigh Realty

Logan Utah homes for sale

Plano Apartment Locators

Dallas Office Space

Thanks Everyone!

The first factor revolves round the reinforcement value. By linking to your website how would the linking website benefit? After all everyone wants to know “what’s in it for me?” By linking to your website, your link partner should benefit in any one of the following ways.

Recognition – By linking to your website, will your linking partner get any special recognition? Is your website part of the top 10 or top 100 lists in your niche? Such websites will get their links much faster.

Resource – Does your website provide useful information? Will it be a useful resource to the linking partner and to the visitors of the linking partner’s website? You will have a good reason to link to a website that offers exclusive information that is related to the concerned niche.

Association – What is the association value in linking to you? Are you a member of any of the online consortiums, any directory of businesses, etc? This will make more sense to link to your link partners to have an affiliation with your website.

Reciprocation – Will your linking partner get a link back to their website and if yes, will your link be of any value to them? How relevant is your website to the linking partner and his or her niche? It makes more sense if two real estate portals to link to each other. This will facilitate easy sharing of knowledge and information on the real estate industry belonging to a particular region.

Besides the above factors on the benefits your linking partner will get by linking to you, there are other influencing factors such as Action, Interest, Desire, Attention, etc.

Your link request emails should be very carefully drafted so that you will be able to get the desired results out of your efforts.

Grabbing the attention – You must remember that the webmaster that you are contacting will be getting a number of similar mails like the one you are sending to request your mail. Unless you get their attention, it is not going to work because they will not have the time to review all the link request mails that they get. Here are few tips that will help you grab the attention of your prospective linking partner.

• Make sure to use the name of the person you are contacting and not just their designation.
• Make your mails sound interesting and not the regular template based email that you copied from one of the link requests that you received.
• Let your subject line, starting paragraphs and closing lines be striking enough to get their attention.

Creating Interest
It is not enough to get the attention but it is even more crucial to get their interest to read through the entire mail. Every one likes to know how they can benefit from your mail so put that first. Make them feel important and special in your link request. Do not try to write elaborately about your services and features of your services.

Creating the Desire to Link
Your request mail should create the desire to link to your website. To do that you should now what they want and giving them exactly that. It can be an eBook, newsletter or even an RSS feed that they want others to subscribe to and before contacting them subscribe to those. This will influence them to return the favor.

Provide them with genuine contact details, email address and your businesses physical address. Be available if they need to contact you.

Tell them the benefits of linking to your website especially how beneficial it will be for their website visitors.

Make Them Take Action
The idea of your link request mail is not to send a thought provoking message that will make them think but they need to act right away. So provide them with the code to link to your website and ask them to send their code to reciprocate their link.

The next time you draft a link request, incorporate all the above factors and you will certainly see better conversion rates.

One of the most frequent questions that website owners ask their SEO is the list of keywords for which they have managed to get rankings for their customers’ websites. The next question that follows is whether the SEO company or the SEO consultant will be able to provide a list of references that they can contact. If that is what you have in your list too, then it is high time that you strike them off and try to review the skills of your SEO professional and his or her ability to come up with strategies that will help your website.

Past Rankings and References Are Futile

You must know that as a company or as a consultant who wants to win your contract, if you were to ask some one about the keywords for which they have ranked websites, they are very unlikely to show you their failures. Moreover, success stories presented out of context of the customer requirements will make no sense. No company or no SEO professional will share their customer requirements when they share the success stories as they are bound by non-disclosure agreements.

Search engine ranking is a very complex factor and each website is different. It is just not the SEO professionals efforts that bring success or failure of a website’s online presence. The nature of the website itself has a lot to control. So all rankings cannot be considered equal. Rankings on the first page or #1 rankings in the top search engines do not tell anything to us as far as the success of your real estate website’s SEO is concerned. Success stories should always be accompanied by the effectiveness analytics and no SEO company will share with you this information. Therefore, your questions on past rankings do not help you in any way in identifying your SEO consultant.

Coming to the next question that people ask, it is about references. What do we hope to find out by asking for references? By asking for references we are hoping to find out about the quality of the services offered by the company by talking to their past customers. No SEO in their good senses will list references that will put them in trouble. You can be 100% sure that only happy customers of the past will be supplied to you as the list of references. So here again, you will be just wasting your time asking for the list of references and contacting them. Contacting references will make sense if you are going to track them by yourself and contact them.

It is interesting to note that every real estate website owner understands these dynamics well and not that these are new insights. Despite our understanding, all of us find ourselves asking these questions to our SEO companies before hiring them. If these are not the right questions to ask your SEO company, then how should one assess their SEO company before hiring them?

The best way to hire your SEO company

Before you set out to hire your SEO company, you must make sure you understand your needs first. You must have a basic understanding about SEO only then you will know what to expect of your SEO company and what results mean with regard to SEO. In other words, you should be a well-informed customer. After educating yourself about the basics of SEO, you should start taking to the SEO companies to learn about their understanding about the real estate market, the competition involved in the real estate industry etc. They should be capable of understanding your business model to effectively promote your website online. Rather than asking about the past rankings and references, you can ask them about the strategies and tools that they would be using to promote your website.

I never really knew what I wanted to do with the domain, build a directory, free WP website provider, free content provider and I still don’t really know, so I decided to dispose of the site.

From time to time I’ll guest post about our local market ( backlinks you know ). Come to think of it, market news never really got implemented. All the content will remain and the blog will still be updated with great real estate related content, so nothing will change. If anything the site will improve in content and design.

Saying all that, I may wake up tomorrow and decide just to keep the site! I did have a great plan for a directory, however it’s just way to time consuming.

Therefore, before you start your link building campaign for your real estate website, you should know what matters and what does not matter when it comes to links. Without knowing this, all your efforts may turnout to be futile. Here are few factors that matter while building your links.

There are two basic requirements for a link to pass on its link value to your website:

The first important factor is that your link should be embedded using hard coded HTML. Though there are reports that say that Google is also takes into consideration links presented using JavaScript, it is best to stick to HTML. For example the link should be embedded in using the following tag: < a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com” >

The second factor is that the page from which you are getting your link should already be indexed by Google. You will be able to find out whether a page is already present in Google’s index using the site operator in Google. Until a page is indexed, you cannot expect any good to come out of the link embedded in that page.

Factors That Affect Your Link Count

The following factors will block the search engines from taking the link into account.

1.Nofollow Attribute: Today many websites use this attribute to curb the menace of online spamming. Google disregards links that come with ‘Nofollow’ attribute. You must therefore whether a website uses nofollow attribute for its link before you spend your precious time in submitting your link.
2.Redirects – If the link value has to be passed on to the link, then the pages should use 301 permanent redirects in case there should be any need for redirects. If you are using 302 or temporary redirects, you cannot get any benefit for links that go through your temporary page.
3.Robots nofollow – If nofollow attribute is used in the Robot.txt file then all the links in such pages will not get any link juice.
4.Links presented through JavaScript – There are differences in opinions with regard to the status of the links presented through JavaScript. Some say that Google does not take into account JavaScript links while others deny it. It is best to avoid JavaScript links to be on the safer side.

Further Symptoms That Affect the Link Value
Low PR Sites – Google is very careful not to promote websites that try to manipulate the search engines. For example, it can penalize a website that sells links by reducing its PageRank even though the site may have all the other qualifying factors for good PR. Google may stop following links from such problematic sites.
Old Cache Date – This can be an indicator that Google does not consider a website important and that is the reason why its bots do not frequent them. As a result, they have old cache rates. If the page from which your are getting your link has a cache date that is longer than a month, then you should try to avoid such websites because this could also be a symptom of bad neighborhood.
Location of the link – This is yet another factor that affects the quality of the links. Links in sidebars are often devalued as they are associated with advertisements and paid links. It is best to get your links from within the content of the page.

Checking a Link for Its SEO Value

You will be able to check the link value by creating a link on the page with a unique modifier that is rather obscure. If your web page is ranked for that obscure keyword after few days, then it will indicate that the link juice is being passed on from the linking page.

I assume there are many upsides to creating your own real estate IDX solutions, such as:

1. you own the product

2. making changes/updates & hosting fees will be at cost

3. **your competition won’t have your exact IDX

4. you can fix or access your product in a moments notice

Some downsides to creating your own IDX maybe:

1. Upfront Cost to develop a good IDX solution

2. Finding good programmers and designers

3. Having to reinvent the wheel

As I see it, if you have a good real estate IDX provider why reinvent the wheel. While there are significant advantages in creating your own IDX, for the overwhelming majority of Realtors creating their own IDX is not realistic.

We’ve been very pleased with REW’s IDX solution, which also has a great CMS system. Only issue we’ve really faced is the load time for our sites, which seem to be extremly slow currently. However, REW is always quick to addresses our issues and is quick to resolve them.

We’ll be testing out some new IDX solutions in the coming year and we’ll update the products when we’ve had a chance to test them out I’m also hoping to hear from the Realtors that have developed their own solutions.

Update: Looks like We’ll be testing a new IDX sooner than I thought. REW’s new Iframe IDX is ready to launch in January 2010. The new IDX looks like it will have some awesome features too, actually looks better than my custom one.

Check out Morgan’s post here

This has received various levels of reception from different industries and tested in all possible ways. However, today the idea of marketing your USP does not seem to work in all situations. The term “Unique” does not seem to hold water because it means that your real estate consumers use your services for singular reasons but in reality people choose to use your real estate service for primary as well as secondary reasons.

The idea of USPs tries to drive home the core selling features repeatedly in an effort to make your prospective customers choose your real estate services. Marketing ones services in the real estate industry is much more complex than what it might look like through any USP. However, it does not mean that it will not work completely. Today we have plenty of options unfolding right before us and there are more than one format through which we can market our services and more than one channel to reach our customers. Our customers are equally complex and they decide to choose your services or not to choose your services for more than one reason, which ranges from the emotional reasons to practical reasons. To complicate the situation further, each customer is unique irrespective of the fact whether our services are or not.

If you are going to approach your prospective real estate customers with your USP, then you are expecting them to adapt their needs to your message. What if your USP does not match their needs? To avoid such risks today the real estate industry uses diversified selling propositions.

Further Issues

There are a number of other issues relating to the original idea of using USPs as a branding vehicle. The main issue identified here is that such an approach will work only as a long-term concept of building relationships with customers. This may not work to well for the real estate industry because here consumers make their decisions on a number of factors and a many of them are issues of the moment. There is a compelling need to strike the chord at once and you don’t have that kind of time to establish long term relationship with your real estate customers because most of them approach real estate services just a handful of times during their lifetime. Therefore, what we need here is more of a diversified message. However, this should not push you to the risk diluting the overall message. You need to ask few pertinent questions to stay focused and coherent with your message.

You must ask what makes your customers choose your real estate services.

1.Quality and professionalism of your services?
2.Cost of the services that you provide?
3.Top-notch customer service you offer?
4.The impact of your references that directed your customers?
5.Additional features or advantages that come with your services?
6.Some kind of emotional factor?

You will realize that you have more than a single reason from the above list. There are other factors that come into play such as the location, age group, income group, personal preferences etc. All these further diversify the decision-making patterns. This simply indicates how difficult it is to use your Unique Selling Proposition to convince your real estate customers. Many companies have rightly identified these difficulties and that is why you see various types of advertisements from the same real estate agency. By doing this you will not only be able to capture various emotions of the customers but it will also make sure that your services match to a wider group of consumers.

Handle With Care

At the same time, you should set boundaries for your diversified selling propositions so you don’t end up making unrealistic promises. Such efforts will only water down the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and make people lose confidence in your services.

However, this does not mean that it happens to all the SEO techniques. Even today good number of old SEO techniques work well. Amongst such techniques, you can list link request to build links for your real estate website. By making other websites and blogs to link to your website or blog, your ranking will be boosted even today.

One of the drawbacks here is that not many real estate webmasters know how to make proper link requests. Their faulty approach makes their request mails dumped into the spam mail folder. With a little bit of finesse in their approach, you can get links that will speak volumes for your search engine rankings. Here are some tips that will help you get better results.

Building Relationships – Try to avoid requesting for a link in your first email, first phone call or first meeting. Your intention should be to build a relationship with the webmaster from which you intend to get a link. If you have a blog, it will be much easier to establish relationship with other blog owners by leaving good feedbacks and comments in other blogs. You will also be able to interact with the other bloggers through chat and email. This should help you create a network of online friends. Once you have befriended them, they would not mind linking to your blog or website.

Subject line of your link request – If you make mistakes here, your mails are sure to enter the spam mail folder. So avoid subject lines such as “Link to my site”, “Visit my website” etc. This step is all the more crucial if you are contacting someone for the first time. Subject lines like, “About your blog, “name of the blog” will elicit the interest of the recipient.

Personal Greetings – Make sure to use the name of the person that you are contacting. Do not use a generalized mail with greetings such as Dear Webmaster or Dear Blogger, etc. It will work out well by personalizing the mail to the individual person that you are contacting. You should also give them enough information about yourself so that your mail will look genuine. Introduce yourself properly and give them the necessary contact information including email address, website address and phone number.

This includes introducing yourself (if you have not had previous contact) and providing multiple contact details (website URL, phone number, etc).

Highlight the Benefits – No webmaster is obliged to respond to your request in a positive way. You must give them something in return for linking to you. So list all the benefits of linking to your blog or website. Just to ask for free links without offering them anything in return will make you sound too rude. If your website or blog does not have anything in particular to offer them as benefits, then you can create some impressive content that will be of use to their visitors in some way and inform them of presence of such content in your website which they can link to and benefit. If they see by linking to your website or to your blog their website visitors will benefit in a positive way then they will be more inclined to consider your request.

For instance, if you come across a blog post that poses questions on a certain topic, then you can provide the required solution that are supported by facts in your blog and request the blog to link to your website or blog which provides a solution to the problem raised by their blog.

One of the best ways of having your link bait distributed is through social media network. You must post your attractive content in as many social media networks and directories as possible. The idea here is to create a buzz about your content and to prompt people to share with others your unique content. This process is also known as seeding. You must try to reach to social news sites that are voted upon by the users. If your content gets a large number of votes, then it will elicit the interest of others too. You will be able to see your content in the first page of the news site when it becomes one of the most voted news item. It has been proved that news items in the front pages of the news sites get the most clicks. Your link bait will be viewed by hundreds of visitors and a certain percentage of visitors will click your website link and visit your website. Some of the popular sites where you can submit your news include but not limited to Digg, Reddit, Mixx, etc.

Yet another social media site that is becoming increasingly popular is Twitter. However, you can expect others to link to you only when you have some worthwhile stuff that others can link.

Link Bait Strategies

When you are using link baits, your intention is not only to make people link to you but also to make those who see your bait to click on the bait and visit your website or to vote for your news item, which will increase the popularity of the item you submit. It is not the social media sites that offer you the best links, they often come with nofollow attribute. The best links come from other internet users such as bloggers, news publishers and journalists. If the news item or the content you have submitted is of good quality, they will write about it and link to the source article.

Some of the best baits include the following:

Breaking News – this is one of the top baits. If you publish hot news, then you can ensure a vast traffic to your website. You can elicit a great interest in the social media sites as well as from the news communities. Though breaking news will attract a lot of traffic, they are not the best ones for getting back links.

Controversial Posts

By making controversial posts or by playing devils advocate you can attract a lot of attention to your posts. However, you must be very careful in creating such content to ensure that you do not get into hot waters through your posts and become unpopular through your posts.

Resourceful Posts

Resourceful posts not only get a great level of attention, they also bring in a large number of links to your website. You must make sure to create resources that are not time bound so that they will continue to bring more links to your website.

Humorous Posts

Funny posts have always been the favorite of many online users. Humorous posts have long life when compared to news items.

Ego Posts

You will be able to make popular community members to promote your content by making a mention of their names in your content in such a way to inflate their ego. You will certainly get links from the people whose egos you are boosting.

The most important aspect of link baiting is to create content that users can identify with, something that they can connect to; such content is sure to bring a great level of success in getting you the desired links for your website.