Earlier I posted an article outlining the Importance of your Real Estate Blog. Here I’m going to provide an example of how powerful a blog can be in increasing traffic to your website.

We are going to use this site www.silkwoodmedical.com.au. Silkwood Medical are a plastic surgery company based in Bondi Junction, Sydney. They built this website around 18 months ago and although the site looks very nice it does not rank well in search engines and therefore does not generate too much organic traffic. The site has no blog associated with it and news articles are posted to the website in pdf format.

Our solution was to create a blog which looked exactly the same as the client’s website and place the blog on a separate url www.silkwoodnews.com.au. The idea of this, is that a user will jump between blog and site or site and blog without realizing they have been redirected to a new url. The client would then post articles through the blog which will build up pages in search engines driving traffic back to the blog which in turn will direct traffic to the original site.

This has worked very well and the blog now rates high in search engines in many key words which the original website does not. Some of these key words included on the first page of Google for the blog are:

• macrolane sydney
• ulthera australia
• breast macrolane injections
• breast injections macrolane
• ultherapy cost
• ultherapy reviews
• cost of face ultherapy
• facial revolution
• macrolane breast enhancement sydney
• macrolane injections sydney
• skin tightening ulthera
• ulthera laser in sydney
• ulthera reviews
• ultherapy costs
• video ulthera

Because users now receive the Newsletter via email and a link back to the website, means traffic is driven to the blog. This is better for their business as readers are likely to view other information about their services and could lead to an increase in new business.

Unfortunately, the General Manager of the company left a few months ago so content has not been updated since then. However, the main Silkwood Website receives between 55% to 65% of its traffic from the blog site and this would spike significantly each time a post was created and an email sent to subscribers.

In summary, by attaching a blog to the website will increases the amount of pages and content in search engines resulting in increased traffic. Also, a great way to encourage users to frequent your website is to post your newsletter through your website, further increasing traffic.

Note: if you do not want to set up the blog on a new url you can cerate a sub-domain for the blog eg news.silkwoodmedical.com.au

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As a sales person regardless of whether you’re selling real estate or real estate websites, a pivotal point in your success is justifying to a client why the service, product or asset is worth the investment outlay. In real estate web development this can be a difficult task, especially if the client sees very little value in the web. However, this is now become a whole lot more easier thanks to a service offered by a company called The Ad Network.

The Ad Network is a specialist digital agency which focuses in real estate advertising representation. They’re basically the middle person between advertisers (who wish to market their products and services) and website owners (who’s audience is the advertiser’s target). The Ad Network perform all of the leg work in finding an advertiser who matches your website profile, looks after the contracts and the relationship, serves the ads on your website and then provides you with a quarterly cheque for the advertising revenue your site has made.

From a recent press release:

“The Ad Network represents Australia’s biggest Real Estate Agents, including Raine & Horne, Century 21, First National, Richardson & Wrench and Laing + Simmons with exclusive advertising rights. They have also established themselves as Australia’s leading real estate industry network, working with a variety of partner sites within the real estate industry including Myhome, Rentfind, Homeloanhints and the Real Estate Institute of NSW.”

You might wonder how this links in to your own real estate agency website given you are not operating a head office website. In recent times, The Ad Network has seen a strong demand for targeted local area marketing, where advertisers are looking to promote their goods and services to a specific audience in a particular geographic area. In an industry first The Ad Network placed ads on an individual office website Richardson & Wrench Mosman (here Sales Results and Property Page along with their sales and news alerts). These ads were negotiated independently from the R&W network and relate solely to Richardson & Wrench Mosman with the reported advertising fee being 5 figures each month.

This is quite a significant return for RWM given the average website outlay is in the thousands not tens of thousands. Obviously, the normal real estate agent website would initially not attract this type of advertising revenue but over time through building up a readership and audience it is possible. Basically, the more people that come to your website, the more revenue you can potentially make.

If you’d like to find out whether your website is suitable for advertising, you can contact Rowena Gupta at The Ad Network Rowena@theadnetwork.com.au.

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For new subscribers to Business2 – here are the previous stages.

Diagnosing your online position (warts and all) – Stage One

Constructing your perfect online real estate media platform – Stage Two

Without a doubt from my experiences real estate agents have little to no – understanding about what exactly defines an online business. Today, they remain a tangled online entity boasting a website with very little traffic and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – the lights are on and nobody is home. Direct online communications are next to non – existent simply because they are reliant on consumers finding them, as against actually delivering then driving online customer communications. Easy to fix so long as you are prepared to lock – up this online market.

Not only are you providing purchasers the best online service – more importantly offering vendors a stand-out real estate media platform. One that you created and paid for (I say this because real estate agents struggle using their own monies to invest in technology) hopefully your online platform model of choice will now  exceed your competitors too! Stop following the market – time to lead it.

Allow me to elaborate on that –  have you read – “Digital Marketing – Strategies for Online Success”? A great and easy read by Godfrey Parkin – a must for your online library (it’s now in mine).

“There is little point in building a website or fine – tuning your e -marketing tactics unless your strategy is right in the first place. To build a competitive strategy to capture the loyalty of your online consumers requires re – thinking your vision for your business from the ground up. It also requires an intimate understanding of what this online environment is all about, from the perspective of your business, from your competitors’ point of view, and particularly in the eyes of your target customers as individuals. Without those insights, you cannot begin to put together a digital strategy that has any hope of succeeding.”

So let’s best sum up where your real estate agency presently sits.

“The answer is that most businesses have an increasingly fuzzy vision of what their future should be, so their tendency is to clutch tightly to the past. As the world around them changes faster and faster, the future becomes even more blurred and uncertain. Without a bright light to head toward, they feel safer not to move away from their fundamentals and put their efforts into shoring up their defences. Those companies that do stumble forward usually head in the direction that they have always followed, tactically groping their way through fog, turning to dodge obstacles and grasping at opportunities reactively as they fly by. Without a vision, they have no idea where they are headed. Without a vision, they cannot put together an effective strategy.” Sound familiar?

“So why, are the brilliant examples of how it should be done so few and far between?” I’m not suggesting that our online strategy is such an example – rather this is what we do – with success.

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We have five non – negotiable online services that we adhere to on a daily basis. It is imperative that your online platform must strive to deliver so that you can claim this all very important point of difference over your competitors.

1. The largest online database within your demographic area – be proud that your online media platform connects to more buyers and vendors. Our proof is that we display on our homepage our subscriber sales to our online business which presently sits at $952,234,220.

2. Without using Google AdWords – use intelligent Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) methods where your agency appears at number one position organically on all Google keyword searches within your demographic areas.

3. Write a weekly e – newsletter, send out daily email alerts, provide weekly data on the sales that have been recorded within your demographic area. Each week send out your upcoming open for inspection lists. Provide subscribers the ability to choose exactly which online communication they want to receive. Keep branding your business online.

4. Get a blog going – move with the times. Each comment adds another page to your website as well as on Google which drives your SEO. TAG keywords that appear within your e – newsletter as we try to add at least – 100 new pages to our website on a weekly basis. When you sell or lease a property keep the link live as the more live links on a website the greater SEO. We are over 3,000 pages and rapidly chasing down 4,000 pages.

5. Be relevant – not irrelevant. Use technologies don’t refuse it. Religiously translate your enquiries and open for inspection lists to connect to your online model. There will come a time (and it is happening now) where vendors and purchasers are restricting online communications from agents – where research has identified no more than five (three is the average) and that includes property portals.

When a successful online agency advises a vendor let’s launch an online campaign with a two week marketing strategy before having to commit to a much more expensive print campaign – guess who will win every time?

As Godfrey Parkin said“there’s a very simple, powerful, burning light that all of us need to keep in focus: properly used, the internet frees customers and marketers from the constraints of time and space, which in turn unleashes personal communication and experience – sharing on a scale unprecedented in history.”

Our online communications are very up close and personal – how are yours? When you start digging at your online foundations make sure you use a developer that really knows what they are doing they are few and far between.

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Your agency’s blog or news section plays a significant part in any effective online marketing strategy. If your agency website doesn’t include one then you’ll find it hard to compete with your competitors who actively use one.

In summary the key benefits of including a blog or news section in your website are:

Fresh Content: Most real estate websites include pages with static or dynamic content. Static content are those pages where information is not regularly updated and would include about us, team profiles, how to sell etc. Dynamic content pages are those where the page content is continually updated like the property page or a blog page. By including a blog and publishing an article once a quarter, month or week adds more dynamic content to your website. This is great way to show users you’re keeping your website up-to-date with fresh content. More importantly though, search engines look for fresh content when they’re crawling your site and this will push up your search engine ranking.

Extra Website Pages: When you create a post/news article using a blogging Content Management System (CMS) the title of the blog creates a page in your website (eg. look in the browser url for this page). You then can add tags to the post which are key words used throughout your article. All of these keywords create more pages in your blog and some of the content from the post/news article will be added to the pages created. So for the article you’re reading now you can see the pages created in the blog (or added to) below:

• http://www.business2.com.au/2010/05/the-importance-of-your-real-estate-blog
• http://www.business2.com.au/tag/build-rapport/
• http://www.business2.com.au/tag/database-building-tool/
• http://www.business2.com.au/tag/extra-website-pages/
• http://www.business2.com.au/tag/generate-back-links/
• http://www.business2.com.au/tag/real-estate-backlinks/
• http://www.business2.com.au/tag/real-estate-blog/ (added content to this page which already existed)
• http://www.business2.com.au/tag/real-estate-news/
• http://www.business2.com.au/tag/real-estate-website/
• http://www.business2.com.au/category/social-networking/ (added content to this page which already existed)
• http://www.business2.com.au/category/real-estate-agents/agent-websites/ (added content to this page which already existed)
• http://www.business2.com.au/category/real-estate-agents/smart-marketing/ (added content to this page which already existed)

What’s so important about creating pages? All pages are added to the sitemap and sent to search engines. The more pages you have indexed with search engines the higher the possibility key words entered by users are picked up in your pages, resulting in your site appearing higher in natural search results.

Database Building Tool: If your blog includes useful information which users enjoy reading then they will subscribe to the blog. When a user subscribes that is one more user automatically added to your database. When you publish an article/post through your blog an email alert will be sent to subscribed users. They will click through to your website to view the article and hopefully they leave a reply or look at your current listings or service you offer.

Generate Back-links: Back links from highly ranked 3rd party websites are one of the key determinants search engines use to calculate your page rank. It is often said that “content is king”. If you have relevant, useful and informative content throughout your website then users will link back to your site from their own website or from other blogs they comment in. B2 is a perfect example of this. Due to the great discussions across a range of interesting topics many users place links on 3rd party websites back to pages with relevant content on B2. Many 3rd party websites also link back to B2 as a source for online real estate technology news.

Build Rapport – Many agents spend countless hours in the local community building their brand and promoting their name. You can now do this online through social networks and your blog. Through your blog you can target potential vendors by discussing topics which relate to them. It could be to do with the latest sales data in your area, remodelling a home, preparing it for sale, or non real estate topics which relate well with the demographics of vendors/buyers in your community. Just because you’re a real estate company doesn’t mean your blog must only contain real estate topics.

Automatic Updates with Social Networks – One of the biggest issues of social networking is finding the time to manage all of your social accounts. By having a blog and through the wonders of RSS, posting content on your social networks is now a lot easier. All articles/posts which appear in your blog can also automatically appear in your social networking accounts.

These are the major reasons I recommend to clients why they should include a blog. I plan to follow this post up with a real example of a website which was built without a blog (and still currently exists) and how it now has integrated a WordPress blog which drives more and more traffic to the original website.

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Stage Two – (for those who missed Stage One)

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A common theme within the real estate industry is when an agent speaks with a vendor who just completed a new home where they always say “we would do many things different with our next home” – the same too applies with agent websites.

Agents struggle to upgrade their own websites yet they boast the latest mobile phone technologies. Telephones are not the solution for generating market activity enquiries. Unless your online media platform is switched on and intelligently activated those telephone enquiries will diminish. In this new century agents/agencies are judged on what their respective online platform delivers where more importantly this involves the businesses driving the communication not vice versa. How many names, telephone numbers, email addresses do you presently have in “your” electronic database?

“You can run – but you can’t hide.” Don’t hide rather start seeking, delivering and then exceeding your online expectations. Move your business to the future given online technologies with aligned marketing strategies are moving at such a frenetic pace that even the most savvy of online real estate businesses are struggling to keep – up. The savvy real estate businesses are the first point of contact for new listings to prospective purchasers which are delivered via an email alert – your personal viewing invitation. Invite the call and invoke – The Law of Reciprocity.

We launched our online media platform back on September 15, 2000. Call it what you want just that at the end of the day we were actually chasing something that was yet to be recognised nor properly discovered for that matter. Five years later, Google entered the online world and the rest is history where today, it’s all about climbing that Google search engine optimisation (SEO) ladder. For all your individual demographic markets one has to explore so that you can then fast track your online SEO position. Just like market positions which are all about growing (not declining) so in which direction is your online strategy headed – better still, do you actually have one?

In life, we are all consumers where not a single day goes by that we don’t buy product(s). When you are buying something you are drawn to product presentation. Change hats – as a real estate agent ask yourself how you are presenting and communicating your properties on your real estate media platform. Are you tracking your online traffic on a daily and weekly basis – your property website as compared to the paid portals? Don’t rely on external forces rather concentrate on your internal deliveries to consumers. When you get the mix right your website must be the (primary) source and the property portals (back – up) secondary for your online communications. Drive your business not others that you invest with. Your online message to consumers has to be your number one priority.
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Online guarantees a market – print suggests a circulation market. Just because you buy a newspaper does not suggest that you want to buy a property – the smartest online real estate agencies work from within not without. I take Unique Browsers (UB’s) well over circulation figures any day – given that UB’s are consumer activated who specifically go to your website in search of information. When consumers are not chasing your website then something is alarmingly amiss?

With Stage 2 – I want to focus on the four key ingredients that I believe assure you of the perfect building process for your online media platform. Much like building a home these four points are what I consider the “bricks and mortar”. You need to build on your foundations first.

• 1. Technology
• 2. Database
• 3. Communication
• 4. Future

All four are actually intertwined although the key processes are the identification, application and integration is to ensure that you are applying best practice for your real estate media platform. When the right technology is applied you can effectively contact your database and communicate your business activity online to your key demographic markets.

TECHNOLOGY

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One word keeps resonating – WordPress which launched to the public on November 2005 a state – of – the – art publishing platform that is free. When I look at the leading websites globally they are all using WordPress. We have been running WordPress for just over twelve months now – and I am one of their greatest fans – the perfect online publisher. WordPress also, provides a fantastic database function that administers our daily database email alerts and also, the flight centre for our subscriber weekly newsletter.

In conjunction with WordPress we run Agentpoint which manages our website individual property presentations for all our listings (the back-end). The dashboard (control centre) required absolutely no training for our staff – a vital ingredient for business owners that struggle to understand online. The transition period to a smart online business must apply the Kiss Theory: Keep it Simple Stupid. If you understand it – you use it. If you don’t understand it you don’t use it!

DATABASE

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The Achilles heel for most real estate businesses – agents own vendors not buyers. If a business is running multiple databases it is terminally ill, where in all probability no one is singing from the one hymn book. Your business is simply a one agency platform that is collectively united or a divorced communication process. United we stand – divided your business will fall. The leading real estate online businesses are running the one (and only) database platform.

COMMUNICATION

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Remember the Telstra advertisement “Why didn’t you call?” Verbal communication is important – email alerts supersede memory loss provided you are managing your database correctly. Database entry = communication. For the cost of a postage stamp (not including an envelope) you can send out thousands of email alerts. Calibrate your business so that you can communicate with your online subscribers. Activate don’t detonate your online communication platform.

FUTURE

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When was the last time you used the White Pages (print edition) to look up a telephone number? Consumers use search engines for over ninety per cent (and growing daily) of their respective enquiries. We still use print with online where the global financial crisis offered an amazing Litmus Test – that being significant declines in vendor paid advertising (VPA). As a consequence we moved our business to online – (refer points 1, 2 and 3) and outperformed all of our competitors ($63,000,000 – June 2009 month sales.)

Which takes me to point 4 – you can’t expect to remain relevant unless you embrace, adapt and activate your real estate media platform.

Online is a magnificent tool – just you have to work on it. We all know what happens when the tools (of trade) go down – your competitors build something bigger and better. Otherwise known (as work in progress) where online today, is very progressive, aggressive and obsessive. Just look at what Google did to Microsoft (whom had many years start on them).

Sit back – take three breathes, and design your perfect online strategy for 2010 and beyond.

All I ask is that where is your online business today – not tomorrow? Today, it happens and tomorrow it follows. (Hmm, I should claim that quote.)

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