Why, then in Australia (and everywhere else for that matter) do so many real estate agencies struggle with the basic concepts of intelligent online activation strategies?

In this four- part series I will walk agents through our online platform strategies identifying from where we started to where we are today. The good news is that (Stage 1) won’t cost you anything where, more importantly this series is aimed at providing you with the guidance and tips that hopefully, will assist you in building your very own dynamic online consumer platform.

Otherwise known as your real estate point of difference – which is based more about, what you are missing in the online world and why, your competitors (may) have gained poll position in your market place. This four part series will address:-

Stage 1 -Diagnosing your online position (warts and all)

Stage 2 – Constructing your perfect online real estate media platform

Stage 3 – Lock –up stage and moving into your online business

Stage 4 – Growing awareness, acceptability and acknowledgment

This is much like when you go to a personal trainer and they assess you by way of that fitness test (otherwise known as the starting point). Remember it is not about where you start – rather where you finish. Believe it or not, this is where the fun begins as you are (hopefully now) about to self test your online business.

Let’s get started.

Open up Website Grader and enter your URL (ie www.yourwebsite.com.au) for analysis to get your grade. Test your competitors websites also, then  print out your reports so that you can identify exactly what you need to do to improve your website and score. This is a brilliant tool where we utilise this report and include it in our property submissions to potential vendors. The vast majority of real estate websites are in sleep mode – I’ll show you why!

Note: vendors are looking for an agency that leads the market as against those that follow. Online tracking can’t be forged as you have to earn your position where your competitors take it for granted based on the assumption that vendors don’t understand online machinations. It is very easy for a savvy online real estate agency to reveal your online weakness and when they do it is costly.

A website does not need to be a Ferrari rather a Ute as it should be working around the clock 24 hours a day/ 7 days a week – maximising your online position (so long as you continue to add content – when you reward Google they reciprocate). Each and every time somebody views (unique visitor) your website Google counts this and improves your ranking on their search engines.

Simply put: this is all about driving your online traffic and accelerating your Google ranking.

Open up Page Checker which allows you to ascertain your Google page ranking (enter your URL to receive your ranking). Rankings are from 1 to 10 (when you get to 10 you have mastered the Universe and online) where even SMH and NEWS get 8/10.  Our score is 4/10 which is pretty good for an individual website – we are pushing hard to get our score to 5 ( all that is required is adding more and more relevant pages to your website and getting more and more websites of consequence to link to you).

Prior to the Internet agents would spend vast amounts of money advertising in the Yellow Pages. These days’ vendors and purchasers use keyword searches on the search engines like Google. So open up Google and assess your online position.

Type in the suburb(s) that you specialise in (one at a time) and note on what page your business appears on the directory. Also, note which agencies appear before your business because now you are going to catch and pass them by organically growing your online business.

Next in Google, type into the search (your suburb) then the words “real estate” and again see on what page you appear. Again, make a note of where competitors appear. Also, do your suburb(s) typing in “real estate agents”. Keep taking notes so that you can monitor your progress where in time your goal is to appear on page one of each and every search demographic.

Again in Google, you need to see how many pages from your website that Google has captured so in the search bar type. Site: (your website) and count the number of pages recorded. Then do the same with your competitors to see how many SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) pages they have recorded. The greater the number pages your business has the higher your Google ranking.

Your goal overtime will be to focus on driving your online business ahead of your competitors – we have. In my opinion, you need to be managing and operating your own website as against, a corporate Head Office website that grabs all your SEO – after all you own the business so maximise your time on the www. Thanks to you they also grab fantastic third party revenues from your listings.

This series is all about building and gaining a greater understanding about how to improve, drive and benefit from making online your agencies point of difference.

Your homework is to search again in Google – How does Google work? As well as study your HubSpot’s Website Grader Report and make sure you read the “Learn More” advice.

There is a strong possibility that your competitors are reading this article too. Spend some time researching and planning your perfect website. What do you want?  More importantly, what are YOU prepared to do to make it better? Business models only change when you do!

Last, but not least – have a look at your website and count the number of pages on it. Homepage, properties for sale, properties for rent, agent profiles, past sales, about us and contact us etc. Our website has just over 2,500 pages on Google.

This is where it gets interesting as most agent websites have around 50 to 150 pages which explains why they appear “down the back of the bus” on Google searches. Average that out at 100 pages/per agency website. Past sales/rentals are a classic example – keep them alive simply because owners search their property addresses and guess who you want them to see first.

We add 100 pages of content nearly every week to our website (Stage 2). Personal trainers teach you how to lose weight and website trainers teach your online business how to add your website weight on that Google Monster.

Have fun with your online position – back soon with Stage 2.
Cheers

^__^

Meet reporter John Brinkwater, Motoring Expert, Religious Affairs Reporter, Political Correspondent, Pet Expert and Love Guru.

How funny it is that Rupert and the newspaper industry will now turn to the same journalistic stocks and plead with them to save their companies. We will now see the newspaper industry invest in generations of reporters- apparently giving you stories you will want to pay for – I just love the irony of it all.

Rupert can do it!

If the idea is to simply provide the same articles online as you find in the printed version it will fail and Rupert knows this, the online version has to be so much more than just a newspaper, it has to be a an extension of the newspaper and the audience that newspapers serves, it has to be a digital world that involves its readers so much more.

Here are some things that the online version will need to be if it is to succeed.

Rockstars
Journalists will now become Rockstars, meet Miranda Devine and Peter FitzSimons, two journalists with strong opinions, loyal followers and equally loyal antagonists. People read articles from these journalists because they either want to believe them or want to disagree.

Today, they write articles for the Sydney Morning Herald, tomorrow they will be thrust into a new limelight, they will have their own Rockstar page, you will be able to see all of their articles and even have them read to you, you will be able to see them give video responses to some of the readers letters and every so often they will be online to chat to a group and discuss the days article.

Beat Journalists
We will also see the return of the beat journalist, the gritty no hold barred reporters that infiltrate the seedy side of town, those that provide a social commentary on the streets we live in. We will see new stories that go deeper into our political spectrum and spit in the face of any reference to any word ending in ‘gate’. We will see editors screaming at them to finish the story or come up with something quickly (like in every movie depicting a journalist) and we will see real news items ‘breaking’ rather than some petty rubbish at an Iguana cafe.

Forums
We will see real forums like http://fora.tv/ and real talks like the ones found at www.ted.com. A hot news topic of the day could end in a weekly forum at SMH’s offices, beamed online to a participating audience. We are not talking about International happenings we are taking about real local issues. Whether it be about building developments, education, social services, sport, religion, health or politics, people are interested in forums about local issues.

Talks are a different thing, however there are brilliant people every single week jetting into Sydney, Melbourne etc that we would want to listen to like Christopher Hitchens or Britney Spears, who of course, in a world first could ‘lip sync’ a speech!

Immerse your audience
I disagree with Miranda Devine about a lot of things, I also agree with her some things, although I would say I am more passionate about the things I disagree on (I think we all are – you never see people marching with signs ‘I am pretty happy about public transport). I have even written to her (Miranda) once or twice explaining why I disagree with her.

But I want a website where I can voice my opinion, no mater how wrong I might be. I also want to create my own little world that others would explore, I might wish to become a little bit of a journalist Rockstar myself. I can chose any article to respond to from my ‘Dashboard’, I can write it, create a video response and even an audio response. I might even want to become a reporter myself and give the option for advertisers to advertise on my page on SMH as it becomes more and more popular and share in the revenues with the newspaper. When I join, I choose my areas of interest ranked 1 – 10 and my page rebuilds giving me the information , news, videos, forums, goods and services that match my interests. I can write, buy, sell, promote anything from this page!

Devices
All of this should be available on any device I choose, desktop, mobile or on the move with any one of the tablet devices (Kindle) we will see hitting the streets in the next few years.

Advertising
The advertising in online newspapers has to get smarter and get local. Newspapers currently rely on big advertisers and this is just dumb and is one of the major reasons they are hurting.

If I am sitting at my desk in Bondi, the advertising on the page for the most part should be local. If I am reading the Age Newspaper on my Kindle passing through Footscray the advertising should be about the area I am in. If it is around dinner time the advertising should be about restaurants, pubs, live music, theatre etc. It should also be about my tastes, I would be happy to provide non deep personal details to get what I want.

If newspapers can build a smarter platform for advertisers they can engage advertisers to the local level, opening up billions of dollars of extra revenue. It also has to be built to work for the advertiser, it has to be built around set micro payments and it has to be 100% automated.

I should be able to log on as a Mosman Realtor and see an article about homes in Mosman and click a button to place an ad on that page for anyone reading it within certain suburbs and certain demographics. It should only cost tens of dollars per day!

Mashups
Open your newspapers up, open your databases, let the development world come in and play and you will open up so many ideas at the base. It absolutely amazes me how scared and dumb these organisations are. You only have to look around the web to see how much innovation comes from mashups.

Ideas Vault
Finally, here is the all important ingredient. Invest in ideas. Incumbent media companies have got themselves in so much financial trouble because they thought they could simply buy ideas. They have to set up teams within their organisations that only answer to the board. This small team of 10 programmers, 2 designers and one manager would just build stuff, anything, they would be allowed access to any information and would just be an ideas vault. Some things would make it and some wouldn’t but by investment a few million each year in this team, they can avid catastrophically costly purchases of the past.

If the online newspaper is to successfully move to a paid for subscription it has to be so much more than just a newspaper. I think it can be done, bit I don’t know if the current leaders of big media are smart enough to do it.

I have been spending the last few weeks researching my second article on ‘newspapers and the online world‘ but will not release this until next week now, as this issue deserves an article on its own. Lets have a little look at what this is all about.

The Murdoch Aproach
On a cool August night at the Edinburgh TV festival James Murdoch launched a blistering attack on the BBC, describing their ambitions as “chilling” and accused them of mounting a “land grab” in a media market that has been decimated by the US recession and downturn in classifieds and revenue.

James basically thinks that the BBC should be scrapped, or at least held to account and its role diminished. In the UK the BBC is huge and is probably the most popular network in the country as it spews out Television, Radio classics with gay abandon. It also is the voice of the news across the country. Each taxpayer in the UK pays about 180 pounds a year to fund the BBC and from facts and figures it very patriotic about the BBC, much as we would be here in Australia.

Rupert on the other hand wants Google to pay a fee for any pages of content indexed not only on its news site but also on its news.google.com.au website and has also sounded a warning to Yahoo, MSN and other news aggregators. Maybe MSN and Yahoo will come running as they are being left behind by Google, but for the majority of users on the Internet and the majority of articles and Tweets, News Ltd has few friends.

This attack actually shows how little Rupert actually understands about the Internet and is quite embarrassing for him.

“The philistine phase of the digital age is almost over,” he said. “The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid-for content, it will be the content creators, the people in this hall, who will pay the ultimate price, and the content kleptomaniacs will triumph.” Rupert Murdoch said.

Fast Company’s Kit Eaton has a great little article that throws a pretty decent punch into the loins of Ruperts argument.

Despite Murdoch’s rants about paid content, it’s widely known that the subscription pay walls at his own Wall Street Journal site are easily circumvented if you search for the headline…using Google.

And Google broadcasts (for all to see) methods by which you can prevent its crawler bots indexing your page–hence keeping its link off Google’s indexed searches, and (in Murdoch’s mind) keeping Google’s thieving hands off his lovely expensively-created news content.

Murdoch’s newspaper’s Web page code doesn’t block Google’s robot.

Rupert hopes that every newspaper will follow his lead and start charging for content – in effect making it harder for the public to get to the news unless they pay for it, but it cannot do this if the BBC and ABC spit it out for free.

Rupert’s problem is – he has not got too many friends in his own market and one thing is for sure – if there is a new way, they will not be jumping on a New Ltd owned solution anytime soon.

Senate Hearings
How strange that the Liberal Party are already moving into the commercial corner with Senator Ian McDonald (LNP) questioning Mark Scott on remuneration for ABC TV personalities. Basically Ian McDonald thinks that all ABC should be public, after all, the public do find it!

I can tell you my position on this and that is I agree 100% with Senator McDonald. I am of the opinion that anytime a single cent of the public’s money is spent it should be available online and we should know exactly where it is being spent. If you want to make money from the public, this is the price you pay for the generosity of the public purse.

However Senator McDonald and other politicians should take notice, how about we extend this to local, state and federal government deals? Yes, no more commercial in confidence, secret public/private deals behind close doors. If you use our money or profit from it in any way, by law, we should know where every last cent of it goes, at the time a deal is inked!

Videos

James Murdoch Speech

Lateline
ABC news

Articles

Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content. So Why Doesn’t He Stop Them?
Scott to hit back on criticism of ABC’s internet space
Google News Search
List of News Aggregator Websites and Software

Over to you

How many of us would give up the ABC News, Radio or Television to let the commercial networks run the show? Would we see the same level of quality?

In case you have not read my some previous articles about current day media moguls, I will repeat it here for you. Having a market share or a semi monopoly is a privilege not a right and this privilege/right is not exclusive, if you cannot adapt simply move on!

Rant One – Public Broadcasting

Rupert rolled out his son James on centre stage to deliver the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival and launched into the BBC with an argument whose motives were was so transparent that the majority of comment outside his own networks were a collective ‘rolling of the eyes’ .

The BBC in the UK and the ABC in Australia are pretty much the only news sources (aside from perhaps SBS) that are free from commercial indulgences and interference, and for the majority of the populations of both countries, an indispensable part of our lives.

James other argument was that the private sector left to their own devices would be more innovative as the BBC. Murdoch added that the BBC stifled innovation as it made it difficult for the private sector to compete.

Would we have seen classics such as Faulty Towers, Black Adder, Top Gear, Chaser, Frontline, Summer Heights High, Kath & Kim without public broadcasting?

I am sure you ca think of dozens more classics that have come from the BBC/ABC over the years. I also consider the news and current affairs on these networks so far above that of the commercial networks that for the past few years on Australia, I rarely ever watched a commercial station – if not for sports!

James also attacked the news reporting of these networks with “Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the internet. Yet it is essential for the future of independent journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it,” he said.

State Sponsored? You lost me there James.

In my opinion the attack is the first in a few deliberate stages and is aimed at the public perception of these organisations.

However, Rupert and James are seriously deluded if they think this attack will have any effect on public perception. The BBC in the UK costs the taxpayer around $140 pound per annum and I am sure the Australian taxpayer is slugged even less per person. Now if you look at local content in bothy countries, it is almost exclusively provided by these networks.

Rant Two – News Aggregators

Rupert has come out and continued his attack on the search engines and news aggregators, telling them the time has come to pay for News Ltd’s content. This shows a complete lack of understanding of how actual search engines and news aggregator sites work. Here is a little primer for Rupert.

Lesson- Search Engine/News Aggregator Primer

Rupert, please sit down and listen to me, no not in my chair, on the little one to the right of you. That’s right the one that is the same color as the Fire Engines.

Once upon a time there was a web page, and on that web page there were little snippets of code called ‘meta-tags’. These ‘meta-tags’ carried snippets of content to make it easier for search engines to find a page. Most programmers gave the page a ‘title’ and a ‘description’ and clever software like www.wordpress.org actually automate that process.

The really clever people with coke bottle glasses at search engines and news aggregator websites created little things that we called ‘crawler bots’ that crawled around and around the Interweb to grab the billions of new or updated articles/pages and indexed them on their sites and allows this content to be found by the millions of users each day.

If your content got selected by the user they clicked on the link and they got to your website and read that article or page. Your website had advertising on it and you made lots of money from those advertisers. The more popular your website got, the more money you made. It was like magic!

What if I don’t want to play?

Now Rupert, this is where all the incredibly gifted programmers out there on the Interweb came in. If you did not want your content indexed in search engines or on news aggregator companies like Google had a standard method by which you could prevent the ‘crawler bots’ from indexing your sites content. This way of you were not happy, you didn’t have to have your content indexed.

Now go out and play with all of the other media moguls in the pay tv tent.

Overarching Strategy

Rupert and friends perfect world would see no free public news, all bloggers discredited and everyone forced into paying for everything we read. Again after more than a digital decade we have a leader of one of the most successful companies in the world bereft of any idea on how to make the same kind of money in an almost exclusive online world.

Rupert, I like you mate, you have built one of the most successful organisations of the 20th century and for that you are in an elite minority, you have success and wealth beyond any of our wildest dreams but if bullying and protectionism is the only answer you have, then please step aside and let the next generation of digital companies take over.

Later this week I have the first of a two part series on Newspapers and how they can be saved.

Much has been written about newspapers and their demise. We have all read stories of how newspapers are bleeding all over the world and in cases like the Los Angeles Times (and The Chicago Tribune) filing for bankruptcy in the United States, not to mention that our own traditionally profitable newspapers are slowly losing profits and revenues.

Change
However, Rupert Murdoch had gone on the offensive and has spoken of the possibility of newspapers charging for access to online content, he has also flagged the possibility that newspapers could be delivered only in digital within 10 years.

In the last few weeks the heavyweights of the newsprint world gathered in Chicago to come together to launch a group offensive against free content.

Today newspapers only push a certain amount of information directly to their websites and hold back on unique investigative information and journalism until after it has appeared in the print versions, I can understand this, but it is not sustainable.

Newspapers have to return to their roots to survive, they have to understand that the reason the majority of people read their content, is because it is unique not because we want to hear a, (we can get that anywhere).

Organisations like Fairfax and News Ltd over the past 20 years have invested more in sales and marketing and less in investigative journalism and this will end with the digital newspaper revolution.

Skepticism
Newspapers believe people will pay for this content but I am skeptical for a number of reasons. The first being that newspapers have invested less and less over the years in investigative journalism and more and more in marketing and sales. Secondly the classifieds have been bleeding to death because online just kills it in so many ways (content, days on market, accessability). This has been one of many factors in the demise of print and many newspapers have just resorted to tacky journalism trying to reach a younger audience whilst alienating their base.

Light
However, there is some light at the end of the tunnel. The Kindle device has proven that even an ugly little black and white wireless reading device can be popular and profitable. All it needs is for a company to enhance this offering and take it to another level (cue Apple and its touted color reader) and we have something that all newspapers need – a vibrant competitive wireless newsreader market.

Real Estate
This is your digital newspapers, so digital newspapers will allow agents to deliver targeted listings with branding, digital newspapers will give you a canvass to work with and allow you to brand your agency around your listings (you hope), unlike traditional newspapers – digital newspapers will allow you to carry a wealth of property information and local sales data alongside those listings.

Subscriptions
So why would we pay for this? You still buy magazines don’t you? Wireless Readers will demolish the gossip/celebrity magazine industry but it will revive the newspaper/unique content industry because we WILL pay for this – but only to a level.

Wireless Readers will be thin, light, color and black and white and have 6 – 10 hours battery life, they will serve a number of purposes but digital newspapers/ebooks, email, web will be the primary market.

The price? $9 a month? That’s about the money, it is all about volume – and newspapers will actually see a revival and in the cases of companies with quality journalists, a good news reputation and content like Fairfax (Sydney Morning Herald – The Age) will thrive, whereas papers like the Telegraph and the Herald Sun will stick to the print versions longer and die a slow death (blue collar)

Fairfax will eat News Limited in Australia for breakfast for another reason, classifieds. News Limited pretty much owns the tacky side of print in Australia and only has one newspaper it can be editorially proud of, The Australian. As for online classifieds, it has realestate.com.au and even that has a limited shelf life given its damaged reputation amongst the industry and agents.

Summing Up
The future of digital newspapers will be all about journalism and content as we can get all the other stuff elsewhere. It has to be about what made it successful in the first place- quality journalism – quality investigations, matched with quality content.

Throw in online classifieds and a brilliant interface and you have a winner. I pay for content today (software design website) , but they only own me only as long as the provide quality unique content ($7 per month).

So sit back and enjoy your newspaper with your coffee because it is nearing its end. No? You might think this, but just imagine if print newspapers lost just 10% of its readers to digital, now think about the fact they are already bleeding $ on print as of todays readership. Now you see it

It may take 5 – 7 years but it is coming! Your thoughts?