Start By making the Video

we use a Creative Vado 3rd generation pocket cam to record interviews with real estate agents. We simply ask for their best real estate tip. Short and to the point, since most online video watchers want videos that are less then three minutes in length.

If you are going to make a how to video I would suggest outlining your video using Powerpoint, then using slideshare.com to syndicate your slideshow.

Once you make the video you should add your company branding. To do this you will need to use some video editing software that allows you to layer graphics on top of your video.We use Sony Vegas Pro for our video editing.

Upload your video to websites

After the video is made, you need to upload to video websites and then syndicate the video to your social networks and personal websites.

We start by uploading to Youtube. the reason is, we output the video from our video editor (Sony Vegas) in .wmv format. That seems to give us the best results. Unfortunately, tubemogul.com seems to have a bug with .wmv files and we cannot upload using them YET.

After we upload to Youtube, we edit the title, description, tags and geotags.

Then we download the MP4 file format of the video. Youtube will allow you download two videos per hour. I found a firefox extension that allows you to download any video in mp4 format. I have used it and found a bug when downloading high-def videos, but standard format it works fine. In this case, I would use the 2 video per hour method and not the plugin.

Once you have the mp4 format, you can upload to tubemogul.com. Tubemogul will syndicate your video to many websites, but it seems like there are losing many of their providers. You can really only upload to 4 websites without trying to get an upgraded account. Better then nothing I guess. We also use tubemogul to post a tweet to our twitter account when the video has been posted.

There are a couple websites that we syndicate to manually. Howcast.com and Wellcomemat.com

Wellcomemat.com will also automatically post to our posterous.com account.

then we post the video to our Facebook fan page, our blog, our website video section and our Activerain blog account.

If you are counting that is 12 websites. 12 websites that brand us, 12 websites that have links pointing back to our business website. 12 websites that have our business profile. It might not sound like a lot, but it really is. These sites help promote us and are not irrelevant sites like digg.com, stumbledupon, reddit, etc… Those sites don’t work well for massive syndication. You might have other sites that you belong to and can syndicate your videos even more.

In summary, this takes us about 30 minutes per video, 45 if you include video editing. But you get such an impact on your efforts. Remember blogging or making videos is not the end all, your real job is after you make the content (marketing message) is to get your content in front of as many people as possible.

Before you even start making the video, you might want to read this post about and added step to get even more exposure using powerpoint

You can upload directly to Youtube, or use a service like tubemogel.com. Tubemogel lets you upload to many sites at once, saving you tons of time.

Video Basics

1. Be descriptive with your video title, description and tags. After you upload you can edit the text of the video. Make sure the title not only helps the website visitor understand what the video is about, but also make it catchy and interesting. Remember, most of the time, people will only see the title when looking for videos.I like to start all my video descriptions with my website address and I like to include links in my description. If the link is very long, use a URL shortening service like bit.ly. Make sure you format your link with the “http://” becuase Youtube automatically makes those links. Without it, it will just be text.

   Tags are simple keywords that you want to use to help people find your video. Separate the tags with a comma and don’t worry about quotes around 2 word tags. Don’t go overboard with tags, and do spam tags, meaning use tags that do not represent the video.

2. Geotag your video. Simple and fast. While editing your video, just add your city and state to the map so if people are looking for videos in your area, you will appear.

Syndicate Your Videos

Just like blogging, or any other content creation strategy, you are not done after you make the content. You have to be proactive about getting it to people that care.

1. You need to make friends and get subscribers to your Youtube channel. In most cases this involves you making the first step and finding people that have similar channels you yours. When you find an interesting or similar channel, subscribe to it and send them a friend invite.
2. For all of your videos, link them to each other using the “post video response”. This puts a thumbnail on the video you linked to and adds a link from the linking video to the video with the response.

   Note, once you make a video response to a video, the response has to be approved. So go to you videos and click on the responses link and then approve your response video. It will not be visible until you do that. You can also set the to automatically allow video responses, but that might open up your video to spam responses from other users.

   You can also use annotations to link your videos and channels together. You can’t link to external websites.

3. There are a couple syndication tools, but I don’t recommend using them. I find it much better to spend the extra few minutes to post the video link to Twitter, Facebook, your blog and other social networks you belong to. Here is my tutorial for syndicating the videos

I have news for you, blogging and getting exposure are two different things. Kinda like working and making money. They seem like they go together, but in reality they are two totally different things.

This is a little secret that we use to get as much exposure to our content as possible.

First off, you will hear me say content a lot. Even tough 99% of our content is made by blogging, I still refer to it as content that we want to get out to our potential clients. Other forms of content is video, powerpoint presentations, email, paid content, etc… I don’t care what the content is, or how we got it (paid for VS. homemade), I want to make sure it gets out into the wild as much as possible.

This trick involves Powerpoint, video and blogging. This technique works great for “how to” blog posts or videos, because you are going to outline the information using powerpoint. Then use a tool to convert the powerpoint into a video, and then then you are going to blog about the content. Sound like a lot of work? It’s really not, especially when you think of all the exposure you’ll get.

Step 1

Outline your content using Powerpoint. If you don’t have Powerpoint, you can grab OpenOffice or use Google docs to make the presentation, then download as a ppt file. Outlining your content really comes in handy when making the video and writing the blog post because the more well organized the idea is, the faster you will be able to write the actual post.

Step 2

Use a screen recording tool like Camtasia Studio to record the Powerpoint presentation to a video. I really like Camtasia because it integrates with Powerpoint, but it can be pricey. You can also try a free tool like Camstudio. Camtasia has a nice editor that let’s you zoom and pan to highlight different sections of the screen. This handy when you want to focus on text. Camstudio has an autopan feature that will move to where the mouse is, but doesn’t work as well as Camtasia’s pan and zoom.

You don’t have to pan and zoom, but it does add a nice effect to your videos. If you are not going to use pan and zoom, you can use a free editor like Movie Maker, or AVS video editor to edit.

Step 3

Now that you have the video and the Powerpoint presentation, you need to upload them to Websites. For the video,  you can use tubemogul.com to upload to many video sites at once. I’m having trouble with tubemogul when tring to upload a .WMV file, but it seems to work fine for all other video formats.

Here is a Mashable post for 30+ online presentation websites you can upload your Powerpoint presentation to. Most are tools to make presentations but there are a few website that let you upload.

Please note that the mashable link is from 2008. many of those links are most likely gone now.  I would recommend uploading to Slideshare.net and scribd.com to start.

Step 4

Write a blog post on your website and embed the video. writing a summary for the video as the blog post content for SEO purposes.

Step 5

Tweet your blog post, add the slideshare.net presentation to your linkedin.com profile using their slideshare app. post the link to your video on facebook… You get the point, after you make content your job is not done! you have to syndicate it!

I know it sounds like a lot of work, but look how much content you made and how many websites your business profile will appear on.

Posting videos on

Even though Youtube is a widely used website, you won’t get your message to every potential client just by having your videos on Youtube. Luckily there are a few ways to get even more exposure.

We highly recommend that you also make a blog post for your new videos. When embedding your video onto your blog, you should include a simple summary about the video. No need to actually transcribe it, but you should at least tell your website readers what the video is about, just in case they are too busy to view it. Many of my blog posts are “how-to’s” and I find it very helpful to make a video that explains why I’m doing the “how-to” and then in blog post I include the detailed step by step process.

I also use the triple play content secret for even more exposure.

To embed a youtube video into your blog is simple a copy and paste job. First, make sure that your blog can handle object tags. Early versions of wordpress would not embed youtube videos without a little hacking, and you should be using a recent version of wordpress anyhow,  just for the security patches.

Go to the video that is located on Youtube. You will notice in the right sidebar there are two textboxes. One has the URL pointing to the video on Youtube and the other is the flash object. The flash object has a lot more code then you can see in the textbox. If you are trying to embed the video into a normal webpage you will probably need to use the embed textbox. If adding the video to a Wordpress blog post, you can use either the url or embed code. Watch the video above to see how to use both.

Along with weekly or monthly real estate newsletters that are filled with information, you can also set them up with simple training programs. We refer to these systems as auto-responders or drip email campaigns. Drip emails are sent out at predetermined intervals and usually have a set timeline. Drip campaigns are great because you can continue to provide real estate information while not having to spend a lot of time administering the email list.

If you give a way an E-book for all new subscribers, you will probably want to continue the same topic with your drip campaign. Set up about 8-10 emails that get sent out every couple days that continue training the new subscribers.

A good idea is to add blog posts or content to your real estate website and then use the drip email to guide people to your blog.

Most email newsletter list services will provide multiple types of email services like one shot  newsletters and drip autoresponders. They are really easy to set up and once they are running you can monitor the click throughs and email reads. you will want to optimize for better conversion rates and to get more people to take the next step and actually call you. For services, rule of thumb says that you will not get someone to use your services right away. You need to touch them a few times before they are comfortable enough with you and trust you enough to give you additional information. Therefore, make sure you are providing good information they can’t get anywhere else.

I cover many types of email solutions in this blog post

Call to action

When your website only has one specific goal, you should make that goal as enticing as possible. Don’t add a form to your website with a header like “Subscribe to my newsletter”. Sure, some people will want to subscribe, but since these are simple lead capture websites, you will need to provide a more compelling offer.

Limited time offers, are always a great way to get people to use your services.

Exclusive offers the website visitor can’t find anywhere else will pull in a lot of subscribers. If needed write an E-book about a topic you are an expert in. Then give the E-book away to all subscribers to your services. You can read more about E-books as a giveaway when I talk about email list services.

The back end of your form should be connected to a email list service provider like Aweber.com or Mailchimp.com. you can make your own form, but then you have to program a backend and do all your own email services, WHICH I NEVER RECOMMEND! Always use a email list service provider. They will provide you with simple customizable forms and all emails that come from the form will be double opted in so you know you will not get accused of spamming.

The Big Picture

The lead form really has not power behind it unless the entire page is made to support the lead capture form. The example I’m using for this lead capture form is located here.

You can see that the entire page is trying to produce one result, and that is to get the website visitor to get enough information to want to get more information from the real estate agent. Just like any e-commerce website, you are selling your services. Make your services look exceptional and you will stand out from the crowd and get more people to subscribe to your email list. Below is the header I use to really capture the attention of website visitors.

The E-book I offer in the deal was written by me and the real estate agent. We used Microsoft Word and then used free PDF software to make it into an E-book that can be easily downloaded. Since Word docs can contain viruses, it is much better to convert to PDF. We wrote the book in about a weekend and is highly motivational and provides simple investing strategies that anyone can understand. What I’m trying to say is, writing an E-book is very simple if you know what your talking about. If you blog, you can write an E-book.

A simple website will consist of a couple pages at the most. The most important page is the landing page.

The landing page is the main entry point for the website. This page should be exactly what the website visitor is looking for. For example, If the visitor found your website from Adwords, the keywords they used in the google search should match up with the keywords on the landing page. I they are searching for “Condos in San Francisco” they should land on a page that has a list of homes already displayed, not a home search form or a main page for your real estate business.

When it comes to lead generation you want them to have three options when landing on your website.

1. They simply Leave – Let them go, don’t worry about it right now. Eventually when you have some good traffic analysis you can optimize your landing pages to deliver better conversion rates. Remember, you land all the leads but you will be able to get a good amount of leads to work with.
2. They fill out your contact form and request more information from you.
3. They don’t want to work with you, yet, but they do see some valuable information on the landing page and download it. Essentially making them a lead. For more on better subscription rates see our article here.

Since these websites are very simple to make and will consists of very similar pages. You should use a website platform that allows you to make simple websites fast. Either a custom built templated system or a free software package like Wordpress.

Hopefully you already have a business plan for your online services. If you don’t you need to start one, and then run you online business like any other business. You’ll be surprised how many people think the Internet is different and that they can just put out websites and everything will fall into place. This is totally the wrong way to go about getting leads from the Internet.

You need to have a create strategy, deploy your strategy and then monitor your strategy so you know it’s working.

Since lead generation websites should be simple and effective, monitoring and optimizing the websites should be easy to. If your websites get to complex you will have a hard time figuring out where people are coming from, what they are doing on your website and where (why) they are leaving. If your website has only a couple pages and only one goal, optimization should be simple.

Using a website optimizer to test and optimize site content and design will allow you to see what is working and what isn’t. Often referred to as A/B testing. Your website should always be trying to be the best it can be. When you do an A/B test, you will learn what changes drive the most conversions. You can then either change the losing design and start over with another A/B test, or you can just use the most effective design from your first test.

Google provides a free tool to do website optimization tool and makes it really easy to find which designs and messages are providing the highest conversion rates.

For more information about website optimization, please go to the website optimization section or to get a better introduction, you can read this post

The problem is, other large companies with a lot of marketing dollars are trying to grab those same home buyers and then sell them as leads to real estate agents. They have some of the best teams working for them to make simple, effective lead generation websites and using SEO, Adwords, and other online strategies to drive traffic to their websites before they get to yours.

the good news is, the strategies for driving traffic and capturing leads is not that hard. The Internet is a closed system by which there are rules that websites have to follow. SEO (Search Engine Marketing) seems very confusing to new businesses on the Internet but in general there are only about 5 things you need to do to your website to set it up for proper SEO. Advertising and marketing are same no matter what medium you are using.

This guide will show you how to compete with the big boys and capture leads before they do. We will show you many cost saving tips and tricks that not only save you money but time also. This guide only takes a couple hours to read. By the end of the course you will be completely ready to unleash your own lead generation network.

Make a large net

• Simple websites are the best
• Effective Lead capture forms
• Email Newsletters and Drip email
• Lead Generation website optimization

Driving Traffic Via Organic Searches

• SEO basics
• It’s all about the keywords
• Buying content Vs. personally blogging
• Creating multiple copy for re0use
• Monitoring keywords
• Social networks and directories

Driving Traffic Via Paid Advertising

• Different types of advertising
• Pitfalls to look out for – Save time and money
• Tools of the trade
• How to gauge effectiveness
• Optimization for better conversion rates

Rock Solid Followup Systems

• Introduction to follow up systems
• Strategies for better subscription rates
• Advanced email lists

I totally agree that you have to stay on top of you traffic generating tasks, but there are only about 5 tasks that you need to do with your website to set it up for 100% solid SEO. Meaning, once you set up the website with this these functions, as you add content to your website, all the SEO will be handled by your website. You do not have to do anything.

That is not that same as generating traffic to your website. After you write a blog post, or add content to your website, you need to do many things so that people know you put up new content. Eventually your content will make it into the search engines, but in most cases it will take a while, and I’m pretty sure if you wait for search engine traffic to grow, your business will suffer from lack f visitors.

5 Essential Tasks For SEO success

1. Start you SEO strategy when starting the business. You do not want to start a business, build a website, then focus on SEO. When you are creating a business plan, you NEED to define your market or niche.Who are you going to sell to? Who needs your product? the more narrow your niche the easier it will be to define your SEO strategy and mainly define the keywords you are going to use to attract customers…Here is an example of a very broad target market for a real estate professional:
   “Home buyers in Oakland California” – That market is very broad and when you try to reach that market with your message it will fall on deaf ears. Here is a better target market. “First time home buyers in Oakland California that want a condo” – There are still plenty of people in that target market and it will be much easier to get your message to the buyers because of less competition.
2. Define your carrier. How are you going to get your content to your market? You can blog, make videos, podcast, etc… Each of these carriers have ways to get your content to the search engines.Try making videos for Youtube, and embedding them into your blog. Youtube videos  have  fantastic search engine placement because Google has made a video section in search results. Then, by embedding into your blog, you can double up the content and keywords in your blog post.
3. Define your message. How do you describe your products or services? make sure you use popular keywords to describe your products or services. These description are usually on static pages on your website. Since they do not get updated often, you want to make sure they have the proper keyword density.
4. Make sure your website code is well formatted. You want the Googlebot to be able to easily understand your content, therefore make sure all the header tags, title tags, and main content is defined in your code.Make sure your webpage title, header tags and meta-data is different for each webpage. If you are using a blog to update your content there are plenty of good plugins like All in One SEO to let you fine tune each page, but in general, wordpress handles most of the SEO.
5. Use images effectively. A long blog post with no pictures can not only look daunting to read, but will drive many readers away. Break up the post with pictures. Not only does the post benefit, but you can also use Google’s image search to get more traffic. Google indexes everything, so if you have video, tweets, or podcasts, there is a section for it in Google.I started making sure my images had at least a good description in the alt and title parameters of the image tag. Sometimes, if I edit the picture myself, I try to make the filename include the keywords also. Google images now account for about 15% of my website traffic.

There is not much to it. When starting make sure you define your market. Everything else will fall into place after that. If you don’t know who you are targeting, you will never now how to contact them.

Are you a real estate professional? Do you use twitter to post your real estate blog and other relevant real estate news? Then you should know about DeedStreet.

DeedStreet, using twitter as a content platform, is a social media tool that aggregates Real Estate specific tweets. How it works is simple. First, you log-in to DeedStreet with your twitter account. Then, start tagging your real estate related tweets with the caret “^” symbol.

In essence, the caret symbol is the real estate hashtag; we used the caret symbol because it reminded us of a roof of a house. Tag (or include within the tagged tweet) the keywords that you would like to dominant on DeedStreet, e.g., ^Soho, ^Phoenix, ^90210, ^Maine, ^Mortgage. You can also tag general real estate commentary with two carets in a row (^^).

Once you have logged-in to DeedStreet, it’s not necessary to come back to have your real estate tweets indexed on the site. So long as you use the caret symbol, you can post from Tweetdeck, HootSuite, twitter.com, your mobile phone or the twitter client of your choice and our system will catch the tweet. Also note that it is only necessary to tag one word in each tweet, as every word within the tagged tweet is indexed and searchable on DeedStreet.

Ok, sounds cool, but what’s the value to the real estate professional? Well, what if you could have only your real estate related tweets appear on your blog/website and not all the other stuff you tweet that may be inappropriate for consumers to see? We have a widget for that.

Simply go to the widget page and add the keyword you want to filter for (or leave the keyword field blank to filter for all your tagged tweets) and your twitter username and we will spit out a code that you can copy and paste onto your website. The example of the widget provided to the right has the keyword left blank and the username as DeedStreet:

Furthermore, DeedStreet centralizes valuable information germane to real estate for the consumer–decentralized, unorganized and unfiltered info on Twitter alone loses value quickly.  Additionally, our platform also allows agents to establish credibility in a transparent community and foster relationships with consumers across a trusted social network.

On our end, we will continually improve the site and ensure buyers and sellers can find the most relevant and useful RE tweets. We will also work hard to recognize and highlight real estate professionals who are providing valuable hyperlocal content (please see “Tempe” search on DeedStreet below).

We also intend to explore aggregating real estate content from other social networking sites (most notably Facebook) in the near future. Please check out the site and start labeling those tweets. Do not hesitate to contact me with any feedback. You can reach me on Twitter, Facebook, or email me at doug@deedstreet.com or call me on my cell phone (480) 282-2100.

About Doug Lazovick:

Originally from New York, Doug Lazovick moved to Phoenix 5 years ago to pursue his passion in Real Estate. Doug was successful in closing over $175 million in commercial RE transactions. About a year ago, the current recession brought the commercial RE business to a standstill. With newfound free time, he began reaching out to people through social media networking sites. Having the ability to reconnect with old friends and colleges, gave Doug the platform to create Deed Street.

Here is a quick tutorial I made for setting up a custom report that will show what keywords people use in the Google search engine to find my website. I make the custom report and then set up an email schedule to email me the report on a weekly basis.

This is a very simple example, but quite useful. Knowing how people find you is very important. the automatic emails will save you time by updating you every week. If you don’t see any major discrepencies, then you can just disregard the email and get back to business.

If you see that your website is not getting found in Google search, you will probably want to optimize your website for better results.

Other reports you might want to make:

• Bounce rate: how many people land on your site and then leave immediately – the lower the bounce rate the better.
• Landing pages: what are your most popular pages that people come into your website for.
• Referral sites: who is sending you traffic? This is very important if you are paying for advertsing on websites. Many webmaster will state they get a lot more traffic then they really do.
• Goals: you can set up goals in analytics that show you quickly how many people do something on your site, liek download a newsletter.

Do you use Google Analytics? let me know how you use it in the coment section below

A wordpress theme is made of a couple major sections. The header, footer, and sidebar are easily managed in wordpress themes. Most users that just blog, don’t really care about the backend of their website. Highly dynamic Wordpress themes make it easy to make visual changes without knowing HTML or PHP code. Moving the sidebar from the left side to the right side can have huge impacts on how Google and other search engine spiders see your website.

Spiders see your website differently then  we (humans) do. That is why I will often tell clients to blog for a human but tweak for a robot. This means your blog posts should be interesting and easy to read while making sure that your keywords are on topic, relevant and dense.

Googlebot, the Google spider, queries both the human readable text and the HTML from your webpages. It looks for highlighted sections and also looks for hidden tags. It’s a bad idea to hide keywords and links from humans in order for the spiders to see them… Google knows!

Search engine spiders look for main content first and foremost. You would be surprised how good the spiders are at finding the “meaning” of your blog posts, and in turn the topic of your blog.

What does Google look for in your blog post?

• The page title tags
• the meta-keywords
• the main header (H1 tags)
• the main content

Make it easy for the spiders to index your content. Google rewards websites that are built well in terms of SEO.

the most common problem with custom Wordpress themes is that the sidebars might be in the wrong place and therefore get read before your main content. This is because sidebars are placed with a CSS style called “Float”. You can set the float to either left or right, depending on where you want the sidebar.

Even if you want the sidebar on the right side of the blog (main content), the code might appear first on the page, before the main content section. If your sidebar has H1 tags in it, Googlebot might get confused as to what the main content, topic, and keywords are for that webpage.

It’s not that hard of a fix. In most cases you can just move the DIV tags to after the main content section on the Wordpress files that display blog posts, like index.php and single.php

Blockbuster movies like Avatar have a created a need for 3D televisions. Whether this technology is gimmicky or not is not irrelevant. The major television manufacturers are all moving towards 3D television by the end of 2010.

Another trend is internet ready televisions and set top boxes that will deliver Internet content like Youtube videos.

How will 3D technology impact virtual home tours?

• Do you think 3D is a gimmicky technology? Will it last?
• Will virtual home tours be more immersive?
• Is the current virtual home tour technology good enough?
• Do virtual home tours make a difference in selling a home?

I don’t really see a huge shift towards these technologies in 2010 because the cost will be very high. Not only to buy a 3d television, but the equipment to produce the 3D videos will be, for the most part, out of the consumers hands. As with all technology, prices will fall and eventually we will all be able to buy a 3D camcorder for less than $500.

Please, leave your opinion in the comments below. There will be a follow up blog post with a few reader opinions in about a week.

In order to properly optimize a website you must first know who your are targeting and what you want that target market to do on your website. Do you want them to subscribe to your newsletter, buy a product, or get more information about your business.

Remember to keep it simple. The more choices  you offer the website visitor, the harder it is to test your website. The most effective websites usually have about 3 option.

Website visitor can:

1. Buy a product or service
2. subscribe to a newsletter and blog feed
3. leave with no interaction.

These simple and effective websites are often referred to as squeeze pages, stealth sites, or satellite websites. These types of websites can be very effective for use in the real estate or mortgage industry.

Testing a website

The first step to optimizing a website is to test different theories on what will work. Colors, positioning, fonts, call to actions all get taken into account when a website owner makes choices as to what he thinks will work.

Every website is different and therefore is no set standard on what works and what doesn’t, you have to test.

You should also “Always be testing”.  A simple example would be to create two styles of newsletter subscription forms. One form is bright red, while the other is dark blue. Use Google’s website optimizer to make the forms “compete”. Test for a about 1,000 website visitors and then which ever form got more subscribers is the form you use.

Only test one section at a time. Meaning don’t test your subscriber form and website fonts at the same time. Also, only have competitions between two styles.

Monitoring a website

Using analytic software you can see where people come from, what people do and where people leave from your website. You must have some sort of analytic software in use for your website even if you don’t plan to spend a lot of time testing and tweaking.

Even after you find a winning style you can them make another style of make it compete with the winner… this is where “always be testing” comes into play.

Tweaking a website

Again, once you find your winning newsletter subscription box, tweak it a little and monitor again. Maybe tweak the fonts or the text. Your not making tweaks so that you are testing apples to oranges, you’re making tweaks to test green apples to red apples… Does that make sense?

Tools:

1. Google analytics
2. Google optimization blog (good videos and tutorials)

Google Adwords service is a good way to advertise yourself or your brokerage. They are beta testing a new “lead capture form” that fits right into the real estate and mortgage industry

This new service works in the typical sponsored ad slots that you see on the search results page at Google. The difference is, when you click on the #1 ad slot, and they are participating in the lead generation form program, you will be presented with a contact form instead of getting directed to a website. the form captures typical lead information such as phone, email, and name.

The kicker is Google gets the information, not the advertiser. The advertiser can contact the lead, but only through Google. The advertiser gets notified of the new lead and then has to call a special Google phone number with a pin number to be able to communicate with the lead.

I first mentioned this lead capture service on my blog and stated that I probably wouldn’t use it. I think there is a lot of value with the connective strings that you make from Adwords to your landing page. Even though I wouldn’t use it for personal advertising, I can definitely see some potential applications in the realm of the real estate and mortgage industry.

Of course you still have to offer a killer product. Making an ad that says “click here for the best Realtor in Texas” isn’t going to create any desire and therefore very few clicks. Google loves ads that get clicked on. The higher conversion rate, the lower the price you pay per click. Make your ads stand out, and create demand, desire, exclusivity, and urgency.

As with almost all other types on online marketing (blogging, vlogging and podding) it’s easy to make the content but hard to get it to people that care. Email is a great way to create passionate fans and keep people informed.

IDX email solutions

Most IDX solutions provide a way for potential clients to save home search criteria and then get an email sent when new homes hit the market. The website owner doesn’t have to do anything because these systems are fully automatic.

These emails will get sent out until either the buyer finds a house, unsubscribes, or marks the emails as “junk” so they get moved to the spam folder and not the inbox.

Email Newsletters

Certain industries have a higher acceptance rate with newsletter then others. Real estate and mortgage  are perfect industries to use an email newsletter. Typically, older, less tech savvy, or busy shoppers enjoy newsletters delivered to their mailboxes.

Email list subscribers should be treated as the most loyal clients. When some one subscribes to your list, they are really into you, and what you sell.

Email newsletters should be an extension of your brand and reflect your other marketing designs. It’s very easy to make a newsletter template and use every week or month (when you send out your newsletter).

When just getting started make sure you offer a double opt in subscription page, and treat your email list with respect. Keep the newsletter authentic, with messages and content that is personally written by you. pre-configured newsletters can save time, but you miss out on making real connections with your subscribers and many readers can tell if the message is canned or truly from you.

As you get more comfortable with email newsletters try creating highly targeted niche newsletters and maintaining more then one email list. The more targeted your message is, the better the response will be.

Make sure you use a service like mailchimp.com, aweber.com or constantcontact.com. These service offer better delivery rates then if you send from your personal email account. They also offer great insight with their monitoring services.

Mailchimp offer outstanding FREE services (3000 emails/month and 500 subscribers).

Email Autoresponders (Drip Systems)

Drip email can keep clients simmering with little interaction from you. Just set up 7-10 pre-written emails that get sent in a timely manner (every 1-2 days) to your list subscribers.

A good strategy is to make an exclusive training course that spans several lessons.

Again, keep is authentic. If you buy pre-made drip emails, then chances are someone else is sending out the same content.

Getting Subscribers

I will be hitting on many tips and tricks to getting more subscribers to your email lists. General rule of thumb… offer something. Offer something the reader will not get anywhere else.

Subscribe now and get my exclusive white paper on hidden foreclosure secrets!

Do you subscribe to any newsletters? please leave a comment telling the readers why or why not.

I was reading Crush it by Gary Vaynerchuk the other day and came across the authors opinion on website analytics. Basically he doesn’t use it. He doesn’t believe that website traffic is that important. I’ve heard other social media consultants say the same thing. I totally disagree and I totally agree.

I totally agree – You want passionate visitors

It is much more important to have rabid, passionate fans visit your site. A few “website evangelists” will help much more then thousands of visitors that look at what you got, then leave, never to come back or ever think about you again.

Passionate fans will talk about your website on Twitter, Facebook, and on their personal blogs. Passionate fans are your #1 source for backlinks, and your #1 source for new business.

But, passionate website visitors often take time to “heat up”. they have to get to know you, they have to connect with what you are putting on the web. this is where analytics come into play because you can find out what topics on your website are hitting the mark and what topics are getting no responses.

I totally disagree – use analytics to truly understand your website

Since I have heard many social media consultants put analytics and other website monitoring tools in the backseat, I don’t surprised when I see this on the web. I am surprised that it came from Gary because he runs a very successful online wine business. I’m pretty sure he cares about conversion rates and return on investment for his advertising campaigns.

What if every month 100 people are adding wine to their shopping carts, but not checking out? what it you could find out why, make small tweaks to your website, and improve your checkout percentage?

analytics lets you digest this information quickly with custom reports, notification and recommendations.

Actually, in his book, Gary talks a little about how they use to advertise and now they focus more on social networks and there passionate fans. That’s great because it is much cheaper to tweet a link to your website, then to buy an add in a wine magazine, but the risk is much higher. What if, it doesn’t get retweeted, what if people put a negative spin on in it. Marketing on social networks can have many outcomes, some good some bad. Analytics will provide the truth.

We’ll talk a lot about what I call the big three website insight tools. Google analytics, Google optimization and Google webmaster tools. With these tools you will be able to fully understand your website and run your website like a business.

• You’ll understand how people are using your website.
• Are they return visitors, or mostly new?
• Do they read more then one page, or just bounce quickly?
• Are you guiding them to the pages you want them to read or to your sales pages?
• What Google searches were used to find your site?
• What websites are referring visitors to you?
• Are your visitors local or worldwide?

The list above is just a smidge of the stuff you can do with Google analytics.

Mainly used for search engine optimization, and often referred to as internet currency, the more backlinks you have to your website the more authority your website has with Google and other search engines. Pagerank is the term Google uses for website authority. Google ranks websites on a scale of 1 to 10, with the higher the rank the more authority the website has.

Only a handful of websites have Pagerank over 8. you can count the the number of websites with pagerank of 10 on one hand.

Along with more website authority, backlinks also help with driving traffic to your website.

The best way to get backlinks to your website is to be active on social networks and create content on your website or blog that people will talk about. Run of the mill content that you can find anywhere on the internet will hardly ever get linked to. There are other ways to get backlinks to your website, such as paid links, linking websites, and website directories. We cover each type here in this blog.

Read more:

1. Backlinks on Wikipedia
2. Pagerank checker – Find out what your website Pagerank is
3. The Google toolbar displays Pagerank for every webpage displayed in your firefox browser.