InfiNET Marketing

Bringing the Power of Blogging to Real Estate

In 2002/2003 the power of blogging was discovered. The power of blogging is simply this – blogs, in general, produce higher rankings in search engine results with less effort than traditional websites. Google ended 2008 with 63.5 percent market share of all search and 90% of all growth in the search industry. Taking this into consideration, it makes sense to have your real estate websites formatted and optimized for Google.

When it comes to technology, the Internet and social media, you can’t keep up with it so don’t lose any sleep. Even speed readers and serious tech addicts can’t keep up with it, why should you? What makes more sense is to keep abreast with what adds value to your business, your clients or the efficiency of your business activities.

We have a full-time Internet marketing “tech” guy on our team that does this for us. A lot of his time is researching and testing new technologies for the ones that hold real promise for our real estate business activities. Consider hiring such a consultant to meet with you once a month. You and several other agents could do this together and split the cost.

Another great way to keep up with the evolution of technology in real estate is by attending local reBarCamps. RE Bar Camp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.

The challenge with waiting too long to implement leading edge technologies that can give you the competitive edge is just that – waiting too long. Being an early adopter has its advantages and challenges. Being late to the party has its costs.

• Many REALTORS® are just now jumping on the blogging bandwagon. The early adopters have established their blogs as the power points in their respective search fields. This does not mean that opportunity has passed you by, but it makes it even more imperative that you narrow your focus in order to compete effectively for high rankings. In other words, the narrower your focus (niche market), the more opportunity for great search rankings. Keyword sales people know this – that’s why they can still guarantee you top 10 listings – not for “San Diego” or “San Diego Real Estate” but maybe for something like “San Diego California Single Family Homes for Sale.” The question is – are consumers actually searching with this phrase and will your investment be returned many times over?
• We already mentioned the phenomenon of REALTORS® flocking to become Short Sale and REO Specialists. The early adopters have sewn up the high revenue generating relationships with the banks. Today, the “experts” selling the books, DVD’s, certifications, and the like are the ones really profiting from REOs and short sales.

How do we integrate social media into our traditional media? How do we tie all the pieces together into one cohesive strategy?

There are several apps that let us use several social media tools at once for marketing campaigns. The challenge with using services like this is that you don’t want duplicate or triplicate copies of the same message bouncing from one service to another. This adds to social media pollution and is a kind of spam that carries two consequences: 1) It makes us look inept and 2) people drop us from their friend or follow list.

Seesmic (www.seesmic.com) is one desktop tool that helps to aggregate Twitter and Facebook into a single view so we reduce the amount of time required to visit numerous sites. TweetDeck is another desktop application for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, Foursquare, and MySpace.

We concentrate our efforts on the 3 major social media giants – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This gives us the most bang for our buck, but also leaves us vulnerable to agents carving out their niche in services like Beebo, Squidoo, Orkut and others.  A comprehensive list of social media sites is available online at wikipedia. You can add as many channels as you are comfortable with to your online marketing effort, but each addition carries a cost in terms of time and energy.

Next Post on Using Social Media to Dominate Your Real Estate Niche Market:

• Social Media – Canned Friends or Fresh?

(Read the entire series on Niche Marketing in Real Estate)