Online Real Estate Technology

One of the easiest ways to stay up to date with the latest on social media, technology and internet marketing, is to get the news delivered straight to your email inbox as it happens.

By subscribing to our weekly newsletter, you’ll receive the latest updates on research, technology and social media as well as tips and handy advice on how to improve your internet marketing.

Included in our weekly newsletter is advice on how to improve your web sites rankings on search engines such as Google and we also look at the impact of social media and technology on search engine rankings.

We respect your privacy and one of my pet hates is when you subscribe to a newsletter, your email address is sold to 3rd parties and you get a whole heap of spam, we do not sell or promote your email address to anyone, so you can subscribe with the knowledge that your email address is protected.

If you would like to get our newsletter delivered to you, please click on the subscribe link below and you’ll start to receive our weekly updates.

Yes please, Subscribe me to Mike Andrew Consulting’s Weekly Newsletter

What a fantastic response we’ve had to our next social media training day in New Zealand, over 550 real estate agents are confirmed as attending the 2 sessions on the day, we still have room for a small number of additional places for agents who’d like to attend the afternoon session on Wednesday the 6th October.

Location is The Great Northern Room, Ellerslie Event Centre, Ellerslie Racecourse Auckland New Zealand, as I mentioned earlier the morning session is now fully booked, so the only session available is the afternoon session commencing at 1:30pm.

You can download the flyer with all the information on the sessions Social Media Training Day New Zealand Registration Form or you can book by faxing the completed registration form to 00617 5534 1046, you can also email your registration form to amazing@iangrace.com.au or info@mikeandrewconsulting.com

Room is limited, so the earlier you register, the more likely you’ll reserve yourself a place.

Your speakers for the day will include Ian Grace and Mike Andrew

The next social media training day, this time for real estate agents will take place in The Great Northern Room, Ellerslie Event Centre, Ellerslie Racecourse Auckland New Zealand on Wednesday the 6th of October.

The morning session is now fully booked, so the only session now available is the afternoon session commencing at 1:30pm.

You can download the flyer with all the information on the sessions Social Media Training Day New Zealand Registration Form or you can book by faxing the completed registration form to 00617 5534 1046, you can also email your registration form to amazing@iangrace.com.au.

The afternoon session is filling very fast as room is limited, so the earlier you register, the more likely you’ll reserve yourself a place.

Your speakers for the day will include Ian Grace and Mike Andrew

I’ll look forward to working with you on the day.  

As you know I’m constantly on the look out for great people and resources to help our real estate community achieve brilliant results – and there’s someone I want you to experience and I’m picking up the tab!

Michael Sheargold (the legendary real estate performance coach) is running a seminar tour next month on How to be a Super Agent. Now if you’ve worked with Michael before you know his ability to deliver great and super-relevant strategies for you to grow your results.

He’s been helping agents and principals for over 18 years and now you have the chance to work with him, because of my relationship with him and his business.

In fact, it’s rare for Michael to do this kind of public event. Normally his strategies are only shared with his specific coaching clients. So this is a unique and limited opportunity I really want you to take advantage of.

So as a special “thank you” for being part of our community, I’ve organised for you to attend this OUTSTANDING 3 hour seminar next month COMPLEMENTARY (saving you $97)!

All you need to do is click on the link below and validate your ticket as my VIP to save you some money and gain massively from the strategies that can make 2010 your best year in real estate yet!

By the way, Michael is running the seminar in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne plus in South East Queensland. Follow this link for more details – I know you’ll be glad you did!

http://www.superagent101.com/how-to-be-a-super-agent-vip

I know you’ll gain massively from Michael’s seminar – once again, thank you for being part of Mike Andrew Consulting.

P.S. In John McGrath’s book You inc, he says Michael is the most effective business coach on the planet – you owe it to yourself and your family to be there and remember, it’s my shout!

The date for this event designed to assist small business in marketing on the web is 29th April 2010 from 8:00am to 10:30am. The location is Currumbin RSL Function room, 165 Duringan Street Currumbin.

What you will learn…

Advertising and Customer Service:

•Determining your business’s image & targeting for results.
•Effective media mix
•How to expand your Advertising Budget
•How to plan advertising & generate free media publicity
•How to determine who your customers are
•Setting up Customer Databases

Social Media Marketing:

•What is Social Media?
•Learn how to promote your business using social media.
•The Impact of SEO on Google search engine results
•Managing On Line reputation
•Google Real Time Search explained

“With so many speakers today on the Chamber circuit, we often find it difficult to sort and decipher what our members may be interested in, and what real
benefit they may receive from guest speakers. We were recently excited to have two quality speakers in Ian Grace and Mike Andrew. Their topics were
both relevant and professionally presented. I would recommend any business owner to attend a session to see them.”

Darren Mackintosh, President, Creek to Creek
Chamber of Commerce

Your Speakers:

Mike Andrew has been advising businesses on Internet marketing and technology for over a decade, including establishing realestate.com.au in the Queensland market. Mike then became a senior executive with Fairfax Digital until May 2009 when he formed his own technology consulting company. Mike is a recognised expert on social networking and the use of new technology in today’s changing online business market.

Mike regularly presents seminars on social media marketing in Malaysia, Singapore and Dubai and is a recognised expert in blogging for business.

Ian Grace is an international Advertising and Customer Service expert who worked and researched throughout the UK, South Africa and the USA for 16 years. Since 1994 Ian has conducted Advertising and Customer Service training worldwide, and is known as “Mr Real Estate Advertising” in the real estate industry. Ian has also been involved with the Federal Government funded New Enterprise Incentive Scheme (NEIS),and currently aids around 50 local small businesses,assisting them with business and financial plans then mentoring them through their first year of trading.

Seats are limited so bookings are essential.

Tickets for the event, normally $125 are Free to the first 50 attendees. If you like to attend please email your name and number to ryangrace@mcgrath.com.au

The event is proudly sponsored by McGrath Real Estate, Southern Gold Coast Tourism,Creek to Creek Chamber of Commerce and RedHeeler Business Essentials.

Effective Blog posts ahead

Every day I can guarantee that you will be impacted in some way by social media, there will be experts telling you, you need a profile on social networks like Facebook, and that Twitter is the best thing since sliced bread was invented, so you create a profile and you start to tell everyone and anyone who will listen about your latest listings and open homes, but is that really the way to approach social media, doing the same thing you do every day on more traditional mediums?

Taking this approach to your social media strategy will do nothing more than waste your precious time, time that could be spent prospecting for new listings and working with your clients face to face.

I know some younger agents who think that social media and the Internet will replace face to face contact, the reality is it won’t, however the very same principles you use face to face, apply to social media, the only difference being the method of delivery.

I know of some real estate groups who have launched their social strategy with profiles on this site and that network, yet  their sites are full of their member offices congratulating themselves on such forward progress, but where is the consumer?, where is the engagement factor?, where is the interaction with the people that count the most, your customers. This should be the reason you create your social media strategy in the first place, to create the local expert, the trusted advisor role, create and engage your community and to provide information and advice for the long term.

One question to ask yourself is, why do people interact within social network sites in the first place? Is it to get your latest listing, or to find out about your open homes, or to get an appraisal? No, No, No, they are there to connect, to engage and interact with other like minded people, to share experiences, to share activities and create a sense of community and to stay in touch with family and friends.

You as a business person need to understand this motivation and work with it to really maximise the return on your investment of time in creating a social media strategy for you and your business

So what is the best way to approach a social media strategy, firstly you need to work out why you want to have a presence on social networks, is it because everyone else is doing it? Is it because your competitor down the road is doing it so you should as well right? Well wrong actually, do it because it gives you another advertising medium to capture the attention of prospective customers, do it because it is a huge billboard of opportunity to take your message to the masses, do it for you and the exposure it can bring you and your brand, do it because you are an expert in your field and do it because people are looking for an expert to advise, coach and motivate them.

Start by doing a business and digital media strategy and look at ways in which you’ll start to build an audience, do you start a blog first, do you jump on Facebook and MySpace or do you start using Twitter and on what network sites do you create a profile.

How do you declare your brand identity? Remember, you should be focused on how you and your team help other people, being the agent to call when listing a property and raising the profile of you and your office on the web.

The first Step, is create accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and YouTube. Check in and see where you fit in to the community, upload or add all of your contacts into Facebook and start a routine of regularly adding “friends” to your page, the goal is to get your personal contacts engaged and to start to follow and engaging with other local businesses, build a schedule so that you can allocate time each week to this, otherwise you will find yourself becoming overwhelmed with trying to keep up with all the conversations that happen.

As you become more familiar with the sites you learn that Linkedin or Twitter may not be for you, that’s fine, at least you are now more informed than you where when you started. You are learning, next you can start to build your blog, your blog web site is your central hub with all roads leading to it, and everything you do should be designed to get people to your blog and interacting with you on your territory.

It’s great to have a Facebook page but even better when you have both working for you; you are in a win win situation.

Remember, with your blog comes responsibility, you’ll need to add content to it regularly and this takes time, so you should allocate at least 2+ hours a week.

Use the same strategy for all the social network sites you use, allocate time each week in your plan to update your sites and remember it’s about engaging your community not only about promoting your latest listing.

We can help you save time and money in building your social media business plan and setting up your pages and blog, we provide weekly coaching clinics that provide information and advice on content and tactics for social media. If you’d like to find out more about our social media integration plans and coaching clinics contact me at Mike Andrew Consulting and we’ll design and set up a coaching plan for you.

Wordpress Blog Platform

I’ve mentioned a number of times on this blog the number of women who are now using social media sites including blogs, to not only research business and products, but who are directly influenced by what they read or research on these networks. The influence of social media on the female internet user is often underestimated by business.

In the US, new research from SheSpeaks highlights that social media networks have become a must for women this year and social network penetration climbed from 58% of internet users in 2008 to 86% in 2009.

When asked about brand related activity on social sites, 80% of female users said they had become a fan of a product or brand directly from a social network. In addition, 72% had learned about a new product or brand, or joined a group around one. To me, one very interesting trend stood out, women were less likely to participate on Twitter with product or brand related activities.

Another interesting point is with actual purchasing of products or services, with one-half of female Internet users buying a product because of a social network. Purchases based on social networking sites and blogs both increased dramatically over 2008.

Users seemed more receptive to social network advertising than they were in 2008, with 9% saying that they always look at ads and often click through, compared with just 2% last year. Thirty percent look sometimes, versus 13% in 2008, and fewer users felt annoyed by ads or actively ignored them.

Brand Related Activity on Social Networking Sites

The ROI for business with a social media strategy that is well set up and planned is well worth the effort and the work put in, and with that in mind, I’ve been really inspired by this research, so much so that I’m prepared to help you get your blogging efforts set up and running for the month of January, I’m going to set up 10 free wordpress installs. No sales efforts, no push, all you have to do is drop me a comment on this post and tell me why you need/want a blog and how having a blog might benefit your business.

To Qualify:

In order to qualify all you need to do is buy one of my hosting packages for a period of 12 months, they are really inexpensive and won’t cost you an arm and a leg. Let me know if you’d like additional information on this.

This is what I’ll include -

• I’ll install and configure WordPress for you. The self hosted version.
• I’ll upload and activate a theme of your choice for you so that your blog looks a million dollars.
• I’ll set up and install add-on software (otherwise known as “plug-ins”) to give your blog a bit of a boost. Things like Disqus commenting, Akismet Spam protection, Tweetmeme, etc.

This is what is not included:

• I won’t move content over from another blog. I’m setting up a brand spanking new blog for you in this case.
• You won’t get personal one-on-one blog coaching. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t sit down with you for some one-on-one coaching if you needed it. It’s not included in this Basic Install. If you’re interested in coaching, then please head over to  Mike Andrew Consulting
• You won’t get tech support. I’m happy to answer any questions that you might have if time permits.
• You’ll need to buy or already have your own domain name as the blog will need this. I’ll help you work out the best domain name for you but you will need to have it ready.

So there you have it, as I mentioned I’ll be happy to do about 10 of these installs so to qualify all you need to do is get writing and leave me a comment, if you already have a blog then please  send the link or recommend this to someone who doesn’t have a blog yet.

Last week during a webinar that I participated in with Michael Sheargold and the Real Estate Results Network, I suggested that every real estate office should create a digital media strategy that covers at least the next 12 months. Technology is changing so rapidly for real estate agents and without a plan or strategy in place you’ll find it very hard to keep up. I’ve had some agents talk to me about what should be in this digital strategy, so to help you lets go through the basics of what you should include in your document.

1. Web site SEO – First and foremost in my mind is having your web site search engine friendly. Local search queries continue to increase as does 3+ word keyword searches.

Yellow Pages book usage is decreasing and Internet searches increasing, so that makes it vital that your site appears on the first page of Google. You need to also consider how your site performs, Google are planning to use site speed as a ranking factor and therefore how quickly your site loads will be a consideration. Image heavy sites without alt tags and optimising your pages for relevant keywords needs to be considered.

During the webinar, one industry specialist wrote a comment ” Do you really think that principals or agents actually write their own copy?”  No I don’t, but they need to make sure that what is written on their behalf is search engine optimised and written for the web, not copied from a newspaper. Make sure that you get access to the coding on your site as well, you pay for it, you own it, not like I have encountered recently with one web company attached to the number one real estate portal, they have a very arrogant attitude to you the customer, so if in doubt walk away, there are plenty of web design companies that will help you.

Search Engine Marketing should not replace your web site SEO, use SEM wisely and don’t double up, if you’re on the first page or rank highly for a search term, don’t waste money on Adwords,use them in areas that you don’t rank, remember, Google ranks pages not web sites so you can effectively optimise each page on your web site for keywords.

2.Social Media – Include this into your 12 month plan, small business is lagging behind their big brothers in using and integrating social media into their business. Your customers have embraced social networking and it is becoming the trusted adviser, so you can’t afford to neglect it any longer.

One of the reasons slowing the integration is a lack of knowledge about social media by small business owners, in my mind you are better to try and work with social media than to ignore it, so jump in and have a go. Plan it slowly and use the major sites such as Facebook and Twitter to start with, you can use this as your guide, POST. This stands for:

• People – What is your target market?

• Objective – What do you want to achieve from using social media?

• Strategy – How will you go about communicating with your customers? Status Updates, Coupons, Discounts etc

• Technology - What are the main sites you’ll use to communicate your message? Facebook/Twitter

That at least will help you plan your strategy, also remember, Podcasting, Vlogging and YouTube are powerful tools in getting your message across, plus Google loves video, so use this to your advantage

3. Blogs – Create a blog and add it to your web presence, it allows you to add the personal touch to your on line marketing. ComScore’s research indicates that blogs reach over 48% of the online population in the Asia Pacific region, social media 56.1%.

Blogs are a great way to communicate with your customers and are a great customer service tool, remember though you need to make sure that your content is fresh and relevant to the target market you are aiming at. Google loves blogs because of the constantly updated information they provide and will index them very quickly as well as give them a high ranking, sometimes even over a higher authority site. WordPress provides a great platform for you to use and I’d recommend the self hosted option as you can use your own domain name and you have much more flexibility.

4. Internet Marketing – Make sure that you have your office details listed with Google business, use different keywords or categories so that you rank on different search pages in your area. Be very selfish with where your links go, you might think its great that your business comes up number one under a realestate.com.au listing in your area, but think where the customer goes when they click on the link, to you? no they go to the portal so make sure your web site ranks on that first page.

Audit your listing on the portals and start to implement good keywords in your copy, remember you’re writing for the web not a newspaper, so think about how people search and what keywords they use. Get those from your own office, you have a wealth of information at your disposal, so ask your staff what words or phrases consumers use when  they contact your office, find the most frequently used and start to weave those into your articles or listing copy.

Don’t leave out of your listing valuable information, Google uses a completeness filter on Google real estate, so the more information in your listing the higher the rank, makes sense really doesn’t it.  

5. Technology – Make sure you stay informed on technology that impacts on how your customers find you, Augmented Reality and QR codes are examples, be aware of the impact they are having and factor these into your strategy.

I hope that helps you in planning for the next 12 months, having this in place is a good start in improving the way you market and communicate with the online consumer, it also improves your businesses “Future Fitness”  for digital marketing.

Search Engines

Your blog will have a better SEO result when you utilise good SEO techniques such as link building, and one of the ways to do that is by creating internal links within your posts or content.

A good internal link structure can have a size-able impact on your rankings on the major search engines. Most blog writers either don’t use this strategy or don’t know how to create internal links and it is really quite simple. You want your readers, particularly new readers to discover all your great content, and by including links to your older posts, it gives them a whole new life, as well as maintaining your readers on your blog for a longer stay. For example, in February I wrote a post about Google Analytics and in January I wrote about how important an SEO strategy is to your business, as you see I’ve included internal links to both of these posts I’ve mentioned, knowing that when new readers visit my blog, they will be able to visit those posts and read the stories, effectively giving those older posts a new lease on life.

So here are a few tips for you on creating an internal link strategy and a few things you should avoid:

1. Avoiding Bad Anchor Text: Whilst adding “Click Here Text” may drive a better click through rate, it is not good for anchor text. You need to decide if click here or keywords are more important. In the examples above, I’ve decided that keywords are more important, you can of course mix them up, by including good keywords and then a separate link containing the words “Click Here”. So if you want to rank for “Red Widgets” don’t use the phrase click here. I’ll cover this in my next post.

2. Uneven Distribution of links: Make sure you spread your links around, promote all your old posts in your new content. But one word of advice, don’t over do it. One or two links per post is sufficient.

3. Broken Links – Make sure all your links work,there’s nothing worse for a reader than to click on a link in your post and it not work. If you change or upgrade your blog software it can cause broken links,so make sure they all work and test them regularly. If you are using Google webmaster tools on your blog, it will tell you if a link is broken. But beware, the search engines don’t like broken links.

4. Missed Opportunities: If you are blogging about a subject you’ve written about before, don’t miss the opportunity to link to your older content.

5.Edit Instead of Linking: Sometimes there is the temptation to go back and edit an old post, or you might even want to add some up dated information to it, Well resist the temptation, you are far better to write a new post and then include a link to your old one.

I hope this post on how to create internal links is helpful to you in getting a better result for your blog. You can breath new life into your old articles and posts by creating internal links, and it will help you in the search results.

Good Luck and if you need help please let me know by leaving me a comment on the blog. I’ll always respond to your questions.

You can now download and listen to this post as a podcast, click here to get the latest episode.

During my seminar presentations I probably sell the concept of a social media strategy like a salesman, get you on a high and all excited about the potential it brings to you and then leave you on your own to do it. That’s the impression I’m getting lately, the more i do of the seminar presentations the less time i get to actually spend time with agents in their offices advising on where to start, so I’ve decided to post about the steps to take to get you on the road.

If you are wanting to start your blog or social media strategy, first thing to do before you set up, is listen.

Listen to conversations on blogs that are of interest to you and your business or the area you want to enter into. Search for conversations from like minded blog writers and a good place to start is to sign up for Google alerts, create the alert on the subject you want to “listen” too, for example, if you want to follow real estate blogs, then create the alert on Google for “RealEstateBlogs”, sure your email inbox will fill up with blog posts in no time, but this is a great place start and to see what topic is being written about and who is doing the talking.

Follow the conversations and take note of the way the writer structures the information, more importantly, take note of the content and whether it provides you with really good information or advice that you find useful. Once you have decided what you like, then start to engage.

Do this by commenting on blog posts you like, giving a blog writer feedback joins you in the conversation that blog writer is having with his or her readers. Join Twitter and Facebook and any other social media site you’d like to participate in and listen.

Now, once you have all the research and are aware of how the conversations take place, is the time to get your hands dirty.  It’s time to create your own masterpiece and dive into the conversation.

Make sure your information is engaging, challenging and stimulating, continue to listen and join in conversations on other blogs, and you’ll be on your way.

Next, I’ll talk about designing your strategy and target market.