REALTORS Save $185.00

If you have kids, or are under the age of 20, you know what that acronym stands for. For those of us who remember learning how to type on Electrolux typewriters, it may be foreign. For me, I had to look it up.

Regardless, that was the sentiment that I felt when my friends over at the RedX (Real Estate Data Exchange) gave me permission to offer huge discount on their listing lead, FSBO and Agent Website listing lead service.

As many of us can attest, they have a great product that includes a complete lead management system that interfaces with your MLS as well as multiple databases to give the correct listing contact for every expired and FSBO in your area. Their system then scrubs the data against the DNC registry to provide. Here is a link to a video demonstrating their product. http://theredx.com/demo.html

So here is what they have agreed too. In addition to waiving the $149.00 start up fee, they are also offering a 15% discount for the first three months of membership if you choose either the quarterly or monthly package. You save about $184 with this package which is fantastic.

So anyway, to take advantage of the program, us promotion code 14610 or register through this rather long URL: http://www.theredx.com/signup/4mysalespromo.html

Planet Realtor

Lockbox

I am pleased to announce that lockbox and supra ekey and strangely enough Planet Realtor which is the florida MLS system are all in my baiawick of tools from which to do a little realtor website optimization.

These new tools have been collected to help Realtors maximize their return on investment by focusing on using lockboxes as market intelligence tools to help better sale a property. The new lockbox technology includes smart phone interfaces as well as infra red technology that allows the showing agent to provide the listing agent with direct feedback about what was liked about the property.

Twitter Prospecting

I must say that I love the Twitter technology. Thanks to Iranian elections, it has reached critical mass which means that most of your target clients are not on the network. I routinely use the technology to offer discounts to the RedX service and to provide updates on dedicated the dedicated listing URL service, and know that for a REALTOR, it can be a very large source of leads.

So as a real estate agent that is new to Twitter, how do you use it to get sales leads? Well, the service provides a window into your client’s mind, and ancillary services give you instant notification when your client is thinking about real estate. You can then connect with that prospect online to direct them toward your services. It’s sort of like someone making the announcement in a crowded room that they are looking for a home, and you responding to them by saying, that’s great because I have one to sell. So how do you get set up to use Twitter as a lead generation tool? My recommendations would be as follows:

1) Register for a Twitter account, upload your picture, add your website, change the background, and make yourself at home.

2) Register for notify.me which is a notification service that will let you know if someone adds a post that includes your search terms.

3) Choose the methods by which notify.me will let you know when a search term comes up. I use google chat for my desktop and the mobile text function for when I am out.

4) Set the system to notify you when someone looks for a specific phrase that would be unique to your target clients. You can also add filters to better limit the notifications that are not pertinent. For example, use the search terms “moving to” “salt lake” and filter our terms that include words such as “planning rent.” With that phrase, you will likely get tweets from people moving to salt lake, that are not planning to rent. You can add multiple search phrases to keep track of and the notices simply popup on your desktop.

5) When a notice is received, follow that person, reply to their tweet, and offer your services. It is really that simple.

Real Estate Leads from Twitter

I have been spending time on twitter learning about its ins and outs and using the site to promote the RedX lising lead, fsbo and web marketing service, with some success. In my learning about the tool and how it is used to promote your business, it occurred to me that Twitter may be the best lead generation tool in existence for REALTORS. Where else can you get a real time notice from a total stranger that they are looking for a home?

Imaging being at an open house and getting a tweet from a someone that you don’t know or follow that is driving around six or seven miles away. The post in your phone reads “shopping for houses today, doing drive by’s” Simply by texting them back you can respond and ask them if they need any help, if they would like to stop by and check out your open house, or any number of other appropriate responses.

So what tools are available to get real time notification that a person in your area is looking for a house? In my original search, I couldn’t find an application that would perform these activities. In fact, I was legitimately planning to create the application myself. However, I did find one application that may do exactly what I was suggesting.

The Twitter Application is called EasyTweets. What it does is continually monitor Twitter for a specific keyword and immediately sends you an SMS message with a copy of the text. From there, you can respond to the person that posted the tweet by SMS or through your standard Twitter activities.

Here is the link to EasyTweets. My recommendation would be to set up your account and be very targeted using phrases you know your target clients will use. Every a fresh lead comes in, respond immediately and get the dialog going

SEO for Bing, The Jury is Still Out

I haven’t quite formed my opinion about Microsoft’s new release of their Bing search engine. In reading the reviews, I am not alone. I have spent a little time this afternoon trying to get a feel for what where my real estate listing lead site and associated links lay in the ranking. What I found is that this “because it’s not google” search alternative has a completely different algorithm which will likely require a completely different SEO strategy for your real estate website.

I am not sure if this new search engine will give google a run for its money in search engine terms. As Seth Godin put it, “Bing is trying to be the new Google. Unfortunately Google is the new Google.” However, it does have some interesting features.

Now for those of us who are trying to get our real estate website to the top of the ranking, optimizing for bing may require a different strategy. In fact, in looking up the search terms that index my site well on google, I there is little success on bing. The Expired Listing Lead term did return back my link to the RedX as the top link, but the multitude of other sites that typically show up in reference to me did not. For my Agent Online experiment, the site was not even indexed, and similar to google, real estate country did not return a link to my page, even when I typed in the exact URL. Even my wife’s’ “prenatal vitamins” page did not get indexed.

From what I can determine with the very limited experience that I have had with the site, it uses an algorithm similar to google’s but puts a high weight on sites that have been around a while along with those that are well linked. Unfortunately from an SEO standpoint there is not much that you can do to age your real estate URL.

Getting Your Site to the Top of Google –Real Time Update

To report on the progress of the experiment to demonstrate how to get your website for a given search term, in this instance “agents online” to show up within the first ten listings of Google, we have now achieved position number seventeen for the organic search. This has been about ten hours worth of work. If you are using these techniques to get a high ranking for your own real estate agent website just think of the number of prospective listings / buyers will end up landing on your website. In addition, you end up with a premium ranking and don’t need to make such a heavy investment in pay per click.

So just to recap the process, again,

1) Use google keywords tool to find a target keyword. High number of searches returning low page rank results. If you are targeting a specific service, REO’s, Short Sales, etc, you can get very targeted.

2) Register a URL using that search term. Our example for this experiment is AgentsOnline.org

3) Optimize your website or landing page to support that keyword and format the site for collection of your prospect’s contact information. For our example I created a thee page site feeding into the Listing and FSBO lead service from RedX.

4) Start getting backlinks to the URL that you have created. I add links from my blogs and created a couple of Squidoo lenses. I also comment often on the real estate blogs that I read and include the URL.

Just to summarize, that is the process. Pretty simple and if you do it three or four times, you can maximize your visibility on google which essentially automates the search engine optimization for your real estate website.

Agents Online is Making Progress

Unfortunately the real estate country website is not moving up in the ranking as well as it was originally planned. However, Agents Online is doing better than expected. Hopefully within the next few weeks the real estate agents online marketing experiment will demonstrate its value to new and veteran REALTORS

Save Time Posting With a Great Online Marketing Tool

I know that I am a bit tardy in my usage and adoption of Twitter.  After all, I saw that it is being used by TMZ on TV.  However, I did find a pretty cool tool to streamline posting on twitter and numerous other networks.  The tool is ver useful, especially if you are using multiple sites to attract real estate listing clients.  I have been using it to promote our discount offer for the the  Listing lead program from RedX service for some time.  

Ping.fm allows you to post a comment once and it will be propagated across the web to update your status on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Furl, and numerous other posting sites.    It is a fantastic tool to do some effective grass roots promotion. 

On a completely separate note, for the real time update on getting my site to the top of the search term Agents Online  the site has not yet been indexed by google.  It’s only been a couple of days, so patience is a virtue.  Real estate country is also lagging still

Launching a New Agents Online Blog

This is going to be a relatively short post. We have launched this morning the Agents Online blog and I wanted to share it with the world. Here is our new source for real estate agents online http://agentsonlinerealestate.blogspot.com

Working with Agents Online

We have just published two new real estate agent sites that I wanted to share with everybody. The first is for real estate agents online, the second is a squidoo lens specifically talking about the great resources available online for real estate agents. Enjoy them both.

Twitter and REALTORS

Because effective Twitter marketing means attracting as many followers as possible, setting up an autofollow, auto-responder and auto-reciprocate tool is a great way to improve your reach and campaign effectiveness.   I am doing this currently with Real Estate Country The tools that help in this process are Tweetlater.com which allows you to autorespond followers with a direct message as well as automatically reciprocate follows.  Combine Tweetlater.com with the keyword autofollow power of Twollow and you can automate most of the marketing with the exception of actually posting content.  There are rss twitter autopostng services that allow you to post content as well, but we won’t go into them in this discussion.  

For those people who follow you, you have three opportunities to create a relationship and there is a free online tool that automates this process.  After you have set up your Twitter account, uploaded your picture, profile and customized your background, go to Tweetlater.com.  This tool will allow you to automatically follow anybody who chooses to follow you, as well as create an auto-responder for anybody who chooses to follow you.  Using TweetLater, you can quickly automate the process of following those that follow you as well as create a short message that automatically goes to your follower.  Generally, this response is a “Thank you for the follows” message along with an invitation to visit your real estate website. 

The other tool that you want to take a look at is Twollow.  This tool will allow you to automatically follow individuals for a given keyword.  By combining Twollow, TweetLater and periodically cleaning out your account with Twitter Karma, you can attract a large number of followers within just a few days.  Each of whom you can promote your real estate services too.

Growing Real Estate Country

I haven’t had a lot of time to post to real estate country over the past few weeks, but I wanted to give everybody an update. We have updated the original Real Estate Country site with additional pages. Also, I have made a few posts in Active Rain to help attract visitors to this blog. The next step is to start creating a number of different pages on the many, many, many online networks that focus on the real estate and REALTOR industry. From there, hopefully we will get the organic growth that we are looking for.

Welcome to Real Estate Country

As I have posted on my blog on Active Rain, Real Estate Country is a way to promote systems and tools to real estate agents across the country. We are starting out small with a simple website and blog with the intention of getting this site as well as the associated content to a very high ranking.

Stay tuned either through this blog or the 4MySales viral marketing blog or even through our Active Rain account as we put Real Estate Country on the map.