Real Estate Agent Marketing

I just got this interesting question in my inbox…

Dustin… are web rings “old school”? Are there blog rings?

Until I got this question I had all but forgotten about webrings… Back in the late 90’s, it was quite popular to join a “web ring” of similar sites.  The end result would be that everyone on the web ring would place a widget that would allow visitors to travel around to different (but similar) sites.

The reality is that web rings are all but dead and have been replaced by two things:

1. Blogs!  Blogs have made is so easy to link to other sites that the idea of sending users to a “random” site just isn’t as appealing as it once *may* have been.
2. Sites like Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon have made it extremely easy to “randomly” find interesting (and much more relevant) articles from around the web on any given topic!

A seminar participant emailed me a while back with a great set of questions…

Once I have a basic blog, how could I promote it and get meaningful participation and really build a community? Even more importantly, what if I’m not in Seattle, one of the most wired/connected places in the world, and my local area is a little further down on the technology-adoption curve? (I’m in the Central Valley of California: Modesto/Turlock to be exact). How would I get people to help build an online community in this type of scenario? If you have any insights or resources you could point me to, I would appreciate it.

A wish I could answer this question in two or three easy tips because this is definitely the most common type of question that I get.  However, that is just not possible.  There is no doubt in my mind that I was in the right-place, right time two years ago when I started the real estate blog in Seattle.  Nonetheless, I do think that creating a community with real value is possible, even in a less tech-savvy area like Modesto.   (You’re really not that far from the tech mecca of the Bay Area, so I’m sure that you have it better in terms of an audience than most!).

The first thing to do is start writing about what interests you… If you’re not interested in what you’re writing, but just there to attract the search engine’s attention, then it will show and it will be very difficult to build a community.

With that said, I’m less fond of relying on just being an “interesting” person or blogger. My mother (who is pretty savvy in these sorts of things), turned me onto the idea that you need to be “interested” in other people as well.  Figure out what interests the people in your community and develop a real interest in those areas.

It might seem contradictory that I start by saying “write what you are interested in”, and then follow up by saying “become interested in your community”.  However, I’m pretty sure that when you find a topic that really resonates with your local community, you WILL become interested in this topic as well…    There is nothing like positive feedback to keep you learning and posting on a particular topic.

I could go into specifics about what worked for me on building up the Rain City Guide community, but the specifics don’t matter.    Write about the things that interest the community you wish to build and everything else will follow!

Another answer from the inbox:

You may remember that I spoke with you at the break and also afterward primarily about whether to concentrate on my home town of Ferndale or the entire Whatcom County/Bellingham area. My dilemma is that our small town is currently going through a visioning process with community/government involvement not seen before and I’m quite involved, but my desire to market to a larger area seems somewhat of a roadblock. My fear is getting pigeonholed into Ferndale while others capture lucrative business with higher prices homes and business opportunties assocaited with Bellingham and waterfront properties in Whatcom County. I know what your advice was to me, concentrate on one area, but I am wondering if I could get away with a Whatcom County Guide but really concentrate on Ferndale???

You definitely have an interesting question and I know that this one really matters to your business objectives.  However, the reality is that you could almost definitely have a very successful community blog that covered both a local or county issues.   Your success will really depend on how interesting your readers find your information! 

My take is to worry a lot less about the specific “location” and write about what interests you.  If you spend too much time concentrating on the business opportunities of your market, then the way you cover your area will likely suffer and it will show in your traffic numbers (or lack thereof).    The most important thing to remember is to be interesting!

I hope that helps! 

I’m working as quickly as possible to get through my inbox… Here’s another question:

hey Dustin! I’m hard at work on www.CometRealtors.com - have any SEO insight
for db-driven sites? links online?

cheers man - thx for the talk in glendale!

The low hanging fruit with database driven websites is to make sure that the site is optimized for the search engines (SEO) so that they can send you the traffic you deserve!

A little aside before I get into the details. Almost all blog platforms are “database-driven” in that the content for the blogs is stored in a database and output into HTML based on some server calls (no need for the detail). The good news is that if you are using an established blog platform (like Top Producers, Blogger or Wordpress.com), then they will have figured out all the SEO stuff for you. The rest of this post only applies to people with home-grown solutions…

The big picture is that you want to make sure that your URL structure is “human writable”, which just means that it isn’t filled up with a bunch of code (as in “….com?=sear…”). Using redirects built into the “.htaccess” file, it is not too difficult for someone who knows what they are doing to substantially improve the URL structure. In reality, the coding of this is WAY too advanced for this blog, but the concept is very important. By the way, a good “page title” is also important and can really help the search engines to know where to send people on your site. Again, this stuff is not too complicated for coders, but way beyond the scope of this blog.

Beyond that, a great place to start is to make sure the title of your pages are filled with good keywords. However, don’t overdo it. If you write for the search engines, it will show and will scare away readers (the very people you want to link to you!). The reality is that if you are writing about your topic of interest, then the good keywords will flow naturally.

There’s volumes more information available on the SEO blogs, the best of which can be found here: http://www.technorati.com/blogs/seo. In particular, Matt Cutts is a Google employee who writes a top-notch blog on SEO.

I sent out LinkedIn invitations to many of the people who signed up for one of my seminars because I think it is a woefully underused resource by real estate professionals (as I explain in the presentation). With those invitations, I opened myself up to a ton of questions about the service. Here’s a simple question that captures a common theme:

thank you Dustin, not sure where to go from here. I’ve added 11 and have yours and a clients recommendation. Any thoughts on what to do next?

One of the best parts of using LinkedIn is that it does not take a ton of time after the initial set-up.

You can always play a larger role by asking/answering questions, but for the most part, I just occasionally return to add some new contacts, update my profile and maybe give another recommendations. Unlike some social networks, you can leave this one alone for a month or two and not look like an absent participant.

However, if you do want more… A while back, I wrote a post that details taking advantage of some of their more advanced features on Rain City Guide. If you still want more, Guy Kawasaki wrote in even more detail how to improve your profile and enhance your LinkedIn experience.

Another question from the inbox…

Question for you that just popped up when I was reading posts on Active Rain–apparently, there are some folks out there who pull blog posts and present them as their own. Is there a way to conceal the source code when it’s a more public forum like AR or on your own site? I am using a Point 2 site and also just getting myself comfortable by posting comments on AR before launching into my own blog. If you want to share out content from your own page to another blog (like Rain City) how does one do that?

The most recent post I read on ActiveRain on such a subject came right from the top (i.e. one of ActiveRain’s founders). Matt was discussing the latest feature of the Inman wiki which is to re-syndicate content directly from real estate blogs onto their site. I was on the same email thread that Matt discussed where some of the more prominent RE bloggers were giving their opinion on this feature directly to Inman staff. Most were okay with this feature, although the general opinion (not consensus) was that there really should be an opt-out for bloggers who do not want to be involved.

I’m not going to share what the other bloggers on the list had to say, but I’m happy to share my opinion:

I can see how the idea of publishing content from blog posts on a wiki would definitely seem interesting to someone putting a list of “requirements” together for a wiki site. But in practice, it does not make a lot of sense. Wiki’s are a great tool for the aggregation and collaboration of knowledge, but not a great publishing platform for the transitory value of most blog posts.

With that said, I provide a “full feed” of the posts on RCG on purpose in that it makes it as easy as possible for my readers to get RCG’s content in the way that they want it. I’m definitely not about to start creating a partial feed so that people cannot leech my content as easily. (You can be sure that the people at Realtor.com are aware that tech-savvy people can always find a way to leech content even when no RSS feed is provided!) In the sense that I provide a “full feed”, or course, people are always going to be leeching my content and there is no way that I’m going to start “opting out” of those each time someone republishes our stuff. It’s just not going to happen as I have much better things to do with my time.

Besides, it starts to get much more complicated on a site like RCG where some of the contributors are empowered as editors and do things in the name of the site. Maybe one of the editors on RCG was the one that actually added the RCG feed to the Inman wiki. (RCG contributors have done much crazier things in thinking they are helping to promote the site!). All-in-all, I’m not complaining about people using my content or going to ask to be removed from the Inman wiki, but rather, I just want to add that I think it is a corruption of the wiki concept to even include this type of feature.

But I’ve obviously digressed heavily from the original question…

So, how do you keep people from stealing your content?

The short answer is you don’t. Providing no feed is a solution that will keep the lazy from republishing your stuff, but as far back as July of 2004, people were already taking any website and turning it’s changes into an RSS feed. In general, all the major websites are run by good people, or at least people who have too much money at stake to steal your content. The only people who you have to worry about are the small guys are are trying to make a quick buck. They come and go, so don’t spend too much time worrying about them. And remember… If someone is stealing your content, that almost always means that you’re writing good stuff!

<UPDATE>

Greg makes a VERY compelling case for why you should care about people stealing the content from your feed. In particular, the idea that if you do not defend ownership of your content, then you may loose it, resonates with me:

“…if you fail to defend your intellectual property, it is arguable that you have abandoned it. I don’t think a judge would buy that argument, but how much money in legal fees are you willing to pay to find out? That notwithstanding, whatever resale value your work might have is massively diluted by wanton republication. This really may not seem like an issue right now, but you have no idea what tomorrow might bring.”

Obviously, all good arguments have more than one side!

Since these seminars started I’ve been inundated with great questions, so I think I’ll just continue diving into my Inbox for inspiration…

“.. Since the seminar I have done some URL shopping. so far came up with www.olyhomesource.com. What do you think? I also did some research to see if anyone was blogging here in Olympia, no one! With one exception www.city-data.com. Do you know anything about this site? It’s nationwide, but get’s down to specific state and cities and wow, lot’s of people are blogging. Amazed me! I can’t believe how many people are seeking information through strangers, well I can but it was very encouraging…”

For starters, I don’t know anything about the city data site. It looks interesting, but I wouldn’t see it as competition for someone who is trying to start up community site in Olympia. The name olyhomesource.com is definitely a good start, but I would have tried to come up with something that would have better captured the community. Is there a major landmark (river, building, high school mascot, etc) that almost everyone in the town identifies with? I probably would have run with something along those lines. With very few exceptions, I’d try to stay away from words like “real estate” or “homes” in my URL. While they may be SEO gold, using them immediately gives away your real estate intentions and might drive away readers who would otherwise participate in your community.

In terms of finding bloggers in Olympia (they exist!), here are a few places to start.

1) A search of the Technorati directory to find people who have self-classified themselves as writing about Olympia (sorted by authority). Some of the more prominant bloggers writing about that community include:

• Olympia Time
• Arbitrary and Capricious
• OlyBlog
• Pertimento
• Pirate Papa
• Spew

I’m positive there are others (and probably some very good ones I missed), but that at least demonstrates the diversity of stuff that is already out there!

Also note that Wikipedia is a wonderful source for information on every city in America. There are typically lots of links making it a wonderful source of inspiration for new posts. Here’s the wiki entry for Olympia.

Another question from my inbox:

I’m planning to migrate my current TypePad blog to a WordPress platform on a unique domain with hosting. Are there any particular hosting providers you would point me too?

There are a lot of great hosts out there for WordPress blogs. Two resources come to mind right off the bet:

• The list of hosting providers given on WordPress.org
• The responses I was given when I asked a similar question on Rain City Guide

And for those that don’t want to manage the back-end of hosting a blog (security updates, plugins, etc.), Top Producer is more than happy to host a WordPress blog for you! (This blog is running on their platform!)

One of the attendees emailed me this question and I thought I’d share my answer with the real estate community…

“… Is it better to have links on a website open in a new frame (window) or to have them open in the same page as my url? If I don’t pop up a new window for hyperlinks, then the consumer leaves my main page and if they don’t hit the back button, then I’ve lost them. What is the best way to work my website for the RE community? …”

Here is my response to this (very common) question:

In terms of frames and/or pop-up windows, I’m not a huge fan of either. I like to put on my consumer hat when thinking about just about any issue like this. As in, what would the people reading your website want you to do?

Assume that users don’t like frames (mainly because they make it hard to link to your content and sometimes “pop” out of your website) and they don’t like pop-ups (more windows!), so I recommend just giving a straight link that opens up on the same page. My philosophy is pretty simple… If I give my users a good experience then I trust them to keep coming back to my site. If I treat my users like I’ve only got one shot at reaching them, then I’ve just created a self-full filing prophesy.