Marketing your listing online | Part 2

Hello everyone,

Last post I talked about how important it is to make sure your property is correctly inserted into your local MLS system because it is syndicated to other national MLS' within days and that sets the foundation for a successful online marketing plan.

This post I want to take it a step further and talk about where else you can post your listings and what you should do after your MLS syndicates your listings world wide.

Most large national and even world wide listing websites such as Real Seekr, Trulia and Zillow will allow you to do what is called "claiming your listings". Claiming your listings will allow you to receive up to date statistics on views and clicks, market yourself through those sites and let you edit any information they may have incorrect about your listing. The only way to know if a site allows you to claim your listings is by visiting the site and reading some of the Q&A sections about how and if it's done.

Once you claim your listings you need to add any additional photos, descriptions etc to them to make sure they are correct and in order so when they are viewed the info. is correct. Also, make sure to add information about yourself, a picture and links to your website and blog so visitors can visit your local site.

As for where else to put your listing on the web I'm going to leave most of that to the comments on this post. I'll tell you a few that I like and if you have one that you've had success with lately post it up so everyone can use it.

External Listing Sites:
RealSeekr.com
Trulia.com
Zillow.com
Craigslist.com
Backpage.com

Ok, so now that you've listed your property on MLS correctly and claimed your properties through external listing websites it's time to go around the web and add your listings to other sites that aren't syndicated to automatically.

PS - Sorry if this post was a little "off" i'm currently sitting at a Christmas festival and their are elves running around singing songs by the Jackson 5. HAHA.

Have a great day,
Matt Rains
Real Estate Technology Online

Marketing your listing online | Part 1

As we move into 2009 marketing your listings online will be a very large portion of your business. Most sellers now are requiring that the agent they hire have the proficiency to market their home online effectively and if they can't then they simply will not get hired.

I want to do a quick series on some ways to market a home on the internet appropriately. In this first part I want to go over an overlooked portion in which I call the "foundation". The foundation to any online marketing campaign begins with your MLS. Hopefully you're already putting your listing in your local MLS but I want to talk about why you should really take your time and make sure you're listing on your MLS effectively.

What a lot of agents don't know is that the listings they insert into MLS are syndicated to other national listing services such as Real Seekr, Trulia, Zillow and more. That means that the listing you've put into your local MLS will be shared and uploaded to these larger national listing systems to further help expose the property.

The reason I bring this up is because I see all to often where an agent will not even go as far as putting a single listing picture on their new listing until one or two weeks go by. So now when that listing is syndicated to these larger national listing services it has no picture and is worthless as a marketing piece.

So for now just know that everything you put into your MLS will syndicated to larger national listing companies and that it is a great way to set a foundation for marketing your property online.

Until the next post go into your MLS and really look over your listings to see what could be added or changed.

Have a great day,
Matt Rains
Real Estate Technology Online

I held the Blackberry Storm....Finally

Hello again everyone,

I wouldn't call myself an impatient person all the time. Only when there is something new I want. Like the Blackberry Storm. I have literally been bugging the poor Verizon people weekly to find out any information I can about the release date of the storm. When I ask "When does the storm come out?" I always get the answer "They don't tell us that".

Well today was a little different. I am currently in Orlando FL at the NAR convention 2008 and I ran into the big Verizon Wireless booth. When I asked the young lady behind the booth when the storm was being released she said......."They don't tell us that!" AHHH! It drives me crazy. I then went to another area of the NAR expo and found the actual Blackberry booth. I figured where better to get the information I need than from the source.

I approached another young lady at the Blackberry booth and asked her the same question. As she began to mutter the words "They don't" I had to stop her and tell her my story. She gave me a sad look and handed me some pamphlets about the storm hoping to make me feel better. At this point I knew I had to pull out the big guns to get the info I needed. I started to ask her all kinds of technical questions about the storm like processor speeds, EVDO rev, storage capacity, OS capabilities etc. and finally she leaned over and whispered "There's one here if you want to play with it."

HOLY COW! There's a storm at the convention and she is willing to let me play with it. FINALLY!! I obviously agreed so she took me behind a curtain behind the booth and handed me a real fully functional Blackberry Storm. I was in heaven. The phone is everything they said it will be.

She asked me not to take any pictures or videos of the phone because it was not even supposed to be at the NAR convention much less activated and turned on. So I did the reasonable thing and recorded a short video while she wasn't looking. Below is a very short clip of me holding the final blackberry storm. I hope you enjoy it and from what I can tell this phone is going to take things up a notch.



Thanks,
Matt Rains
Real Estate Technology Online

SEO Series | Part 1 Keywords

We're going to get into our new series about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The video above is a brief summary from our live show last Sunday night (www.realestatetechnologyonline.com/live).

Before you ever get in front of a computer or meet with a web developer you have to grab a pen and paper to ask yourself a question.

Question 1 - What do I want my website to be found for? or What will people be searching for when they find my website?

That question will lead you into the first step of your SEO plan; "Keywords". Search engines work by using what is called "robots" to search through the text and links of your web page to find certain repetitive keywords. After robots search your site they use your "keywords" to associate what your site is about to what people are looking for from the search engine.

Take your pad and pen and start to write down words or phrases that you want your site associated with. These phrases can be "real estate agents Denver" or "relocation specialist Denver " really whatever you want to associate yourself with.

Now that you have your certain keywords/key phrases you'll want to make sure these key terms are maximized by using the Google Adwords Tool. This tool will show you how to tune your key terms to get the most out of them.

Once you get to the tool type in your first key term such as "real estate agents in Denver". My results show that on average 110 people search for that specific key term each month. Now looking further down at those results I can see that the search term "Denver real estate agent" is searched for on average of 40,500 times each month or "Denver real estate" is searched for on average 165,000 times each month. So just using that one tool I have tuned my key phrase to appeal to 165,000 people instead of only 110. That's a huge difference.

We'll that's it for part one of SEO. Get settled down and find out what keywords / key phrases will work best for your site and maybe next we'll actually start on the website.

Have a great day,
Matt Rains
Real Estate Technology Online

Your Agent Website Series | Part Three

"What in the world should I put on my website?" I get this question a lot and the first thing I always ask back is "What do you want your website to do for you?". Amazingly this always has a way of puzzling real estate agents. They never seem to sit down and think what their website should so for them.

The first thing I think a website should do for you is generate leads. Generating leads is how you make your money so of course that should be priority one and maybe even the only priority. After that realization we then have to figure out do we want buyers, sellers or a little bit of both? Right now I am in a buyers market like most of the country so I have tuned my website to be more friendly to buyers, but still work well with sellers if needed.

By tuning my website I mean I have made it easier to acquire buyers over sellers. I did this by giving buyers the number one thing they want most - A PROPERTY SEARCH - this is they key to generating traffic to your site. You have to have a way for buyers and even sellers to search the current market. Now since I have that taken care of my next priority would be to pre-qualify these new buyers. This is done with a giant button that says "Get Pre-Qualified Here" and when the potential buyer fills out that short form there info is sent to my preferred lenders and the process begins.

Now for sellers I can provide and quick "Find out what your home is worth form" that will set me up to do a market analysis for them and hopefully lead into a listing if I want it. For the most part I am currently not trying to take on any new listings but I will if they present themselves.

Some quick features you may want to add are Videos, Text Messaging and a fun/open description about yourself. These things can add a lot to your site.

I'll go over more in the video above but for now just remember to make your siute fun and useful while keeping it simple.

-Matt Rains
Real Estate Technology Online

Your Agent Website Series | Part One

The first part of our series on agent websites covers a very simple procedure on how to purchase a domain name since naturally this is the first step in owning your own website. If you are already a domain name buying pro you can have a hall pass and check back in tomorrow for the next part of our Agent Website series (you will not want to miss that one).

So the first step in the longest & most important journey you'll ever take in your career begins with purchasing a $10/year domain name. I know it's so cheap, that's because everything else from here out is so expensive (j/k).

I always recommend GoDaddy.com for domain name purchases because they own around 80% of all domain registrations around the world and I never have to worry about them going out of business and losing my domain names. The one thing I will say about GoDaddy.com that I don't like is they try and sometimes succeed to up-sell agents on things they don't need.

If you don't own a domain or haven't actually purchased a domain yourself all you need to do is watch the second video above for a step by step tutorial on how to buy a domain name from GoDaddy.com.

Here are a few tips on some domain names:
- always buy www.yourname.com, .net, .org, etc.
- choose keywords you want to be recognized by (your location, homes, real estate, etc.)
- if the domain name you want is taken use GoDaddy's tips to choose one that is available
- Just remember Domain Names are the new "Net Estate" buy as many as you can!

Hope step one gets the ball rolling. I can't wait for step two.

Have a great day,
Matt Rains
Real Estate Technology Online

Going Green with Technology | It's Easy!

I have tried and tried to wait for someone to do this post because I just didn't want to. I didn't want to fall into this whole "Go Green" movement but it has been brought to my attention that it just has to be done.

I am going to briefly talk about how to make your real estate career "greener" using free technology available to everyone.

First we have to go over communication. Some people like to have face to face meetings and therefore will not use their cell phone to talk with you. Instead of driving 20-30 minutes to meet them just download Skype and have a video conference with them and that way no one has to waste any gas driving to a meeting point.

The next "green" thing agents can improve on is the time spent driving around showing houses. I really think it is silly to drive all over the place showing 20 different houses when we have the types of technology available to us were we can do all of this from home. Take Google street view for example, this mapping technology allows my clients to literally walk down the street or around the neighborhood of a home they may be interested in. They can evaluate the neighborhood without ever leaving their computer. Then when a client does find a home and location they are interested in I should be able to call the listing agent and have a full interior video sent to me by e-mail so my clients can do a "video-tour" of the home before we set out and waste more gas.

I am trying to keep this short but I guess what I am trying to say is agents need to use the tools that are readily available to them so they can save time and money while also being "green".

Any Questions? Contact me at info@retechblog.com

-Real Estate Technology Online

Leave Comments | Part 2

Watch the VLOG Here

Hello again everyone. 2 days ago I posted a blog talking about the importance of commenting on other blogs to create traffic for yourself. The theory goes that if you comment with a full proper signature people will see that signature and click the links inside thus driving traffic to your site.

Let's take a look at how it turned out. The post done 2 days ago has 8 comments and 3 were done by myself so that leaves 5 people commenting on that post.

The first comment was Jeff Turner from Real Estate Shows letting me know he was following orders. Real Estate Shows is a well executed marketing website for agents listings. For more info you can visit them Here

The second comment was from Manny Otero. His web home is www.MySpace.com/realty21 . Manny will be at our Miami Tech Seminar in September and I look forward to talking with him and showing him some new tricks and tools to market himself online.

The third comment was from Jim Whatley at http://www.uberrealty.com/ . Jim is an innovative agent with a lot of great ideas about how the real estate industry is moving. Although Jim your comment didn't lead me to your site I actually had to Google it.

The fourth comment was from Scott Schmitz at www.RealtyJuggler.com. Scott works on getting agents organized and much more over at their website RealtyJuggler.com

The last and fifth comment was made by Pat Williams over at www.CyberCletch.com and www.RealHomeSense.com. I really enjoyed looking at your Real Home Sense website and I think the graphics & content are great.

Ok, so we had five people that just took a few seconds out of their schedule to post comments. So what does that do for them? SEO SEO SEO SEO!!!!

Now that they have commented with the web addresses and names google with "crawl" this site and pick them up. It gets complicated from their but just letting you know it is a great way to incease search engine optimization for a site. That's why we had vendors do it because they know what happens when they get their names out on the web.

-Real Estate Technology Online

Leave COMMENTS!!! It's very important to your career!

Watch the VLOG Here

Ok, so i've noticed a trend among visitors to RETechBlog.com. Vistors aren't leaving comments. You're thinking "why should I leave a comment? I don't have anything to say.".

Who cares if you don't have anything to say! Just use me! I tell agents this repeatedly, you have to leave comments and trails if you want people to find you. It goes something like this..

We get a lot of people that come to this site to read about updates in the technology/real estate industry. So that means you have an audience that you can market yourself to right here. Simply go to the bottom of any of these posts and leave a quick comment. It can be as simple as "Hey man, nice blog today" and then add your contact information.

Matt Rains
www.RETechBlog.com
info@RETechBlog.com

Now when the hundreds of other people come to this site and see your comments they will click on the links in your comments because people are curious about you and want to see more.

This is a must if you want to bring new people to your site and don't only do it here, DO IT EVERYWHERE!

So ill go ahead and leave a comment on this post to get the ball rolling and everyone else follow along. Who knows I may even add a link to everyone that comments on my next blog post??

A little more about comments - Click HERE

Matt Rains
-Real Estate Technology Online

Good-bye Blog, Hello Vlog!

Click here for the Vlog

So you've just started your first Blog and your off to a good start with quality content and a few visitors. Then you walk into the office one morning and you over hear someone talking about their "Vlog".

First thing you might think is "oh, what an idiot. They must be referring to their Blog.". Then after some more in-depth listening your start to realize what they are talking about is indeed a "Vlog" which stands for Video Log.

Well this makes perfect sense, it's the evolution of communication. When we first started this whole web 2.0 endeavor we were and are still using blogs (web logs) which are a written form of communication much like a book or magazine, then we went into the next frontier with "Podcasts" which are like radio broadcasts based solely around voice communication and now we have reached the final frontier with Vlogs (video logs) which are video transmissions much like television or movies.

Just like they have said time and time again "TV killed the Radio star" so I know you just got the whole "blog" thing working for you, but it's time to move forward and start Vlogging.

If you wan't to see a well executed example of vlogging visit Ian Watt at www.IanWatt.ca

Great to see you again and look forward to seeing you again soon.

-Real Estate Technology Online

Leave Breadcrumbs...

There are a lot of agents wondering why no one ever visits their blog. It may be because you never tell anyone where it is. The key to a successful blog or even a website is letting people know where it is and how they can find it. I have always found a simple signature at the end of any of my posts is a great way to leave a trail back to my blog.

A perfect example of this uses Trulia Voices. Let's say I am in Trulia Voices and I am talking with other agents about the current market in my area. After each of my responses or "posts" I leave a simple signature telling everyone my name, location, e-mail and blog address, like the sample below.

Matt Rains
Miami, FL
Info@RETechBlog.com
www.RETechBlog.com

Now when other agents or even potential clients view Trulia Voices they will see what I wrote and how to find more. This is a simple tool that can increase your web activity ten fold. After a few months of leaving your signature all over the web you are guaranteed to see an increase in traffic to your site.

Just remember to keep your input clear and direct. You want the people viewing your posts to really understand you are the leader in your market and they should contact you for further direction.

-Real Estate Technology Online