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 2 Search Engine Compatible

Part two in our series is going to ensure your website is "search engine compatible". Now that we have discussed the keywords and key phrases you are going to use in part one we can actually go into the guts of the website by discussing how to keep search engines happy with your site.

The first area we have to look at is what are the search engines looking at? What makes a search engine dislike you? Search engines have small programs or "scripts" that run called robots. These robots search through your site looking at your "code" and "content". Things that turn robots off are things like pop-ups, an over usage of pictures instead of text or all flash and no text content.

The key to keeping search engine bots happy is simply valuable easy to navigate content. Just be sure to keep your methods ethical and your content valuable. I tell people all the time that most search engines have gotten to the point where if your website truly deserves to be number one in the search result it will be.

Now for those of you that build your own site or have one built the following is for you. Make sure your "meta" tags are all relevant to your content and keywords. Always make sure your internal pages link back to your homepage so bots do not get lost or hit a dead end. Use external CSS whenever possible. If your using flash have a text version available for people without a flash player (iPhone users).

What this all comes down to in a nutshell is - the most important part of your website is how valuable and relevant your content is to the spectrum of visitors you are trying to appeal to. Like I said in step one the search engine world is a giant popularity contest and even if you have a sure fire way to become the most popular site on the net people will never consistently return if your content is no good and remember returning visitors shows Google that your content was worth coming back to.

PS - Our LIVE Real Estate Technology show will be aired Saturday 8pm instead of Sunday 8pm. We will be out of the country starting Sunday morning.

Have a greay day,
Matt Rains
Real Estate Technology Online