To advertise or not to advertise your listings in your real estate blog…that is the question. Many real estate bloggers tell you not to advertise your listings in your blog. Why? The purpose of a blog is to build relationships, not to sell. This may be true for your community blogger talking about community events or your political blogger ranting and raving about current events, but not for your real estate blog. The keyword being real estate! 

Who visits real estate blogs? 

Visitors who enjoy a particular community or political blogger will most likely visit that blog on an ongoing basis…probably until they get pissed off at something the blogger has to say. On the other hand, real estate blog visitors are transactional visitors. They only really care what you have to say while they are buying or selling a house. They may visit for a few months and then are gone. And what they really want to do is look at homes for sale! 

RssPieces.com did a survey of their 2500 blogs and found that buyers spend an average of 15 seconds reading a blog post before clicking on a call to action button…15 SECONDS! What buyers are most interested in is looking at homes. What you are most interested in is selling homes. Why wouldn’t you post your listings on your real estate website? Post away and don’t forget the photos…buyers are more interested in the photos than the story you have to tell about the house. It is a good idea to include the MLS# also.  

Need help with your blog? As a real estate Virtual Assistant, I am at your service. You can contact me by visiting my website, myREassistant.com, sending an email to info@myreassistant.com or calling 757-271-6047.

Related Posts:
Is Your House Made Of Bricks? (Why Your Blogging Platform Matters)
What’s In A Name

What’s in a Name?

What’s in a name? EVERYTHING when it comes to the domain name for your blog! Actually, it is only EVERYTHING IF you want your blog to make you money…and of course that is the point, isn’t it?  Your blog domain, title and site description need to be keyword rich in order to please the ‘Internet Gods’…search engines. Blogs can be search engine magnets, but only if they are keyword rich. You may be asking yourself, what constitutes keyword rich? Generally speaking, your best keywords are your farm area plus the words ‘real estate.’ Example: Virginia Beach real estate, Orange

You can research the best keywords at KeywordDiscovery.com. The site says there is a $49.95 subscription fee, but click on the Free Trial button (center page, near the top). My free trial has lasted 3 weeks now. If I am your real estate virtual assistant, I have probably already done this for you. Or contact me and I am glad to research this for you, 757-271-6047 or info@myreassistant.com. 

You may want to consider having a keyword rich domain name and having a secondary url, pointed to your keyword rich domain for marketing purposes. I mentioned in my last post that I have a new blog ‘under construction’ with RssPieces.com. My keyword rich domain will be RealEstateVirtualAssistant.net, but I will be using VAGrapevine.com in my marketing.  Have questions? Need help with a new or existing blog? Need a real estate virtual assistant? Let me know. I’m here to help.

Related posts: Is Your House Made Of Bricks? (Why Your Blogging Platform Matters)

Blogging became popular in the real estate community about 3 years ago and we have come a long way. One thing I have learned is how important your blogging platform is.

Just like it mattered to the 3 Little Pigs if their house was made of straw, wood or bricks, it matters to you what blogging platform you are on.  For this example, I have broken down blogging platforms into 3 types: website integrated, free platforms and paid platforms with SEO optimization built in.

1. Website Integrated
Website integrated platforms do not have a separate, keyword rich url of their own, but are internal pages on a website. This blog is a good example. There is a url, www.VAGrapevine.com, but it is merely pointed to an internal page of my website, www.myreassistant.com/blog. Yes, I am guilty as charged and am not doing what I am suggesting you do, but as you will see, I am remedying the situation.

After a year and a half of working in these platforms and not seeing much in the way of results, these platforms are like having a house of straw. You can say you have one, but page views are at a minimum and they really aren’t generating you business. The main reason for the poor performance is the content and links are embedded so deeply into the website, the search engines never find them.

2. Free Platform
Free platforms, such as WordPress, are definitely a step up from website integrated options. This is a platform made of wood and if done right can be extremely effective. What makes them effective? Good keyword rich content and SEO work on your part.

3. Paid Platform
As you can imagine, the paid platforms are your house of bricks. BUT, not all paid platforms are created equal. I will use my husband’s (Dave Macklin) real estate blog as an example. Dave had a blog on a VERY expensive platform for 1.5 years. He wrote keyword rich content and the most page views he ever had in a day were 84. He put much time and effort into a mere 84 people reading his posts. To give credit where credit is due, the blog did pull his website, www.BulterTeamHomes.com up in the search engines.

Dave is now using an www.RSSPieces.com platform, www.AllVirginiaBeachRealEstate.com. It has only been online for a month and is not ranked by Google yet. He is writing the same keyword rich content and his best day, to date, for page views is 337. Certainly better than the previous 84 page views. With the SEO built in this platform, the results in a few months should be even more dramatic.

I am so impressed with Mary McKnight and the RSSPieces.com platform, I am in the process of moving this blog over to them…so stay tuned!

Questions about blogging platforms or how I can help you with your blog as your real estate Virtual Assistant? Visit my website, www.myREassistant.com or give contact me at 757-271-6047 or info@myREassistant.com.

The “NEW” 3 Most Important Words In Real Estate is the title of a recent post on Real Estate Radio USA Blog. Location, location, location immediately comes to mind, but this is being pushed aside by the words conversion, conversion, conversion.

Barry Cunningham reminds us not to lose sight of the fact that Web2.0, Real Estate 2.0, the blogosphere, etc. is to make money and is not merely an outlet for frustrated journalists.  

It is not enough to have eyeballs reading our lastest blog post. We also need to be looking eyeball to eyeball with those folks.

Barry reminds us to know our numbers, concentrating on how many of those web visitors actually turn into buyers or sellers.

My husband, Dave Macklin, is a Realtor and he just changed blogging platforms, AllVirginiaBeachRealEstate.com. This current platform is with Mary McKnight at RSSpieces.com, whose philosophy is your blog should make you money.

Mary puts an enormous amount of effort into training her clients how to blog to make money. I can’t tell you how much I have learned from her in the past month and after only a few week’s Dave’s posts are being seen by more eyeballs than 1.5 years with the previous vendor.

‘Conversion, conversion, conversion’ also got my attention because I have a previous post concerning Interent lead conversion and how we often concentrate all our energy on generating the lead and drop the ball on the follow-up to convert the lead to business. I also talk about the success my Team of real estate Virtual Assistants has had helping agents convert their Internet leads into business, http://myreassistant.com/blog/?p=40.  Give us a call at 757-271-6047. We’d like to help you convert your leads, too!

Inspiring words can often make your day - one of them might just fit where you are now. 

www.greatquotesmovie.com

Thank you to Ken Deshaies for sharing.

One thing I like to do as a real estate Virtual Assistant, is share marketing ideas, tips, and anything I think my clients might be interested in. You might have heard that last week Oprah offered a free download of Suze Orman’s book, Women & Money. In case you missed getting it, you can download it here.

Happy reading and saving!

We tend to put our efforts into generating leads and not much real effort into converting that lead into business that actually puts money in our pockets. We are all guilty of letting leads fall through the cracks because we are either too busy or because we really think that the drip email campaign we set up will do all the work for us. My experience as both a licensed Realtor and as a Virtual Assistant (myREassistant.com) tells me this is not the case.

When I was out in the trenches selling and had a buyer in my car or was sitting at a prospective seller’s kitchen table, I would always ask, “Why are you in my car and not some other agent’s?” or “Why am I sitting here in your kitchen and not some other agent?” The answer was always the same, “Because you called me and no one else did.”

I may have been lucky and made an appointment after 1 or 2 phone calls or it may have taken calling for 1 or 2 years. But, I never gave up. I always remembered what my first managing Broker ever told me when I asked, “When do you stop calling?” She said, “When they buy, they die or tell you to stop.”

I keep hearing that in this slower market we need to get back to basics. Phone calling is basics!! and it works.

These days, my Virtual Assistant Team follows up on Internet leads for a number of our agent clients. I must admit, I wasn’t sure how this would work at first. As I am in Virginia and my agent client is in Charlotte NC. But you know what? The buyers in North Carolina are the same as the buyers in Virginia. They have the same concerns, the same needs, and all they really want is for us to be attentive to those needs…no matter where we are located.

Let’s face it, those first contacts with a prospect are about connecting and giving what my husband calls ‘warm fuzzies’ and it really doesn’t matter if the call is coming from VA or any other place, as long as it comes.

The agent I started this experiment with is Leigh Brown, www.LeighBrownAndAssociates.com. Here is what Leigh has to say about our Internet lead follow-up program:

“The best investment I’ve made in my business-EVER-was in my virtual assistant team. They were great anyway, but we discovered an amazing opportunity when Ruth Ann and her Team started doing the initial contact and follow-up on the website leads. Since the incubation period is longer than ‘normal’ leads, it’s too time-consuming to do a good job when you’re currently working with clients. They have allowed us to actually convert ‘B’ and ‘C’ leads throughout the year, in a seamless manner. In fact, our buyers are sad to learn that after talking with Ruth Ann and her Team for 8 months, they have to go find a house with me!  Our conversion ratio on web leads is naturally higher than ever, and we are able to cull the leads before spending money on relocation packages.

I’m sure that some of the credit is mine, but I’m only as successful as the people who work with me as a part of my team. But the numbers do speak well-8% of my 2006 business was website related, in 2007 it was 23%.”

So, I encourage you to pick up that phone, call those leads and don’t give up until ‘they buy, die or tell you to stop.’ Or give me a call and my Team will do it for you:  Ruth Ann Macklin, www.myREassistant.com, ruthann@myreassistant.com, 757-271-6047.

Also read Speed Counts.

If you are like a lot of real estate agents, all this talk about Social Networking gives you a headache. You can’t open a real estate industry magazine without hearing that merely having a static website is not enough anymore and it is all about building relationships through networks.  But, it is all a little overwhelming. Between MySpace, Friendster, Tribe, Jibber Jobber and 100’s of others, where do you start? 

This week I have taken a number of training classes from Mary McKnight of RSSPieces on building your business and generating leads through Social Networking. I love Mary! For one, she doesn’t speak Geekeze. She explains the workings of cyberspace in language any human can understand. And two, she is extremely knowledgeable, down to earth and fun to listen to.

Mary explained that spending hours a day on these networks commenting on posts is not the important thing, but having a profile on various social networks and building backlinks to your blog and website is important. Search engines think your are more important if there are more incoming links to your sites. Below are Mary’s Top 5 Social Networks she recommends we all belong to:

1. Active Rain
This is a network of 60,000+ real estate professionals discussing current happenings in our industry.

2. LinkedIn
Focusing on business networking.

3. FaceBook
Originally a network for college students, but ahe evolved to anyone with an email address.

4. WannaNetwork
Real estate specific networking. Not as large as Active Rain.

5. Zolve.com
Also for real estate professionals.

If you are thinking I don’t have the time or the desire to deal with all this Internet stuff, I just want to be out there selling real estate. That’s what real estate Virtual Assistants are for! Give me a call. I am glad to take care of it for you! You can reach me at 757-271-6047, ruthann@myreassistant.com or www.MyREassistant.com.
 

Just a reminder to everyone that the Real Estate Cyber Society Convention is this week 11th - 17th.  If you haven’t already registered, it’s not to late.  Go to http://recyber.cyberconventions.com/convention/  and register or login if you forgot you already registered. 

This is a close as it gets to attending an actual convention while still in your slippers! Great speakers (these are just a sampling):

Monday:  Dave Beson, Jerry Rossi
Tuesday: Dave Liniger, Bob McComb
Wednesday:  Michael Russer, Kendra Todd
Thursday:  Stuart Siegel, John Helmering
Friday:  Rich Chadwick, Phyllis Staines
Saturday:  Bill Barret, Bill French
Sunday:  Suzee Miller, Roger Butcher

There is also an Expo, Lounge for Networking and the opportunity to earn the RECS (Real Estate Cyber Society) designation.

See you there!

We tell our children not to let a stranger into the house or get into a car with someone they don’t know, but Realtors do this everyday. They go into the homes of strangers and put people in their car they may have only met a few minutes before. Let’s face it, Realtors are in potentially dangerous situations everyday and don’t think anything of it.

The National Association of Realtors recommends every Realtor set up a distress code system. It may just save your life one day. Here’s how:

A distress code is a spoken word or phrase that is not commonly used but can be worked into any phone or in-person conversation for cases where you feel that you are in danger. Use this code if the person you are with can overhear the conversation, but you don’t want to alarm them.  Here are the steps to setting up and using a distress code: 

1. Choose a distress code word or phrase and share it with your colleagues, friends and family—anyone you might call in an emergency situation. Your distress code should be something simple, something that makes sense to you and is easy to remember, and something that will not alert your prospect. Examples of distress codes:  “Hi, this is Jane. I’m at [address]. Could you look up something in the RED FILE for me?” Or, “I’m with Mr. Henderson, and I just realized that I can’t find my Blackberry. Can you see if I left it there?” (Assuming you don’t have a Blackberry.) It may make the most sense for everyone in your office to share a single distress code; this will be easiest to remember for everyone.

2. Share and practice your distress code with your office, your colleagues and your family and friends. You may have a designated person you plan to call, but circumstances may change that; it’s best to have several people prepped and ready to receive a call with your distress code.

3. The colleague who receives your call with the distress code will then be alerted that you may be in danger. At your pre-arranged signal, they will know to call 911 on your behalf, or, after asking a few careful questions, can arrange to meet you so that you are not alone, or call you back and ask you to return to the office to respond to an “emergency situation.”

When should you use the distress code? In situations where you are uneasy, but do not feel you are in danger. If you are in immediate danger – stop the car and leave the area, or jump out of the car at the next stop. Also, don’t hesitate to call 911 in an emergency. Source:  Washington Real Estate Safety CouncilThe distress code for when you are overwhelmed with daily tasks or simply ready to take your business to the next level is www.myREassistant.com. As your real estate virtual assistant, I will come to the rescue!