Mary's Blog

You’ve been blasted, someone is ranting and raving in the comments of your blog or they have you in their cross-hairs on their own blog. What do you do? Do you delete the comments, do you respond, do you ignore them? This is the question many bloggers face daily. As a Realtor or lender, getting attacked is a complex problem with a very simple answer. Maintain your professionalism. While there are many ways of handling an attack, the key to managing a nasty commenter or blogger is professionalism and authority. Never lose either. Do not do or say anything that will cause your readers to lose respect for you. 

blog is a social network so it must be engaging and emotional

Before we even delve into what to do when someone attacks you, let’s look at what the blogosphere is and how it works. The blogosphere is a social network, meaning a place where readers come not just to see what you have to say, but also to participate by commenting on your blog. In order for a blog to be engaging, it must be emotional. Meaning, people have to feel like they can connect with you as a human being through your posts and communicate with you personally through comments. Most of the time you get love-y dove-y comments agreeing with you, sometimes you get insightful comments that make you think and occasionally a reader will rip you and your ideas to shreds in a comment. 

Now, before you go responding in a knee-jerk, angry comment of your own, remember, even this kind of comment is good for you and your blog. A negative, nasty or ranting comment can actually help your blog become more engaging because it produces an emotional response not only from you the writer, but from your regular readers. A negative response can actually help your blog become more popular. It can galvanize your supports or create feuding factions that regularly participate on your blog. And isn’t that the idea, increase participation on your blog to grow your visitor base? So, that crazy raging bull that likes to destroy you and everything in your blogging path is actually helping your blog to become more emotionally engaging to visitors.

How to handle a disgruntled commenter

When someone comments on your blog negatively or attacks you personally you have 3 choices:

• Respond: When someone attacks you or your ideas you can choose to respond, however I always recommend taking at least 24 hours to cool your rage, then pen something polite and steeped in fact, then sit on it for another 24 hours. If you still feel the need to post it, go over it one more time and make sure it will not offend anyone and the content will not diminish the respect your readers have for you.

• Delete the comments: I don’t really recommend this one, because I think leaving negative comments shows your willingness to accept criticism or, if the commenter is a raving lunatic, illustrates their character. However, I have run into situations where deleting the comment was what served the community best. For example, one of our blog clients was in the middle of a messy divorce and her soon to be ex husband would post slanderous/ obscene comments on her blog. She deleted them and eventually banned his user. So, there are times when deleting a comment is the best option, but on the whole, be the bigger person and leave the comment.

• Ignore the attack: If the attack is personal in nature and just a clear example of sour grapes or general insane ranting, you’re best bet is to ignore it. Fact is, you can’t argue with crazy, so stay above the fray. Nothing pisses people off more than being ignored. Ignoring someone, tells them “you’re not important to me, you don’t matter.” And by never responding you maintain your professionalism.

Recognize constructive criticism and reward it

One of the most important rules of netiquette is to admit when you are wrong.  If someone catches a flub on your blog, admit your wrong and correct it. Recognize that that kind of comment is constructive criticism and deal with it properly by giving the commenter credit for recognizing your mistake and being kind enough to point it out to you. It will only make your blog better. No one is infallible, by admitting that even you make mistakes, you actually help increase your authority and engage other commenters because they know you are listening to them and respect their positions. You get respect by giving it! (Hey Damion, this one is for you! Thank you for helping me make my blog better!)

How to handle a raving blog-atic

As you scour the blogosphere you see that one of your competitors, clients or vendors has slammed you on their blog. How do you respond? You don’t. Marketing 101 says you do not want to drive traffic back to your competitor by providing their name or link in your blog. You do not want to draw attention to another site saying negative things about you. Why drive the hard earned traffic and repeat visitors on your site to someone else’s site that is attacking you. Not a very good competitive strategy. Doing that is a sure fire way to lose your potential clients and chip away at the respect your existing clients have for you. 

Whether the attack was warranted or not, you don’t acknowledge it!

Never book a room at the asylym with your crazy blogger/commenter

Remember when Howard Deen went nuts on TV? He was a presidential contender until he started acting like a raving lunatic. In 5 minutes of raving, he lost the credibility he had built in 30 or so years of public service. Or, a more recent example of raving attacks is exemplified in Allan Dalton of Realtor.com and Lloyd Frink of Zillow.com’s panel discussion at the California Association of Realtors annual convention. (see the video on Sellsius) These were pretty credible guys until… the lunatic within busted out! Similarly, when people rant and rave on a blog, they lose credibility. So, don’t get down into the mud and respond to a negative blog by ranting and raving yourself. 

No matter what happens on your blog, be professional, maintain your authority and credibility. The less you engage with angry bloggers the more authority and credibility you will build and the more likely those disgruntled commenters will be to move on to another blog where they spew their nastiness.

Your blog is your child. And just like a newborn, it must be nurtured and monitored to ensure that it graduates from pre-school and eventually moves out of the house to achieve success on the wild wild web.  I thought about all the ways I could show you what to expect from your blog and how to track your results, but I finally decided to just prove how marketing efforts have catapulted RSS Pieces into super blogdom. This way you can see empirical evidence of what the right kind of marketing will do for your blog. Yes, I am seriously going to show you how marketing your blog properly will increase traffic by 40%, page rank by 500% and boost your Alexa rank into the top 100,000 of all sites on the internet.

I’ve been in technical marketing for some time now, so I love breaking down the segments of my online marketing campaign and seeing exactly how effective they are. It helps me understand where I need be syndicating my articles, whose blog I should be commenting on and what the effect a press release has on traffic. So, this is going to be your crash course in blog marketing. You’re going to see tons of graphs and charts right from the back-end of our blog platform along with third party tools like Alexa and iwebtools. This should make it very clear how each part of the online marketing strategy increases traffic and helps us all to quantify the value of everything from commenting on other blogs to participate in Active Rain. Let’s get this show on the road.

Outline of RSS Pieces’ blog marketing efforts

Marketing Effort 1: Domain purchase

January 6, 2006, We purchased the RSS Pieces domain

To avoid being sandboxed by Google when the site went live, we purchased the domain well ahead of our launch date and posted a splash screen. Between the time that we purchased the domain and went live in August, the site received an average of 92 unique visitors per day and went from a page rank 0 to a page rank 1.

Marketing Effort 2: website launch date

August 7, RSS Pieces website launch date

By launching with 5 well written articles, the site traffic jumped 302% over the course of 1 week. 

Marketing Effort 3: press release

September 20, 2006, Press Release #1 announcing launch of myrealtyblog

Marketing Effort 4: syndication and commenting

By syndicating articles, posting on AR and commenting on popular industry, traffic increased again to  22,836 hits on October 14^th.

Marketing Effort 5: directory submission and free tools

October 20, 2006, Began submitting to directories

October 24, 2006, Began releasing free SEO tools to development and real estate community

Simply from continuing commenting and syndicating articles and adding directory submissions and some development tools, the traffic increased from 25,374 hits on October 20^th to 52,512 hits  on October 25^th.

Page Rank and Alexa Traffic

In January 2006, RSS Pieces had a Page Rank of 0, according to Google, by March we had a Page rank of 1. After the official launch of the website, RSS Pieces Page Rank had climbed to a 3 by late September. If all continues according to plan, iwebtools predicts that our future Page Rank will be 5 at the next Google PR update (likely around Thanksgiving).

 RSS Pieces’ Alexa rank was 66, 715. That means that out of the millions of websites that Alexa tracks, RSS Pieces ranked well within the top 100,000. Pretty impressive for a baby website selling a service to a niche market, huh? Think that is impossible for your blog? Not at all. Let’s break down exactly what the ROI on each of my efforts were so you can see what you should expect from doing the same thing.

Wow, look at how much of my traffic can be directly attributed to Active Rain, a full 16%. Now, all that syndicating of articles I do on RealEstateVoices accounts for 9%. Simply pinging Google boosted traffic by 5% and getting involved with the Carnival of Real Estate (hotpads.com) bumped us 1%. If I add up all the various blogs I comment on, it amounts to a full 8% boost in traffic. When you add it all up, the hour that I spend each day commenting on other blogs, posting on Active Rain and syndicating articles accounts for a full 39% of all the traffic to RSS Pieces.  

The breakdown of marketing ROI as a percentage of total traffic:

Couldn’t your site use a 39% boost in traffic?

How to get all your marketing done in less than 1 hour each day

Commenting on other blogs:

For a list of some reputable blogs to comment on, check this post out.

Posting a blog article on Active Rain

Syndicating posts on RealEstateVoices and/or Carnival of Real Estate

Directories listings

Just get in touch with Best of the Web Directories; they will do it for you.

Pingoat is really the easiest one to use and it will take you less than a minute to do it after each post.

Avoiding the bipolar website and blog

Does your website or blog need Prozac? Does your site ramble on and on touching on everything from phone cards to razor blades and eventually getting around to your listings, local information and maybe somewhere in there what a great agent you are? If so, here is a valuable prescription for your site.

Quality Content is king in the world of SEO.

When you are writing for the web, you must stay focused and on-topic, if you stray too far from the intended theme of an article, you will devalue your content to search engines. We’ve already established that search engines for all their technical mumbo jumbo aren’t really that smart. They want to see that your content is clear, concise, dense with keywords, centralized in theme and generally stays on point. If you insist on discussing how great you son is at soccer and what’s happening with Paris Hilton at length on a site selling homes in Denver, you will lose the interest of a search engine. (I didn’t just pull that one out the air, we actually have a client that needed convincing that talking about the Pairs and Nicole Fued was unacceptable on their real estate blog)  While, I may write long, wordy blogs, you don’t have to.  It’s not necessary.  A solid 250-500 word post is all you need.  If you feel the need to become overly wordy in each article, you will actually decrease your keyword density. If you feel compelled to include poison words like FREE and HURRICANE KATRINA in every entry, your site is not going to be ranked well.

The web, just like your customers like short, sweet, to the point content. Also, much like your customers, engines don’t want a whole bunch of useless off-topic info. Don’t use your site as an extension of your print campaign or to discuss how you didn’t like the last season of the Sopranos. That means minimize your sales pitch and rants and maximize your expertise. You need to provide valuable, useful information to your potential customers. If you are selling homes, provide useful information on what the market conditions are in your area, what listings will move first, where the hot areas of town to buy are... I’m not talking about giving away your entire body of expertise so people don’t need your service, but you ought to be able to provide some expert advice that will help to further your role as an authority in the field. People like to know they are dealing with experts that know what they are doing. Prove it by providing regularly updated content that gives helpful tips related to your farm area, the real estate industry as whole and your specific listings.

SEO Content Rules

Rule 1: KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid.

You don’t have to write a book with each post. Keep each article on topic and short. If you feel the need to be prolific, great! But write more articles that are shorter and do not combine topics on a single page.

People like content that is split up with bullet points and has lots of white space.  It helps them read and digest what you have to say better.

Rule 2: Write with keywords in mind.

Have a list of keywords you would like the article you are writing to be searchable by. Be sure to include those keywords and repeat them frequently throughout the article to increase keyword density and relevancy. Keywords are specific terms that you would expect your customer to search for your site by. Think to yourself, “what would I enter in Google to find my site and how can I incorporate those words into this article?”

Check the keyword density of your articles with the Widexl Meta Tag Analyzer.  Having a reasonably keyword density is the sign that you do not, in fact, have a bipolar website/blog.

Be careful:  while you want a reasonable density- too much density looks likekeyword spamming and freaks out Google.

Rule 3: Provide regularly updated content to your site.

Fresh content tells engines that they should check the site more regularly. If an engine sees that you haven’t updated your content in six months or more, it simple won’t crawl you that often. So, fresh content invigorates a site and helps with SEO. The best way to accomplish this is to integrate a blog into your website.

Rule 4: Provide useful information.

What kind of stuff is a customer looking at your site interested in? Buying, selling, mortgages, local attractions… The list is endless. Write about those things. You are an expert in both how to buy and sell real estate and your local farm area, so let your customer know that by writing content that is less sales pitchy and more valuable. You can divulge helpful tips or entertaining facts without giving away your secrets. Be sure to include content that speaks to a customer and gives them a reason to bookmark your website.

Ideas for writing engaging real estate content that is on point

Resources:

Real Estate Blog Writing 101

Copyblogger

• Hold a contest.  Like Sellsius recommend, hold a local content on your blog.  Call out to local photographers and house hunters alike to take pictures of local attractions.  You can even notify a local newspaper of your “blog contest.”  If your town is small enough, it may even get picked up!  Judge your entries and post the winners on your site.  This kind of contest, keeps it local and engages the community as a whole.  Check out Teresa’s pumpkin contest!

• Be sensational.  I always call out Christine’s Blog for covering the Billy Joe home sale, so I’ll do it again here.  This was brilliant.  It completely opened her blog up to a whole new audience and made her easier to find on the web while still keeping on the topic of New York and home sales.

• Give a lesson.  Hey, I am the undisputed world champion of real estate technology tutorial marketing!  (don’t let that Jim Cronin at the Tomato see this… we might have to have a blog-off).  Give a solid lesson on how to stage a home for sale.  Or provide a “top 10” list of things to do before a closing.  People like to learn things that directly relate to their lives and how to be successful at their tasks.  Spend the time to write a solid tutorial at least once a week.  It is a sure fire way to keep your readers engaged.  A good example of a great tutorial marketing Realtor is Jay, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy.

• Be entertaining.  Even if you are telling people how horrible the market is in your area, make ‘em laugh. If you can make the boring content entertaining, people will line up (subscribe to your RSS feed) just to hear what kind of wacky thing you will say next.  Take a look at TLW’s blog.  She’s engaging because she makes you laugh but get’s her point across.  Not a boring post on her blog! People love her for it.  Look at all the comments BB and her amass!

• Make complex topics understandable.  Make sure that no matter how complex the topic you are writing about is, you make it understandable. I can talk about canonicalization all day long, but understanding my mortgage… forget it.  Nobody likes to feel confused and stupid because they read a post, so if you are writing on a complex subject, have another agent in your office review it- get a second pair of eyes to see if you wrote intelligibly. 

Take a sneak peek behind the wildly successful Sellsius blog. Rudy and Joe come clean with their tips and tricks for building a successful real estate blog, how they love ActiveRain, what their crystal ball holds for the future of online real estate technology and why man holes are round. This is a must read for real estate bloggers everywhere!

It’s getting hot in here: REBlogGirl Catches Up with Sellsius°

Checkout the Auto-Podcast on the RSS Pieces Site 

REBlogGirl introduces Sellsius°:
Hey all, this is my interview with Real Estate Technobitionists, Sellsius° founders, Joseph G. Ferrara and Rudolph D. Bachraty III. For those of you not in the know: Sellsius° an all inclusive Real Estate Community where, anyone can post unlimited enhanced listings for any type of Real Estate, Business For Sale, or Classified Ad for related jobs, products or services, detailed professional profiles & more. If it's Real Estate Related, You Can Search, List & Compare It.  To learn more about Sellsius° and what they are doing, visit them on the web.  Wanna reach out and touch them? (None of that Michael Jackson stuff, buddy- I’m talking a phone call.) Give them a ring at: 347 535 0696.  Now that you know how to get in contact with these guys, let’s kick off my first interview in high style…

The Interview:
REBlogGirl:  Sellsius° thank you for giving me the time for this interview. I truly enjoyed Christine's interview with you and thought I could supplement that with some technical questions I have been dying to ask.

Sellsius°:   Mary, thank you for this interview.

REBlogGirl: You have truly mastered the art of "out-of-the-box" blogging for traffic with your 101 Post contest and Top women bloggers posts, what are your top suggestions for the typical real estate agent to drive traffic through content on their site or blog?

Sellsius°:   We have not mastered anything.  We have experimented with different ideas and some have worked. We are still learning and making mistakes along the way, which is fine.  We are not afraid of making mistakes nor should anyone else be.  We'd like to make clear to anyone reading this interview that whatever we say here is just our "opinion" & should not be taken as "gospel" truth.  We have done what we thought would help others because that is ultimately our goal in building the Sellsius° grassroots real estate community.  We are real estate people, plain and simple, who want to help other real estate people succeed.  Active Rain is a good example of how a community can provide benefit to its members.

One way we have used Sellsius° blog is as a vehicle to promote other real estate bloggers and real estate professionals.  As a real estate agent you can apply the same principle on your site or blog by focusing on your local community & sharing your particular niche expertise. You can highlight local neighborhood events, businesses and people. Get out in your community and interview for your blog (take your camera everywhere).  Be a local reporter on your community --people will love to visit your site to read your post & see the photographs (people love photos, especially when they're in them) or video or podcast.  In this way you involve your community in your blog.  Have the people in your neighborhood appear in your blog. They will be happy to recommend & promote you in return.  Throw a blog party (& invite us.)  Have some fun & entertain as you  inform--that's been our approach. Our friend Justin Farrow from JustNYC uses photographs to document New York City.  It's a great way to get people to come back to your site.  Here is an example of a post where we promoted a local business franchise in a blog post.

Use the latest technologies to keep your site up-to-date & interesting.  You can use Trumba to calendar local events. You can use FilmLoop in creative ways (we use it as an archive tool). You can sponsor interactive promotions & contests.  An easy one is a holiday themed contest, such as best decorated house for Christmas or Halloween. You can use print media to announce community events taking place on their blog or site. Offer free white papers. We are not SEO experts but we think it's wise to use neighborhood keywords in blog post titles, first sentences and links. You can even use your neighborhood name in your blog name.  In this way your blog should have a better chance in coming up in local searches. So we've been told.

REBlogGirl: Since Podcasting has become a hot issue for realtors and I see (and hear) that you use high quality autocasting technology on your blog, which autocaster do you use and do you feel that it increases your traffic, reach and/or adds SEO value to your blog?

Sellsius°: We like to experiment with new technology so we tried talkr. The idea was to add a unique feature so our readers could listen to our posts as another option. Each post, with text, is now an mp3 file which you can download to your computer. Theoretically, you can listen to them on your ipod while jogging or on your commute to work. Not sure if anyone has done this yet but it is possible.  Plus, the computer generated voice can be really funny in its pronunciation, e.g.  Ardell DellaLoggia. 

We're not sure what SEO benefits autocasting has, but it sure is fun. Uploading a podcast or video may have SEO benefits provided search engines can access the textual content via tags, headline, description, etc.

REBlogGirl: One of my recent posts covered the RSS reader in Windows Vista. Do you feel that the integration of the reader in the OS will spike blog RSS subscriptions in 07 and lead to what you termed in Christine's interview a "blog over saturation?" What do you recommend Realtors do to combat (or differentiate themselves in) what might become an over saturation of blogs and RSS feeds in the marketplace?

Sellsius°:  Yes. It's possible that RSS subscriptions will increase as more people learn how to use the technology. Early adopters have already embraced RSS but we don't believe it is mainstream yet. The integration of the reader should help increase awareness of the great benefits of using RSS.

Oversaturation is an unavoidable consequence of a popular medium, including blogs.  The only thing we would recommend is that real estate agents who choose to blog do it with passion and be themselves. It's much easier that way. There are of course some "tricks of the trade" to get links and some notice but in the end it comes down to people liking you or what you have to say. Use your creativity and do not try to fit someone else's definition of what a blog should do. The medium is too young to be fully defined in its reach or influence. Creativity and innovation result from breaking some rules and blazing new paths.  That's one reason we LOVE new bloggers.  They bring fresh enthusiasm.  Focus on your particular niche, experiment and network (call email, comment) within the blogoshpere. We wish we had the "secret sauce" but we don't.

REBlogGirl: While we all see your Web 2.0 SEOmoz honorable mention award on the Sellsius° blog, some may not truly realize what an honor that is and what kind of competition you were up against. In what ways do you think web 2.0 design and technologies will revolutionize how Realtors do business?

Sellsius°:  We are very proud of that award. Web 2.0 technology should make it easier and more enjoyable for consumers using a real estate website.  But something more is needed to have them return.  We think interactivity will bring people back to your website.  Helping people will bring people back to your site.  Filling a need, solving a problem and giving them some kind of pleasure will bring them back too. Showing them new things will bring them back.  That was the effect of the 101 Blog Post Challenge.  We are working on another event called the Blog Debate, which we'll announce later today or tomorrow once we finalize the debate topic.  We'll encourage other bloggers to run their own debates.  One of the reasons we have Open Mike is to get non-bloggers involved.  (Unfortunately, only 1 person took the mike).  Web 2.0 will not replace the older ways to improve your business.  Getting referrals is still one of the tried and true ways to improve your business, in our opinion.  You don't even need the internet for that.

REBlogGirl: I love the idea of Sellsius° and can't wait to see what you have in store for us. What do you feel the most compelling component(s) of the Sellsius° package will be for Realtors and average Joes just trying to sell their houses?

Sellsius°:  The two most compelling components are that each member will receive ALL benefits without having to pay extra for anything and that we are passionate and committed to helping our members increase their business, without picking their pockets. We will be active promoters (in the best sense of the word) of our members.

REBlogGirl: I hail from the venture capital community and one of the things they always do in an interview is throw some crazy curve ball question at the end, so here goes. Why are man holes round?

Sellsius°: Easy to roll and no thinking required for proper placement. Plus, they got a good deal on them.

REBlogGirl: Roland, thank you for your time and I am on pins and needles waiting to see what you guys do next.
 
Sellsius°: Pins and needles huh.  That's gonna leave a mark.

Bonus: Mary, we think that REBlogGirl is a great name. You should register rebloggirl.com because the domain is available, [you may want to register the domain before you post this :) ], and can become a great brand. A logo and character icon is something you should consider as well. Marketing wise, you can use your cool character on everything. You'd probably sell a good number of t-shirts too :)

Thanks for the interview,

Joseph & Rudolph

REBlogGirl’s Interview Rearview: 

Boys, thanks for this insight into your company and the future of real estate online marketing.   Ya’ll give good interview!  And, super thanks for the Bonus tip: I bought the domain and yes, I am putting together a rockin’ site there!  Stay tuned, REBlogGirl has arrived and I owe it all to you. 

Ladies, the boys of Sellsius° calendar drops in December… be waiting by the door because these guys are hot, hot, hot! Just kidding, there’s no calendar, but they will still raise your temperature, just like their name implies!

According to Technorati’s February 2006 study, one new weblog is created every second which amounts to about 75,000 new bogs each day. With that much competition, clearly, not every blog will be successful, so what makes one blog climb in the SERPs and gain momentum with readers while others flounder? Let’s dig into the mechanics and marketing of successful blogs and how you can be one of them.

Shout out of the day goes to this article on successfully launching a blog at avivadirectory.

For those of you that have been watching the launch of RSS Pieces, you might have noticed that we came onto the scene strong. (Our site went live in August 2006 and our marketing campaign only began in early October and already we have posts and features everywhere) And, no, it’s not because we have a lot of marketing dollars to throw at this thing, it’s because we are using the following free techniques to drive quality traffic back to our blog. The same techniques you can use!

1. Make a good first impression

Write content that connects personally with your audience and introduce yourself with an about page and/or welcome message on the front page of your blog! People like to know who they are dealing with, so fill them in on who you are and what you are about. FYI: being humorous and humble will help people to relate to you better than listing every magnificent thing you have ever done or award you have ever won (Dude, only your mother cares about that stuff).

Be sure to launch your site with no fewer than 5-10 posts live. People come to your site to see what you are about. If all you have is one or two posts, they will see you as a flash in the pan. So, launch with a reasonable body of work that they can sink their teeth into. Having more than one post on various topics with varying writing styles will also help you to determine which types of articles and topics your visitors are most interested in.

Add at least one new post daily with at least 250 words. Be sure your posts are well written and the titles are catchy enough to spark people’s interest. Posts should be credible so you can build your authority. Wanna learn how to build credibility through content? Read my recent post: Don’t get caught lying on your blog.

1. Get people connected

Visibly display your RSS buttons on each page to increase the number of subscriptions to your blog. Blog subscribers are the key to a successful, consistently high trafficked blog. Beyond your natural RSS feed, offer an email version of your RSS feed. Both CopyBlogger and Aviva agree that an email subscription option can more than double your subscriber conversion. Another way to kick start more “referral” traffic is to clearly display Delicious and Digg chicklets so people can easily submit stories they found helpful to these behemoth social networks.  

1. Build your network

Beyond, promoting yourself with ping services like pingoat and googleping, get out there and actually seed your own posts to social networks like Delicious, Digg and Real Estate Voices. For example, since I started submitting RSS Pieces posts to Real Estate Voices, I have noticed that a full 7% of all the traffic to our site is generated from Real Estate Voices. Amazing, huh? Well, that’s the beauty of an industry specific tool like that… it can really drive quality traffic back to your site. If you are having trouble getting “dug” on these social network sites, ask friends, family, the bum on the corner, etc to vote for your article. Worst they can do is say “no.”

Commenting on other blogs with quality, educational comments is the key to getting other “experts” and “blogmasters” in your niche interested in you. It is also a way to drive quality traffic from those authority sites back to your site. You must post valuable comments- not just “hey there, great post.” Some of the more popular blogs for engaging in the market are:

RSS Pieces

Sellsius

The Future of Real Estate Marketing

A little bird told me that Jim Cronin is working on an Ultimate Guide to Commenting post that will shed much more light on this subject than I could ever hope to, so stay tuned and check out the Tomato often!

Include outbound links to other authority sites in each of your posts. Webmasters check their referring domains and backlinks often, so if you start driving some quality traffic back to them, they are more likely to put a link to your site on theirs! It also helps you build relationships with other authorities in your niche. Plugging yourself into the greater community is essential to getting recognized as an authority yourself. Never mind the fact that all those quality inbound links add value to you in Google’s eyes.

1. Market yourself

FYI: a blog is your own reality show where you are the superstar. Be a diva and get out there and promote your brand (i.e. YOU). Contact other “expert” bloggers in your niche and offer to provide them with a “guest” post (yes, you can actually guest star on someone else’s blog). For example, look at the great opportunity, Transparent Real estate gave me with this guest post. That post continues to drive a substantial number of unique visitors back to my site. Thanks PK, again!

1. Build your backlinks. 

Not even going to go into this again. If you haven’t read my Ultimate Guide to Backlink Building yet, go for it! Most of what I have to say on this subject is there and my fingers are getting weary, so follow the link if you are interested.

That’s it, boys and girls. Those are my 5 simple steps to a successful blog! By devoting less than 1 hour per day to your blog marketing, you can grow your online presence and traffic substantially inside of 6 months.

For those of you not in the super geekdom that I reside in, you may have missed Randfish’s (SEO expert) crack to Google’s SEO Algorithm.  Yes, I am talking cracking the code to Link Quality (a primary factor in Page Rank).  It is beautiful, it is simple, it will put people like me out of business, because it means every Tom, Dick and Mary will be able rank highly in Google.  Boys and girls, this is the post you have been waiting for- the post that tells you flat out what Google values and how to get into their good graces.  Read it, learn it, live it but most of all... like Nike says, "Just do it!"

Who is Randfish?

Rand is one of the foremost authorities on SEO.  Let’s just say, he's such an expert, even Aaron Wall of SEO Book thinks he’s a genius!  If I weren't already married to a genius, I'd throw myself at this little geek's doorstep and hope for the best.

Well, without further ado… his magnificent post (we are not worthy…):

Google Algorithm Crack

The basic premise of the algorithm:

GoogScore = (Keyword Usage Score * 0.3) + (Domain Strength * 0.25) + (Inbound Link Score * 0.25) + (User Data * 0.1) + (Content Quality Score * 0.1) + (Manual Boosts) - (Automated & Manual Penalties) 

Oh, how beautifully simple is that?

Another, far longer and more involved post about ranking factors is here:

Search Engine Ranking Factors

A humorous glimpse into the future of Google filters:

One of the things that many SEO experts, academic papers and research  have been talking about lately is that the search engines of the future will use a method to determine the relative quality of a document based on how the grammar is structured. Basically this means search engines will try to determe the intelligence level of the writer based on grammar, spelling and reading level. Reading level is typically calculated by measuring the words in a document and measuring their syllables or obscurity against wordlists from educational guidelines. So, complex documents might be considered to be at a 12th or 13th grade level (high school senior or college freshman in the US) while low-level, simplistic documents would be at a 5th or 6th grade reading level. It is believed that this kind of filter will help to determine the authority level of the content.  Essentially, search engines will be giving your content an SAT!

This is just a theory mind you.  However, somewhere in the Search Engine Rankings Document, Dan Thies says about this “grading filter”, “I'm tempted to vote for this factor to trick people into writing better copy.”  See, even SEO experts think most of the web content out there is garbage!

On that note, I think I will leave you with the link to CopyBlogger again. 

If you don’t know what Podcasting is, how simple it is to implement, how little you have to spend to do it, or what the best ways you can use this technology on your real estate website, it is time you learn. Podcasting technology enables users of personal audio players (iPods, MP3s, some cell phones, etc) to receive broadcasts of audio media via an Internet feed to which users can subscribe. Basically, it’s your way of posting audio to your website and broadcasting it out to your subscribers.

I need to do this as a multi-part article simply because there’s so much to say and my attention span is a little too short to write it all in one post! This part is going to go over the basics of Podcasting, why real estate agents should be doing it, how to implement a podcast and what options are available to you for recording and publishing.

While I would normally quote Wikipedia for a definition, even I got confused by theirs, so here is about.com’s definition. A Pocast is an audio file you create in .mp3 format which contains your own radio show or any audio you wish others to have.   You can upload a Podcast along with an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) file to a server (your website for instance) that your intended listeners download using one of several programs that have been created to retrieve your audio file automatically so, they can listen to it at their convenience on their own iPod or .mp3 player. Interestingly, it is estimated that perhaps only 20% of podcasts are actually consumed on portable media players; 80% are consumed on the PC onto which they are downloaded. 

What makes a podcast valuable to a real estate website?

Audio on your website, big deal, huh? Well, it is and this is why. Unlike the other Internet audio formats, Podcast technology allows you to associate searchable text to the audio/video file. Say what? Podcasts and vidcasts contain enough extractable information to be used for SEO. That means that podcasts can be searchable and indexable by engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo! and podcast directories like podcast.net, podcastdirectory.com, odeo and ipodder.org. What types of data can be coupled with the podcast to make the whole think indexable and SEOed? Keywords, descriptions, author information, publish dates, titles and chapter information, etc. 

So, the end result is that adding podcasts and vidcasts to your website or blog (most blogs freely offer the ability for podcast publishing) can add to your site's overall SEO value. 

What types of podcasts can help real estate professionals?

You can record a podcasts yourself on your computer. All you need is your PC, microphone and some some podcast recording software. There are a bunch of free podcast recording tools, but I really recommend spending between $20-$50 for a quality package. My recommendations are: Propaganda or Webmaster Podcaster, both of which are about $50.

Autocasting is the ability to convert the text on a blog into speech so that it can be downloaded as via podcast.

Recommended AutoCasting Service:

ReadSpeaker

*For a great example of a real estate blog using a high-quality autocaster visit Sellsius and click on the podcast icon at the bottom of any article.

This is pretty much the same as an autocast- just has a more specific name. A blogcast is a portmanteau of two better known media types, the blog and the podcast into a single website. A blogcast is a podcast with an associated text summary, which can be indexed by search engines to make the podcast searchable. (this is from wikipedia)

    Teresa Bordman's recommendation: Talkr 

How to market your real estate podcast

Directory marketing is so far the best way to market a podcast. Here is a pretty complete list of podcast directories. Choose a few and list your podcasts there. It will help people find you and drive traffic back to your site.

Top 5 ways to use podcasting on a Realtor website or blog

• Offer personal tours of listings: Couple your Podcast with a Virtual Tour or slide show for a listing to give visitors a personalized tour of your listings. This type of podcast would be called a Vidcast as it can contain video. By doing an official or unofficial podcast/vidcast of your listings you are providing a level of service and intimacy available no where else. 

• Tour local attractions: Similarly, you can couple a video of the downtown area with a description of all the local “hot spots.” You could even do a series of podcasts and feature different attractions or hot spots in each cast.

• Give mini seminars: Guide buyers through the mortgage and closing processes with bite sized audio clips of what they can expect at each step. You can even personalize RSS feeds to automatically send these audio tutorials to your clients as they approach their closings.

• Create a “talk radio” show: Interviewing builders of homes you are selling, happy clients who love the home you sold them, mortgage brokers that can help people understand the process or the options, etc. The list is endless. It really creates an intimacy with listeners and showcases your personality.

• Announce events: Have an upcoming open house? Use a podcast to alert subscribers to the open house and other relevant local events.

In the next installment, I will go over how to create and publish your very own podcast/vidcast at almost no cost.

People love glitz, glamour, gossip… why else do you think CNN.com has started putting gossipy headlines about Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson or some other pop-tartlet of the day on their homepage? I’m sure that one of today’s featured stories “Harrison Ford: I’m still fit to play Indiana Jones” isn’t really news, but I’ll probably read it. Why? It’s a sensational headline. The kind of headline that if you wrote it, would get you the front page of a syndication site like Digg and get bookmarked in Del.icio.us.

No matter how good your content is, if you don’t’ get people to read it, all that information that you are providing is lost to your audience. Probably the best example of how to market yourself through headlines is from a recent Edison Inventors Society  Meeting. One of the members launched a designer barf bag (kid you not). Seems crazy until you realize she markets it to pregnant women and cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. In any case, her entire press strategy was about grabbing headlines. Her copywriter wrote this series of ads and press releases all about “Barfing in Style.” Truly, funniest thing I have ever read. But the point is, the titles were so catchy that Fox news and Regis and Kelly picked up the story. Needless to say, this woman is laughing all the way to the bank.

Where I am going with this one is, before you even think about writing some Pulitzer Prize winning content, come up with an attention grabbing title. I’m not talking about some fun play on words that makes people think too hard about what you have to say, I am talking about a to the point, call to action headline that just begs a reader to click on it and read the article. I call these “Houston Headlines.” For those of you that don’t or have never lived in Houston, TX: a “Houston Headline” is a headline that makes you read or watch a news piece because you think if you don’t your children might get run over by a runaway train or roaming vagabonds might break into your home and kidnap you Patti Hurst style.

Your headline should make it seem as though getting the information in your article is vital to the reader's very existance

So, what kinds of titles create headlines for real estate sites? 

These are just examples of the types of titles you can use. I am not suggesting these titles, just showing you how to implement the ideas.

Create a little fear. Make people feel like if they don’t read this their entire buying, selling, investing future is in jeopardy. Sounds crazy but the fear of loss is a compelling reason to dig deeper into some topic.

• 5 Things that will ruin your closing

• Are you preventing your home from selling?

• Will your open house be a flop?

People love lists. Think about People Magazine’s Most Beautiful People issue.  It is historically one of their best selling issues each year. Simple lists catch people’s attention. It gives them knowledge in bite sized pieces.

• Top 10 things to do in Area X when you’re retired

• The 20 most important things to do when staging a home for sale

• Top 10 ways to get more for your money when buying a home

Strangely, people like to be told what to do. They like to be guided through processes. So, writing “How-to” and “Ultimate Guide” type titles always make for a popular post.  FYI: These types of titles and posts are called “tutorial marketing.”

• How to get an offer at an open house

• Ultimate guide to closing in 30 days

• What to do when a seller refuses your offer

There wouldn’t be a show called Mythbusters if people didn’t like their myths busted. So, bust those myths. 

• Myth: you can’t get home owner’s insurance in Florida

• Myth: I'll get the best deal on the house if I call the agent listed on the For Sale sign

• Myth: Our new kitchen is a great improvement and will improve our home value

As Realtors, I know you know things that average home buyers like myself are just in the dark about… Share them. People like to think they are getting “exclusive” or “secret” information. Doesn’t a secret peak your interest?

• Secrets of painless closings

• The secrets of zero down investing

• A Realtor’s secrets to buying homes for less

Please, we all can’t get enough of Star Magazine in the grocery line. I may not buy it, but I read every juicy little nugget I can while the husband unpacks the cart! It’s an unfortunate fact, people love sensational gossipy news. If your area is predisposed to having celebrities in town or you have a local scandal, blog all about it. It will drive traffic in droves to your site and possibly get you syndicated!

• Councilman Harry puts your home sale in jeopardy with higher taxes

• Johnny Damon sells Fort Myers home, take the virtual tour and see how a World Series winner lives

• Why Rod Stewart makes a bad neighbor

Need more ideas from a great source, other than me… check out CopyBlogger.

Your website is an online storefront that needs traffic to drive leads and sales. Websites are marketing tools, just about every source on the World Wide Web agrees that the purpose of a website is to generate business through getting more “eyeballs” to see your product.    The web is the least expensive marketing channel available to real estate agents.  If your realty site isn’t searchable by Google, Yahoo!, MSN… or driving quality traffic and leads, you’re site isn’t working as a marketing or lead generation tool for you.  Fact is, you can’t build a personal relationship on the web with people that don’t visit your site or blog.  So the first step in online marketing and internet visibility is generating and measuring traffic to your site. Let’s dive right in see what you can reasonably expect from your real estate site, what other realtors are achieving with their sites and how to measure the success of your site.

What should a real estate agent reasonably expect from their website:

• A minimum of 10,000 hits per day or 150 unique visitors per day

(hits and visitors are very different animals- hits refer to the number of files pulled from the server per day while unique visitors refers to the number of actual people that visit the site daily) NOTE: For smaller farm areas, you might need to reduce those numbers, but not substantially.

• A minimum of 2 new leads per week (According to Jim Cronin over at the Tomato, 4% of all traffic should convert to leads- so a reasonable expected pull-through of 150 unique visitors should be 6 leads)

(this is highly dependent upon the content of the website and the inclusion of a solid lead generation tool, but this is n attainable goal- our agent sites average much higher than 2 leads per week but I feel 2 is an attainable goal for everyone)

• Searchability in Google, MSN and Yahoo! meaning first or second page placement in search results for their primary keywords

• Page Rank of 3 within the first six months of your websites' life and a page rank of 5-6 by the end of its first year of life.

How to measure your traffic

Your website’s back-end traffic metrics

Most all websites and blogs have traffic statistics modules running on their backend that will tell you what your daily hits and visitors amounted to.  Some will even show which posts or pages received the most visitors so you can understand which topics are of most interest to your visitors.  Many also will log what keywords a visitor used to search for you on popular search engines that drove them to your site.  These are all very important metrics by which you can measure your success and use to modify your strategy to drive more traffic. 

FYI: Monday is generally considered the most surfed day in the Internet world with Wednesday being the softest.  So it is natural for your traffic statistics to rise and fall throughout the week.  If your website’s analytics tool doesn’t show weekly, monthly or quarterly results, you should track your traffic in an excel spreadsheet so you can quickly modify your strategy if your traffic isn’t increasing. 

Alexa’s traffic report

While your server and your back-end tool will give you the best and most accurate traffic statistics, Alexa is a good tool to check in with.  It gives you an idea of how the rest of the web thinks you are doing.  For example, while RSS Pieces just launched in August, we have already catapulted our traffic into the top 100K websites on the web according to Alexa.  Think that is impossible for a regular local real estate website?  Look at Jay and Francy’s,  Phoenix Real Estate Guy, one of my favorite Realtor blogs. Jay and Francy are tech savvy Realtors that have harnessed the power of the Internet to drive traffic, leads and, I would imagine, market listings in the Phoenix real estate market.  This Realtor’s blog is clearly within the top 100K websites on the entire web!  Jay and Francy prove that driving high volume traffic is not only possible but achievable for a local real estate website or blog.

Page Rank

Page Rank is not the end all be all of your web existence but it is an indicator of how Google feels about you.  Since Google only updates their page rankings every 6 or so months, sites don’t climb the PR ladder very fast.  However, this is what you should expect a solid PR 3 within your first six months and between a 5 or a 6 by the end of the first year.  You can check your website’s page rank in Google’s own search results, in the Google Toolbar or by going to 123SEOtools.  For example, according to Google itself claims RSS Pieces’ homepage, while only 3 months old, has a Page Rank of 3.

How to measure your searchability

There are a million ways to find out where you stand in various engines on your primary keywords, but I am just going to mention to easiest and the most useful.

• Obvious searches

A properly developed website or blog should drive traffic through organic searches on popular search engines like Google. Not sure if yours is? Try this. When you search for your website on Googl, Yahoo! or MSN with the keywords or phrases you would expect your customers to enter, does your site show up on the first or second page of the results list? (If your website is less than 6 months old- this doesn’t really apply to you- you’re probably still in a Google sandbox)

• IBP

IBP: With all the tools out there and all the high-dollar ones I have at my disposal, I recommend IBP as an affordable option for analyzing your real estate website/blog’s SEO, backlinks and searchability.  I seriously, do not get paid to say this!  I like this product so much I have been known to buy copies of it for clients and give them as a Christmas gifts.  It will help you to understand what the primary competition is for the keywords you are selecting, what they do to get there and what you have to do to get your site into those results.   The free trial version will give you all the searchability results you need, but I recommend the $250 product for all the other funky SEO stuff.

How to get volume traffic and generate leads on your site

1. Make sure your website is SEOed.  And, no, you don’t have to call me to do it!  Get that IBP program and have your existing designer implement all the recommendations it makes
2. Develop a backlink strategy
3. Update your site or blog with very well written, useful and somewhat sensational information daily.  You might want to re-read some of my blog writing articles:
• Humanizing your blog for intimacy
• Ultimate guide to writing a real estate blog
4. Make sure your website and blog have validated HTML so a search engine can read it and index it well.
5. Make sure you include a lead generation tool on your site on every page not just a “contact us” page.  Some ideas are a CMA tool, newsletter signup, rss to email subscription tool, open house register, etc.
6. Always look at what the successful real estate agents are doing, you just might learn something… I do!
• Phoenix Real Estate Guy
• Rain City Guide
• NY Houses 4 Sale
• Another good place to find quality real estate bloggers is on the Top 500 Real Estate Bloggers List
7. Keep a close eye on your traffic statistics!  Following the ups and downs of your traffic will tell you if you are doing something right or heading in the wrong direction.
8. Be sure to use syndication tools like RSS on your site so you can notify subscribers when you update your site.  Also submit stories from time to time to RealEstateVoices and Carnival of RealEstate.
9. Use ping services like pingoat and googleping to notify social networks and search engines that you have updated your sites and suggest they come back and re-index you.

Top 5 attributes of highly successful real estate websites and blogs:

1. frequently updated with fresh relevant content that is valuable to potential customers
2. HTML is optimized for search engines with properly formed tags and relevant meta data (keywords, descriptions and heading tags) Ken Smith and Toby Barnett have extensive posts on this topic.  I recommend reading through them.
3. HTML is fully validated so search engines can read it and browsers can display it consistently
4. drives substantial traffic through syndicating its content across the web
5. consistently builds incoming links from other trusted, relevant and highly ranked websites.

FYI: for all of you that wanted to know how to use SimplePie to pull RSS feeds on your own site- go to the RSS Pieces website.  We posted the first part in a how-to series with code examples and explanations.  I had this sneaking suspicion that AR might not like posting code into their edit window... I know I wouldn't like someone doing that in mine!

If your real estate website rings, flashes, lights up and buzzes you probably have Macromedia Flash on it and you need to get rid of it or at least optimize it for search engines.  Flash is the single technology that separates the men from the boys in web development and SEO. While Flash is a great technology for the novice we designer, Flash is not W3C compliant.  To a search engine it is completely invisible. Why? Simple, search engines only read text and cannot index the contents inside a Flash file, so, you can consider the text inside a Flash file completely lost to a search engine. It is very difficult to near impossible to boost rankings for a Flash only site.  That being said, if you still feel compelled to use this technology, there are some ugly workarounds to optimize Flash sites. NOTE: an optimized Flash site is still like being blind and having Halle Berry for a wife…

Mary’s Required Flash Rant

Needless to say, I hate Flash. I hate everything about it. It annoys me and I consider Flash developers (meaning those who develop entire sites or navigation menus on sites using Flash) an inferior breed of web designer.  I’m sure that will cause one or two Flash “Developers” to spin themselves into a Flash-ified tizzy but so what.  OK, enough of the rant portion of this post.

Why am I on a quest to wipe Flash off the face of the web?

Because I received a call from another ActiveRainer, the ever so sweet Dawn from AllABoutVirtualTours. She asked me to take a look at her website from an SEO standpoint.  (And yes, before anyone thinks I am busting on poor Dawn, I have her permission to use her name and site as an example in this article.)  Dawn has a site developed using Macromedia Flash.  You know the kind of site that plays music when you open it in the browser and has lots of animation before you get to the meat of the content.  The kind of site that is, well, annoyingly unindexable (like this new word?) by search engines.  For example: Take AllABoutVirtualTours and run a “site:allaboutvirtualtours.com” on it in Google.  Only 2 pages appear in the index.  Why only 2 pages when she clearly has many more?  Simple.  Her entire menu is in Flash and because the engines can’t read the content of the Flash file, they can’t follow the links to index the pages on the rest of the site. 

Why Search Engines Hate Flash Sites?

Flash just like the rest of your web candy media types is simply too complex for a spider to understand. Spiders cannot index a Flash movie directly. Spiders prefer plain text. Spiders index filenames but not the contents inside. Flash movies use a proprietary binary format called (.swf) and since its not text, spiders, obviously, cannot read the contents, at least not without a whole bunch of assistance. And even with the proverbial “seeing eye dog” for Flash, spiders cannot crawl and index all your Flash content. Before you ask: this is true for all search engines not just Google. There might be differences in how search engines weigh page relevancy but in their approach to Flash, at least for the time being, search engines are really united – they hate it but they index portions of it if optimized.

Why not to use Flash:

1. Flash cannot be indexed by search engines

2. Flash movies, especially banners and other kinds of advertisement, distract users and they generally tend to skip them.

3. Flash movies are fat. They consume a lot of bandwidth, and although dialup days are over for the majority of users, a 1 Mbit connection or better is still not the standard one.

What Not to Use Flash For?

You can use Flash for some things. I do, but for the most part, avoid it for things you need indexed like menus, navigation and primary content. Now, sometimes Flash movies are worth the SEO efforts. But as a general rule, keep Flash movies to a minimum. In this case less, is definitely more.

The general rule of Flash is: Flash is good for enhancing a story, but not for telling it. What this actually means is that if you are talking about something important- use real searchable text (HTML/XHTML) that you can SEO. Only use Flash to add further detail or give a visual representation of the story.

Full Flash Sites

Now, for all those that insist on telling the whole story in Flash. Your developer has committed a crime against all of Internet humanity! Look for forgiveness from above because the rest of us real developers will not forgive you. The fact is, a full Flash site is not searchable and it won’t receive decent rankings by the engines. For the most part Flash sites have abysmal page ranks in the 0-2 range.

Menus/Navigation

Never ever use Flash for navigation or menus on a website. This applies not only to the starting page, where once it was fashionable to splash a gorgeous Flash movie with some external linksl. Although it is a more common mistake to use images and/or JavaScript for navigation, Flash banners and movies must not be used to lead users from one page to another. Text links are the only SEO approved way to build site navigation.

Got Flash on your site?  Here’s what you tell your developer to do to fix it.

• Workarounds for Optimizing Flash Sites

NOTE: the following workarounds are not be considered a solution but rather a cheap and dirty fix that have some value for SEO.

MetaData

Although metadata is not as important to search engines as it used to be, Flash tools allow you to easily add metadata such as keywords, descriptions and titles to your movies, so there is no excuse to leave the metadata fields empty.

Alternative pages

Always provide html pages as alternatives to represent your Flash pages so you do not force the user to watch the Flash movie. Preparing these pages requires more work but the reward is worth because not only users, but search engines as well will see the html only pages.

Flash Search Engine SDK

This is a must use technique for SEO and Flash. SDK is the most advanced tool to extract text from a Flash movie. One of the handiest applications in the Flash Search Engine SDK is the tool named swf2html. This tool extracts text and links from a Macromedia Flash file and writes the output unto a standard HTML document.

That being said, you still need to have a look at the extracted text to correct it, if necessary. Most commonly, the order in which the text and links are arranged in your SDK will be strange so you may need to restructure it in order so that the keyword-rich content, title and headings are at the beginning of the page.

Also, you need to check for duplicated content. Font color can also be an issue. If the font color of the extracted text is the same as the background color, you will need to change the color of the font.

NOTE: Google and the other search engines may not use Flash Search Engine SDK to get contents from a Flash file.

Got Flash?  Get SE-Flash.com

www.se-flash.com

This tool visually shows your Flash files look like to search engines. This tool will even check the contents of the extracted text in your Flash Search Engine SDK.