EasyImpress Blog

Real Estate Social Media – The Beginner’s Guide to Getting Results

Everyone’s talking about social media. But what uses does real estate have for it? For your average agent, it’s not make-or-break. But if you’re looking for an edge, or if you’re at the top of your game and want to go even higher, social media can do that for you.

Social media is word-of-mouth marketing, online. Unlike traditional word-of-mouth, with social media you can monitor it and participate in it. For instance, imagine being able to know anytime someone in your area was talking about selling their home, and able to walk up and introduce yourself. On twitter, that’s exactly what you can do.

I’m going to give you a brief overview of the four main types of social media for real estate: blogging, twitter, Facebook, and real estate social networks.

Real Estate Blogging

A blog is like your own speaker’s podium. If you write (/speak) authoritatively, you’ll gather attention, build an audience, and find yourself being linked to from other sites. There’s no form of social media that’s better for establishing a reputation as someone who’s an expert on real estate in your area. And it’s one of the best ways to increase your search engine rankings, by having the blog as part of your site, and/or by linking to your site with relevant keywords in your posts.

Pros of Blogging for Real Estate

Search Engine Optimization benefits. More frequently updated content, better keyword usage, and increased likelihood of getting content linked to can generate a lot more traffic to your site from search engines.
Personal branding benefits. Not only will you be found more often when people are looking for an area real estate expert, you’ll be able to refer others to your content. They’ll see the content you’ve referred them to, and all of the other content you’ve created.
Content can serve multiple purposes. Blog post content can easily be reformatted for your e-mail marketing, presentations, or open house handouts. If your blog is active enough, consumers in your area will help you improve your content by commenting with questions and suggestions.

Cons of Blogging for Real Estate

It takes a lot of time up front. Getting the look and feel of your blog right can take many iterations. It’s best to seed your new blog with several posts, which can be a few hours worth of writing. And getting an initial readership usually requires some time promoting your blog.
It takes time to keep up. Writing a blog post can take many real estate agents an hour for a well-written post.
It takes commitment. There’s nothing worse than visitors finding a blog with just 3 posts on it, or a blog that hasn’t been updated in a month. If your blog is part of your site, you link to it, or you include it’s URL in your offline marketing, make sure you’re committed to updating at least weekly.

Real Estate Twitter Uses

Twitter most closely matches the metaphor of social media as a conversation. While it might be hard to see the utility in twitter at first, spending some time using Twitter Search will really open your eyes. Not only can you find a conversation about almost anything, you can filter those conversations so that you only see tweets within a certain number of miles from any city you choose. Searching for things like “Realtor”, “selling my home”, “buying a home”, “real estate”, or “moving” near your city can turn up some great openings to start a conversation.

Some pros of twitter for real estate:

Each tweet takes little time. Quick (but interesting) thoughts, linking to good content elsewhere, and showcasing good points by others is the name of the game.
It can connect you geographically – most other social media is more focused on connecting by interest, with people that are very spread out.
It’s easy to multi-purpose content for and from twitter. Linking to blog posts and photos in your tweets gets more mileage from them, and embedding a feed of your twitter account (or just rounding up your best recent tweets) provides more content for your blog, website, or newsletter.

Some cons of twitter for real estate:

It’s hard to get your existing network using twitter. You’ll find it harder to get members of your SoI tweeting than you will to get them reading your blog, or using Facebook. Twitter’s a channel for new prospecting, rather than getting more from your existing network.
It’s a smaller overall audience than other social media. Twitter is growing rapidly, but even with mentions on CNN, it’s not regularly used by the mainstream yet. Twitter is about being able to effectively target, not mass broadcast.

Real Estate Facebook & Social Network Uses

Facebook is one of the best ways to help you get referrals from your Sphere of Influence, by keeping you linked in their minds as the person they know that knows about real estate. Facebook provides you with “ambient awareness” about your network. In ten minutes, you can get an overview of what’s going on in the lives of hundreds of people, and easily follow industry best practices like Keller Williams’ “33 touches” of your SoI.

Pros of Facebook for real estate:

Great for personal branding and increasing referrals. Regularly updating your Facebook status with updates on the local market, home improvement, and your business successes will fix you in the mind of those you know as the expert on real estate.
It takes very little time. 15 minutes of Facebook each day is all it takes to update, maintain contact with several members of your network, and check for any opportunities worth spending more time on.
Easy to get frequent high-quality multi-media exposure. Sharing photos, other images, videos, and links on Facebook is dead simple, and easily catches the eye of your network.

Cons of Facebook for real estate:

It can be hard to get traction if your profile is strictly professional. People add others as connections because they’re interested in them. If you’re only using Facebook as a marketing channel, people will see that and not add you.
It can be hard to expand outside your existing network. Facebook and social networks like it are primarily for people who already know each other. While most of your friends and family will add you in a heartbeat, people you’ve met once at a conference might not want to connect. Some people like to keep Facebook strictly for personal connections, not business connections. But everyone’s different; the only way to find out is to try.

Social Networks for Realtors & Real Estate

One of the best uses for social media is connecting with your own peers, for networking, referrals, and learning. ActiveRain is a site where real estate agents can not only connect with each other to discuss everything from sales strategies to brokerages, but can also connect directly with consumers discussing moving, mortgages, home improvement, and other real estate topics.

Real estate social network pros:

They are highly relevant. Almost all of the content and people on a real estate social network will be related to what you do.
It’s a great networking opportunity. Not only is it available at any time, the searchable nature of online profiles lets you easily find the exact type of people you’re looking to connect with.

Real estate social network cons:

It’s a crowded channel. There are likely to be at least dozens of other agents wanting to interact with consumers on these sites. It can be hard to be first (but, depending on the other agents, not always as hard to be the highest quality).
You have to stay active to keep getting results. Unlike blog posts, which can get traffic long after you’ve posted them, you have to keep browsing, reading content, and posting comments / sending messages to keep getting results on a real estate social network.

Real Estate Social Media Summary

Social media is a great way for a real estate agent to gain an edge over the competition. It can be used to find buyers, find sellers, learn from other real estate professionals, and build your brand as a expert on your area.

Real estate blogging is one of the best ways to build your brand and get more traffic from search engines.
Twitter can be used to find and connect with buyers and sellers at the earliest stages of their real estate process.
Facebook and other social networks
Real estate social networks like ActiveRain connect you with your peers and provide the most uniformly relevant audience of consumers interested in your services.

For more information on getting results from, avoiding mistakes on, and being one of the best agents involved in real estate social media, get our updates by e-mail.

Tags: real estate blogging, real estate Facebook, real estate social media, real estate social networks, real estate twitter
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Effective Real Estate Websites – What Realtors Need to Know

If you think you should be getting more from your website, you’re probably right. This post is a simple overview of how to make your real estate marketing website an effective one. How do we define ‘effective’? Few realize how much their goals for their website can overlap with their overall business goals as an agent.

Real Estate Website Goals

Getting Traffic to a Realtor Website

Although the last thing you want is irrelevant traffic (e.g. 13 year olds, or people looking for hotel room deals in your town), in general the more traffic your site gets, the more opportunities you have to get leads. Getting traffic to your website isn’t hard, but it isn’t magically effortless either. For a real estate website, the absolute easiest way to get traffic to your site is listing syndication.

The next easiest way is to include your website’s URL ( http://www.yoursite.com ) in your offline marketing materials. Although it won’t increase the quantity of your traffic much, it will get you some, as well as improving the effectiveness of your offline marketing.

Search engines can bring a large number of home buyers to your website. The gold mine of traffic for real estate websites is search traffic. When someone types in “[your town's name] homes for sale” or “[your town's name] Realtor” into Google, the first three sites get almost 100% of the traffic from those searches. And it’s a lot of traffic. Even smaller cities like Newburyport, MA, Oakdale, CA, or Brunswick, GA receive over 10,000 searches for homes for sale in that city each month.

So how do you improve your search engine rankings and get into one of those top 3 spots? Through a process called search engine optimization, or SEO. Read our post: An Introduction to SEO for Realtors.

Establishing Trust with Your Visitors

It’s essential that when you get traffic, especially from search engines, your website makes a good impression. Because first-time visitors to a site make the decision to stay or go back to the search results in less than 7 seconds. So what makes a good impression, and establishes trust during and after that first impression, on a website?

Professional design. High quality web design isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s about professionalism, easy-to-understand navigation, and easy-to-read content. More on this when we discuss getting leads.
Friendly photos of real people. It’s ingrained in us to recognize faces. Many studies have shown that photos of people on websites substantially increases visitor trust and interest, even if it’s unrelated to the main purpose of the site. A good photo of your smiling face goes a long way to getting calls or e-mails from site visitors.
Easy access to what the visitor wants. Visitors should immediately be able to find what they’re looking for on your site. In most cases that’s: homes, information about you as a real estate agent, or information about the home buying or selling process.
Showing your expertise. Buyers and sellers both want to deal with a professional. Having content on your site that shows you know the area and you know the buying / selling process (and can communicate it well) is key to establishing credibility.

Getting Leads & Listings by Getting Visitors to Take Action

All the traffic in the world isn’t worth anything if it doesn’t convert to actions, like contacting you, filling out a form with their information so you can contact them, or even just bookmarking pages / signing up for updates on listings.

If you’ve followed the advice above about making a good first impression, you’re already headed in the right direction. Clean, uncluttered sites are essential to getting visitors to take action. Too many choices, too many unneeded bells-and-whistles (area weather information, website awards, etc.), will overwhelm visitors and send them back to a simpler site.

The guiding question of real estate website design is: “What do I want the visitor to do next?” This means you should always have a clear next action for the visitor to take, and a clear call-t0-action to do it. “View more homes” (linked to your listings page), and “Call me about this listing at 555-555-555″ are good examples.

Next Actions for Real Estate Websites

Finally, remove as many barriers to action as possible. That means always provide the information needed to take action (your phone number and/or e-mail address to contact you), don’t make visitors jump through hoops (forced registration to search your listings), and avoid multi-step instructions (”to see those listings, go to the menu and hover over “Listings”, then click “Search Listings”, then type…”).

Enjoy Your Real Estate Website Results

If you follow the advice above, you’ll not only get better results from your website, you’ll be able to use your site as a competitive advantage when trying to get listings.

For more real estate marketing tips, and real estate website advice, get our updates by e-mail.

Tags: getting leads, increasing traffic, real estate marketing websites, real estate SEO
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An Introduction to SEO for Realtors

Wondering how your competitor got that number 1 spot? Want to know how you can outrank pages on sites owned by major businesses, or even the NAR itself? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) professionals will tell you that a complex algorithm with hundreds of factors determines where sites appear in a search engine’s rankings. It’s true, but you don’t need to understand every technical detail of how a search engine works to learn to rank better. Almost the entirety of search engine algorithms can be categorized into two factors: Authority and Relevance. Here’s the plain-English guide to understanding SEO, for Realtors.

Realtor Website Authority

Authority is a measure of how important and trustworthy your site is. Two of the biggest factors in this measurement are: how many links are pointing to your site, and of what quality are they? On the face of things, you might assume that all links are equal. But in reality, search engines treat links from other authoritative / important / trustworthy sites as a much greater indication that your own site is authoritative. By the same principal, links from untrustworthy sites or pages (massive link directories, spam sites, etc.) can hurt your ranking by making search engines think your site is… well, shady.

The rest of a search engine’s calculation of your site’s authority is based on a wide variety of credibility & quality indicators, such as:

the presence of a street address on your site.
how quickly your site loads.
how well your site is coded.
how long your domain name is registered for.
whether your site has original content.
whether your site’s content is frequently updated.

Think of the authority of your site as the foundation, or the base amount of ranking power, your site has for any given search term it might rank for. What determines how well you rank for each different term is your site’s Relevance, explained below.

Relevance of Realtor Websites

The second thing search engines put a lot of resources into determining is: what is your site (and each page on it), about? Search engines analyze both your site as a whole, and each page individually. The two most important factors in determining what your pages and site are about are:

What is the important text on your site about? Not all text on your site is treated equal. The words in your page title, headers & subheaders, and code elements like your meta description have the biggest impact on which phrases your site ranks for. But be warned: “keyword stuffing” these areas with many versions of the same keyword, or too many keywords, will penalize your site.
How do links pointing to your site describe you? Called the “anchor text” of a link, the actual words that are linked to your site are taken as a strong vote on what information the page contains — within reason. Words like “click here” are used for so many links that search engines don’t give them any meaning. But if your page is about foreclosures from your local (let’s say, Atlanta, GA) bank, and someone (or even a page on your own site) links to that page with the words “Atlanta bank foreclosures”, you’re more likely to rank for that term.

Just as search engines look at the authority of sites linking to you, they also look at the relevance of sites linking to you. Sites about the phrases you’re trying to rank well for, particularly those that are also authoritative, help prove to search engines that you’re relevant to that search. And, finally, if you’re looking for an edge on other sites competing for a good ranking, keywords in the parts of code that describe your site’s media (mainly images, but in some cases videos and embedded Flash files) can also help you rank.

The 5 Main Takeaways of Real Estate SEO

Search engines measure your site’s overall, and page-specific, Authority and Relevance to determine how well pages on your site should rank for searches with different keywords.
Authority is about how important and trustworthy your site is. It’s measured mainly by the number and quality of links pointing to your site, and other credibility indicators your site provides.
Relevance is determined by what your site, and each page on it, is about. It’s measured by the use of keywords in important places on each page, and the use of keywords in links pointing to the page.
The authority and relevance of sites linking to you have as much of an effect as the number of links pointing to you.
Links from low-quality / spammy sites, keyword stuffing your pages, and otherwise trying to trick search engines most often results in your site being heavily penalized in search engine rankings.

Hopefully this has helped you understand SEO in as non-technical of a fashion as possible. If you liked this article, share it with a friend using one of the buttons below.

Tags: real estate search, real estate SEO
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Why do Realtors Even Need a Website?

High selling agents in many areas are masters of print advertising, home yard sales signs, and sphere-of-influence networking. They’ve made plenty of sales each year, and they’ve done it without a website. So many agents ask themselves, do they need a website? Aren’t most sales for most agents to buyers in the same city? Why should they spend money on yet another marketing tool? In this post, I’d like to tell you why it is essential that every agent have a real estate marketing website, even if (for now) they’re doing fine without one.

Professionals Use Professional Tools

An agent without a website is like a builder without power tools. Sure you can do the job without them, even be a master craftsman of your work. But even if you beat others in quality, you’ll never be able to match them at speed, efficiency, and perceived professionalism. Even if you can convince clients you don’t need a website, do you really want your competitors showing them reports of the online traffic their listings are getting? Yard signs can’t count drive-bys. Buyers and sellers will trust an agent with a website more, as surely as they’d trust a banker in a suit over a banker in blue jeans.

Easier Sales = More Sales

Online real estate marketing gets results. Your sphere of influence is your most valuable asset as an agent. If you could give every person in your SOI a flyer to refer others to you with, wouldn’t you? A website’s not only more likely for your SOI to share, it’ll increase the utility of referrals even if the referrer doesn’t remember it. Because the first thing someone referred to you will do is search for your name online.

Having a site that showcases your skills can eliminate any need they might feel to look for other options. And buyers who can view your listings online, bookmark them, and get e-mail updates, are much more likely to stay engaged than buyers who simply circle a home in a magazine — even if that’s where they first found your site. Real estate marketing websites don’t just help you reach new audiences, they improve the stickiness of your marketing within your existing reach.

A Real Estate Marketing Website Will Keep You in Business

It’s a difficult market for even the best agents. Now is not the time to throw away sales, and a website is one of the least expensive & most effective (from the right service) tools for getting them. Your sphere of influence is aging, and that affects the age of who they refer to you, too. Today’s first time buyer is 30 years old, on average, and the first stop in their search for real estate is going to be online.

And with construction at a full-stop in most areas, competition for listings is just as tough. Having an online marketing presence is a major differentiator that will help you get ahead, or help keep you there. 60% of agents have a website at this point. Don’t just be one of the agents that has one, be the agent that has one of the best ones.

Get Results From Your Website

I hope I’ve helped you understand why a website is essential for modern day agents. We’d love to be the platform for your expertise and success. If you’d like to have a website that really gets results, get a real estate marketing website from EasyImpress.

Tags: real estate business, real estate marketing websites
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10 Million People: The Value of Trulia, Zillow, and Other Syndication Sites

Just as local MLSs are syndicating their listings to Realtor.com (which gets about 6 million unique visitors per month), many agents are tapping into an additional 10 million+ home buyers by syndicating their listings to sites like Trulia.com, Zillow.com, and Yahoo! Real Estate. These services accept feeds of listings from agents’ or brokers’ sites, and provide user-friendly search and property information tools for visitors to use. For today’s agent, properly marketing a property means you must syndicate it to these sites. Why?

These Are Consumers’ First-stop Sites

Trulia and Zillow both have powerful brands, and other syndication sites piggyback on equally powerful brands, like FrontDoor (by Home & Garden Television), and Yahoo! Real Estate. Even when consumers don’t know to go directly to these sites, they’re the first results that come up for searches like “real estate search”. Given the option, most consumers don’t want to go to dozens of agent sites to search through all the houses in the area. And they hate the clunky interfaces and forced registration of IDX searches and other ‘Search the MLS’ tools.

They Are Top Dogs in Google Search

Syndication sites have great SEO. Type in almost any search along the lines of ‘City Name, State homes for sale’, and most of Google’s first ten results will be syndication sites. Even if an agent’s site has good enough SEO to appear within the first ten, or even at the top, it’d be a major mistake to not cover all your bases and give consumers more chances to find your listings if they go to a syndication site instead. And not just your listings…

Syndication Sites can Send Traffic to Your Site

Syndication sites do a great job of taking as much commonly-present-in-a-listing-information and making it searchable. But they know they can’t show everything. Every listing on their sites links back to the agent/broker site it came from. And, if you’re a top agent in your area with the marketing budget to prove it, you can capture a percentage of every home search done in your area through their less than $100/month ads. Especially in metropolitan areas, that can be more cost-effective than even Google AdWords.

Leads When You Need them Most

A common complaint among agents is feeling like there are too many sites they need to have a presence on, each of which takes time. Syndicating your listings is a one-time effort (or no-time effort, if your website provider does it for you automatically) that you don’t have to do constant upkeep on. But when business is slow and you’re in need of leads, syndication sites do have options for you to be more actively involved. Zillow and Trulia both have Q&A areas, and many sites have some sort of consumer discussion areas, where agents can answer questions buyers & sellers have, getting on their radar and generating more interest in their services.

Millions of visitors to these sites translates into thousands of additional visitors your listings could be getting. Don’t miss out on them. Make sure your real estate marketing website syndicates your listings.

Tags: real estate search, syndication, Trulia, Zillow
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EasyImpress – Real Estate Marketing Websites That Work

Hello real estate world!

I’m Jay Neely, one of the founders of EasyImpress. We’re a new service providing real estate marketing websites; our goal is to help agents get the results they deserve from the online marketing they’re paying for. On this blog, we’ll be sharing tips and participating in the conversation on real estate marketing and technology’s role in it. Our belief is that an agent’s website is the most important part of their online marketing strategy… and it’s a part that’s been terribly under-served.

Impressive and Effective Real Estate Marketing Websites

Real Estate Website example Existing hosted services create websites that are cluttered, outdated, and ineffective, while custom designers charge an arm and a leg for sites that look great, but aren’t user-friendly and don’t get traffic. EasyImpress removes the need for web expertise or tech skill to create a site that’s impressive, easy-to-use, and effective. We provide an all-in-one package including:

High-quality, modern design.
Search-engine-friendly formatting & guidance for content.
Listing syndication to top consumer-destination sites.

EasyImpress is an expert at online marketing for real estate. We look forward to providing the highest-quality service to our customers, and speaking more with our peers in the real estate industry.

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