To some real estate agents search engine optimization is "rocket science"

I'm here to tell you today it is not. It’s just a matter of knowing what to do, and more importantly, consistently doing it.

If you consistently do these three tasks, you’ll achieve higher rankings and more targeted traffic.

1. You’ve got to do keyword research.
2. You’ve got to optimize your reader-focused content.
3. You’ve got to build links to your site.

Scores of professional web writers use a web-based application to perform SEO. We have written about it before – it's a WordPress plugin called Scribe SEO.

The reason we are covering the plugin again is that the software programmers have vastly improved the product and now through November 5, 2010, they are offering to "step up" new subscriptions with a coupon code:

STEPUP.

Go to the Scribe site look for the yellow box below the plan option boxes, enter STEPUP in the promo code field, and push the “Get” button to see your new “step up” choices.

Oh, and did we tell you we subscribe and use Scribe SEO all the time?

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Why limit your clients' digital presence to computers,

… when you can extend their reach to the Mobile right in their pocket or purse? 

Direct Response Mobile statistics are staggering. SMS's (Short Message Services) or texts have a 98% open rate, over 60% within the first 5 minutes of delivery.

So communicate with your clients' in a way they will respond to in today's interactive world.

Mobile marketing isn't really that new, but certainly has been the recent buzz word and there has been a ton of information being published about it lately.  So I intentionally withheld writing anything about mobile marketing for real estate agent until the flurry of content slowed a bit.

Mobile marketing is doing big things for Realtors! 

The problem is this …

… so many of them don't fully grasp the potential and the real-life applications or how these services will enhance their real estate business. 

But don't worry, that is what this post is all about!  I want to give you some easy to understand steps to implementation, in other words  -how to get results!

But before we get to that you may want to read this article if you don't "speak mobile marketing" written by Jonathan Rivera at the Real-TechGuy.

Ok now that you are up to speed with the lingo … let's get straight into it.

How can mobile marketing help Realtors close more deals?

First things first!  Let's divide the question into 3 sections:

1. What can mobile marketing do for you as a Realtor?  Mobile Marketing can do several things for you as a Realtor, including generating more hot leads, providing you another method of delivering relevant content to prospects
   
   This potentially saves you a fortune in printing flyers for the yard sign box, and giving you added value to offer your clients in the way of real-time statistics that traditional marketing just does not offer.
    
2. What can mobile marketing do for your client?  Mobile Marketing does a few things for the seller client.  You can now show the seller real numbers on how many people text for information, you can show how many requested more info, how many viewed pictures, etc…
    
3. What can mobile marketing do for your prospect?  Mobile Marketing allows your prospects to get real-time information without calling you, prevents them from taking a paper flyer that they may not want, gives them access to your site in mobile format, gives them what they want while they remain somewhat anonymous.

Imagine being able to send a text message to everyone who texts for information on your listing, to let them know about an upcoming Open House, New Listing in the Area, Price Reduction, etc…. 

Imagine being able to text a free market report on the area around your listing to everyone who text for info on that given listing …

Next let's examine what tools you need to have in place, and what kind of budget you will need to be successful with mobile marketing.  The basic tools are:

1. Smart Phone (or one that receives text msgs)  – I prefer and use the iPhone 4
    
2. Texting Service for Real Estate – click here to get an awesome service with unlimited texting for only $10 per year
    
3. QR code(s) – read this article to learn the 5 Best Ways To Use QR Codes For Real Estate. Learn what a QR code actually is.
    
4. Marketing Collateral: ie. Yard Signs, Sign Riders, Flyers, etc…. (FYI — any good texting service will provide the signs and sign riders for you with your service)

Set yourself free from the constraints of yesterday's business traditions …

Click Here right now to get access to a 42 page report that shows you some really cool stuff on mobile marketing. 

Or you can RSVP for a very special webinar

For those of you who are up-to-speed on the basics of mobile marketing, you may be interested in the these links to get even more great resources:

Mobile Marketing For Realtors – Tools to Boost Sales Productivity

Cool Tools to help Realtors go Mobile

Likify makes it easy to like you

I believe mobile is THE FUTURE of Direct Response Marketing.

What are your thoughts?  Leave us a comment below!

Create video animations with cartoon type characters

Real estate agents can get their marketing messages across by using compelling animations.

This illustrated tutorial will show you how easy it is.

Go to xtranormal.com to get started on your animation – for this tutorial we are going to use the online "Text-To-Movie" option.

Set up an account and login – select "Make Movies" from the top navigation bar.

You will then be presented with some choices of backgrounds and characters. We chose the two actor Colorz option for ours.

You might recognize this character from the animation going round that features, amongst other lovelies "I'd like to shove a lockbox up your a**" and a bunch of "F bombs".

This next graphic shows a site popup that pretty much explains how the free and premium actors and sets work.

We published our video for under $5 so it's not that expensive. Here is the control panel that you will use to create your movie:

1. Direct the action. These controls can be dragged into the editing boxes.
2. Add your actors text – will be converted to speach
3. Choose which actor speaks and is animated
4. Choose your camera angle OR
5. Let Magicam choose the best camera angle automatically
6. Animate your character with a series of options – ie hands on hips pointing
7. Preview – clicking this prepares your animation so you can view it
8. Run your animation
9. When you are done you can select Publish

The animation actions are pretty extensive.

Click on the person and you get loads of options

- here are some of them:

Clicking the play button will give you a preview of the action.

Using these option near the bottom of the editing screen you may choose different characters and scenes:

Selecting the background screen will bring up a series of choices – in this case you could choose a TV studio, bedroom, sauna and more …

That's pretty much all that it takes to create your masterpiece …

…apart from making it available on the web of course.

Xtranormal makes that part easy too, with options to host the movie on their servers – they provide the embed and link codes – or post it to YouTube right from the site:

Video animations can go viral ..

We have our movie embedded here on our blog – you can see it here on this link or play it right from the sidebar.

We have had hundreds and hundreds of visitors watch the animation with over 65 sharing it on Facebook.

With over 1,000 views just on YouTube in two weeks we are certainly getting our message across!

There are some other online services that you might consider for creating video animations they are covered here on MakeUseOf.

So we hope that this has inspired you to get creative.

Please be sure share any animations that you create!

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Watch the video of the new Esquire iPad app ..

… courtesy of Mashable. Explains how the new Esquire Magazines iPad app works, and it's beautiful!

OK I know the guy is a bit hard to take, but stick with it. At this point we don't need the details of how the app works just understand the interactivity.

Now go to your website, blog or MLS site and see how stale, ridged and boring they all are.

Let's not get caught out again!

Before the real estate profession realized how web 2.0 could be leveraged along came Trulia, Zillow and a couple of others.

These "interlopers" kicked off with some original thought and produced sites that (if you think about it for a nanosecond ok, in retrospect) the real estate industry themselves should have conceived and maybe done even better.

Why didn't they? Good point. Perhaps too many of the old Guard still miss the book

Believe me – this is one of those turning points.

Right here, right now.

It's a turning point because we have proven tools and technology that can seriously change the consumers expectations and enhance our value proposition as real estate professionals.

It's time for large Brokerages, Franchisors, MLS software providers and other influences to step up quickly and start building these sort of interactive experiences that consumers will find irresistible.

Let's reinvent how home searches work, how the peripheral information like video tours, walk scores, demographic and sales history data are presented and manipulated by the end user.

If we don't someone else will

If we don't then please don't come complaining to me that some new innovator backed by VC cash comes along and changes our landscape to the detriment of the guys in the trenches -

- you know, the ones that actually list and sell and deal with all the pain and anguish the industry in general inflicts on the consumer.

Where to start?

To save you searching I suggest you start with the company that put together the Esquire app – ScrollMotion – a company you probably have never heard of but have over 11,000 apps in the iTunes store.

Eleven thousand apps!

These companies have already used ScrollMotion: Hearst, Random House, Houghton Mifflin, Simon and Schuster, and The Jim Henson Company.

From Mashable: " ScrollMotion has developed a platform that allows their publishing partners to easily take content and format it, add extra features and then publish to iTunes. The system is fast and it’s also inexpensive.

Koppel told me he feels confident that ScrollMotion can create content faster and for far less money than his competitors because of the process and platform practices that the company has in place."

The whole Mashable story is worth reading.

If you are inspired please share …

… unless of course you are so stoked you are calling VC's right now

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I wrote last week how my local MLS consumer print outs sucked.

In the article one of the commenters pointed out that HAR – The Houston Association of Realtors have a great reputation in the industry for innovation so I went over and checked out their consumer facing portal at HAR.com.

So I headed over and clicked on find a home.

The home search functions were a bit clunky but I'll skip that part and head straight to a consumer display to see how that stacks up.

Here's a typical property listing sheet from the HAR site with our observations and  suggestions.

(I'm guessing I'm not going to be very popular in Houston)

1. Location is important – if you can map it please don't make me click
2. No kidding, why bother to explain…
3. Share brings up Facebooks share function (shown below) pity it doesn't actually describe the home
4. Print flyer pulls up a different display (shown below) with a huge flaw
5. Neighborhood in this case pulled up an empty page (shown below)
6. Price reduction info but when? How long is the total market time?
7. Can you show me more than 1 photo at a time please?
8. This belongs below the listing so there is more room to play with for photos and map

The print flyer function offers two choices:

Either a preformatted "flyer" with just photos the main description and the agents details (actually not enough info to be meaningful).

Or the web version which I have shown here.

Only the street # and street are displayed on the page – not the town or zip    This is a HUGE flaw.

Again the listing agent info belongs further down (where it is anyway) and there are not enough images or a map.

Here is the popup from the "Share on Facebook" link – this time the address is shown in full – but does not tell me anything about the home that would make many want to click over to find out more.

Here is the dead end for this properties neighborhood info

Personally I didn't expect to find so many problems so quickly. They are all easily fixable but IMHO these flyers and linked information have not been designed with the consumer in mind.

So what do you think? Am I being too harsh?

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Search Engine Optimization is important, right?

Getting organic links on Google's search results pages rather than paying for ads (PPC) on those pages is absolutely the right way to go …

Here is a visual on which parts of Google's search results pages contain paid results – highlighted by the yellow boxes.

Ideally you will be optimizing your web or blog real estate site and it's content to get listed in the organic – read FREE – results highlighted in the red box.

Brian Clark, the creator of the awesome Thesis theme for WordPress (this site uses Thesis) has written a great 26 page ebook about search engine optimization (SEO) and is giving it away free.

The report is easy to read with lot's of great tips. Here is the link for the SEO copywriting report

Brian is currently promoting a big discount on his search engine optimizing software, but the discount runs out tomorrow at 5pm Central time, so seriously consider looking into this offer – use the coupon code PROMO27  to get the discount.

We use Brian's software on this site and can tell you that it works. It saves time and get the results we are looking for on Google and the other search engines!

QR codes are weird looking square "quick response" codes that ..

… turn website addresses, vCards, or any other text into a jumble of pixels!

This jumble converts back to text with the appropriate app on your smart phone – but will it catch on? Realtors are up for trying new stuff, so maybe ..

This is what a QR code looks like – it's the URL of our blogsite produced from an online QR code generator

If you have the right app on your smart phone you can scan it and immediately translate any QR code with no typing required.

Google is using QR codes

Google's "Favorite Places" campaign puts QR codes in the windows of local businesses that point to their online listing page – they sent out codes to 100,000 of the most popular companies in its Local Business Center.

If Facebook started implementing this idea (a possibility according to Techcrunch) can you imagine a QR code that instantly makes the person scanning it a fan of a brand, company, or personality on Facebook without ever typing a URL.

Using a camera phone equipped with a reader the user can scan the image of a QR Code containing a website address which launches the phones browser and redirects to the programmed URL.

To enable the use of QR codes you will need a QR scanner app on your smartphone. Search for "QR Reader" and your phone – iPhone, Windows Mobile, Nokia, BlackBerry, and other app-based phones with a camera built in. Google's mobile operating system Android has also helped along QR code adoption.

Here is a link to an iPhone QR code app

How to use QR codes in your real estate marketing

• Put on on your blog with your contact info – total bleeding edge geekiness
   
• Place one on the back of your business card.
   
• Keep a QR code handy so others can scan it
   
• Take a photo of you own QR code on your phone and allow others to scan it from your phone (my best idea!)
   
• Have a T shirt made with a large QR code on the front – show how totally bleeding edge you are! You can actually order them here – maybe with your Facebook vanity URL??

• Place on in your offline print ad and explain why it's there.
   
• Use one on your print flyers in your brochure boxes

Other uses

At conferences you could include a QR code on every registrant's badge to cut down on paper waste and manual data entry.

Continental Airlines use QR codes for paperless boarding passes.

Have you seen or scanned a QR code?

Is it just a geeky fad or will it prove to be a must-have for all mobile users? Let us know your thoughts in the comment box.

Which Contact System do you use for your Real Estate Business?

Recently we polled our Facebook Fans to see what CRM systems they were using as a platform for their real estate marketing endeavors, see what they have to say …

I was quite surprised at how many systems were being used, to be honest I was under the seemingly false impression that Top Producer had this market all locked up.

Here are the systems Facebookers are using …

You can see the actual results on our Facebook page. 

Our goal behind asking this question to our Facebook Fans is simple … we want to encourage and promote sharing information among the Real Estate Community, we want to be your trusted source of up-to-date and relevant resources. 

We understand that our industry is inundated with vendors selling us crap and how easy it is to be lulled into buying stuff that either does not work or fails to live up to expectations …

… So we are making our best effort at giving you fair and unbiased information, knowledge & experience from your peers who are actively working in today's market.

Stay tuned for an indepth review on these different contact management systems.

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Google Wave is …

… a personal communication and collaboration tool" announced by Google earlier this year.

The app is now in formal "beta" mode, so what does that mean and how can it help me?

Google Wave is quite revolutionary offering many innovative features …

…to get the complete story you will want to check out the video toward the bottom of this post.

If you currently use Gmail and Google Apps you may really love the Google Wave as it has great potential for the real estate professional.

Ben Parr has done a very thorough job with his complete guide: 

"It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client."

 You can apply for a beta access to Google wave here. We already have and as soon as we get our hand on it we will post our review ..

Say NO to Property Listing Flyers…

Imagine the ability to follow up with every prospect who calls on your listings.  Imagine never getting that call from the seller to come out and fill the flyer box with new flyers.

Imagine being able to contact every prospect who ever called on your listing to notify them of your upcoming open house or a price reduction.

Sellers deserve better from us and so do our buyer prospects.  Mobile Marketing is the next wave of marketing for Realtors, but don’t listen to me try it out for yourself.

We came across a new company recently that brings real estate agents into the 21st century – click over to NineMobile to setup your account, then order a sign rider from your local sign company like the one illustrated and place it in the yard of your listing. Sit back and watch the prospect leads call in.  This technology will give you a great way to show your sellers exactly how many calls came in on their property.

Ask NineMobile about how to set up drip text messages – who would have thought of that one!

There are so many cool new technologies available to help Realtors improve your customer service and follow up.  One of the best things about this one in particular has to be the money you will save.  Think of the paper, ink and toner you will save.  No more time spent designing paper flyers that just end up in the trash.

Want to try it out now, go ahead.  Feel free to text any or all of our current accounts:  Text the below keywords to 85800.

• home101
• home102
• nar

If we can help you implement this in your business, feel free to call us directly.

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