“The single most effective strategy for localism is placing a geotargeted keyword in the domain name…”

There are three ways this can be done, first in the Root Domain, as in DenverRealEstate.com. This is in fact a root domain that Kentwood Companies here in Denver purchased as a strategic move back in February. The second is in a Sub Domain, as in DenverRealEstate.website.com. This type of localism will aslo help to increase seo. The third version of domain localism is on Landing Pages, website.com/DenverRealEstate. This type is often more common, especially on real estate websites that have landing pages dedicated to specific cities and communities. Overall, the search engines give more weight to the Root Domains over sub domains and landing pages. If possible your best bet is in purchasing a root domain with your local keyword in it.

The Kentwood Companies did a great job recognizing this trend and implementing a plan to practice it as well. Unfortunately not every company will have the ability to purchased their localized root domain. No worries though there are other ways to meet the localism trends, especially through the sub domains and landing pages, as well as dedicated localism content.

 Take a look at my last blog about localism for tips on incorporating it into your website and blog content.

 Read the press release from Kentwood’s purchase of Denverrealestate.com.

There was an article in USA Today recently that talked about how Baby Boomers are heading online to participate in Social Networking. We generally talk about using social networking for professional reasons but this article in particular focused more on the differences in uses by generations. The boomers who are mostly just getting online now are looking to make friends, catch up with old acquaintances and keep in touch. USA Today notes that the biggest difference between generations is the interest in making new friends. Older generations are looking to find like minded people, chat and get to know them while younger users are there to see what their current friends are doing, not to find new ones. Either way people are truly embracing the popular technology and it is changing society, “affecting everything from TV viewing habits to the way companies peddle products.”

As part of the article, Josh Quittner of Time magazine gave some suggestions geared towards those individuals over 40 that are joining the online social network revolution. Although a little cynical, I do think he offers some valid basic advice. Read on for fun and think about what you are or shouldn’t be doing with your online networks.

BEHAVE LIKE AN ADULT ON SOCIAL NETWORKS

• It’s not Las Vegas:“Think twice before uploading that amusing photo of you wearing boxer shorts on your head,” says Quittner. “What happens on Facebook does not stay on Facebook.”
• Don’t share the love: “When Vampire Poke Stick or another such wacky application asks you to invite all your friends, ignore it. Frankly, you’re the only one who thinks that app is funny. Your friends are sick of getting spammed with stuff like this.”
• Resist the spotlight: “Every now and then, maybe once in 14 months, it’s OK to start a group celebrating your first book of poetry or the opening of your photo exhibit. But it’s better to have someone else do it for you and best if you don’t do it at all.”
• The world is reading: “Remember that when you post a comment on someone’s page, everyone can see it. You might think this is obvious but the fellow who posted a love couplet to ‘my steamy escargot’ did not.”
• Get real: “They’re not really your friends.”

Like I said, a little cynical but spoken with an honest truth. Many people get caught up in the 1,000′s of ways you can personalize your profile and forget what social networking is all about – connecting with people.

What do I want you to take away from this:These tips are a great reminder that social networking can be used very differently for business and pleasure. The way you would treat your profile if it were strictly for fun should be very different from that if you are using it as a business tool. Remember your purpose, revisit your goals. If all you want to do is reconnect with old friends and keep in touch with others, using your network for fun is perfectly fine but just remember that others may be looking you up online. Business contacts, potential partners, investors or clients, may be looking you up on Facebook or Twitter – will they like what they see?

If nothing else it’s a reminder that what you put online is public. It represents you and forms the perception that people have of you. Build a positive online identity because it’s guaranteed that someone will be looking for you!

The USA Today article has a lot more examples of boomers using Social Networking to connect with new friends, read the full article here.

We all know that if you want a successful community, you need people ready and eager to join and participate. The lifeline of any community is its members and the content. Keeping members involved and inspired to contribute is the biggest struggle but first lets start with a plan for your community.

First Step: Lay the Foundation

1. Write down some goals. What area do you want to influence? Write down the geographic area.
2. Make a list of influential people that you want to contribute to your community.
3. Reach out to influential bloggers and other community leaders.
4. Start a spread sheet of people you have access to and start reaching out to them.
5. Make sure you have some analytics running on your blog or social community so you can see and track your readership. 
6. Make a list of offline networks you have access to. Non-Profit organizations, trade groups, Chambers of Commerce, etc. - reach out to these groups and bring them online.
7. Find agents in your company that can be a part of the community and are willing to contribute content.
8. Interview people you want to be part of your community and record the conversations or better yet, do a video interview.
9. Start a database of content.

Second Step: Start Reaching Out

1. Start participating in the communities you’ve identified. You can participate by writing comments on blog post, or write a review and provide a link back.
2. Start emailing 2 people per day and ask them to contribute to your community; or do an interview with them.
3. Start featuring community members – people love their 15 minutes of fame! The more you interview and talk about other people, the more they will share your blog or community.
4. Run a contest and have some fun. Maybe give away an iPod or something for the best article submitted.  

Third Step: Start Promoting your Community.

1. Host a “best of” series on your industry blog featuring the best posts from the top bloggers.
2. Bring your online community offline. Host a party and invite your community members. Document the event and be sure to feature it on your blog. By building offline relationships with your community, you will get people more involved.
3. Reach out to the social networks and begin spreading your community throughout other online networks. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are great social networks to start with.
4. Become an online detective and never stop trying to find influential people to interview and get them following your blog.
5. Most of all, have fun! Don’t forget to ask your members how you can make the community better.

Following these steps will get you started and get you moving on the path to building your own social community. It is important to remember that it will take work – it takes time and persistence to build a successful online community. But it pays off - spending time to develop exisitng relationships is a great way to maintain contact with individuals and to expand your network in order to build new relationships.

It will pay off. Good luck!

The “4 Steps to a Successful Brokerage Blog” according to Realtor Magazine:

STEP 1: Pool your people. Contributing consistent, quality content is the ultimate key to any blog’s success. By creating one central blog for your brokerage, you can leverage the collective time, energy, and diverse talents of all your associates. Individually, a salesperson may simply not have the time to post regular entries. Pooling the talent of your sales staff allows them to combine their knowledge to create rich content about the markets they serve. You can help to direct and focus your team by giving specific ideas or topics for the blog. With your vision, your team can create digital archives of highly relevant and informative articles that consumers can easily access. 

STEP 2: Be hyperlocal. There’s nothing that buyers and sellers desire more than fresh and relevant information about their neighborhood. And there’s no one more qualified to deliver this content than the professionals who canvas these neighborhoods on a daily basis. Treat your blog like an ultralocal newspaper and take hold of the opportunity to own your ZIP code. 

STEP 3: Use social networking to spread the word. You probably know that SEO stands for search-engine optimization, but have you ever heard of SNO? Social networking optimization is a smart way to drive traffic to your blog using sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Start by creating accounts on these sites, if you haven’t already, and post headlines and links to all of your brokerage’s latest blog entries. SNO allows you to increase your sphere of influence on the Web and reinforce your expertise with all of your online contacts. If your social networking friends like an article or video you’ve posted, they’ll send it along to their sphere as well—and you’ll benefit from the magic of viral marketing. 

STEP 4: Don’t take it personally. Now that you have a flood of visitors coming to your blog, make sure to reinforce your real estate expertise. Give real-life examples of how your brokerage and sales team has helped buyers and sellers meet their goals. (Just be sure to do it in a natural way; no one wants to read an overly promotional blog.) It’s also imperative that you make a “Home Search” feature readily available on your site—for a quick solution, there are some widgets that offer this capability. Be sure that the blog is integrated into the rest of your brokerage site too so visitors can check out other tools and resources you offer. At the end of the day, your company’s blog should be attracting prospects and converting them into clients.

These four steps are things we’ve been talking about consistently over the last few months. It’s no secret that building a blog can increase our visibility, your digital footprint and increase your search engine rankings. The hard part is implementation. Those that are embracing a blogging strategy now are seeing the results and building up an archive of content that will help them become more ‘findable’ by every search engine out there, making them more findable by the consumers they want to attract.

If you’re not blogging, you should be!

To read more about our thoughts on brokerage blogging, click here. Or to read the full Realtor Magazine article, click here.

Your company’s blog truly is the best friend for your website. While your website hosts all of the pertinent information about your company and the products or services you offer, it is limited to a static amount of space. You can only have so many tabs, links and pages before your website becomes too complex to navigate and your potential customers become frustrated with trying to find the information they want. A blog offers unlimited space to advertise your products/services, knowledge and brand. Plus, as a bonus, blogs are continuously updated and this inflow of information and content offers a great boost for your websites SEO.

Your Blog = Organic Search Traffic

With this in mind you should focus on how your blog could capture those organic searchers. This means focusing your blog around the information your customers want.

1. Keywords- Find out which keywords your customers are using to find your site. If you know anything about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) then when you planned your website you more than likely had to decide what keywords you wanted to target. Now what you want to do is find out what customers are searching. This may mean contacting your website provider. Do the two match? If not, you might want to re-evaluate your keyword strategy.

2. Write with them- That’s right. Actually use those keywords as content for your website and your blogs. If customers are searching Las Vegas Foreclosures, use this term as a topic for your blog. Make a category out of this topic.

3. Name Your Blog- When in doubt, name your blog after one of the keyword terms that customers are using to find your website. This will only increase your chances of being found on a search engine.

Active Website has blogging solutions for our Enterprise Network Members. Want to see some of them? Check out the links below. If you would like to find out more about the Enterprise Network and our Blogging solutions contact us.

• Rubloff Residential: http://rublogg.com/

• Reinhart Realtors: http://blog.reinhartrealtors.com/

• Kentwood Companies: http://blog.denverrealestate.com/

• Residential Properties: http://blog.residentialproperties.com/

• Sonnenalp Real Estate: http://blog.sonnenalprealestate.com/ 

• Wright Kingdom Real Estate: http://blog.wkre.com/

• Windermere Tri-Cities: http://blog.windermeretricities.com/

I recently read that Facebook currently has “222 million active users worldwide.” That means 1 in 5 people online use Facebook. Say you have 150 friends on Facebook, talking and spreading your good word, letting people know that you are the real estate expert in your area. This is great: it will build your credibility as the local expert and expand your digital footprint for when referrals decide to “Google You,” as well as your existing customer database. So while your message is successfully reaching those 150 friends you could also be advertising to the other 221.9 million yet to be added friends (those potential customers). What I’m saying is, let’s advertise to increase your visibility. 

Facebook offers two plans for advertising.

• Cost-per-impression
• Pay-per-click 

Cost-per-impression is where you pay per thousands of views. The pay-per-click plan utilizes the Adwords model where you only pay when viewers click through. Facebook, unlike Google Adwords, allows for visual advertisements as well as more specific targeting. If you’re using Facebook as a business tool, this is the greatest benefit Facebook has to offer. Their specific profiling can be utilized to create highly directed advertising campaigns that are seen by your most qualified viewers.

Targeting options include the basic demographic information of age, sex and geography but also offers a more advanced selection based on hobbies, pastimes, special interests and travel preferences. You can target the 25-40 year old professionals in your neighborhood, town, state and throughout the U.S. Drive them to your Individual Agent Website or blog. Or maybe you decide to launch an international campaign on Facebook to test the interest of the international market. The options are limitless.

My interest was sparked when I came a cross an article about someone who actually used Facebook for a campaign. At the end of it, they talk about the lessons they learned. I think they are simple guidelines to keep in mind while you plan your next Facebook advertising campaign.

1. Don’t think it can replace all other channels.
   Use it to supplement your strategy. It’s still early days and the CTR (click through rate) is lower than Google Adwords.
2. Don’t dismiss Facebook as just for young audiences.
   Take a look for yourself. You’ll be very surprised.
3. Test, test and test your ads again.
   Don’t just sit there and wait for it to happen.

Read the blog that got me thinking: Further proof that Facebook can deliver an audience. Their success with Facebook advertising caught my attention, let me know what you think.

In the meantime, go onto Facebook and when logged in, check out the ads you see on your page. You’ll be amazed at how targeted some of them are and how relevant they are to you and the information you have in your profile. I agree with the article, this is a new thing and you can’t expect it to replace anything just yet, but the potential here is endless and it’s something worth familiarizing yourself with.

Ready to advertise right now? Click hereto access the Facebook advertising page.

Universal Search Term: “relocation companies”

Local Search Term: “Chicago relocation companies”

In the report they focused on the fact that while someone might put in “relocation” and only the big companies across the nation will come up, a localized search like “Chicago relocation” evens the playing field. With more detialed search criterias, a local company is more likely to appear in the search results than before.

Real estate searches in general seem to be fairly localized but I think this is a good time to take a look at your content and see if you are maximizing this trend. Localizing your website and blog will help your SEO and help you rank higher on the search results.

Think Local!

1. Define your localized keywords. For example: if you already know that people are searching Chicago real estate or Chicago homes, what else could they be searching that relates to real estate? Come up with a list of about 5 other terms. Perhaps, ”moving to Chicago” or  ”relocation company Chicago”
2. Use your website to create localized keyword content. Stick those defined keyword terms in the content you have for your website. Be appropriate, don’t flood the page; a keyword term every paragraph or so will be plenty. Beefing up your website content ultimately helps with your search engine optimization making your site a likely candidate to show up in a search for that term.  
3. Use your blog to create localized keyword content. Active Website encourages all of our Enterprise Network Members to create and maintain a blog. Sometimes there are not enough pages on the website to accommodate all the topics, so we use blogs to expand and build on a theme. For example, if your broker website does not have a dedicated page to relocation, you could start your own blog to show all of your knowledge and tools available to home searchers. For an example, visit Rubloff’s Chicago Relocation Blog. Creating localized keyword content for a blog is very similar to doing so on a website however you have the free range to use the terms more often. Think about it; each day you blog about moving to Chicago and somehow incorporate that simple term into your writing. – even a quick this should make moving to Chicago an easy decision. Within no time your blog will be gaining search engine recognition and who knows, it could even end up on the first results page of Google for the searched term “moving to Chicago.”

So get started on defining those localized keyword terms that you want to attract visitors from and get them incorporated into your website and blogs. This can not only help make your website more visible but it makes you the percieved expert on the topic and location.

Here are Carmine Gallo’s suggestions for effective videos:

1. Keep it short…Keep your YouTube clips under three minutes.
2. Make it loud and clear…Use a microphone other than the one built in on the camera you use. 
3. Avoid bulleted PowerPoints…Presentations don’t transfer well on tape, if you have a presentation be sure to edit the video with full shots of the slide.
4. Use good lighting…You don’t need flood lighting, but be conscious not to deliver your message in a dimly lit room.

Seems simple right but more often than not people make videos cluttered and less interesting. In October the Kentwood Companies of Denver did a great job of posting video of their Real Estate and Economic Forum. They used their blog as a platform to give background on the topic and then posted the video of the presentation. This is a more formal use of video. See their videos here.

I also found a real estate company in Louisville, KY who posts web-casts on their website. Their videos are very basic and entail one of their agents talking about a subject important to their customers. It is easily filmed in front of their office and nicely edited. Take a look here.

Video is a great way to expand your digital footprint. Think about the creative ways your company can talk about important topics or any events that you might be able to film. Questions or topics that affect your local community are a great place to start. If you were a home buyer moving to your town, what would you be interested in knowing? Start simple.

To read the full Business Week Article click here.

For some that might seem absurd – to us, it’s reality. The California Association of Realtors recently released their 2007 “Internet vs Traditional Buyers Survey.” According to their survey of California homebuyers, just 12% used print media to look for their next home. While many will read this and say ‘but that’s in California, my market is different.’ Stop with the excuses -this trend is happening everywhere. 

This survey is a great demonstration of the need for real estate brokers to shift their marketing dollars from print to the web. Active Website offers a plethora of tools for Brokerages and Agents to make this shift. Successful web advertising means more than just having a website for the Brokerage, it is a unified company image and presence that simultaneously meets individual realtor and buyer/seller needs.  It should include services such as:

• Individual websites for Teams, Offices and Realtors

• Individual websites for listed properties and new developments

• Syndicating your listings with multiple venues

• Implementing in-depth SEO techniques to generate great search engine results

• An e-Business Solution to manage lead distribution and conversions

The list of possibilities is endless but one thing is for certain - the online real estate industry is the most used tool for anyone looking to buy or sell a home. Does your Brokerage site allow for all of these features? How much money are you spending on advertisements a month? Are you tracking those ads and have you taken the time to actually track the ROI? For most companies, the answer is no. Most would say we just do it because we’ve always done it.

While every market may vary, the shift from print to web doesn’t. When re-evaluating your budget for 2009 think about it. Ask yourself, why are you spending so much money on print advertising? Have you evaluated your spending to see if it’s working? Is there a better way to allocate your marketing dollars? If you look, you’ll find one answer - move print to web.

At Active Website, we believe in it so much that we are building an entire print to web strategy for each of our Enterprise Network Members.

Each of our Enterprise Network Members will be working through this plan with us step by step. Some have already begun and those that have are already experiencing increased exposure and better Google page rankings.

Our plan includes:

• PHASE ONE: Establish your online presences and outline your goals
• PHASE TWO: Establish your presence on 3rd party sites
• PHASE THREE: Establish a voice
• PHASE FOUR: Broadcast your brand

 We will be elaborating a little more on each of these four phases every day. In the meantime check out this video by CommonCraft, “Social Networking in Plain English“ to get your mind thinking!