I have spent a 4 years looking at the advertising trends of real estate agents and brokers through some very interesting real estate cycles. What amazed me was that they are backwards. Real Estate Agents and Brokers advertise more when the market is good and less when the market is bad. This is inverted with what I will refer to as “professional” advertising.  In professional advertising – mass market retail and other, advertising is used to drive business and increase market share to improve slow sales, or launch new products.  This is true of all of the worlds largest advertisers. [...]

Several of us have been involved in a lot of discussion about why the same search produces different results between Google Maps and Google.com. The recent expansion of the Google Maps One box on Google.com makes local search optimization much more important than it was before this new display was implemented widely on Google.com. Now, whether you have a web site or not, a business that Google ranks highly in Google Maps can get dramatic exposure thanks to last month’s change. How dramatic? Well, according to Bill Tancer’s Hitwise data, Google.com gets about 100x more traffic than Google Maps. So, [...]

20% of traffic to blogs from search engines are directed to the home page 95 are delivered to the topic cloud 8% of the traffic to real estate blogs are directed to listings 8% of the traffic to real estate blogs are directed to real estate news 5% of the traffic comes to Web news feeds 2% of the traffic comes to News feeds from other blogs. All of the sites in the study are getting more than 100 visitors a day.  All blogs in the study were supplied by real estate blog sites, and all visitor statistical analytic tools [...]

Recently I was asked by a client about their Alexa rankings. it seems that few people understand that Alexa gets its rankings data from browsers that have the Alexa toolbar installed.  That’s a fairly small sampling, as well as a skewed one, as many savy individuals believe that having that tool installed in thier browser is like having spyware on your computer. alexa does measure the popularity of your site – but only for that minority focus group. The reality today is that 90% of the traffic to agent and broker websites come from people typing in the URL (look [...]

Try using these great free services to load images to your blog. TinyPic will give you the code to paste into the text of your blog. Photobucket will allow you to store your photo collection online and also allow you to build slide shows on the fly.

Thank you to Broker Agent news for this thoughtful list. […]

HomesMagazine.com launched a blog a few months ago.  Yesterday there were 150 click throughs from google alone. Here are the keywords that worked and the traffic associated with it.  Incidentially, 89% of all search engine traffic to the blog came from Google. […]

I spoke to a top-producing agent today who has consistently sold over $50 Million in residential real estate over the past 10 years and did $75 Million last year (a down market eh?) As her marketing consultant, I share ideas with her and keep her up to speed with marketing trends in Real Estate.  I covered the concept of Communitainment with her today. After a few tries at various pronunciations, we turned to definitions and I explained that Communitainment is a new buzzword, created by Piper Jaffary, to explain all of the fuss created by sites like myspace, youtube, and [...]

Ever wanted to be on top of search engines for keywords in your market. Sounds exciting eh? Up until about a year ago, the best strategy I knew of was to go to websites that were already there, copy their content and meta data, then launch a site that contained more information than the top 5 sites already at the top. Ergo – you win. NOT SO FAST!  Aside from plagerism, and copywrite infringemnet, the real crime is what search engines call Content Spamming […]

The worst thing a broker has ever heard. “Can I get a floor agent to pick up the client holding on lines 2, 3 and 5, please.?” I had an interesting conversation with a broker in San Francisco this morning that first had us laughing, then had him crying. This broker floats between number 3,4, and 5 in San Francisco – which is a highly competitive market. We were doing a marketing piece for the brokerage to launch a new program for buyers and sellers and I asked him what phone number I we should use. “Phone?” he replied.  “We [...]

Brokers are beginning to use video more and more in offering content to consumers for real estate. With desktop video editing emerging as an easy to use application, brokers no longer need to pay a fortune for property video.  But if you want to, Inman will be happy to send a professional videographer to capture an increadible video story of your listing and the community. […]