Spam sites usually are only registered for one year.  Therefor a site that has a multiple year registration may be perceived as unlikely to be a spam site.  Payment for several years in advance usually saves the registrant a percentage of the single year fee so it makes good sense to invest in a 5 or 10 year registration.

If you have some practical experience with this aspect of Internet marketing for REALTORS® I’d appreciate hearing about it.

Internet Readiness Quiz

If you are satisfied that you are getting plenty of business from the Internet DON’T TAKE THIS QUIZ!

If you think you’re not getting your fair share of Internet leads, take the quiz.  (This is for your info only.  You will not submit the answers.) (Does not show on Smartphones)

If your answers are a bit discouraging, take heart.  Only a very few business owners will be happy with their answers.  The good news is that if you make the effort and investment in time and money to improve these answers you will be at the top of the pyramid.  10% of the websites get 90% of the available Internet leads.  You can be in that 10%.

When you mentally design the web page you would like to use to sell your product or service, do you design it for what you like, for what your prospect likes, or what you think your prospect likes?

I’ll bet it’s the last option.  Be very suspicious if that’s true especially if you’ve based your ideas on past experience with media other than websites on the Internet.

Studies have shown some surprising anomalies that could lead you astray in your design and that could also work to your benefit if you understand them better.

Well, that’s cryptic I admit, so let’s take a look at a couple of findings.

Very few people browsing for a product or service will look at information that is below the top two thirds of the first screen they see. Your important points had better be right up there at the top. That doesn’t mean ignore the rest of the page but use it knowing it won’t be read by many people.

How can you use that to advantage? Well if text at the bottom of the page is seldom read, it doesn’t have to be deathless prose does it? In fact if you want to have your web page appeal to search engines by using a lot of text relevant to your search phrases, you can stuff some of them down there even if it makes the reading by humans a little awkward. The top is for your prospects, the bottom is for the search engines.

Contrary what we all ‘know’ is true about newspaper and print ads — i.e. pictures are the first thing a reader notices–there is evidence that on the web your prospect looks first at the print headlines and has become very adept at avoiding pictures unless they are in sync with their interest and in the subject of the text. Eye tracking tests have shown that browsers eyes avoid looking directly at ad pictures especially garish banners that twitch or shake or contort to get them to look. So, use pictures modestly and in a way that will help your prospect associate the message of your ad with you.

Most browsers scan a page starting at the top left, then move to the center, then the left column, then the right. The right column is NOT prime real estate on your page. Moreover, even newbies on the Internet quickly and subliminally catch on to where the good information is (from their standpoint), and if pages are all formatted the same they may skip the content in locations that they discovered was uninteresting previously. If your ‘good stuff’ is in different locations on the page then vary the layout in a way that will make your prospect stop and re-evaluate where to look.

So being suspicious of your ‘little darlings’ really means to think ‘outside the box’. You can pick which cliché you prefer.

Marketing for real estate agents is evolving at a blistering pace.  Just as we start to realize that to have an effective real estate business we need an effective website, we find that even with that we must scramble and compete for ‘position’ in order to get our fair share (or more) of prospects.

These are some of the statistics (April 2009):

• 87+% of buyers start with the Internet.
• Most spend about 8 weeks researching listings on the Internet before contacting an agent.
• 40% go to Google and browse websites to line up an agent while others use sites they are familiar with.
• Social Networking is becoming another source of possible agents for buyers and sellers.
• When they finally contact an agent MORE THAN HALF want to hear back within 1/2 hour!

PDA’s are fast becoming as important to your business as your phone.  If that prospect fills out a form or picks up the phone or sends an email to contact you for information and you don’t respond Pretty Damn Quick, they will simply go to the next one on their list.

There is absolutely nothing as depressing as finally getting around to contacting that lead and finding out they are already working with your competition!

Get on the learning curve if you haven’t already done so and talk to your webmaster about streamlining your Internet marketing so your incoming leads find you wherever you are  IMMEDIATELY.

You read a few articles, talk to a few colleagues, and horror of horrors even listen to some of the telemarketers trying to separate you from your cash.  Pretty soon your vocabulary is laced with “PPC” for Pay Per Click and “SEO” for Search Engine Optimization and “Meta Tags” and “Incoming Links” and “Search Engine Robots” and “Search Phrases” and,….well you get the drift.

After mounting the learning curve you get to the point where you know that there is no “Free” way to get traffic and prospects to your website.  So, if you’re one of the few real estate agents without tons of cash, you’re going to have to make decisions on where to put your advertising dollars to get the best “bang for the buck”.If you don’t have a limit on your funds, then you shouldn’t be reading this or fooling around with your website.  You should be playing golf or visiting a spa in Hawaii, but if you’re not golfing or spa-ing in Hawaii read on because making the wrong choice won’t just cost you your advertising budget, but will lose you all of the business a right choice would have made you.

First  quick definitions of the two types of program and their general consequences.

PPC means bidding against your competitors for ad placement on the search engines.

SEO is attempting to make your website link appear in the “natural” (unpaid) positions on the search engines.

Well SEO sounds great because who doesn’t want advertising where you don’t have to pay for it?  The only problem is that — especially for real estate — there are hundreds or thousands of sites that want the same thing.  When you find out the things you have to do and the money you must spend and the time it takes to (maybe) achieve that golden dream of being on the first page of a Google search for your best search phrases you begin to understand that there really are no free search engines.

The payoff with SEO is that if you manage to get on top and if you make the effort to stay there and if you have the time to wait until your SEO kicks in (could be six months, could be over a year, could be never) then you do have a terrrific source of prospective prospects.

PPC on the other hand is “instant gratification”.  Within hours of setting up a PPC account you can have targeted traffic coming to your website regardless of the site’s incoming links, meta tags, word density, age on the Internet, etc, etc.

For the short term there’s absolutely no doubt that the best choice is PPC if it’s set up properly.  It’s the program that can grow your business while you are also working on SEO so you’ll have better unfree traffic in the future.

So in short it’s SEO for the long term and PPC for the short term (and maybe the long term too).

Marketing using the Internet is one of the most competitive and potentially lucrative types of prospecting for individual agents and small to medium sized brokerages and, perhaps, the most misunderstood.

I’ll list a few misunderstandings here, and later list the “understandings”

MU (Misunderstanding): The key to getting prospects is getting lots of hits.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.  Hits have nothing to do with the success of a site.  One unique visitor might rack up 1000 or more ‘hits’ in a session for various technical reasons.  The key to getting prospects through your website is by getting unique visitors who have an interest in your service and are impressed by your website enough to call you or contact you by phone.

MU: If I get 500 visitors and the competition gets only 100 I will get more prospects.

Wrong again.  One targeted visitor with an interest in your service trumps hundreds of visitors that don’t.  It might be different if you were selling T-Shirts with Barack Obama depicted on them, but no, you want buyers and sellers of real estate interested in your geographical area.

MU: Visitors to my website are there to find out what my qualifications are.

No, they are there to get information about real estate.  After they meet you they may be interested in the alphabet soup after your name, but not initially.

MU: If I have clever flash movies and music on my site that will make it more ‘sticky’ and so visitors will stay on the site longer.

If they wanted to be entertained they would probably go to their television set.  They want information and ease of navigation.  If it isn’t there on your site they’ve got a whole list of other sites to try.  You get one chance to get their attention.  Don’t waste it with flashy flash or little dogs running across the screen and don’t have automatic music since they may be accessing your site from work and not want the boss to know.  A blast of catchy music could blow their cover.

MU: My existing clients and sphere of influence will naturally look up my website when they want to know about real estate.

If you believe that, have I got a deal for you!  Reality:  when they want information they will enter a search and start clicking on the results.  If they find a great site chances are they will contact the owner when they have a question.  Your job is to have a great site and ‘train’ your sphere and clients to use it. If you site is blah, they’ll still go to the competition and you’ve lost them.  I’ll talk about that in a later post.

MU: Since 87% of buyers and sellers go to the Internet first for information, I can expect some of them will find my site.

Only the top 10 or 20 sites that come up on their search have a chance at getting the prospect to their website.  In most geographical areas, even very small towns, there are thousands or tens of thousands of sites  competing for those positions.  There are ways to get more than your fair share of prospects, but it isn’t easy, and it isn’t free.

More MU’s coming soon along with some positive suggestions.