There are many advantages to having a blog, not the least of which is helping your marketing tactics. Let’s say you are a New Jersey real estate agent. How will a blog help your effectiveness as a New Jersey real estate professional?

Expanding Your Exposure
Most people start researching the real estate market long before they are ready to buy. Investing in real estate is a huge commitment. You’ll be able to reach out to people as a knowledgeable realtor before they are in a position to buy.

Creating Fresh Content
Blogs are ideal for establishing a documented and effective presence on the internet. The Web is a fabulous research tool. Supplying fresh content to garner more crawls from the search engines will place your information above the other realtors on the net.

Creating a Following
Having an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed to your blog is a quick and easy way for people to sign up and get the latest from your blogs. You can create a following of both real estate seekers and professionals alike. Really simple.

Giving Means Getting
Perhaps the most important benefit will be the information you are giving. When you offer your advice, your opinion, your expertise, and your help for free, you are giving people something for nothing. You’ll be amazed at how much people take that into account and will come to you for service just because you’ve already helped them out.

Will everyone who reads your blog use your services? Probably not. But, if you offer them interesting and informative information, they are going to remember you, refer you, and will more likely develop a certain amount of trust in your abilities and services.

You can make your blog anything you want it to be. From telling personal real estate stories to marking real estate changes to talking about changes in your community – make it a conversation between you and your next client, and it will work.

Why You Should Have A Blog If You’re A Realtor is a post from: PROPERTYHOUSE.org

Technorati Tags: Creating a Following, Creating Fresh Content, marketing techniques, Really Simple Syndication

Top of the pile is PANAMA. It has a strong economy, a favourable tax regime, and businesses are attracted by its offshore banking facilities. This makes it attractive for property investors, who can choose between offices, beachside resorts, and hotel occupancy deals. By the way in the UK, if you are taking coals to Newcastle – you might be interested in Cheap accommodation Newcastle

In second place is Kuala Lumpur in MALAYSIA. It’s a booming city, with property that’s still affordable, and can be reached fairly easily by budget airlines (always a key factor in property prices for UK investors).

Next comes Brazil. It’s a vast country, so it’s best to narrow it down to the north-eastern city area of Natal, with clean air and much untouched space, as well as a warm year-round climate and miles of sandy beaches. Also, the city of Sao Paulo has high demand for quality accommodation in a large and growing city.

In fourth place is the High Tatras mountain region of Slovakia with winter sports in winter, and golfing, walking and other nature-related activities in the summer.

Coming next is the United States, tipped because property prices could be about to bottom out. In Florida, apartments are going for 54 per cent less than launch price, and offer an instant six per cent return.

Sixth in the list is the UK. Again, here, property prices might soon bottom out, and for overseas investors the weak pound will make property look attractive. To overseas investors, property in the UK looks to be 54 per cent cheaper than 12 months ago.

Property hotspots for 2009 is a post from: PROPERTYHOUSE.org

Technorati Tags: hotspot property, X hotspot property 2009

For those interested in Real Estate, there is a twitter group – details here:

Twitter Group: Real Estate Agents

Group Tag: #realestate
Created By: @1datarecovery
Group Long URL: http://twittgroups.com/group/realestate
Group Short URL: http://tgr.me/g/realestate
Join This Group: Join Group

PS – contact me here: http:/twitter.com/francophile; you “email” me on twitter on @francophile

Twitter – marketing with Real Estate Tweeter Group is a post from: PROPERTYHOUSE.org

Technorati Tags: real estate twitter group, twitter, twitter groups

What is Google Adwords?

It is a Pay Per Click (PPC) program of advertising on Google and other websites that offer Google adverts. The adverts can be text adverts, banners or even videos. With Google AdWords you create your own ads, choose keywords to help match your ads to your audience and pay only when someone clicks on them.

As you can see in the above snapshot doing a search for “Paris Property Investment Opportunity”, the natural search engine rankings are on located on the left main content area. The Google adverts are located at the top of the listings and on the right-hand side. They are illustrated above in the red ellipses. Note: the adverts seem relevant to the search term!

As an advertiser, you are bidding to be located within the Search results (or on content pages of other websites). For a given keyword / keyword phrase you are bidding against other advertisers. In general, you are having to bid higher for top of the page rankings. In reality, Google “scores” your adverts and if your keyword phrases (that you are bidding on) link to relevant pages – then the cost of the Google Advert click is less. However, link your adverts to non-relevant pages and you will pay much more!

Branding

Remember that you only pay for an advert when somebody clicks on advert. Some companies use this as an opportunity for Branding. They believe getting the name in front of customer eyes often enough and it may stick! The advert below illustrates the point.

If you do not click on the advert perhaps subliminally you are associating Investment opportunities with CssPartners.

In some markets, and real estate is one, the costs of advertising can be high. Typically between $1 and $10 per click depending on the keywords! It is absolutely essential that you have a method for tracking introductions from this type of advertising. Google does provide some tools. But you need to justify that the Google advertising works and converts to sales. If $500 of Google Advertising brings one sale, then one would guess it would be deemed successful!

In later articles, we will describe how to use Google Adwords successfully and reduce costs!

Real Estate Marketing: Google Adwords is a post from: PROPERTYHOUSE.org

Technorati Tags: advertiser, advertising, google, google adwords, PPC, real estate

Evaluating Keywords

Fortunately, one of the best tools is free: Google’s Keyword Tool

Let’s use it to find out about the competition on “Real Estate”

Results for Real Estate

At first look, this looks great: huge search volumes. This is the keyword for me! Hang on – first, if you want to use Google Adwords to advertise your site, it is going to cost you about £1.49 per “click through” to your site. How much is a sale worth to you? If your site is good at converting “clicks through” to your site to a sale, then this could be good value. Say, you can convert 1 click in every 100 clicks into a sale. Then the advertising has cost you about £149 – could be good value! Results we have seen in the Real Estate industry suggest that you need about 1000 to 10,000 click throughs to get a sale. Now look at the costs.

OK – the alternative approach is to get your SEO expert to design you a site that is going to get high rankings for “Real Estate”. Your SEO expert will either rub his hands in joy about the bill he is going to give you or be frank and say “this is a very competitive term and this will cost a lot and we cannot guarantee you a top search engine ranking“.

Competitive Search Terms

What does he mean competitive? OK – do a search for “real estate” in google.com. There are 634 million competing pages. That is not the complete story – your SEO expert will do at least a little more research – he will add this phrase to Google.com “allintitle: real estate”. Basic SEO says you should put “Real Estate” in your title tags. The competing pages now reduces to 89 million. Another technique is to try “allinurl: real estate” as this is also a measure of what you are also competing against. A mere 21 million competing pages. So what does all this mean – well “Real Estate” is not a search term to chase unless you have a MEGA budget.

Long Tail Keywords

One technique that is advocated is to choose “long tail keywords” for both Adwords advertising and natural search engine rankings (latter by designing pages to promote these keywords). Long Tail Keywords refers to phrases with typically at least 3 words – say “buy spanish property”, “brittany property for sale”, or “miami luxury villas for sale”. Check the number of daily searches and the competition as above to select good long tail keywords with good search volumes and low competition! For natural search engine results, create unique content about the keyword (or keyword phrase). Do not scrape content from other sites or copy content from other sites. Repeated use of duplicate conent can expose your site to a Google Penalty.

Keywords that Convert to Sales

As well as the number of searches, & the competitiveness of keyword phrases you should also look at whether the keywords convert to sales. You have to get into the mind of the “searcher” – is he just browsing for information, doing research (further down the line) or wanting to buy now. Probably it is this last category that you are really interested in! For example, “President Bush” and “buy spanish property” – extreme examples but illustrate the principle well. Microsoft have a free tool to evaluate whether the keywords are more likely to convert to sales called Online Commercial Intention. On this page check Tool Input: Query. In our example let us try “President Bush” and “buy spanish property”- “President Bush” has a value of 0.04 and “buy spanish property” a value of 0.77. Anything with a value above 0.5 is likely to be a “buy” signal. So with this tool you can also select keywords that show a buying intention.

Research your Marketing Effort – part 2 is a post from: PROPERTYHOUSE.org

Technorati Tags: keywords, long tail keywords, natural search engine rankings, top search engine ranking

How well do you know your market?
Is your market in decline or on the up? We can look at general trends and target specific areas. Google has a great tool called Trends. Follow this link to find the latest trends for REAL ESTATE. Below is a snapshot of the results in July 2008.

In addition, you will get information about the most searched countries and cites.

“Real Estate” is very generic and trends may be completely different for niche real estate markets – say “French Property”, “Victoria Real Estate” (Australia), or very targeted “New York”. Studying these results might indicate which markets you should be getting into!

What are your competition doing?
Do your major competitors have websites? How much traffic are they getting to their site? Alexa.com (and new kid on the block Compete.com) rate sites. Their figures are not absolute but are a good indicator. So go to www.Alexa.com, type in your website address and get your ranking. Do the same for your major competitors. Lower value rankings imply high traffic sites. So the likes of Yahoo, Google, and Youtube will have rankings of 1,2 and 3. How do you compare with your competitors?

Spy on your competitors?
You can find out what “keywords” (in the search engines) are successful for each competitor by visiting – www.seodigger.com. We would suggest you sign up for a free account as you will get more results. So for example, if you were evaluating the French Property market. Do a search in Google for “French Property for Sale” and find the top sites.  As a top site, it would suggest you should study 1st for French Property. So enter “http://www.1st-for-French-Property.co.uk” into the Seodigger toolbar – and look at the number of pages with #1 rankings, and the number of daily searches in Overture and Wordtracker (remember the number of searches will be much larger in Google.com!).  They have over 100 #1 ranking terms – and many of them have many daily searches. Here is an extract of the Seodigger report.

Remember, these are “natural search engine rankings” not paid search (Google Adwords, etc.). It would suggest that 1st for French Property have lots of content pages relating to these topics. In fact, it is probably their strategy to create content pages (and probably use SEO to get top rankings).  All of this is giving you clues to your competition and how you might compete! The WT column tells you the daily searches on WordTracker.com for each term. Click the column heading to see the terms that get the MOST traffic. Remember: the daily searches on Google will be much HIGHER than Wordtracker.com. So now you know where your competition are getting most of their traffic from on the Search Engines. The Google search engine brings in over 60% of searches done on the Internet!

In Part 2 – we will look at evaluating keywords, discovering how competitive keyword phrases are, and choosing keywords that have a higher percentage of converting to sales!

Research your Marketing Effort – part 1 is a post from: PROPERTYHOUSE.org

Technorati Tags: marketing trends, property marketing, real estate marketing

First, you will get additional traffic from these external sites AND they will be targetted visitors. Second, incoming links are viewed as “recommendations” by Google. These links will be on theme and count more in Google’s eyes.

Ideally these will be one-way links and not reciprocals – again browny points for Google’s algorithms. What is the result of obtaining these on-theme links? Higher search engine rankings in Google and more traffic to your real estate site.

But how do you get these dream links?
The answer is Blogs! Many real estate blogs will allow you make comments to blog posts.  When you make a comment you add your name and website address. After the comment is published (in some cases, you will need to wait for the comment to be moderated) your name will be hyperlinked to your website. Voila a valuable one-way link to your site!

Any real estate blog?
No – choose sites which do not use the nofollow attribute.  If the “nofollow” attribute is used, Google will not be able to credit your link. Hint: if you use Firefox – the SEO for Firefox plugin will help you to check for the use of this attribute. So choose real estate blogs which have disabled the “nofollow” attribute. Our list below will be a useful starting point.

Etiquette
We do not advocate scamming the blogs. Have some courtesy when posting a comment. Add your name to the Name box – do not use some real estate keyword. Make sure your comment is a valuable contribution to the theme of the post. Do not comment “Great blog – keep up the good work”. Remember in many cases comments will be moderated, and your comment will get deleted if it is spam. Secondly, you can use commenting to build up credibility for you and your site.  Also, you want browsers of these blogs to click through to your website – you have to give them a reason to click through!

Dofollow Real Estate Blogs

Here is a list of such blogs – please contact us if you want your blog added:

www.3minutestomidnight.org
www.adbraganca.org
www.agentgenius.com
www.allvirginiabeachrealestate.com
www.anuj-online.net
www.austinrealestatetoday.com
www.barbaralasky.com/tucson-real-estate-blog
www.bendebell.com/blog
www.berritzen.biz
blog.mariah.com
www.bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/
www.bonusagents.com/blog
www.bostonreb.com
www.brandonrealestateblog.com
www.braxtonbeyer.com
www.cmeconferences.org
www.core2006.org
www.creo-lr.org
www.daveso.com
www.dennispeaseteam.com/blog/
www.dollarhouse.catati.com
www.expertrealestatetalk.com
www.findsouthwestfloridahomes.com/blog
www.floridasrealty.com
www.geosciety.org
www.homesalessandiego.com/blog
www.indyrebaterealestate.com
www.inman.com/news
www.marinmodern.com/blog
www.nashvillehomes.org/blog
www.newhomessection.com/blog
www.no68and70.org
www.northcountyluxuryhomes.com/san-diego-real-estate-news/
www.northofthesavannah.com/posts/
www.PhoenixMarketTrends.com
www.phoenixrealestateguy.com
www.propertyportal.ae/blog
www.realestatebloglab.com
www.realestateweblogging101.com
www.ryanwardrealestate.com/WordPress
www.SandbarsToSunsets.com
www.seattlecondosandlofts.com
www.SenaSellsVegas.com/blog
www.stpaulrealestateblog.com
www.tampa-real-estate-blog.com
www.teamaguilar.com/blogs
www.truthfullending.com
www.unit195bridge.org
www.upstartagent.com
www.varbuzz.com
www.virtualresearcher.org
www.zerozeromortgage.com

Real Estate dofollow blogs – a marketer’s dream! is a post from: PROPERTYHOUSE.org