All Entries Tagged With: "real estate"

AssistantForRealEstate – Real Estate Blogger Of The Month

We’d like to send out a special “Thank You” to Kandra Hamric at AssistantForRealEstate and award her with the Real Estate Blogger of the Month Award.

Kandra is giving away a free e-book for real estate professionals who have an interest in blogging. “10 Minutes To Great Real Estate Blogging” is a must-read for any real estate agent, broker, or other real estate professional considering a blog. The e-book is free to download and is a good, quick read. Kandra is a virtual assistant with years of experience in real estate and she also teaches other virtual assistants how they can be of assistance to real estate agents and professionals. Kandra is a real industry leader and we’re proud to announce her as the Real Estate Blogger of the Month.

How Real Estate Blogging Should Be Done In A Down Economy

Real estate and mortgage companies are running scared, stopping their blogs, and cutting back on expenses. I understand. Things got rough out there, didn’t it? But why are you cutting your marketing budget when this is when you should be marketing your business the heaviest?

Did you know you can cut your marketing budget and still keep blogging daily? It’s true. And all you have to do is take a few partners.

Let’s say that you’re used to paying $400 per month for blogging (if you are then you probably have the wrong blog service provider). You’d think that by cutting that $400 expense out of your budget you’ll be saving money. In actuality, it will probably cost you money. How many of your phone calls come from people who read your blog? Have you asked? Chances are, if you are getting calls from your efforts online then your blog is playing a part in that. Why stop blogging?

Instead of cutting the expense out of your budget altogether, try partnering with complimentary businesses. You use a title company, right? Don’t you have a preferred mortgage lender? How about furniture rental companies? Moving companies? Real estate attorneys?

Think about all the relationships you have with complimentary services. Ask those companies if they’d be interested in partnering with you on a blog. If you took three partners (say, a title company, a mortgage broker, and a furniture rental company) and shared the expense for your blog then you’d only be paying $100 per month for the same service.

There are a couple of ways a blog partnership can benefit you as a real estate agent or broker. You can establish a mortgage and real estate blog, or something similar, and divide your posts up evenly between you and your partners, but that’s only partially effective. A second way to handle the blog partnership opportunity is to ask your partners to sponsor your blog. You promise then a banner ad on your blog in a highly visible location and one post per week with in-text links to their website to help them promote their service.

By taking sponsors this way you can stay in control of your blog and help out your business partners by having them pay you for their sponsorship, which you then turn and use to pay for your ghostwriting service. But don’t cut your blog out of your real estate marketing plan completely.

Note To Real Estate Agents: President Obama Says Keep Blogging!

The president’s economic stimulus package includes a provision for home owners to get a $15,000 tax break if they purchase a house this year:

(Source) The proposal would allow a tax credit of 10 percent of the value of new or existing residences, up to a $15,000 limit. Current law provides for a $7,500 tax break but only for first-time homebuyers.

If you are a real estate agent with a blog then you should keep your blog running. In fact, if you do business in the real estate sector at all, you should be blogging. Many people will take advantage of this tax credit. If they’ve been putting off purchasing a home until the economy recovers they are more likely to purchase that home now and take advantage of the tax credit. A blog will help you find those searchers who are looking for a home this year.

You know by now that most people start their search for a new home online. If they start searching in March for a home they plan to buy this summer, who are they going to find? You or your competition? A blog will give you an edge over the competition and those real estate agents and mortgage brokers savvy enough to tough it out this year will be the big winners. Keep blogging.

Hyperlocal Blogging And Realistic Expectations

I love what Matt McGee has to say on his hyperlocal blog.

I’m a big believer that blogs are about as powerful an SEO tool as you’ll find right now, so our plan began with a blog.

We agree. That’s why we always recommend a blog to our clients who want to speed up their search engine rankings. Matt McGee is using a hyperlocal blog to help his wife in her real estate business. They’ve been doing it since December 2006. We’ve been doing it since April of that year and have had great success in helping real estate agents reach local home buyers and sellers. Local blogging is here to stay and business who want to reach a wider audience in a small geographical area will need to start a blog. This will be the way to communicate with potential customers in the next 3-5 years.

Matt also says this about obtaining business from his wife’s blogs:

blogging has led directly to at least three clients and closings that we know of, and indirectly to several others. Those commissions mean the blog is a success in the only metric that counts: Revenue created.

That’s a great point. You can get thousands of links and hundreds of top rankings for your keywords, but if you aren’t making money from your efforts then something is amiss. If you aren’t cranking out the revenue, however, it may not be your blog’s fault. We use blogging as a traffic driving tool. SEO, yes, but we also expect to drive targeted traffic to our clients’ blogs and we’ve done that well since the summer of 2006. We lost one real estate client who said that after one month of blogging she had more traffic to her static website than she’d ever had before. But she wasn’t closing any sales. That clearly is an issue with your static website or the agent’s own ability to close sales. The blog is doing its job.

On one final note, here’s Matt again:

There are no shortcuts when it comes to SEO success. Commitment and patience are foundational elements of longterm online success, and we’d have to slog through the tough work like everyone else.

There’s no need to be impatient. Your blog will work for you, but it doesn’t happen overnight. Learn what is important and measure the important stuff. If inbound links are important then build inbound links. If traffic is important than pay attention to your traffic numbers. Set specific goals for your blog and manage your blog toward those goals.