Shock and Awe Marketing Tutorials in Plain English

Not everybody in the blogging community believes that SEO is a viable component of blogging.  If you are of this belief, you can stop reading this post now and move it right along.  But if you want to be at the top of the search engines and you are just starting now, without SEO, you are going to have a really hard time in most markets. 

Look at the engines in your local market.  There are Realtors, directory sites and lead aggregators at and pounding their way to the top of the engines.  How are you going to pass them and arrive anywhere near page one?  Do you think a new site can do that without being fully optimized?

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization.  No, you do not need a secret decoder ring, it is not about writing in code.  SEO is simply the act of optimizing your site for maximum performance.  It’s not a mystery and it doesn’t happen all at the same time, it’s not a race to the finish.  It is an ongoing process and once you have learned the basics it’s fairly easy to apply. 

If you are new to blogging it can seem a bit overwhelming at first, and it really can be.  There is so much new information coming at you, it just seems to jumble all up and come out wonky.  Don’t worry, most of us went through that in the beginning as well.   It does all sort itself out pretty quickly if you are paying attention. 

Once your blog is designed, you have purchased a keyword rich domain, added the right title tags and  keywords to your site it is time to begin to add content.  Writing blog posts doesn’t have to be a brain squeeze, although your first month blogging is actually a pretty important time for your blog.  You are laying the informational base for your blog and establishing yourself in Google’s eye’s.

The first month you should be writing keyword rich, sticky, neighborhood posts, describing the neighborhoods (your farm) in your area.  Tie them into real estate by describing the area, types of homes available, lifestyle etc…  You do know about your neighborhoods - right?  Write what you know, do some research, find some interesting facts, link to businesses, convention centers, restaurants, city agencies and programs and other neighborhood sites.  Give out some link love.  Write a series of posts on the history of your community, or highlight the finer points of it, go ahead and brag about it.  Write individual posts for each of the neighborhoods in your community.  Link them all together.  It’s not as overwhelming as it sounds.  Just sit down and write one post.  Then write another and link them together.  It’s not a race, do it in your time. 

Did you also purchase 1 Park Place lead generation system with your blog?  If you did, learn how to set up the RSS IDX feeds and link those into your neighborhood posts as well, make it easy for the consumer to search for homes in your lead generation system, by community and by neighborhood.  You are building a powerhouse here. 

Read also:

• The First 30 Days of Blogging
• Formula for a Successful Blog Post

The title of your post is very important.  You will want to include keywords that consumers use to search on the engines, which are also included in your post.  Your title instructs the search engines where to place your post. 

For instance:  If you are writing about the neighborhood of Celebration in Orlando Florida, Your title might read:

Celebration Neighborhood Resource Guide - Orlando Florida

This is a keyword rich title and will be a post that lives forever.  You can always change and update the information in it and keep it fresh.  The search engines love it when you freshen up old content and reward accordingly. 

Read also:

• Real Estate Blog SEO Tip: Keyword Use in Title Tag

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One of the things that drives me craziest on the Internet is there is a lot of GOOD advice out there- but there is a distinct lack of explicit practical advice. Meaning, everyone wants to tell you that you need to generate leads from your real estate blog but they don't tell you how to specifically capture each type of lead. So, let's hit it. This post will show you how to use two conversion psychologies called "the cult of me" and "self qualification" to generate highly qualified investor and foreclosure property leads.

Goal: To attract more investors contacts

Strategy: Create a list of Top 10 Best Buy, REO, Foreclosure or Investment properties that you require users to register to receive. This will require 3 steps:

1. Create the list

2. Create a call to action button and lead conversion form

3. Create a blog post announcing your offering

Real Estate Investor Profile: The average investor that will find you online fins you because they are looking for information on investing in real estate. That means they probably are not a professional investor and are most likely a first time or part time investor that recognizes they need the help of a real estate professional to identify savvy investment properties.

Real Estate Investor Psychographics: A first time or part time investor is typically "new money" meaning they are self made and proud of what they have become. They feel good about their accomplishments and want to use what they have to make more money. They can be shrewd can like to be appreciated for their accomplishments. They often also like o feel like they are masters of their destiny's and like to have hand in making decisions that affect their future.

Implementation:

1. Create the list of best properties

The list MUST have value, so put some time into this. Cull through the MLS for foreclosure, investment, first time buyer, fixer upper, etc best buys. Put together a list in Microsoft Word where you take some of the MLS data like images, MLS#, Street Address, Description and your remarks on why you consider that particular property a best buy. Also, make sure that you fully brand the document with your logos, phone numbers, address and websites. Then save the document into a PDF and save to your drive in an easy to find location. You do not want to immediately publish this to your blog, because you want to create implied value and make people register so they can receive it.

Read also: Top 5 Easy and Effective Listing Posts You Can Write for Your Real Estate Blog

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Landing Page Optimization is an essential component of good web design. It is the process of improving a visitor's perception of a website by optimizing its content and appearance in order to make the pages more appealing to the target audiences, as measured by target goals such as conversion rate. What does that really mean? Basically, it means you need to make individual pages on your blog or website so simple and compelling that visitors WANT to contact you. And, isn't that what we all want... people to contact you through your website?

So, how do you optimize the layout, calls to actions and content of your real estate agent blog or website to get more conversion?

1. Identify mission critical parts of your website and their true economic value

Your only answer should be "my conversion forms." As a Realtor, your conversion forms should be one or more of the following:

• Contact form
• Search for properties registration form
• CMA/House Value form
• Market report form
• Special Offer/Newsletter form

These forms are the most important pages on your site because they are where conversion from visitor to contact takes place. Therefore, each of these forms has to be clearly identified, visible on each and every page of your real estate blog and incite people to want to click them.

Read also: Let's Talk Landing Page Optimization by SEOmoz

2. Define important visitor classes and key conversion tasks

This one is easy, real estate blogs typically have 3-4 qualified visitor types with the following conversion motivations and conversion points

Tip: See how the Jove Team of Rancho Cucamonga is using a content call to action to build conversion traffic for their brand new real estate site.

Read also: What Pamela Anderson can teach you about calling readers to action

Resource: Copywriting Maven's Landing Page Makeover Clinic #11

3. Gain insight on customer decision-making and make your page friction-free.

This one is simple - literally- make the page simple and the call to actions explicit. A simple design is the most important thing you can do for your real estate blog. The design should feel simple, easy to navigate with your most important tools (lead generators) towards the top of the page with explicit calls to action.

A Lesson in Simplicity from Google: Ever consider why Google owns search when Yahoo! Was the predominate search engine throughout the 90's? The reason is simplicity. When Yahoo and MSN turned themselves into portal sites, Google, did one thing... search and they did it well. As people were just learning how to navigate complex pages, Google, decided to simply answer one single question for users "How do I find what I am looking for on the Internet." Google's home page reflected that. All that you could do there was search and because of that Google WON search in less than 5 years.

Your home page needs to be "Google Simple." That means, make your call to actions explicit and identifiable. Put them at the top of EVERY page, make sure they have compelling copy and images that represent the function.

Read also: Get more real estate leads with killer call to actions on your blog and website

Read also: Steal these buttons: free real estate call to action buttons

Bonus tip: Place Lead Generators in Easy to Find Locations: Always start with a solid layout that directs visitors to your lead generators and includes the following:

• Your phone number and/or address on each page of your site
• An easy to find contact form
• An easy to find lead generating CMA and Property Search tool

Read also: Real estate blog rookie mistakes

4. Uncover problems with your page and decide which elements to test and how to test

USE TOOLS that let you graphically track clicks on your pages. One of the most important things you can ever track is where people are clicking on your homepage. It will show you if your lead generators and call to action content is working. For example, I use a tool that allows me to graphically track page clicks as seen below.

As you can see (this click traffic is from a 1 hour window) my best call to action is the win a blog icon with my second best being the join a webinar button followed by the buy a blog icon. The most import thing this traffic pattern shows me is that my calls to action work. I get plenty of clicks per hour which is exactly what I want to see.

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A real estate blog or website without well crafted and placed calls to action will simply fail. A call to action is simply that single offer on your page that gets your visitors to convert from a casual reader into a contact by clicking on and filling out one of your lead generation forms.

BONUS: RSS Pieces and 1ParkPlace have teamed up to provide you with complete sets of high quality, graphically relevant and SEOed call to action buttons you can use for free on your real estate blog or website. Each button is already SEOed with high quality, universal, real estate related "alt" and "title" descriptive text- all you do is copy and paste these buttons to your site and add the link to your lead gens!

See our real estate button sets here.

Sample:

What makes a good real estate call to action?

1. Invaluable Offer. The call to action HAS to offer some value to the visitor. That means that you must have lead generators connected to tools that truly have some function that is critical to the user experience. So what types of tools are critical to your real estate visitors?

Read also: How to generate leads from your real estate blog: we have proof

2. Compelling Copy. Just like in a headline, be explicit in your offer not implicit. This means you need to explicitly spell out what the benefit will be and answer the question "WIFM" (What's In It For Me?).  Below are compelling ways to improve your call to action copy to more explicitly state the purpose of clicking the button.

Read also: How to write compelling copy for your real estate blog

3. Image association. One of the most overlooked web design rules for consumer conversion is that graphical links are 10 times more likely to be clicked than textual links, so your calls to action MUST use images and preferably look like clickable buttons with some related imagery on them.

Read also: Generate 100+ more quality leads from your real estate blog next month

4. Location. You need to make sure that the call to action is obvious and easy to find on every single page of your site. Typically, your call to actions ought to be placed towards the top of your site and visible on EVERY single page on your site. Try to avoid placing them in the sidebar.

Sample: See how Kaye Thomas of the Manhattan Beach Real Estate Blog has all her lead generators placed visibly at the top of her blog?

5. Order: Your calls to action should not only be grouped together but also placed in order of importance so you can pull through the most clicks and people's eyes are immediately directed to your most valuable tool. Act as a guide to your visitors by designing your site in the more intuitive and easy way.  Making a site "Google" simple is the key to creating a comfortable and effortless user experience.  And when the experinece is good for the user, it ill be good for you in terms of leads and business.

Example:

If you get 100 leads this month and

• 50 are through your search form - 50% of all contacts use the search conversion form
• 25 are through your CMA form - 25% of all contacts use the CMA form
• 10 are through your contact form - 10% of all contacts use the contact form
• 10 are through your market report form - 10% of all contacts use the market report form
• 5 are through a special offer form - 5% of all contacts use the special offer form

This should tell you that your call to action buttons should be placed in the following order: search, CMA, contact, market report, special offer.

TIP: You can track this metric by using VisiStat's Touch Mapping heat map tool which will show you what area of your site get clicked the most. VisiStat's Touch Mapping overlay report is one of the fastest, most accurate ways to see exactly what links, products and information your visitors are interested in.

OK, so I never make blog announcements but these two are extremely cool. We are welcoming the blogs for 1parkplace and Russell Shaw and announcing the approval of 1parkplace for offering it's IDX search and lead generation solution to the ARMLS.

Real Estate Lead Generation Blog: Steve Hundley

The first is that of Steve Hundley, CEO of 1parkplace.  For those of you that don't yet know just how much I love the 1parkplace IDX search and lead generation solution, just talk to our clients using it- Laurie is generating between 5-30 leads per day, Ines, Mariana, Teri and others are also raking in leads daily. Most of you may also know that we have had a very strong relationship with 1parkplace and exclusively offer their RSS feeds through our blogging platform.  Steve is a newbie blogger- so be gentle and give him encouragement.  He's a fast learner and is happy to share what he knows- so if you have questions- go to his blog and ask away.  Or, better yet- register for a webinar - his presentation and tips on lead generation can change your business.

What's the product?

1. A map based IDX search

2. Search, CMA, VIP Sign in etc lead generators

3. Back end client management and drip email campaign system

There are other features but these are my top 3 picks.

Read also: How to generate leads from your real estate blog: we have proof

Why am I excited about Steve blogging?  Because I have been telling him he should for almosta  year now- he is a master at crafting online strategies that get results for top producers liek Ruth Pugh and Gregg Neuman and amazes me with his knowledge of how to use on and offline marketing to generate more leads and grow your business.  His new blog will focus on tips, tools and ideas on how to improve your bsuiness, online presence and lead generation. 

Check out his "Steal This Post" blogs - these are articles he writes that you can use on your own blog - they are mostly controversial, research or entertainment pieces meant to be linkbait.

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