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 Peyman Aleagha  Monday, April 6th, 2009 What do you want a website or blog to accomplish for you? Are you only interested in listings? If so, you want to present a nice site that showcases listings well for future presentations and business generation. Do you also want buyers? That expands the need for content to accommodate those who need to learn about the area, the process of buying a home, negotiations, and more.
Now, disregard all of the above! That’s the standard thinking that creates “standard” websites. Standard websites create standard business volume. Exceptional websites create exceptional income. Don’t use a thought process that assumes, incorrectly, several things:
Continue reading: Location, Location, Location? – Content, Content, Content!
Peyman Aleagha Monday, March 30th, 2009
It’s interesting how many real estate professionals haven’t made the leap to social and business networking on the Web, especially considering how ingrained the old styles of networking are in their business plans. They join local civic groups, go to meetings, sponsor events and groups, and more. The goal being to not only help their community, but to meet people to build that “sphere of influence” that leads ultimately to future business.
How many hands can they shake? How many meetings can they attend? What’s the cost to sponsor groups, and what’s the membership they impact? These are all questions that illustrate the limiting nature of personal involvement at the local level. Once you realize that Internet social and business networking is exactly the same, but leveraged dramatically, you can get really excited about it. After all, can someone in Oregon see what you’re doing in Florida? They can on Facebook or LinkedIn.
Continue reading: Social Media and Business Networking for Website Traffic
Peyman Aleagha Monday, March 23rd, 2009
The American consumer is going mobile at a break-neck pace. Sometime late last year, according to researchers, the number of people living in households with one or more cell phones exceeded that of people living in a household with a landline. And, it’s only going to move more in that direction. The convenience of the cell phone in our busy lives is just too great.
The real estate professional who wants an effective Internet presence should also be carefully following this mobile trend as well. Let’s expand our nomenclature to an “effective technology marketing presence.” It ties together the Internet with the mobile market via SMS text messaging and mobile web sites. There are already a number of major retail marketers using text messaging and mobile web sites to allow their customers to shop from their cell phones.
Continue reading: The New Mobile World – How Does Your Web Marketing Stack Up?
Peyman Aleagha Monday, March 16th, 2009
When you’re developing a real estate website plan, there are a great many things to consider. From a very broad perspective, there are two major areas of concern:
Site Look and Design – This is important, but don’t place your planning emphasis in the wrong areas. You want a pleasing site, with colors and presentation that invites the visitor to stay a while. If you’re working with a site design or theme vendor, they have probably researched visitor behavior, and their template and design choices likely are structured with this in mind.
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Peyman Aleagha Monday, March 9th, 2009
The ultimate success of your business will probably be tied closely to your success on the Internet. Your website or blog is your storefront in a very big world. It’s easy to get a dry cleaning customer if they pass your store every day on their way home from work. It’s a lot harder to capture a real estate lead from an armchair buyer or seller clicking around the World Wide Web.
Just entering the key phrase “real estate” into a Google search yields a whopping 589 Million results! In your area, county, or town, there are thousands of web search results related to real estate. They’re not going to drive by, so how do you stand out and get found? We all know that we need to continually work on SEO, and many pay to advertise with pay-per-click marketing. Those are fundamental and effective things we must do. But, what else can we do that’s cost effective and will bring us more site visitors?
Continue reading: SEO and PPC for Traffic – But There’s More
Peyman Aleagha Monday, March 2nd, 2009
As real estate professionals who want to make a success of our Internet presence, we should know some of the terminology. But, we should also know how to concentrate our time and efforts on what’s important when it comes to tracking visits to, and activity on, our websites. These two goals go hand-in-hand when it comes to sorting out website traffic statistics. Let’s look at some terms and see how we want to use these site traffic statistics.
Hits – This one has been around since the beginning, and you’ll still hear a great many people say things like “How do I get more hits on my website?” The truth is, you really shouldn’t look at hit count for any meaningful measure of what’s happening on your site.
Continue reading: Hits, Visits, Page Views – What’s Important?
Peyman Aleagha Monday, February 23rd, 2009
Actually, we’re not just talking about “social networks,” but business networking as well. The Internet has made dramatic changes in the way the world shops, locates information, and in how they communicate with each other. Of course, email is the elephant in the room. But, as we become ever more mobile and in a hurry, networking will become a many-faceted activity.
So, what do we mean by online or social networking? It’s all about sending messages to one another in real time, and getting back responses quickly. But, it’s also about introductions. We introduce our contacts to others, and they can introduce us to their network. It becomes an ever-growing circle, encompassing more people who in some way keep up with what we are doing or saying.
Continue reading: Social Networking and The New Real Estate Sphere of Influence
Peyman Aleagha Monday, February 16th, 2009
It’s been written around the Web that 90+% of real estate websites and blogs are not effective at their intended purpose. This is assuming that your goal for your site is the actual direct generation of business. If all you want is a billboard to place your listings and show to your listing clients, then most any site will do, and you really don’t need to get into lead capture as a strategy.
However, that’s a great waste of the potential of a real estate website. Believe it or not, you can generate listing client leads as easily as buyer leads with the right website and tools. The trick is to entice your visitors to give you their contact information, not steal it from them with black-hat techniques. The right content, a great IDX search page, featured listings, and special offerings is the way to go.
Though there are ways to do it, you never want a visitor to your site to automatically get an email because you somehow captured their address without their knowledge or approval. If you are capturing the contact information of a site visitor, it should always be with their full knowledge, and it should happen because they intended to give it to you. Usually, that will not happen with a simple “Please sign our guestbook” popup. Why should they… what’s in it for them.
Continue reading: The Etiquette of Effective Lead Capture
Peyman Aleagha Monday, February 9th, 2009
The most competition-intensive thing you can do with your website is to develop all of your content around keywords and phrases that are generic real estate, as “YourTown real estate.” Virtually 95+% of your competition is doing the very same thing. Far from a negative, this opens up a great opportunity for you.
Wait, you say! I work residential real estate, so I really don’t have a niche. Actually, you have several.
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Peyman Aleagha Monday, February 2nd, 2009
It would be difficult to find a real estate professional who doesn’t understand the value of a website, and the need to have some type of MLS search displayed on it. Yet, a great many of them also complain that they get few or no leads from their websites.
First, if you’re not using some type of analytic or statistics software to track your site’s visitors and the pages they view, you may not even know where you need to concentrate for improvement. Once you know what’s going on, you can do what is necessary to make it better.
How many people are visiting your IDX search page? How long do they stay there, as searches usually make it one of the “stickiest” pages on your site? Few of us would deny that we need to improve these statistics. But, how do we do that?
Continue reading: IDX – Make it Prominent & Easy
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