When I left the tech industry, I was very fortunate to get a fast start in real estate by joining a team. I did not have to spend money on marketing, but rather was able to focus on perfecting my lead conversion skills. After about a year in this role as a buyer’s agent, I wanted take what I had learned and begin building my own company and team. I joined up with a close friend from the tech world who was also an agent and we founded New Era Realty (www.mynewera.com). Our firm has grown over time and we now have 15 agents and expect to be over 20 halfway through this year.

In the early days of our company, we tried many different marketing tactics with varied success. The most successful endeavor did turn out to be a WordPress based blog that we started about 3 years ago. The site focuses on the specific niche of lofts and condos in Downtown Denver (www.denverloftsandcondosforsale.com). We have climbed to the top four results on Google for key search terms such as “Denver condos” and we have approximately 3,000 visitors per month. The most recent statistics show that 76% of the visits are coming from organic Google traffic and that the average visitor views just over 3 pages and spends about 2 minutes on the site.

For Geek Build 2012, I would like to redesign my parent’s web site, www.tophomesforsaleco.com, which is focused on the Northern Colorado market. This site has enough history and content to make it a fast riser on the rankings front. Further, since the Northern Colorado market is less competitive from an SEO perspective than Denver, the site should make for a great testing ground for this project.

Quick back story as to why I want to work on this site. I grew up a dairy farmer and my folks always employed me on the farm. Of course, they also fed me, clothed me, put me through college and have continued to help me and be generous with their time always. Making my parents site world class and generating a significant number of leads for them would be a small thank you for all that they have done for me.

Summary:

• New or Redesign: Redesign
• Geographic Focus: Northern Colorado

Note from the Editor: Not sure what Geek Build 2012 is? It’s building a few real estate websites from scratch publicly with the help of the Geek Estate Community and overseen by an experienced steering committee. Read more about Geek Build 2012 here, or view all posts related to Geek Build 2012 here..

**Geek Build logo designed by Dominic Morrocco at M Squared Real Estate.

Many businesses have thrived thanks to this giant social network, including Real Estate professionals. However, in order to win a game, you must not only learn the rules but stick to them as well!

This article is dedicated to Real Estate professionals who strive to take their Facebook pages to the next level. Let’s discuss 25 tweetable (140 characters or less) tips that will help you reap all the traffic, SEO, lead generation and customers’ acquisition rewards that intelligent Facebook marketing has to offer.

Part 1: Facebook Page Creation Tips

1. Make sure that your Facebook page name is compelling, memorable and combines keywords and brand name.

2. Your Facebook page welcome tab must be eye-catching to potential customers. Add testimonials, awards…etc.

3. Create an introductory video showcasing your skills and expertise. Upload it to YouTube and your welcome tab on your Facebook page.

4. Fill in ALL of your Facebook page “Info” tab fields, making sure to include the keywords people use to find you in search engines.

5. Take advantage of your Facebook image size (180 by 540 pixels) to visually present important info about your business.

6. Start your new page with bang! Hold a contest, offer scarce information, industry trends and so forth.

Part 2: Facebook Page Traffic Tips

7. Make sure to include a link to your website in the visible part of your “About” section to drive more traffic to your site.
( The “About” field permanently shows the first 80 characters and a “more” link. It’s a good idea to include your link anywhere within the first 80 characters for maximum visibility. The screenshot below is an example.)

8. Include your website URL in your Facebook page profile image to keep it memorable to visitors. (P.S. The image is NOT clickable).

9. Link back to your blog articles on a regular basis, making sure to diversify your Facebook posts with 3rd party content.

10. It’s perfectly ok to link to your popular blog articles over and over again. Just keep the posts separated and change the wording.

11. Do NOT settle for copying your articles’ titles into your Facebook posts. Add more compelling info to maximize clicks and blog traffic.

Part 3: Facebook Page Social Media Integration Tips

12. Use networkedblogs to add a “blog” link to your Facebook page, including your recent blog posts.

13. Take advantage of the “YouTube for Pages” app. Created by Involver to display your YouTube videos on your Facebook page.

14. Use third party applications to display your Twitter threads and Flickr pictures on your Facebook page.

15. Link to your Facebook page from your Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ profiles and use the Facebook page widget in your blog.

16. Include Facebook sharing options in your blog posts and make them visible to your blog visitors.

Part 4: Facebook Page Lead Generation Tips

17. Offer useful and up-to-date information that your target customers are interested in.
(The screenshot below shows information displayed by Jay Thompson, a highly regarded Real Estate agent known as “Phoenix Real Estate Guy”)

18. To get the best of both worlds email marketing and Facebook marketing, offer a freebie in return for users’ info in your Facebook page.

19. It is recommended to mix business with pleasure on Facebook! Share fun activities and interesting local events in your community.

20. Conduct Q&A sessions with your Facebook page fans at preset dates to showcase your expertise and blog about them.

21. Become a trend-setter on your Facebook page. Be known as the first Realtor who shares breaking news in your community.

22. Offer helpful tips and insights in your Facebook page. For optimal results, share a “teaser” tip that links back to your blog.

23. To engage your fans with your Facebook posts, start your post with a question and EXPLICILTY encourage them to comment.

24. Respond to your Facebook page fans comments promptly and thoughtfully and use Facebook questions for market research.

25. Make your Facebook page “vibrant” and turn it into a social hub by offering regular contests (E.g. Trivia Qs about your neighborhood.)

I have barely scratched the surface here! Facebook is a very rich marketing medium that is loaded with great features.

What additional Facebook page tips would you suggest for Real Estate agents? Which tips have you tried with your Real Estate business and how was your experience?

Please share your thoughts in the comments.

I was browsing AgentsOnline.net and came across this thread about Superlative. The post originated in 2007, but there was a response added about a week ago that I wanted to highlight warning of contractual obligations for website providers (and Superlative specifically):

I too would not recommend anyone to Superlative.com after my experience with them which I am still dealing with. Long story short, I signed up for service in July of ’09 when Superlative’s Regional Account Manager visited our real estate office. Afterwards, I exchanged a few e-mails with the regional account manager clarifying the terms of what the service offered and as they were waiving set-up fees, and domain fees since I had my domain already, etc., he had me cross out certain terms in the contract and his own words, word for word on his e-mail to me says: “We bill on the first of every month $29.95. The agreement is for one year if you want to leave after that just email superlative and let them know.” – With this being said, I signed up. Surprising to me this January (2 and a half years later), I sent an e-mail to them requesting that my hosting be cancelled. I received no response to that e-mail so continued to send 1 or 2 other e-mails until I got a call from a representative saying the contract is an ‘auto renewing’ contract and I cannot cancel until July. This irritated me to no end, especially since I have the e-mail above from their Regional Account Manager. Since my e-mail requesting service be canceled on January 11th, they still have not canceled service and will not reply to any e-mails. Sure enough, February 1st came and gone and so did the $29.95 charge on my credit card. I have submitted a complaint to the LA Better Business Bureau which still has not received a response.

Again, a word of advice to agents looking for website hosting – it is my opinion that there is much better providers with better service, lower prices, and most of all, no contracts required – I am sure other companies won’t make their “long time” customers go through what I am going through just to cancel.

Obviously, the above does not shed much of a positive light on Superlative — but it should serve as a wakeup call to the realities of monthly contracts in this industry. The monthly recurring revenue is the business model of almost every vendor in this category. The exception being development or design shops that do one off completely custom work for a specific client — the entire cost of that (generally) has to be paid upfront. One important point I do want to make is that you should EXPECT to pay more money upfront for a website or other product if you don’t have a monthly contract. You are almost always given a discounted rate when tied to a monthly contract, since the dollars are committed to for a set amount of time and the company doesn’t have to worry about you canceling after a month or two. That said, don’t expect to pay (close to) nothing, get an amazing product, AND have no monthly contract — the world doesn’t work that way.

I know Virtual Results (the best websites in the vertical in my biased opinion) doesn’t generally tie people to monthly contracts, but I’m not sure about other providers.

Are you on a monthly contact, or are you free to go whenever you like? If you are on one, make sure you are aware when it expires and whether it auto-renews or not. If you have negative, or positive, experiences with contracts with real estate website vendors, leave them in the comments.

Given that Mr Williamsburg is my primary brand, should my primary domain be MrWilliamsburg.com? Or should I 301 redirect that domain to http://williamsburgsrealestate.com and simply redesign that site with the new branding in mind?

The steering committee has discussed the question amongst ourselves and made a final decision.

We’ve chosen the domain name mrwilliamsburg.com to be the domain for the website redesign. Our reasoning is two fold. First, John would like Mr Williamsburg to be his primary online brand. Second, the domain already has decent page rank and his other domain, williamsburgrealestate.com is not an “exact” match domain since there is an “s” right in the middle of it. From a branding perspective, it’s not ideal at all to have a domain name that someone won’t remember. Had the choice been between an exact keyword match domain & a brand domain, the decision would have been more difficult. However, the one-off keyword match domain is actually a detriment, due to missed return visitors incorrectly typing in the URL, so the decision was relatively easy.

We’re very excited to move forward with the MrWilliamsburg.com redesign!

Note from the Editor: Not sure what Geek Build 2012 is? It’s building a few real estate websites from scratch publicly with the help of the Geek Estate Community and overseen by an experienced steering committee. Read more about Geek Build 2012 here, or view all posts related to Geek Build 2012 here.

**Geek Build logo designed by Dominic Morrocco at M Squared Real Estate.

Having grown primarily through referrals in the past, it wasn’t until about 1 year ago that I began to develop and implement my blogging/social/seo/online advertising strategy.  My main site, San Diego Coastal Homes is a regional site for San Diego North County Coastal and is still in its infancy as far as seo, traffic and conversion rates.  My business has grown significantly through various web generated leads and I have had a great ROI so far.

I would like to develop a new site that is hyper local and can be separately branded or co- branded, whichever the community feels to be the best path.  I am happy to further define the strategy but am also open to the Geek Build community’s input.  Having run many businesses, I understand the benefit of a collective of professionals and the impact it can have on the final product.

Summary:

• New or Redesign: New
• Geographic focus: Encinitas, CA

Note from the Editor: Not sure what Geek Build 2012 is? It’s building a few real estate websites from scratch publicly with the help of the Geek Estate Community and overseen by an experienced steering committee. Read more about Geek Build 2012 here, or view all posts related to Geek Build 2012 here..

**Geek Build logo designed by Dominic Morrocco at M Squared Real Estate.

Zurple, Boomtown, Tigerleads, Buyerlink Help!

Ok I have added up the hours each week that I’m spending doing my own lead generation and it’s stupidly high. So instead of hiring an assistant to help with that and having to deal with payroll, taxes, them not showing up etc, I’m thinking of outsourcing the lead generation portion of the business. My time is much much better spent actually working leads than generating them. Mostly because I’m not that great with the computer stuff.

Anyway – does anyone have any experience with any of these places? I have gone on each of their websites and signed up to get more info. Haven’t heard from anyone yet. The funny thing is that the form on Tigerlead didn’t seem to want to submit. So this one may be on the outs already. If they can’t get their own registartion form to work on their own website I’m not sure they would have it working for me.

Let me know if anyone has used any of these sites and how you liked it. Thanks!

Here is one of the responses:

I just got off the phone with the Zurple guy. Holy cow! What a jerk! apparently their strategy to get you to cough up the big money is to tell you how incompetent you are. Not the best strategy. I was so ticked off by the time we hung up, that I will never EVER buy anything from them. He had some nerve let me tell you. Most infuriating sales call ever. I’d rather go buy a used car.

As it turns out, there are some Zurple haters out there.

What is the Zurple business model you might ask? Do they provide you a website? Yes. That said, Zurple is not a website company. Zurple is a Pay Per Click company that creates a website that THEY own. They a ton of Pay Per Click campaigns (at your expense) and they LET you use the site as long as you pay the monthly bill.

The day you stop paying the bill? You are left with nothing. The URL, traffic, current clients using the website, and leads all go away.

Please people. OWN your brand. OWN your own URL. Don’t rent your most important online asset.

Having overseen the release of the neighborhood boundary project at Zillow a few years ago, I believe this school data set is an extremely valuable and sought after one — previously unavailable, unless you had a LOT of money to spend.

I’m curious if we’ll see any innovation from the developer community like this mashup my good friend Andrew Mattie created using the Zillow neighborhood boundaries. I suppose you’ll have to ask the team at Education.com if you want the raw boundary files — not sure what their policy is on that data, but guessing they will come by and leave a comment here to clarify.

For those that want boundaries directly on your own website, take a look at their widget.

I served for 6 years in the Navy on active duty and continue to do so on a part-time basis in the reserves. My military experience is in aviation on helicopters and airplanes, and interestingly, I’ve never worked on a ship. I also stay busy as an MBA student at TCU. Business school has been fun and is definitely keeping me on my toes!

My website, www.fischer-realestate.com, has been active for a few months and receives about 1,000 visitors monthly. Diverse Solutions provides the IDX and I’ve built the current site on WordPress using the Genesis framework. I consistently show up in the top of search results for individual property addresses, MLS #’s, and other various search results related to Fort Worth real estate, but my bounce rate is at 81% and the average visit lasts only 1 minute and 30 seconds.

My goal for the website redesign is to build an attractive, easily navigable, and content-rich website. I’d like to include a regular blog, neighborhood profiles, informational articles, and dynamic search capabilities. My goal is to dramatically increase the traffic and conversion rate while also positioning Fischer Real Estate Services as a leading Fort Worth real estate brokerage. I am committed to improving the design and content of the site and am thankful for the opportunity to work with Geek Estate Community on this project!

Summary:

• Redesign or New: Redesign
• Geographic Focus: Fort Worth, TX

Note from the Editor: Not sure what Geek Build 2012 is? It’s building a few real estate websites from scratch publicly with the help of the Geek Estate Community and overseen by an experienced steering committee. Read more about Geek Build 2012 here, or view all posts related to Geek Build 2012 here.

**Geek Build logo designed by Dominic Morrocco at M Squared Real Estate.

Redesigning your website is no small endeavor.

Most likely you’re redesigning it because it’s not as effective as it should be. When clients describe their existing websites to me, they are often embarrassed and don’t want me to look at their old site. It’s almost as if they’re happy no one visits it. While I hope this isn’t the case with your site, the fact is a lot of people are struggling to get their businesses noticed because of bad websites. Your real estate website can be a goldmine or your greatest disappointment, but either way, you know you need one–and there’s a good chance it’s not the one you have now. To compete in today’s market, you need a website that’s tuned to your specific audience, that’s intuitive, engaging and most importantly, it answers the questions that your customers are asking online. If you want some more ideas about creating a site that your customers love, read an earlier geekestateblog post: Website Love

For now I will assume that you are investing in a real estate website re-designing for all the right reasons; To get more business, establish legitimacy, build trust and provide continued value for your customers. If you need more insight into a website redesign, check out: Real Estate Website Redesign Kit for more info.

OK, you’re on the right track. Now let’s talk about the value of your existing site. With a redesign you are at somewhat of an advantage in that you have some pre-existing SEO juice. Juice that is worth preserving and nurturing. You have a real estate marketing site that shows up in search engines for your important key-phrases and may even has some pagerank worth protecting.

Here’s a list of the the top 17 things you can do to help maintain you valuable SEO juice.

1. See what keyword phrases you’re ranking for. Use a ranking monitor to find all the phrases you rank for and the associated pages.
2. Measure your existing pages to see where the traffic is coming from.
3. Make sure your new site includes those high traffic’d pages.
4. Make new pages for your old keyword phrases.
5. If you can, avoid changing your URL and don’t change the URLs for the most important pages.
6. If you must change your URL, change it to something key phrase rich.
7. Add internal links. It’s important to link between pages as much as possible.
8. Create key phrase centric links
9. Redirect your backlinks.
10. Research your indexed pages.
11. Use a “permanent 301” redirect for each to new or similar page on the redesigned site.
12. Create a new sitemap.xml file.
13. Update your robots.txt file.
14. Check for 404 errors (page not found!).
15. Make sure you use your key phrases at least the same number of times in the same spots (headers, titles, body text, meta descriptions…)
16. Create a custom 404 page.
17. Don’t forget to optimize your title tag, meta tag descriptions, headings and the main content.

Redesigning your website doesn’t have to be harrowing. It only needs to be purposeful. Search engines and people like fresh content and thoughtfully redesigned websites. For a bit more detail on the 17 Tips, see Maintaining your SEO When Redesigning Your Website. So, have no fear of redesigning your website, just keep your focus on SEO and functionality during the process. When in doubt, talk to an expert.

Mining listing data for interesting data and photos to attract consumer traffic is not that hard. It serves two primary purposes — interesting content for consumers AND link bait as one method of link building. It works, or I assure you Zillow would not do it. But brokerages aren’t doing it (that I’ve seen).

But, alas, content marketing is NOT free — it requires resources and actual work. It requires DOING SOMETHING, not being lazy.

Are there examples of brokerages having success with content marketing with listings data that you know of? Leave them in the comments please.