It’s happening less often these days, but you probably still encounter executives or colleagues who have trouble wrapping their heads around newer technology(especially in Real Estate)—how something works, for instance, and what it can do for them. So if you find yourself trying to explain the ins and outs of Google Analytics to someone who has barely mastered email, Lynne Harrold comes to the rescue with an anecdote about analytics on a small scale.

In a few posts at her Marketing Analytics blog, she recounts creating an online shop for her mother’s handcrafted jewelry—and using Google Analytics to determine whether her mother should be making quite so many bracelets.

What Harrold found seemed to confirm her suspicion. “Visitors clicked on the necklace section more often than the bracelet section,” she says, “which indicates that necklaces are more popular. However, necklaces are the first section listed and it may be that the order is causing more page views. Thus, I will switch the order and check back to see if the pattern continues.”

Combining this information with sales numbers, moreover, it nevertheless helps to confirm that her mother’s energy might be best spent on necklaces. “I had thought,” notes Harrold, “that visitors would gravitate towards bracelets because they are less expensive; however, her online sales suggest that visitors are more likely to purchase necklaces even though they cost more.”

What’s the Point?: With a simple story about a very small business,

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I am excited to take this journey with each and every one of you. Each of you will have slightly different goals but one goal you all have in common is to get steady flow of business from the web. Over the next 30 days, this program will change your life.

So what is the “Are You Connected Yet Challenge”?

In a nutshell… The Are You Connected Yet Challenge is about teaching you how to get new visitors to your site. For a full 30 days, you will complete small tasks that will give you the knowledge and skills necessary to get noticed on the web, how to use social media to effectively promote your brand, run a pay per click (PPC) campaign to funnel visitors to your site, how to measure your results and more. The cost to you is ZERO. That’s right; this is going to cost nothing. The entire training program is free, no credit card required. All you I need from you is your participation and feedback.

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Every real estate site or blog’s success can be measured in the usability of the site. Many sites today still concentrate on being pretty with special effects like Flash or AJAX, sound or video. While cool looking in most cases it’s not the most important factor that decides whether your site is going to fail or to succeed, usability is.

Bounce rate
The bounce rate is one of the most important usability metrics and thanks to Google Analytics it is easy to follow. 1000 visitors with a bounce rate of 95% means that in fact only 50 actually visited your site. So a site with a much lower visitor number AND bounce rate can be much more successful than a “stupid traffic” site with huge traffic numbers. Targeted quality traffic is the main key to a successful site.

Returning visitors
This should be obvious, only returning visitors really like your site. So the more come back the better, the more successful you are. One time search visitors and casual social media visitors are not the backbone of your site. The subscribers and returning visitors will be.

Pageviews per visit
Measuring pageviews is over hyped. If they land on the right page to start with then you have succeeded. Often bad sites require users to navigate through the site several layers to accomplish your goal not theirs.

Time on page
The time spent on a page can be read in many ways but you can deduce from it whether people just skim your content or read your whole article among others.

Time on site
It’s not always the longer the better but 5 minutes is in most cases better than 30 seconds, especially for a MLS search page or blog.

Next pages
To encourage people visit more than one page on a site we use internal links. Some of the links are links that we really want the people to follow such as “free CMA” or “list of foreclosures”. Understanding the “next pages” from a particular landing page we can determine whether the readers followed our advice or not and adjust our strategy accordingly.

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Here is one of the most common questions I receive.

Question: Do I need to submit my new web pages to Google if I want them to show up in the search engines?

Answer: No. There is no particular method of submitting your individual web pages to Google. What you need to do instead is make sure that your website is already being visited or spider’d by Google and the other search engines.

When the search engine ’spiders’ come to visit a site, they will crawl the site and see your content. That is when they will be naturally added to the search engine results. This is the method that works and that Google likes – finding your content naturally through crawling the website it is published on.

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Skype-enabled audio and video are already infiltrating many business settings, with users recording their Skype conversations and adding the recordings to their blogs as podcasts.

Skype - Is the best online conferencing tool for you to connect with others. It will work on Mac, PC and Linux, so whoever you have on your team will be able to use it too.
Handy Tip - Standard etiquette when using Skype. Sending someone a message to find out their availability prior to just calling them is always a good idea. Also, headsets are highly recommended!

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Get yourself prepped for the “Website Results in 30 days”. The following are a series of free profiles that you should set up. This will begin getting your site noticed by search engines. A couple of time saver ideas are to create a desktop folder with a photo of yourself or team (this is often better than a logo as these are “personal” profiles and we prefer to deal with people, set up an email my suggestion is  ”social@yourdomain.com) and create a brief bio (keep it simple). Now you are ready to get signed up. Follow each of these links and set up your free profile. Another recommendation I have is to have all of your profiles be the same name. For example, all of my username or profile names are CraigsAdvice with the exception of Google. This will help with the second part of this assignment.

Google – http://www.google.com/profiles

Yahoo – http://profiles.yahoo.com

Bing – https://signup.live.com/

Zillow – http://www.zillow.com/wikipages/Create-a-Free-Profile-on-Zillow/

Trulia – http://www.trulia.com/agents/

Once you are on these sites and if you have the staying power you should lock down your brand name or website. Knowem.com has a free program that will show you what usernames are available on 120 social media sites. They also offer a service that they will create accounts on each of these sites for $60 Click here to Protect Your Username on 120 Sites . I believe that you should protect your brand and lock down each of these usernames. If $60 is too much for your budget at the very least, lock down the following:

Also don’t forget these: FaceBook , LinkedIn , Yelp, Skype (this is the best way to connect with me and your clients, see the “i’m online” in the top right part of this page)

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It’s the 9th day of the 9th month in the 9th year and 9 minutes past 9 am. I am recovering from a long weekend followed up by a full day of speaking and learning at REBARCAMP in Seattle. BarCamp was a big hit as it allowed real estate industry professionals learn from each other about new marketing ideas and social media.
One thing is evident about the every changing Marketing options for real estate agents, the days of outbound (cold calling) marketing are dead and using Social Media and blogging to attract customers in (Inbound Marketing) is in. The big mistake many agents make that jump in to social media marketing is they PUSH or MARKET to connections by pushing listings on them. Social Media is about relationships and having fun and perhaps connecting with people in a meaningful and lasting way.
The big three in the Social Media arena for real estate professionals are Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn. Each of these are so different that many users are on 2 or all three regularly. Here is a quick break down of what each does or is.
Twitter is without a doubt the best way to share and discover what is happening at this exact moment. Anyone can see what anyone else is writing (unless you want it to be private-more in the how to Twitter 101 & 201 blog coming up).
FaceBook is a social networking website that uses a permission based system to allow you to connect with users. You can set you permissions to allow only friends to see or the whole world your choice.
LinkedIn is a business-oriented social network dedicated to helping professionals maintain a list of connection. It is also a great way for you to maintain a list of connections to past companies.
If you want to connect with me pick your favorite.
Twitter – www.twitter.com/craigsadvice
Facebook – www.facebook.com/Craigsadvice
LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/in/craigsadvice
Email – social@craigsadvice.com

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Gone to the Beach

The concept of personal branding has been around for a while but professionals in the Real Estate Industry have been slow to adjust. This is due to the “busy” nature of the business.  In the Corporate world, companies hire professionals or experts in a specific field to create and implement solutions but real estate agents are more like the lone gunman of the wild west and try to do it all themselves.  The good news today is it has never been easier to do it yourself by utilizing the Internet and social media.

Below I have outlined seven tools or steps that can help you get your brand noticed and help make your message even more pervasive, powerful, and efficient.

1. BE CONSISTANT

As you sign up with Social Media outlets like Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn and others, you should do your best to insure that no one else is capitalizing on or damaging your Brand.  The easiest way to do this is to go to sites like the ones mentioned in my article Managing Multiple Social Media Profiles.  These sites can let you know in seconds whether your username de jour is available.  Once you have picked out your name start signing up with as many sites as possible to “lock” your name.  If you want to do it fast you can use services like www.knowem.com which offers a service for $65 that will sign you up with most of the major sites.

2. Start with the easiest; LinkedIn

Many real estate professionals ignore LinkedIn, (Connect with me on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/craigsadvice – email social@craigsadvice.com) or have relegated it to a position of low importance on their list of social networking sites. I feel that it should be your first site for several reasons but mostly because it is easy.  The belief that the business focus of LinkedIn will not get you a hot home buying or selling prospect isn’t accurate. Everybody works somewhere. Many are self-employed contractors and professionals. In fact, these very professionals are in the higher income strata that will produce higher real estate commissions.

You can quickly connect with current and past employers and co-workers, connect with other agents and real estate associations, your favorite charities and clients.  Also consider your professional contacts in other in positions related to real estate.

• Appraisers
• Mortgage brokers
• Bankers
• Home Inspectors
• Attorneys
• Title companies
• Contractors

There are also numerous groups on LinkedIn discussing real estate and real estate investing topics. Investor clients are on LinkedIn asking questions that you can answer, building your credibility and gaining “Expert” points for display on the network. There is a NAR group, as well as several other real estate professional discussion groups. You can learn and discuss in these groups and connect with more people.

3. GOOGLE, ZILLOW, TRULIA – OH MY

You don’t need to build your own website or blog to have a powerful and authentic online brand. But before you start, you must prepare your branded career marketing materials. They include a branded bio that describes you and only you (ensure that you write it in a style that showcases your emotional brand attributes), a decent head shot, and your list of keywords (words that connect to your area or expertise).   Follow these links to Google, Zillow and Trulia and set up a free profile.  These sites will boost your web presence and are very easy and quick to set up.

Also, you must…

• Buy your domain name (even if you aren’t ready to have your own website). It costs about $9 per year. When you’re ready to build your own place on the World Wide Web, you’ll have the “property” on which to build it. You can buy your domain name at www.godaddy.com. (Search for “godaddy promo code” before purchasing, to get the latest discount offer.)
• Establish a Google Alert for your name to stay on top of what is being said about you on the World Wide Web. This will help you as you continue to post new content and build your brand online.

Even if you are virtually invisible now, you can be on your way to having a stellar online profile just by following these steps. And remember to continue to monitor your online ID—and subscribe to Google Alerts for your name. Google results change more frequently than the weather, so stay on top of what others are learning about you.

Next post I will go over the remaining steps.

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Everyday agents ask me if social media is a fad or should they be focusing their attention on what they have always done and works perfectly fine? Well… the short answer is every so often there is a major technology shift that improves a process, Car, Lightbulb. Phone, Plane, etc.  Social Media has the ability to get a message to people faster and more precisely than any media before it.

I found these Videos that illustrate my point.  Let me know what you think.

This is the older version.  Notice how much has changed in 2 years.

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This event (REBARCAMP-SEATTLE) is a must for Northwest agent that plan on being in the business in 5 years. Next Week on Tuesday, Sept 8th from (8am to 5pm) at The Lake Union Armory Building. Over 400 real estate professionals from throughout the Pacific Northwest will gather and spend the day learning about social networking. These events are catching on like wildfire all over the country. Our industry is dynamic and we must be able to adapt to the every changing market place in order to stay in business. Everyone from the “newbie” to the seasoned Social Media expert will gain some insight into the current trends. The conference will have dozens of breakout sessions on everything from Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, databases, using video, etc. We won’t know all the sessions until that morning. YOU will have the opportunity to run a session on a social media topic also! The conference is run by the attendees. Our Keynote speaker will be awesome. He runs his real estate business using the best digital technology. The entire conference is FREE including the lunch. There may be T-Shirts for all those attending also! RSVP now!

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