This is a good article written by Jimmy Mackin – I suggest starting out with a website in which your blog is a page within in it. Your goal is to drive traffic to you website and to optimize your web site – Call me for more information how this can be a part of your real estate marketing plan!!!

Facebook Page or Blog? Where do I start?

Where do I start?

Many Realtors® who are new to Blogging and Social Media do not know where to begin.  A common mistake many Realtors® make is they try to do everything at once.  I want to share with you the strategy we used to build our brand.

July 2nd, 2010 – we launched our Facebook Page.

Over the next 6 month, we focused all of our attention on connecting and engaging with our community.  As a result of our efforts, we were able to consistently grow our Facebook Page month after month.

When we launched our blog (Jan 12, 2011)- we immediately started seeing traffic flowing in from our Facebook Page.  In our first 108 days, we have driven in over 16,000 visits and 35,642 Pageviews.  Our readership is growing by approx 30% per month.

The important takeaway here is that only 8.84% of our traffic is coming from the Search Engines.

We often think that the only way to drive in traffic is to rank well for relevant keyword phrases, we have found that there is an alternative marketing strategy that you can use that may help you get better results.

Pre Social Media

Realtors® would launch their blog, hope that Google would crawl their site, index their web pages, and “hopefully” rank their pages for highly relevant keyword phrases.  This is a push and pray marketing approach  - push out your content and pray that Google ranks your pages well.

The challenge many of us face with this approach is that we cannot control how well we rank for specific keyword phrases.  We can optimize our sites until we are blue in the face, the fact remains, that ranking well for highly competitive keyword phrases very difficult.

Post Social Media

Facebook allows us to take more of a proactive approach to building a following.

There are two very important distinction worth making

Establishing yourself as a resource for valuable information is a great way to attract followers.  This doesn’t require you to create all of the content, you simply need to be a good curator.  A perfect example of this is The Corcoran Group.

People are the engine that drives growth – not bots.

2011 | Mar 16

By Erin Duckhorn

Hey you. Yes… you! I just finished visiting your website and I’ve got to say it was one of the most painful experiences I’ve gone through in quite some time.

Even for an expert in all things, I had a hard time navigating it.  It’s painfully difficult.

I was searching for some information there. It was nearly impossible and every minute that I wasted made it more and more painful to continue.  Finally I broke.

“Excuse me.  I’ll be right back.”  I pushed my chair away from my desk and stepped over toward the door.

Immediately I began bashing my head into the door frame until my face was bruised, bloody and swollen.  After several minutes of mercilessly smashing my face into the door, I finally reached the point where the pain in my face was more than the pain of navigating your site.  I returned to the desk and tried to continue my quest.

Visiting some sites is simply more painful than getting a root canal with a plastic spoon.

Is your site like that? Seriously, is it?

If you’re wondering why nobody visits your site then maybe it’s because it’s so painful for people to visit it that they would rather play leap frog with a unicorn.  The male readers understand what I’m talking about on that last one.

Don’t get your feelings hurt thinking about this.  We all have to learn and grow.  That’s part of life.  In fact, that’s why Site Sketch 101 exists… to help you transform your site into something beautiful.

So study, work hard, and get better.

The 15 Deadliest Web Traffic Killers in 2011

Here’s a few things I noticed at your site that really made my eyes bleed.

1. You don’t post enough: One of the fastest ways to get even your regulars to start abandoning you and your site is to simply stop posting.
2. Your titles bore us to tears: All I can say on this one is to read this article, 15 Tips to Awesome, Eye-Jerking Post Titles.
3. You punch people in the face with ads: We all understand the desire to profit from your online ventures but there’s a tasteful way to make it happen.
4. Your site is ugly: First impressions are lasting impressions and your lasting impression is disgust.
5. You ignore your readers: If folks leave you a comment, it’s always a great idea to try to respond as much as you are able.
6. You write like a 2nd grader: Spend some time each day learning how to improve your mastery of the English language.
7. You’re all over the place: It’s okay to mix in a little variety, but a new design every week and random content will chase people away.
8. You write the same thing everyone else writes: If people can get the same information somewhere else, why should they visit your site?
9. Your content doesn’t live up to the headlines: You write a headline that offer 15 tips and then you only provide 9.

This is just a quick list.  But hopefully you get the point.  If you’re here at Site Sketch 101, then I hope that it’s to find out how to fix up your website or blog. I’ve laid out in cold, hardcore, brutal honesty the way to take your site to the next level.

In the theme of my blog posts the week of November 15th, I have invited a web designer as my Guest Blog Post. Scott Stadler is my “go to” guy for my web site and any questions I have when setting up Social Media for my clients.

written by Scott Stadler, web designer

When we think of blogs, many of us automatically envision a Blogger blog, or perhaps even a WordPress.com blog.  In other words, we think first of the kind of blog that is provided by a third party and is entirely separate from our own website.  It’s probably because this is how blogging started off (almost a decade ago, believe it or not).

Do you use Blogger for your blog?  TypePad?

The thing is, using these systems is just fine.  With active promotion, online and off, they work just like anything else when it comes to giving you a place to connect with your readers about topics you’re both mutually interested in.  In this case, real estate is the name of the game.

In fact, a stand-alone blog like this might even accomplish some hefty goals when it comes to attracting new traffic through organic SEO and really building up a solid trust-factor with your base of blog followers.  After all, there’s a reason blogging has become and still is so incredibly popular…it just works!

Linking Or Framing Blogs To Your Website:  A Good Start, But…

Well, the next point here is that what works well as a third-party service pointing to your site (i.e. these types of off-site blogging services)…they’ll work even better when integrated into your actual website with more of a cohesive, holistic approach.

This requires more than using a link from the third party, off-site blog to your website.  The bottom line here is that most of your blog’s visitors will never find or use that link from the blog to your actual website.  The path of least resistance leads visitors well away from finding one small link—it’s kind of like finding a needle in a haystack (and then using it to actually sew something).

But everybody already knows this…right?  Old news.

Enter the next popular trend:  Framing your third-party blog into your website.  This means having a dedicated page on your website set up to pull a copy of your off-site blog onto your website itself.  It seems to be a popular trend with real estate oriented websites—and many of the top real estate website providers rely on this tactic.

And sure, it works to some degree…at least it helps your website visitors find and read your blog.  But naturally, there’s a catch.  The search engines that crawl your site only see a snippet of code for that framed blog page—because it’s not actually a part of your site, but rather is just a copy pulled from your third party blog service, the search engines treat it as such.

They don’t associate any of the information within those blog posts you’ve worked so hard on as a part of your site.  When it comes to being a part of your website, your third-party blog might be visible to humans, but it’s invisible to the search engines.  With search being a very real portion of a good traffic generation strategy, this just won’t do.

Your Blog Should Be An Actual Part Of Your Website…

Your blog should be built into your website from the very beginning as a wholly integrated solution…not just as an add-on or framed-in third party service.

The benefits of making your blog a real part of your website are countless.

First and foremost, each and every new blog post you create will be seen by the search engines as a new page on your website.  There’s a little bit more to the story when it comes to optimizing and maximizing this benefit, but the overall concept here is that the more pages you have out there in the search engine’s index, the more visible you’ll be to search visitors.

Search engines love sites that have a regularly updated blog full of fresh new content all the time.  They’ll see your new posts as a legitimate part of your site and give credit to the rest of your website pages as well.  It’s almost like a snowball effect; the more great quality pages and blog posts you have under your website’s “umbrella,” the better each one of these individual pages will do when it comes to being recognized.

In Conclusion…

For what it’s worth, it’s really not any more difficult to integrate a blog correctly into a website from the very beginning.  It’s just a matter of doing it right the first time instead of going back and adding a third-party blog and trying to match it up to your site as an afterthought.  The benefits of building your site around your blog as one holistic solution far outweigh the tactic of using an outside blog for your posts.

Scott Stadler designed my website, ww.BildaBetterBusiness.com. Having worked with many designers for my clients and many real estate web companies, I found working with Scott extremely easy. I told him what I wanted and he designed it – and the first draft was exactly what I wanted! Scott also helped me use Organic Search Engine Optimization and creating a working website that I am proud to have clients come to. To find out a little more about Scott, visit his website, www.visule.com. When you want a great website which will work for you, contact Scott - Phone: 217.617.4610 or Email: scottstadler@gmail.com.

Scott says, “Programmers program. Writers write. Designers design. If you build a website focused on any single one of these different schools of thought, it will likely perform great in that specific area. However, for a website that truly works, it’s important to put them all together.

10 TIPS TO BUILD_YOUR_ONLINE_SOCIAL_NETWORK(SocialMediaTipsheet)

Top Producer has so much information to go with its Real Estate Software Management program. This excerpt is from using Social Media in your networking. A lot of good ideas, if you haven’t started using Social Networking – and some great tips even if you have. Click on the link above for the entire article.

Approach online social networking as you would building relationships in
the real world. It takes time to develop new relationships- for you to get to know
your network, and for them to get to know you. Ask yourself how you would make
friends, build trust, establish rapport and gain business in the real world, and apply
those same principles in your social networking endeavors.

Create a friendly, professional online profile. Upload a professional photo of
yourself, and information about your real estate expertise and areas. Include contact
information to make it easy for people to get hold of you in the ‘real world’, including
your website, email address and office phone number. And make sure that any
personal photos and details you share are items that you’re comfortable sharing
with potential referrals and clients. It’s okay to have your personal as well as professional worlds blend into one
another over social media. In fact, you should be prepared to share a details of your
personal life while social networking. Potential clients want to know you as a person
before they enlist your services.

Aim to spend at least 30 minutes per day online social networking. Update
your online networks on personal or professional news, send personal messages,
share tips, and stay up-to-date on people’s lives. It’s important to be consistent in
your updates- better to update two or three times a week than to update every day
for one week, then post nothing for four weeks.
Remember to comment on the posts of others, as everyone appreciates their
thoughts being acknowledged. Commenting on your clients’ and prospects’
Facebook posts is a great way to check in and let them know you’re part of
their world.

Focus on delivering value and participating in conversation. Nobody wants
to be “friends” with someone who’s just going to aggressively sell and market to
them. Help the people in your network advance their goals – share their goals with
others, introduce them to helpful contacts, and make public recommendations if
you honestly believe in what they have to offer. Help them reach their goals first,
and they’ll be more likely to call you when it’s time to make a move.

Meet the influencers. Take time to get to know the influencers in a network.
These might be the group’s organizers, long time members, or people who make
regular contributions. Share your experiences with them about the group.
Ask questions, as they will understand how you can become established
within the network.

Post links frequently and position yourself as a resource for market
information. Facebook and Twitter are great platforms for posting quick links and
starting a conversation. If you come across an excellent article with current, local
market information, post the link where your peers and prospects can access it. Not
only do quality links keep your page engaging, they help you supply your clients with
their own resources for educating themselves on the market, rather than presenting
a hard sell. They’ll remember who the information came from!

Promote social media channels on your website and in email signatures.
To encourage clients and prospects to participate in your social media channels,
include links to your different social media accounts from your website and in your
email signatures. For example, your email signature could include links to your
blog, Facebook or Active Rain page, along with your name, email address and
phone number.

Make sure you set up a unique url to your Facebook page by registering a
username. Selecting one that is short and easy to distribute will go a long way
in helping to promote your page, as you can list it on business cards, email
signatures, and ads. Go to facebook.com/username to create yours.

Feel free to contact me if you have questions about Social Networking or Top Producer.