Attleboro Falls, Massachusetts
I will be posting any online and/or mobile industry news or tips that I feel may benefit the community. Check out thedigitalmass.com for more information.
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Sep. 8, 2008
Attending last week’s RISMedia Leadership Conference in New York gave me a much better understanding of the difficult position agents and brokers are in regarding making decisions on their marketing spend. New technology, although proving effective, has added increased complexity to the decision making process. How does an agent/broker know if a technology is worth the money and (sometimes more importantly) time investment in a new marketing technology?
The unfortunate thing is there really is no formula for determining whether a technology is going to be worth your while. As someone who has been in digital marketing for about 15 years I’ve certainly made my share of mistakes and think that I’ve learned from them.
Here are some very simple things to keep in mind when considering how to spend your time and money with marketing technology.
1. Get over the WOW factor – Many of us have that inner geek just waiting to grab on to the next coolest thing. It’s very easy to get enamored by a fancy technology that looks cool and does something that you’ve never seen before. But ask yourself these questions:
- Are my customers using this type of technology today?
- Will my customers find this useful?
- Will this help me better reach my customers on a level that they are comfortable?
2. If it sounds too good to be true it probably is – At the conference last week I spoke with a few technology company owners (and sat in a session that was literally just a poor sales pitch for one) that had products or services with all of the answers. Yes, technology can create a better user experience which can equal deeper engagement with your customers, but it’s rarely the panacea to a poor overall message.
- If you are considering a technology that promises to turn your business around with little work on your end be skeptical.
- Ensure that your overall marketing strategy and message is sound and can stand on it’s own. Use technology to amplify this message, not change it.
3. KIS (keep it simple) – This is probably the most important. I’ve seen countless over-developed, over-funded and over-priced technology products that are simply way too complex to be effective. The vicious cycle that I see in terms of this is that technology companies receive an infusion of investment capital and feel pressure to invest all of it in their product. As a result they over-develop and end up selling on the first two rules that I stated above.
I sat in a session at the RIS Media show (the sales pitch that I mentioned) where after 1.5 hours of talking about a product the audience (and myself) barely understood it. This is a definitely a red flag and a great example of what I’m talking about. Consider the following:
- Will my audience be able to use this technology and figure it out easily?
- Is the technology trying to accomplish more than what's needed, and is my message being clouded as a result? (example – if a buyer wants information on a specific property and dials an 800 number for the info, would it be a good idea to offer them them a search on the entire MLS for the area? Is this noise, clouding your message and the specific information requested? YES! Will a unanticipated complex phone system likely confuse the inquirer? YES!)
- Social Networks are simple, use them. It’s a serious time investment but is simple person to person communication.
In technology… simple works. Example – Google, arguably the most successful technology company today, started with just search. By internet standards search is very basic and simple. They understood their customer, mastered their product/message and delivered what was expected without clouding the customer experience.
There are more things to consider when choosing to move work with a new marketing technology but I tend to use these three rules in my initial approach.
Aug. 29, 2008
If you are not familiar with Local.com, they are localized online search tool specializing in helping people find large and small businesses within their local area. Unlike other local search tools out there Local.com contains rich review content submitted by actual customers as well as free listings within their directory.
According to Compete, Local.com’s traffic has been steadily increasing over the past few years as well and they are now just under the 10 million visitor per month mark.
At a minimum real estate agents should submit their business as a free listing….it’s a no brainer with almost 9 million people going their per month. If you are in a larger market and feel advertising on Local.com will benefit your business their rates are low with a $50 introductory offer.
Aug. 26, 2008
Too many marketers live in silos. Their strategy too often fails to address all the ways they could be reaching their target audience. In many cases if they are reaching their audience through the right channels the message is not consistent or integrated properly.
When I build a digital marketing plan for a client there are three primary points that I focus on. I encourage you to think about these three points if you are struggling with your own marketing challenges.
1. Channel Diversity - Are you reaching your customer in the places and at the times when it matters most? If you’re a real estate agent you should be reaching your customer in newspapers/tv/etc. (local paper, home shows) , online through real estate websites and social media (sites like Facebook, Trulia, Realtor.com), and in their email box or on your customers mobile device (with services like HItxt, http://www.hitxt.com). These are the primary ways your customer is consuming messages/communication which is why you need to be there. The levels of these channels start with a broad, untargeted reach (newspaper, etc.) and funnel to a very specific and personal connection with the customer through mobile interaction and email.
If you are successfully reaching your customer in these three areas you are building deep brand equity and a higher propensity to significantly speed up your sales cycle.
2. Message Consistency - So you are reaching your customer in the three primary channels listed above, but how consistent is your message. Ensure that customers are not getting conflicting messages between channels. Also, it’s important to use one channel to promote the other. For example listing your site URL on your TV spot. Or listing your SMS listing information in your classifieds ad. Showing a customer that your reach spans well beyond the way they are finding is important to demonstrate your ability as a marketer.
3. Measure the Team - This is an integrated strategy so don’t measure it in silos. Too many times I hear marketers criticize on area of a strategy like this consistently more than others. The fact of the matter is there are channels that will receive direct sales or leads and others that will drive sales or leads to that channel. It’s like hockey, players stats reflect actual goals scored and assists. The assist part is as important as the goal. Yes, you need to make sure you are seeing an ROI through any marketing efforts, but at the same time think holistically in how you are reaching people and how they will likely respond.
Don’t give your target customers the excuse that you were not accessible to them. Reach them at every point possible and deliver the clearest and most consistent message possible.
Aug. 11, 2008
Search engines may not be mythical creatures bred for the skills in magic, but they are constantly engulfed by marketing myth. That is simply because the rules change almost daily. The rules you knew from late 2007 have changed and will likely change again before the year is out.
The points below specifically address Search Engine Optimization. Some of the tactics below, such as video marketing outside of context, are effective outside of an SEO strategy. Google and the big engines are making page rank more and more difficult, hopefully these tips help.
Search engine submissions are worthless. Once your site is
indexed, it’s over. Mission accomplished.
Directories are no longer a good source of quality one-way links.
Article submission sites are so inundated with content that any
new articles will be buried on Page Rank 0 pages forever.
Press releases are nice if you just cured cancer but they don’t
help you reach your target audience.
Diverting traffic from blogs is called spamming. It will get you
banned from any decent blogs (the only ones that matter).
For an RSS Feed to work, you need relevant, well-written
content that is regularly updated for your core audience.
Social bookmarking is great IF you to have something of
value to post. You need your own blog to do this effectively.
Getting permanent, one way backlinks from other sites is
ideal, but the only way to get them is to write customized,
individual e-mails aimed at target sites of value.
Using video clips to promote your business is effective IF
you place the videos within the context of your blog. Placing
them in social media sites is not going to have the desired effect.
Aug. 8, 2008
Adopting new marketing techniques is essential for agents to keep up with an evolving buyers market, and one of the hottest technologies today is mobile marketing. Now don’t jump to conclusions on mobile marketing and SMS, it’s NOT just for teenagers. Right behind teenage users, SMS is most heavily used by women ages 25-40 according to mmetrics (a mobile marketing intelligence service).
There are many ways to leverage this technology to your marketing advantage, here are just a few ideas:
1. Posting a Mobile Information sign at the property – Giving buyers the ability to acquire your property information on their cell phone while they are sitting in their car in front of the property is extremely powerful. Mobile listings can immediately provide the buyer critical info on the property and pictures of the interior or backyard. Also, agents can immediately follow up with the potential buyer while they are still sitting in front of the property.
2. In your classified listings – Quickly save money in classifieds advertising with unique SMS listing codes. In your classifieds ad provide details on one property in the ad, and list four SMS codes under the listing detail indicating that readers can find additional info on like properties by sending a text message to the advertised codes.
3. On your business card and signatures- One of the great things about SMS listings is that they are completely reusable and only expire when an agent wants them to. On business cards and email signature place one or two SMS listing codes that contain information on your latest listings. This gives prospects immediate access to your listings while they are communicating with you and shows then that you are technically savvy marketer.
4. Link your mobile listings- SMS listings give you the ability to cross promote other listings without taking a significant amount of space. Place a short line at the bottom of one SMS listing with the unique code of another like listing. Buyers can end up browsing your entire listing portfolio from one inquiry and while driving to their next home showing.
5. Keep them engaged- Establishing communication with a buyer on their personal mobile device is an extremely powerful position for any sales person or agent. Without abusing that important line of communication, SMS gives you the ability to contact the buyer with additional property information or listings immediately, when they need it. Timing is almost everything in sales and SMS removes any potential time lag that may have been a factor in the past.
These are only a few ideas on how to use mobile marketing to enhance your advertising and marketing efforts. To learn more about this form of marketing and to try 30 days for free go to HItxt at http://www.hitxt.com.
Aug. 4, 2008
In April of this year Zillow launched their mortgage service called “Zillow Mortgage Marketplace.” The marketplace enables consumers to create a request for a purchase mortgage, home equity loan, or refinance loan. However, unlike other home loan aggregators, Zillow enables the potential borrower to remain completely anonymous throughout the process. For instance, consumers are not required to enter their social security #, address, or even their name at any point during the online application experience. Borrowers ultimately receive loan offers from multiple lenders sent directly to an anonymous Zillow account. Clearly Zillow believes that by keeping the application process anonymous users will be more likely to fill out an application to gauge potential home loan financing options without fear of being inundated with marketing solicitation from lenders.
You may be wondering what type of traction the “Mortgage Marketplace” is gaining with consumers. As the chart below illustrates, traffic to this section of Zillow’s site has steadily grown from the time of product launch.
It is clear that this offering is an increasingly important piece of Zillow’s overall portfolio, as ~25% of total site visitors in June went to the Mortgage Marketplace. It certainly will be interesting to keep an eye on the rate of consumer adoption for the Mortgage Marketplace in the months ahead.
Best,
Michael Ouellette
Hitxt.com - SMS Real Estate Leads
Jul. 25, 2008
The importance of backlinks to your site is of course search engine results. Backlinks are links from other website going into your site. The more relevant sites linking to you, the more popular your site will appear to search engines. This is a critical component to optimization. Here are a few tips for getting more backlinks to your site
Post comments in other blogs. When you add a comment in a blog and when you add your blog’s URL a new backlinks is created, but try to post comments only in those somehow related to what your blog is about, don’t start posting in each blog you find out there. Contribute with the community, that´s what the blogging business is all about.
Submit to directories. There are a lot of free web directories on the web now and there are an equal number of sites that list free web directories.Here are some directories you might want to try.
Link Exchange. It is important that you exchange links only with related sites. If a site has nothing to do with your site a reciprocal backlink from it will serve little to no purpose. Post an entry and let people know that you are open for link exchanges.
Join forums. And contribute posting comments, use your URL as your signature, try to participate in the hottest threads, don’t start posting comments without content just to get backlinks because it is probably that your entry will be deleted by a moderator.
Link Baiting. If you don’t know what this means, it is when you write a controversial or a very interesting post or article that catches the attention of a large audience that wants to blog about that, this is going to generate automatic free backlinks. Write a creative post, this kind of links are very important because people are choosing to link to you, what gives your blog an extra value.
Submit articles. If you know a lot about something write an article for free distribution, or for reprint, and submit it to free article directories.
All of these tactics take time but are all worthwhile. Good luck!
Mike
Michael Ouellette
VIO Media Group, LLC
Next Generation Real Estate Marketing - http://www.hitxt.com
My Digital Marketing Blog - http://www.thedigitalmass.com
Jul. 21, 2008
Most of my postings in the Real Town community are to offer online and mobile marketing tips and advice. I typically do not post anything regarding my business, however wanted to take this one moment to fill the community in on a new service that my company just launched. Here are the details for anyone interested:
HItxt is announcing the soft launch of the new service for real estate agents. With the easy-to-use HItxt service real estate agents no longer have to rely on flyers and 800 numbers to get their property information to prospective home buyers. By subscribing to HItxt real estate agents give home buyers the ability to get property information delivered to their cell phones. Real Estate agents receive lead information on each inquiry on their properties.
With the soft launch real estate agents and home sellers can sign up the service for a free initial 30 day trial period (a credit card is not needed for this free 30 day period). During this period registrants can add up to 20 properties at no cost. After the initial 30 day period the service is only $19.99 per month. There are no set up fees, contracts or messaging fees. This is the most affordable service of it's kind and gives agents the opportunity to test the technology with zero risk.
Sign riders with each customized property code are available for purchase right on the website for $5.95 (plus shipping).
If you've been thinking of trying this service this is probably your best chance.
- It's VERY easy to set up. Start at http://www.hitxt.com
- The first 30 days are free. No credit card required for the trial, no contracts.
- If you like the service it's only $19.99 for 20 listings ($1.50 for every listing after 20). The best pricing for this service, with no contracts, set up fees or messaging fees.
Please let me know what questions you have about the service. My direct email is michael@viomediagroup.com. Thank you for your attention.
May. 6, 2008
If you are not already working with Trulia, but are working with Realtor.com, you may want to consider expanding to Trulia as well. They are growing at warp speed right now in terms of overall traffic. They are quickly outpacing Realtor.com and Zillow in terms of audience growth...see below.
The chart above illustrates a 156% audience growth rate for Trulia year-over-year compared to only about 20% for both Zillow and Realtor.com for the same time period. Their month-over-month growth rate is double digits which is amazing considering they are driving about 2 million people to the site every month and their competitors are posting 1.5% and 2.2% growth rates.
I expect their growth to cool somewhat as they mature, however they are already posting great traffic levels at these growth rates. It may be quite a while before any significant slowdown occurs.
Apr. 30, 2008
There are so many ways to market your website. As a business owner I understand how important it is to be found by the right audience online.
Here are a few free or low cost ways to market your business online. If you’ve spent any time marketing your business online I’m sure you are already doing some of these, but there may be one or two new ones here for you.
Submit Articles: A great free way to market your business is through article submission. There are many article submission site out there that although have thousands of articles archived in their index, will provide you additional visibility to search engines…super important. Here is an example of a good article submission directory: http://www.articleblotter.com/
Free Link Submission: With the same premise as article submission this will increase your web presence and search engine ranking. In additional to link submission there are link swap services as well. Dedicate a small area or deep page in your site for links to other, quality sites and swap traffic. Search engines look for inbound linking to gauge your ranking.
Newsletters: You can start a newsletter or autoresponder service with little to no cost. With the amount of spam blocking software out there today it’s important to take time with your email formatting and ensuring that you will not be viewed as spam. When I create email newsletters for my clients there are many factors that go into the creation to assure a low spam grade. But the best advice is to watch your reporting click-throughs and open rates closely.
If you do not have a list yet I would start by sending simple emails with tips and tricks of your industry and start building. Add a newsletter sign up page to your website and a link to your email signature. Once you have a large list, you can use a database manager with reporting features to send out your emails to a larger database.
Start Blogging: Yes, blogging does take time but in my opinion it’s time very well spent. Blogs are one of the best sources of what is typically relevant user generated content which is food for search engines. Blogging is mainly a time investment. Here are some places you can go to start your blogging:
Blogger.com - Free to set up & customize.
WordPress.org - Free program to download & install on your web server.
Movable Type - Free & paid subscriptions available.
Live Journal - Free to set up & customize with an upgrade available..
Blogging on Other Blogs: The more you blog the better. Outside of having your own blog focused on your business, blog elsewhere…Real Town is a GREAT place to start.
Craigslist : Yes, Craigslist is a place for spammers, but the traffic benefits are so high that in my mind it’s worth dealing with them (it’s also free). Craiglist listings are search engine food which will significantly help your rankings. If spamming is a concern do not post your email address, only your URL. Spammers are less likely to visit the site and pull your email.
In your email signature: This is one of those ways to market yourself that is so simple that it is very frequently overlooked. If you are not including your business in your signature line, just think about the amount of email that you send and to probably a diverse audience.
eBooks: Although I have never published an eBook I know a few consultants who have and have done quite well with it. If you are a seasoned professional and have an interesting take on your industry eBooks make it easy to publish your thoughts for sale. There are tons of free information on how to go about this process. Here is a great blog on writing an eBook: http://ebookwritingandmarketingsecrets.com/
Offer something of value outside of your product or service: Offering your audience free content of value (such as an ebook), coupons or something little to no cost to you with high perceived customer value will keep them coming back. Is your site listing properties for sale in Phoenix, AZ pull some interest rate info from Bankrate or maybe an article from the Arizona Republic. Credit the source of course!
Apr. 24, 2008
I've written about it in the past, social networking is time consuming. Here are a few more tools to help you save time managing your social networking efforts.
StumbleUpon is a social community that allows users to vote on posted content through an installed toolbar on their desktop. This is a great place to get your content posted in front of a very engaged audience. The StumbleUpon Alerter is a great tool that easily provides a view into your StumbleUpon account’s activity.
Like StumbleUpon Reddit is a highly engaged community that allows users to vote on content right on their site. To save time managing your Reddit posts there is now the Reddit River mobile version. It is 3 times as light (in size) and automatically discovers mobile versions of stories posted on Reddit. It also supports viewing the various SubReddits.
Propeller is a social news site, not unlike Digg. The PropellerTray is a tool that allows you to see the vote and comment count on each of the content pieces you submitted to Propeller.com.
Twhirl is a great desktop tool for Twitter users. it gives you the opportunity to do just about anything that you can do on Twitter within a little window on your desktop. It also has a great Outlook integration giving you a 'new email-like' message every time you receive a Twitter message.
Apr. 23, 2008
Facebook's rise within the college student community has enabled it to grow into a dynamic yet professional environment which is very effective for marketing your business (or yourself). Not as personal as MySpace and not as static as Linked In, Facebook offers a great middle-of-the-road solution for business professionals.
The thing to keep in mind when using Facebook for your business is that it's true value is in building new business relationships and strengthening old ones. Here are three tips for those of you who may be new to the Facebook scene.
1. Build a great profile...not a good one but a great one! Your Facebook profile will be the center point of your Facebook strategy. Provide details about your business, skills and background. Also, include some person interests. A good profile is great for search engine optimization outside of Facebook. When creating your profile, think about the reasons why someone would be interested in talking to you and write about it...keep it engaging, fun yet professional.
2. Reach out to people you know and others within the industry. Think of Facebook as a giant networking opportunity. Send messages within Facebook to others in your industry, request to be friends, start a dialog. Don't be shy...
3. Reach your target market through friends. As you make connections look at the friends of your immediate friends and start to build new relationships through them. This will quickly expand your network with the right kind of people that you are trying to reach.
If you are apprehensive to send a message to someone, post on their wall. If someone posts a message to you, make sure you respond on their wall. And remember, be social...your next sale may depend on it.
Apr. 21, 2008
Banner ads are one of the oldest forms of online marketing. There is a chance that you are using in the links to your site on partner sites or considering using some to drive traffic to your site.
I recently came across some info from Marketing Sherpa that I found interesting regarding how to improve response rates to banner ads.
Here is the tip: In a recent test performed by Marketing Sherpa they found that the phrase ‘Start Shopping Now’ performed much better than including a free offer in the banner ad. This is contrary to what many marketers have believed in the past.
So, if you are planning to use banners to drive traffic to your Real Estate site, think about including marketing text like “New Homes throughout the Phoenix Area. Start Searching Now”.
Also, they found that the best size for your banner in terms of response is 300x250. This size beat all other banner sizes in terms of click through rates.
Apr. 14, 2008
With today’s Web being more social and average Web users having more than one account in several of these sites, be it MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg or YouTube, it is becoming increasingly cumbersome to manage each account individually. A new wave of social aggregation services aims to make our online social lives a little easier by displaying information from each social networking site in a single location--where one can keep track of every inane action of their friends through feeds. Today there are dozens of social aggregation services including FriendFeed, Spokeo, Iminta, Dandelife, and SocialThing! among other start-ups.
FriendFeed allows users to aggregate information and activity streams from various services on the Internet--Flickr photos, YouTube videos, blog posts, Delicious bookmarks, Last.fm, Twitter messages, etc. (a total of 33 services). Basically it keeps you updated on what your friends or family are sharing, uploading, linking or commenting on--listing it in an RSS feed format. The site recently launched a search feature where users can search by individual, friends or all users as well as narrow the search to specific services like Twitter or YouTube. Similarly, Spokeo is a RSS reader of all your friends’ activities. While FriendFeed requires that you add which friends you want to track, Spokeo will find all your contacts from Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail and then go out to 30 or so sites it monitors and bring back any new content from people in your address book.
Apart from merely being a blog reader of your friend’s activities, Socialthing! (in beta) allows you to send data back to social services (e.g. respond to your friend’s Tweeter messages directly on the site). Iminta allows you to create groups of friends and determine which groups see what content. Other services in this space include Mugshot, SecondBrain and Dandelife, among others. As more social sites open up their APIs and become more tolerant to third party sites, the benefits of data portability can be truly realized--giving users more control to share or move data from one system to another.
Apr. 10, 2008
When people are searching for a realtor online where are they going? Compete analytics has broken down the top sites that people go to when they do a search on the term 'realtor'. We can assume that these people are in market for real estate or looking for a realtor. No surprise who the top site is, however what is a little more interesting are the sites below the top.
Some definitions for you:
Keyword Share - The percentage of total click throughs generating from the 'realtor' keyword search going to that specific site.
Site Share - The amount of total site traffic that click throughs on the term 'realtor' accounts for.
Average Monthly Search Referrals - All clicks generated to that site from any search engine in a given month.
Apr. 8, 2008
Google Adwords continues to be the dominant channel for online advertising, however Google's foray into print seems to be ramping up a little more slowly. Google Print Ads allow advertisers to easily advertise in up to 600 newspapers nationwide, all managed (and tracked!) through Google Adwords. Advertisers have the ability to target specific publications in the local markets that they are most interested in. Like Adwords, Print Ads gives advertisers the ability to name their own price on the specific ad of choice in any publication. Newspapers then have the option of accepting or denying that bid.
I recently used Google Print Ads for a client and had good results. The tools were easy to use and we had a nice ROI on the advertising purchased. For an overview of how Google Print Ads works click here: http://services.google.com/training/adwords/printads/print_adwords/
Apr. 7, 2008
According to Comscore, overall traffic going to real estate sites in the month of February is up, year over year. This may be good news for the market, showing an increase in overall consumer interest in the real estate market.
Not much new here, however top apartment and rental related sites are showing an overall decrease in consumer interest, which I did find interesting.
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Top Real Estate Sites by Unique Visitors (000s)
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Property
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February 2007
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February 2008
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Change (%)
|
|
|
Total Internet: Total Audience
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175,653
|
185,017
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5
|
|
|
Real Estate
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36,930
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42,213
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14
|
|
|
Move Network (includes Realtor.com)
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7,708
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9,384
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22
|
|
|
Yahoo Real Estate
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3,416
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5,322
|
56
|
|
|
MSN Real Estate
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2,157
|
4,539
|
110
|
|
|
AOL Real Estate
|
N/A
|
3,107
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N/A
|
|
|
Rent.com
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3,112
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2,680
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-14
|
|
|
HomeGain.com
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3,337
|
2,545
|
-24
|
|
|
Apartments.com
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2,543
|
2,227
|
-12
|
|
|
Trulia.com
|
752
|
2,174
|
189
|
|
|
Remax International
|
2,050
|
2,034
|
-1
|
|
|
Zillow.com
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1,764
|
1,952
|
11
|
|
|
Note: ComScore audience measurement data report on media usage, visitor demographics, and online buying power for home, work, and university audiences across U.S. and worldwide Internet audiences.
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|
Source: comScore Media Metrix, 2008
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Apr. 4, 2008
WWW.  .com
I recently read an article by Aaron Wall that was very interesting and struck a chord with me. I'm constantly getting this question: "yesterday I was ranked #1 on Google and today I'm gone without changing a thing...why?" Well there are many, many reasons why a search rank can change quickly, especially in Google, but one can be the direct result of a human review of your site by Google employees.
Google has a team of human site reviewers that analyze the content of each site that is indexed by the spider. Of course the spider moves faster than humans do but they will catch up at some point. Here is a simple question to ask yourself about your website that can gauge how your site may be viewed by Google:
'if all images, scraped content and ads were removed from my site would there still be value?'. If not you will likely be construed as spam.
As Aaron pointed out in his article Google has destroyed the Pagerank of most of the low end link selling blogs, article directories and general web directories. Working with these site will not improve your ranking, it's as simple as that.
Bottom line, make sure you are providing valuable and original content and you will likely avoid the Spam categorization.
Apr. 3, 2008
According to Compete analytics year over year growth at prominent For Sale By Owner sites is down when compared to growth at sites geared towards Realtor listings. Of course this does NOT include Craig's List and other typical melting pot sites where the Realtors and owners mix of listings tend to be more equal.
Although month over month growth is down across the sample, the year over year growth is up notably on the Realtor focused sites. Is this another indicator that more consumers turn towards professionals in difficult market conditions? I think this is a good discussion point to support that notion.
Apr. 2, 2008
Like most bloggers you probably could use more traffic to your blog. Getting people to Digg your content or submit your content to Reddit is critical to generating traffic. But how can you get more people to do this? Here are a few tips that might help you out.
The overarching thing to keep in mind is that most people interested in digital content are busy and sifting through a ton of content every day. They tend to skim everything they read, paying attention to only the most relevant pieces of content in an article. When pulling your content together for your next post, keep this in mind.
Readers do not want 20 pages – People active in social meda are not necessarily interested in pages upon pages of content. They understand that many bloggers will set extensive pagination in order to generate more impressions…you’re not fooling anyone. Keep it reasonably short, long enough to get the message out and for the reader to gain value from the article.
Always include a subheading – Subheadings are great tool for someone who wants to Digg your article. This gives them something to quickly use as a description.
The title is everything – Just like pulling content together for a website, blog article titles are critical. On many sites, like Reddit, it’s only the title that people initially see so you need to captivate them immediately. Make sure you are taking some extra time you’re your title.
Always include an image – Even the most basic of images will be more captivating to a skimmer than a straight text article. For sites like Digg that allow images, this will help you stand out from the blogs without. People are naturally drawn to images.
Pop Culture always works – The more you can incorporate pop culture references in your article, and especially your title, the more engaging your article will be to the reader. People like to be able to quickly relate to the world around them in the content that they read, this helps establish a quick connection with the content and the author.
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