Real Estate Web Design and Marketing Blog

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Recently, Brad and I were honored to be guest on a webinar hosted by our good friend and real estate trainer and social media expert Amy Chorew with The Tech Byte. The next day I received an email question from one of the participants asking a series of questions about selecting domain names for their real estate website. These questions are pretty typical of the questions we are asked from time to time and I thought, why not use the Dakno Real Estate Blog to provide some answers.
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In today’s highly competitive online marketing arena, if your real estate website fails to deliver the five critical components below, you could be falling behind your competition. Today at 2:00pm EST (1-26-10), we invite you to view our Dakno live stream as we guide you step by step to understand what home buying and selling consumers want the second they land on your real estate website. Come see for yourself what essential ingredients are needed for your real estate website.

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Part of the DNA of the new breed of real estate agents is their voracious appetite for tech toys. We are all about the “shiny objects”. With the holiday gift giving season upon us, I’m sure you have started your own personal “wish list” of tech toys you want this Christmas. While this list is in no particular order of the “most wanted”, these bright and shiny objects are priced under $150 MSRP. Given our current stingy economy and the state of the housing market in many areas, I figured we all needed to be pretty smart with the budge this year. My compliments to the writers at “WIRED” Magazine and their December 2009 issue for serving as my inspiration for this post.

What Real Estate Pros Want Most This Christmas!

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I’m writing this blog post as I head out to Blog World and New Media Expo. I’ll be on a panel talking about things to think about when hiring a Vendor. But strangely enough,  this blog post isn’t about my session. Instead it’s about the session that’s happening directly after. Reggie Nicolay of My Tech Opinion will be talking about Integrating everything into “One Site”. I’m really looking forward to the session as it’s a topic that I 100% agree with. I think it’s vital to real estate agents building a successful online marketing presence.

Seamless Integration Across All Sites

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One of the most important aspects of a successful real estate website is solid hyperlocal content. You would be amazed at how many people search for homes in specific neighborhoods or condo buildings

The neighborhood entrance

I know it’s cliché but it’s an important shot. This will help home buyers more easily find the location of the neighborhood should they later want to venture out and take a drive through that neighborhood.

Homes

It’s important to photograph a few homes but don’t go overboard. Let’s face it, showing the fronts of a dozen homes that all look the same doesn’t sell the neighborhood. Mix things up by showing the various architecture types and styles of homes. Keep things interesting by photographing the different homes from various angles.

Common Area

Walking trails, bike paths, play grounds, etc. Remember to sell the “lifestyle” that comes with living in that particular neighborhood.

Amenities / Clubhouse

Many people choose neighborhoods based off of its amenities. With this in mind, make sure you feature all of the various “extras” that are available to people living in the neighborhood.

Neighborhood Site Plan

Site Plans help provide potential home buyers with an overview of the neighborhood. Typically a quick phone call to the builder is all it takes as they will be happy to receive the “free advertising” in exchange for the Site Plan. While your at it, ask if they have any additional photographs that you could use on your web site.

Capture Photographs, Not Snapshots

Now that you have a good idea as to what to photograph, here are a few tips to help move your photos from “snapshots” to professional looking photography.

Get There Early or Arrive Late

The time of day plays a big part in how your photos turn out. Evenings produce long shadows and warm colors helping to add character to the photograph. Early morning also has great diffused lighting and helps capture those still moments just after the sun rises.

Frame and Perspective

It’s often difficult to truly capture the perspective in a flat photo. With this in mind, place something in the foreground to add depth to the shot. A simple low hanging tree branch may be all you need to do the trick.

Photoshop Is Your Friend

Even those less than stellar photos can come to life with a little help from a photo editing software such as Photoshop. Just remember, you want to accurately depict the neighborhood so don’t go overboard. Adding a little extra green to the grass is fine, but removing unsightly telephone poles and powerlines is another!

Peak Season

Spring and summer are a great time for photographing the great outdoors. Flowers are blooming, the grass is green and the neighbors just finished their spring cleaning! With this in mind, there is no time like the present to get out and photograph a few neighborhoods!

Bonus Tip

Like so many blog posts that I write, this topic came from a my inbox. Kari Mullins of Peoria Home Office asked me for a few tips on photographing neighborhoods. Instead of simply emailing her back, I decided to write this blog post. So the next time you’re faced with writer’s block, just take a look in your inbox. It’s likely overflowing with blog post ideas!

What a privilege it was to be invited on the Tamara Dorris Blog Talk Radio Show on Wednesday, March 24th. Over the next 2 post I will share with you my notes from Tamara’s show. I thought it would be helpful for you to have access to this Neighborhood Marketing Plan for your little corner of the world.

1. While it’s awesome to get those great keywords like city name real estate (example-Dallas real estate), too many real estate agents overlook neighborhood keywords (long-tail searches). And the reality is that people who are searching with those neighborhood-centric keywords actually make stronger, more qualified consumers. Why? Someone searching for “Dallas real estate” is just browsing (tire-kickers) in broad generalities while someone searching for homes for sale in the Dallas neighborhood of Preston Hollow are looking for – well, homes for sale in Preston Hollow. There’s a strong probability they may be 30-60 days out instead of 18 months.
2. If a RE Pro will provide this unique, SEO keyword-rich indexable content it will offer so much search power for the site owner

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For all of you who are here from Active Rain to read the rest of the story, welcome to the Dakno Real Estate Marketing blog! Thanks for making the click.

What I Thought Would be a Wasted Afternoon!

With Brad standing in line at the passport office I figured my afternoon was going to be totally unproductive. I walked up to the barista at the Starbucks and placed my order, “grande’ mild blend and a slice of iced lemon pound cake”. She rung it up and said “your bill has been taken care of”. In bewilderment I said “really”. She said “yes”. I wondered who could have performed such a random act of kindness.

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While attending Bloggers Connect at the Inman Conference in NYC earlier this month the thought came to mind to share the presentations by Jay Thompson and Dustin Luther with the rest of RE.net. Armed with my built-in webcam and Bobby’s new webcam he received for Christmas, I decided to offer a 2-camera configuration for the live streaming video web broadcast. Getting the word out about our live streaming webcast was easy. Because we had been sending out REBar Camp and Bloggers Connect “Tweets” with the hashtags #rebcny and #icny, I figured viewers would come. Within minutes we had about 50 subscribers watching the Bloggers Connect streaming video over Mogulus.

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It seems Twitter is all the buzz right now. My relationship with Twitter, like many, has been an interesting journey. At first, I was like so many other Twitter doubters. I even quoted the famous line of “I don’t get Twitter. Does anyone really care that I am eating breakfast or brushing my teeth?” I then decided to take another shot at it. Unfortunately, I again grew frustrated at Twitter because I couldn’t keep up with everyone’s conversations. I mistakenly thought it was because I was following too many people. Frustrated again, I set Twitter aside for a few months. Suddenly, one day it dawned on me. I didn’t have to follow every single conversation on Twitter. I simply could jump in, get a quick snapshot, reply to a few people and jump out. I finally “got” Twitter!

Inman Connect Made Me A Twitterholic!

So off to Inman Connect I went with my renewed love for Twitter. In an effort to make my life easier, I put automation to work for me. I decided to have my Facebook status automatically update based on my Twitter updates. Twitter life was good – so I thought.

From the first session at Iman, I started feverously tweeting different updates about what was happening at the conference. The Twitter community loved it. I knew because I quickly started gaining more and more followers. I thought to myself that I had finally achieved Twitter Zen.

What’s Good Content for Twitter is Not Good for Facebook

My Twitter Zen didn’t last for very long. A tip from Jeff Turner turned into a harsh reality. You see, Jeff mentioned that he’s not a big fan of syncing your Twitter and Facebook status updates because the two social networks appeal to two difference audiences. His point was proven when my Facebook friends started messaging me saying things like “What’s your obsession with this Iman guy” “What the heck is #ICNY” “Your status updates make absolutely no sense!” While the information was quite relevant to the Twitter community (since they knew the context), my Facebook friends had no interest in seeing every detail of the Iman Connect conference.

I looked back at my Facebook Wall and quickly saw what they were referring to. It was ridden with tons of updates about a conference that they had no interest in. My effort to automate my social media back fired! Needless to say, I quickly disabled my Twitter/Facebook sync and now update the two sites separately with difference (relevant) pieces of information.

Automation Isn’t Always the Best Choice

The entire point of automation is to reach more for less – basically increase your ROI. But it’s important to see how much time you are actually saving compared to the benefit of a personal touch. Let me give you one more quick example.

ActiveRain gives you the ability to automatically update Twitter every time you write a new blog post on ActiveRain. On the surface, it seems like a great feature. Right? WRONG! That’s because the Twitter update looks something like this… “Just Posted on ActiveRain – www.activerain.com/blah.” Now doesn’t that make you want to just run out and view the blog post? <sarcasm> Sure, having this automation saves you 20 seconds in having to manually update your Twitter status, but the problem is that it doesn’t compel anyone to actually click the link! What good is automation if it doesn’t increase your ROI? Instead, what if you took just 20 seconds to personally go to twitter.com and tease your blog post?

I asked Bobby (@rewebcoach) to help me out testing this. Instead of using the standard automated “just posted at…” approach, he created a personal tweet on a recent blog post. It was simple but a great Twitter tease. “Loose Lips Sinks Ships” and a link to the article was all he put on Twitter. Yet he had over 50 people immediately click to view his article. Why? Because it wasn’t the canned tweet that so many people see continually roll across their Twitter stream. In other words, those few seconds to create that personal tweet was much more valuable than zero seconds to create something that would have yielded zero results.

Automation Still has Its Place

Don’t get me wrong. I still love automation and I think it’s a great way to extend your social reach. But it’s important to make sure you understand when to use it and when not to use it. Just because you can save yourself a few seconds here and there, doesn’t mean you always should.

To Your Success,

Brad Carroll
Follow me on Twitter: @dakno

It’s something every real estate blogger dreams of, getting national exposure from the media. If it should happen to you have you considered what you would do with all that new found attention? And should you be even more fortunate to get some “link love” from the media, now that now that would be the ticket. It doesn’t happen often for most agents, but when it does don’t be caught off guard without a plan. That’s the subject of this post.

Dakno Client & Blogging BootCamp Graduate Strikes Gold

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