Real Estate Marketing http://www.real-estate-marketing.net Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:20:40 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.1.2 en Why Real Estate Agents and Realtors MUST Use Email Marketing http://www.real-estate-marketing.net/2009/12/03/real-estate-marketing-email/why-real-estate-agents-and-realtors-must-use-email-marketing/ http://www.real-estate-marketing.net/2009/12/03/real-estate-marketing-email/why-real-estate-agents-and-realtors-must-use-email-marketing/#comments Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:20:40 +0000 Joe http://www.real-estate-marketing.net/2009/12/03/real-estate-marketing-email/why-real-estate-agents-and-realtors-must-use-email-marketing/ When realtors and agents market online to their customers, e-mail inevitably comes up. There must be a good reason that your friendly neighborhood title companies, appraisers and mortgage pros are filing your inbox with newsletters and weekly/daily/monthly specials. It is one of the swiftest, and most personal, paths to leverage the power of the internet. Customize it with their name, first, last, or both and you’ve got a highly targeted and personalized message being delivered to a captive audience. Today we are going to talk about the top 3 pros to promoting your services this way.

Pro 1
You can reach ten or ten thousand folks at the touch of a button, and will have no more time invested to reach them all no matter how massive your list grows. Simply type your message, load it into your formatter or broadcast service, hit send, and each one of your clients or possible clients are notified of your message. And the better part is is costs nothing more than your subscription. Try doing that offline!

Pro 2
When done properly, email marketing can have a far higher close rate that other selling tactics. Your potential client is hit with a type of ‘in your face’ strategy whereby you are speaking to THEM. Unlike an ad in the paper or a commercial on television that’s common, email is private. Get their attention by including their name. Write as if you are addressing their particular problem, and you have the battle half won.

Pro3
Private emails work well as pre-sellers. Autoresponders are wonderful in that you can load up your messages and set them to go out at certain intervals. You do this once, and they continue to go out for each new potential customer that signs up, without you lifting another finger. Fundamentally, it’ll be warming up your possible customers while you are free to do other tasks - even sleep!

If you are already using this great tool in your business, great! But if not, you HAVE TO start, and you need to do it sooner rather than later.

There are a lot of great services out there : Aweber, VerticalResponse, and Constant Contact are three that we have used and would certainly recommend. Do your homework and look around. Make a list of the features you need and see which providers have them available, in your price range. This should not be too hard, as many are full of all the bells and whistles and start as low as $19 a month.

Good luck, and stay tuned for the next post in which we’ll be sharing some guidelines about e-mail etiquette, and why it is particularly significant in business…

]]> http://www.real-estate-marketing.net/2009/12/03/real-estate-marketing-email/why-real-estate-agents-and-realtors-must-use-email-marketing/feed/ Ok, let’s get started for real this time…. http://www.real-estate-marketing.net/2009/12/03/announcements/ok-lets-get-started-for-real-this-time/ http://www.real-estate-marketing.net/2009/12/03/announcements/ok-lets-get-started-for-real-this-time/#comments Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:09:07 +0000 Joe http://www.real-estate-marketing.net/2009/12/03/announcements/ok-lets-get-started-for-real-this-time/ Wow, what a couple of years it has been. While I appeared to drop off the face of the earth right after things got started over here on Real-Estate-Marketing.net, I actually jumped even further into the deep end of online marketing. That project (I’ll touch on it a bit more below) required that I step away from all of my own projects including this blog and its sister blog, MortgageMarketingIdeas.com.

In late 2007. I took a lot of the internet marketing philosophies that I briefly started touching on here and applied them to a group of websites that provided lead generation in the elective medical space. From an initial contract as “SEO Guru” I ended up transitioning into a COO/Partner role and, thanks to a visionary CEO and an AWESOME team of operations and sales folks, we grew revenue from 2007 to 2009 by over 200%.

We were recently acquired by a large public internet company and are now in the last months of our intial transition period. Even in this down economy, the incredible team I have had the privilege to work with just posted a 60% sales increase November 09 vs. November 08. I can only imagine what our numbers would be in a “normal” economic climate let alone the boom times of just a few years ago.

While the majority of my time and energy will, for the foreseeable future, still be devoted to the people and product that I’ve spent the last two plus years working with and developing, I’m excited to get back to working with, helping and learning from other like minded folks learn how to utilize the internet to grow our businesses and enrich our lives.

I’ll be devoting additional resources to make sure this blog stays updated and fresh. I’ll be bringing in additional experts in real estate marketing and online marketing in general to help share the tips, tricks, practices, and ideas that continue to produce top results.

For those who are still fighting on after two and a half plus years, congrats on keeping your head above the water! And, to those who are new, welcome! I’m excited to be back and very excited to see what 2010 and beyond has to offer!

]]> http://www.real-estate-marketing.net/2009/12/03/announcements/ok-lets-get-started-for-real-this-time/feed/ Craigs List Real Estate Listings http://www.real-estate-marketing.net/2007/11/17/real-estate-internet-marketing/craigs-list-real-estate-listings/ http://www.real-estate-marketing.net/2007/11/17/real-estate-internet-marketing/craigs-list-real-estate-listings/#comments Sun, 18 Nov 2007 00:12:26 +0000 Joe http://www.real-estate-marketing.net/2007/11/17/uncategorized/craigs-list-real-estate-listings/ As many of you already know, Craigslist is a an incredible free resource to market yourself and your listings.

I just started using Craigs List and quickly became frustrated with having to remove and then repost my ads over and over to make sure that the spam didn’t push my legitimate posts off into the great abyss. On top of that, I just hate repetitive tasks. Once I’ve done something once or twice, I’m pretty much loose interest and want to move on to something new.

Realizing that I shouldn’t let my ADD get in the way of a great (did I mention FREE) resource, I quickly set about finding a tool to do the grunt work for me. After a few hours of reading about different auto posters, I kept being drawn back to one in particular.

I’ve just started using this baby and I’m seriously impressed. If you take a look at all the features, I’m sure you’ll quickly realize that, unfortunately, this is a probably a key tool for CraigsList spammers.

But, no reason to let them rain on your parade. I say fight fire with fire and use this tool (or a similar one) to keep your legitimate listings visible. If you use this to help streamline some of the more time consuming tasks, you can really get quite a bit out of this tool.

The the basic tool starts at just $67. Take a look and happy posting!

]]> http://www.real-estate-marketing.net/2007/11/17/real-estate-internet-marketing/craigs-list-real-estate-listings/feed/ Top 5 Real Estate Keywords http://www.real-estate-marketing.net/2007/03/20/real-estate-internet-marketing/top-5-real-estate-keywords/ http://www.real-estate-marketing.net/2007/03/20/real-estate-internet-marketing/top-5-real-estate-keywords/#comments Wed, 21 Mar 2007 02:29:35 +0000 Joe http://www.real-estate-marketing.net/2007/03/20/real-estate-internet-marketing/top-5-real-estate-keywords/

As part of a series I’m doing on do it yourself online marketing strategies for real estate professionals, I spent some time researching local real estate keywords Coming soon, I’ll be diving much deeper into keyword research and it’s importance, but I wanted to take a quick moment and share the "biggies" when it comes to keywords based on the root phrase "real estate".

This top five is by no means scientific and are based on my observations from
a 15 or so random cities I researched.

Top 5 Local Real Estate Keywords
ranked from most to least searched

1. CITY ST Real Estate
2. CITY Real Estate
3. CITY STATE Real Estate
4. Real Estate in CITY ST
5. Real Estate CITY STATE

CITY = Target City Name / Target Metro Area Name
ST = Target State Abbreviation
STATE = Target State Full Name

In all my searches, the overall most searched version is the “CITY ST
Real Estate”. We’re talking 4-10 times the search volume! Just replace
CITY, ST and STATE and off you go!

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]]> http://www.real-estate-marketing.net/2007/03/20/real-estate-internet-marketing/top-5-real-estate-keywords/feed/ Welcome to Real Estate Marketing! http://www.real-estate-marketing.net/2007/03/10/announcements/welcome-to-real-estate-marketing/ http://www.real-estate-marketing.net/2007/03/10/announcements/welcome-to-real-estate-marketing/#comments Sun, 11 Mar 2007 05:49:19 +0000 Joe http://www.real-estate-marketing.net/2007/03/10/announcements/welcome-to-real-estate-marketing/

Welcome to Real-Estate-Marketing.net!

I created this site as a companion site to Mortgage Marketing Ideas in response to the incredible response that I have received from Real Estate Agents to a series of posts that I have made on ActiveRain regarding internet lead generation. (If you aren’t already a member, I strongly encourage you to check out ActiveRain. The “ActiveRain Real Estate Network” is a free online community for real estate professionals run on behalf of its members.)

While the majority of techniques and marketing methods apply equally to those on the mortgage side as they do to those on the real estate side, there are quite a few areas where it would be helpful to have a separate forum for each. With that in mind, thus was born Real-Estate-Marketing.net.

Before I go on too much longer, let me take a moment to give you a quick bit of background on myself. I’m a licensed California real estate broker. I’ve been working on the mortgage side of the industry for about four years now. While mortgages pay the bills, my true passion is the internet. I’ve spent the good portion of the past two and a half years teaching myself how to build and market websites for the purpose of internet lead generation. At this point, I’m able to exist on the leads I generate online and on my past clients. As a one man shop, it really doesn’t take that much for me to get by. By no means am I producing enough to retire off of (YET!), but, I’m making progress each and every day. Hopefully I can pass on a few of the things I learned along my journey and help flatten out the learning curve and help you avoid some of the mistakes I’ve made.

My goal with both Mortgage Marketing Ideas and Real-Estate-Marketing.net is to help brokers, agents, and loan officers build their business without breaking the bank. The internet allows virtually anyone to compete on a local, national, and even global scale with virtually no initial investment.

You don’t need thousands of dollars to build your business online. What you do need is persistence, and time. I went from virtually zero technical internet knowledge to where I am today due to over years of hard work and long hours. I’ve spent a good amount of money on various courses, programs, and pieces of software. But, in all honestly, most of the tools and information that I really have found truly useful were picked up on free websites, message boards, and forums. There are a ton of good products and courses out there, I just encourage you to do some research and really evaluate if you are going to use them before you cut a check or press the “buy now” button.

In addition the on-line portion, I’ll try and touch as many other marketing areas I can. Some of the areas that I plan to touch on are mailers, TV, radio, sales techniques, networking, and client relations. Of course, I’m always open to suggestions and comments. Perhaps more importantly, I’d love to have other professionals chime in and share there knowledge and experience when it comes to real estate marketing.

Well, thanks for taking the time to check the site out! Before you take off, bookmark this site and sign up for my free Real Estate Marketing Newsletter. In addition to sending out weekly (or so) updates, I have some great ideas that I’ll be sharing down the road and my newsletter subscribers will be the first ones to get a crack at what I think will be some incredible opportunities!

-Joe Ramirez

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