Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Blogs are one of the key resources used by Internet Marketers to sustain their campaigns, but they often are just a container for sales pitches or pages that are uniquely aimed at capturing leads. Real bloggers on the other end have substantial valuable content which attracts lots of traffic, but they don’t monetize this traffic property.

Many of top bloggers rated on Technorati rarely make more than $ 15K per year, which is well below the survival threshold of any business. Probably only the top 1% make a really sizable income out of their blogging activity and it is often income that doesn’t come directly from the blog per se but from consultancy and other engagements, or simply from selling products that they have developed themselves in addition to the blog (44% of the bloggers do so according to a poll done by Problogger.net).

This is the scenario that I have come to know today while listening to a very informative video by David Risley one of the top bloggers on the market and one of the few that is actually making serious money by blogging full time. So what can we learn from this? Is bad blogging more remunerative than good blogging?

Apparently yes, to a certain degree and in the early stages. Blogging is the evolution of the printed media and TV (as far as video blogging is concerned) and if you think at what happens in traditional media, you can easily find many gossip magazines that make a good amount of money and many TV commercials that have nothing but sales pitches and that are quite successful. They are more succesful than poor quality printed or TV media, but they can’t compete with a good quality magazine or TV show that has unique content.
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Financial newspapers and TV have long been the main channel to keep informed about what was going on in the business world. The Web has now replaced paper as a main source of reference both because most of the papers have gone online and because you find many more resources, closer to your particular niche and market, and they contain often articles or comments written by experts in the field or by people that are actually familiar with what they write about. Blog are ranking high now as a source of information on specific subjects.

In his “The Art of Money Getting” P.T. Barnum lists as rule number 12 “Read the Newspapers” but today he would have said read the most important blogs in your area. In doing so not only you can get valuable information for your business of for your passion, but you can also get ideas on you to structure your own blog.

Where can you find them? On Technorati.com the directory of the top blogs in any industry. You chose the subject or field and then you browse the list of blogs available, starting from the top. Some of them are actual magazines, written by several people, each contributing with her own knowledge and expertise.
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In the last few weeks I have been in touch with all kinds of people, some quite remarkable and positive and a few troublemakers. I think it is statistically impossible to crunch your marketing numbers and never meet any bad apple in the bunch.

What I realized in analyzing this, is that the troublemakers consume much more time than any other person and actually subtract energy and time from many other customers that are just ready to do business with you. So it has become important for me to develop a system that will screen good customers before I engage with them. I don’t want to lose opportunities just because of some complaint, but I want multiply the effectiveness of my efforts avoiding those that are just out there to create chaos.

It is not a perfect system yet, but it has already worked for me, saving many hours of useless concern and aggravation, so I want to share it with you.

1. The very first step is a fairly easy one and will save you most of the trouble. It consists of gathering some information through the Web. You will be amazed how much information is available out there,. You can also ask some questions and notice not only the answer but also the delay before you get an answer (that is usually not a good sign).
2. Second comes a meeting in person, if the type of business requires it. Here you should always believe what you perceive in front on you. Some after seeing or talking with a person for the first time I have the immediate feeling that I don’t want to do business with her. And it usually proves out right. Many difficult relationships could be ended at the very beginning if you just believed your own perceptions.
3. As soon as you see evidence of real trouble, cut the line and move on. I am not talking about complaints or general difficulties that can be part of any business. I am talking about some weird and odd behavior that has no explanation and that looks somewhat crazy or unwarranted. Real troublemakers do very crazy things that they will try to explain or justify to you, but that don’t belong there at all. When they do it, is the cue that tells you it is time to go.
4. In a nutshell don’t go “reasonable” with the many red flags that will inevitably pop up when you deal with these type of people. Recognize for what they are, red flags, and then act accordingly. No business opportunity is worth the aggravation that a real troublemaker can bring you. Screen your key customers like you would screen a tenant or a contractor and you will be happy and will be surrounded by happy and loyal people, always.

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Having too many irons on the fire can be a problem but also having too little can also be a risk. In his old book “The Art of Money Getting” P.T. Barnum would give the following as the golden rule number ten: “Don’t scatter your powers” and he would add: “Engage in one kind of business only and stick to it faithfully until you succeed, or until your experience shows that you should abandon it.” But today you can’t do any business without being somewhat versed in marketing and particularly Internet Marketing, which is a whole big field by itself.

So how do you combine the requirement of focus with the need to also keep in touch with the rest of the world? I find daily in my real estate business that I would be at a serious disadvantage if I were not constantly working on improving my marketing and particular my Internet marketing skills. But there is so much to do in all areas, where do you start first? And what do you do yourself and what do you outsource?

In my recent experience, the first effort should be put into branding yourself. That means having a voice and a presence both online and offline that gives a uniform message and that talks about you and not only about the business you are in. By making yourself known on one of the major social media sites, like Facebook or Liknedin, and by publishing a personal blog with some regularity, you can keep fresh your person in the mind of other people and they will involve you in new business when they have the chance.

Then you could look at which aspect of your current business could be “monetized” online. It doesn’t need to be necessarily an affiliation program or a typical Internet Marketing campaign, it can just be some kind of knowledge you have that can be offered to other people through e-mail, Skype or other long distance communication and that solve some specific problem people have.
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Life can be fairly unpredictable and so can business. Sometimes you find yourself confronted with a totally unexpected shift in circumstances and you need to be fast on deciding where you want to go and you must always rely on your perceptions more than anything else. In the end we are dealing with people all the time and the better you can understand where people are going and what are they really thinking, the better you can cope with any given situation.

One tool that will come to your support in this regard is Twitter. Some people love it and some people hate it, but there is one objective value in it in addition to building a community: its search engine allows you to keep track of what people think and say about a specific topic or what are the hottest topics of the moment.

You just access the search.twitter.com and you can have a look and what are the most discussed issues, then you can dive into the conversations happening about these various topics and find out what is going on. Some of the messages that go back and forth are meaningless therefore expect to spend some time in sieving through the “noise” before getting to the golden nuggets. What is remarkable about Twitter search feature is that you can also look for a specific emotional coloring of the messages or for a specific semantic structure, like questions and exclamations.
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