Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

I have just returned from an amazing evening presentation by Chris Krimitsos the founder of  The Wealth Building Annex in Tampa and a leading expert in how to train business men to use Internet Marketing without becoming Internet Marketers full time.

The Wealth Building Annex meeting on social media strategy.

It was a private session for just a limited number of people and I have come back with the feeling that something has changed in my whole perspective of how the Web will play a key role in the future evolution of business. First I will quote a statement that was emphasized during the event: “70% of business comes from referral”, which means it comes from word of mouth by your existing or previous customers.

Social media makes it easier for the word of mouth to spread, but the real connection happens between real people who have been involved in real business. Gone is the time (or soon gone) where you just use some technology trick or technique to gather always new potential customers and then leaving them behind to find some more (high churn based on ample availability of leads with little competition).

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I have found two articles that you simply need to read. They give you the three key elements you need to turn your message around, either in writing on in person. If people think you are nice but are not willing to do business with you.

Give real traction to your messages.

If you have very good deals but nobody apparently cares. If you sometimes get across as too eager to get business and therefore lose it, you must read the two following articles.

It doesn’t matter if you are a blogger, a real estate investor like me or any one else, this is something you don’t want to brush off.

Read these two articles:

The Ancient Persuasion Tactic Behind “But Wait, There’s More!”

Why You’re Too Qualified and Respectful to Produce Great Content

and you will discover the following techniques:

1.How to become bold or bolder in your message so that people act on it.

2.Which type of public you are really aiming for.

3.How to pump up the volume of your message so that people really get it.

It is good stuff by people who know their business therefore it is worth your time.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. Let me know in the comment section or on twitter if you found this information useful.

There are always four key steps in developing or redeveloping your business activities online. I have borrowed a video from the famous Thirty Day Challenge, a free Internet Marketing training prorgram, that you can use to get the basics of this challenging world.

Four elements for your online business strategy.

Here is the video taken from the Thirty Day Challenge:

And here is my summary of the four basic elements:

1. Market research – this is the area where people make most mistakes. They start developing or redeveloping a product without first finding out what the market wants. This results in a lot of useless activity and frustration.
2. Traffic – when you have found a potential market you need to check if there if traffic online or any other communication line you might be using. If there is no traffic (which mean interest) you won’t be able to attract people’s attention.
3. Conversion – if there is traffic, are people really willing to spend money on this market? For example political views and comments attract lots of attention and could have a ton of people interested in them, but nobody would be willing to pay for them (you could sell advertisement only during election periods).
4. Product – once you have checked the preceding three items, you are now ready to develop or find a product to resell. You need to use the market to tell you what type of product they want. You can also start without having your product, but reselling somebody else’s product (affiliate marketing) that is already selling well. In this way you can familiarize and then find out what you can develop.

Market research won’t tell you what will be successful, but will definitely tell you what will NOT work so avoiding you a lot wasted time and resources.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. If you want to get more tips and daily guidance for your business online and offline sign up for my newsletter or my rss feed.

Marketing on the Web today is about providing content and making sure that people find it relevant and easy to reach. It can be about products or about how to do something or achieve some result. Basically it need to solve some problem, or cater to some necessity or desire, but still it must be available and easy to consume.

Eight rules to avoid social media disaster

My field is international real estate and the experts say that in real estate you make money when you solve problems. The same is with any other type of business, but what matters in the first place is finding the people who have these problems so that you can solve them and this bring us to the channels and the format of information that you will have to use to find them. Social media is based on digital media: text, audio, pictures, video in all their various formats. And here are the rules that I have gathered on how to use it:

1. Your customers have very different schedules so you need to allow them to get your information when it is more convenient for them. Direct interaction is valuable and interesting, like in webinars, Q&A calls and social media chatting, but cannot be used on a wide scale. So record your key content and make it available for future reference (click here to read more on this point).

2. You cannot predict where your customer will use the information. She will not necessarily use a computer, therefore prepare to make your content available on portable devices (like the iPod) if possible (click here to read more on this).

3. Create content that can be viewed on as many different devices as possible. Less people have time to spend in front of their computer just for getting information. Production schedules get more and more tight, so produce your content so that it can be consumed in a number of ways.

4. Be concise as much as you can and to the point. This doesn’t mean that you should write little, but avoid padding your content with useless material. Value the time of your people and they will value you. Always give them a short cut to the action items they can perform immediately.

5. Never create an article or video or podcast/MP3 that depends on previous material to be fully understood. Build every single item so that it can be used by itself. You can still create series, but each item in the series should be independent.

6. Keep it simple: it you expect your public to understand what you write because they have read something else before, you will lose. Always define your key terms when you use them and where you use them.

7. If you don’t provide real value in your content then it is pointless. The value is established by what other people think of it. Also the value of a piece of content needs to be evident by its title and presentation. People need to know immediately what’s in it for them.

8. Use as many channels as possible to reach your audience as they will shift in the use of their channels and you will lose them is you use just a few.

By following these simple rules that I have collected from my personal experience and from the writings or presentations of Internet Marketing experts you will be able to grow your public and keep in touch with it in the way it is most convenient to them.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. I am sure you have your own opinions about this subject so please leave a comment and invite others to do so. Your viewpoints are important to allow me to improve  my content.

How good is you Web presence? Are you really leveraging your tools to their best? What’s missing that is giving an advantage to your competition? How can you measure your progress? Are you an entrepreneur like me, who has no time to figure out complex systems to evaluate your Web presence? You don’t trust consultants or just don’t plain know what to ask them? Well here is your answer.

Grading your Web footprint.

I have just found a presentation by a social media marketing company named HubSpot that I am embedding in this blog because it contains some really interesting information, but above all this company has created three free tools that measure instantly the value of your Web footprint in three different domains: Twitter, Facebook and your own blog or blogs.
Try them and you will get some very informative information as well as maybe some flattering comment. This is what happened to me. As soon as I found these tools I was immediately attracted by twitter.grader.com. I am a real fan of Twitter and I was curious to measure how they though I was doing. I went to the page, I entered my Twitter user name and I got almost immediately a 100/100 grade! How flattering, but what is even more interesting I can analyze the status of my followers and see the top 100 of them, based on grade, number of followers they have and so on. Apparently my top follower is @chrisbrogan president of new Marketing Labs and New York Times best selling author, in addition to being of the the top bloggers on the planet. The top Twelfth (Twitter fellow) that I follow instead is @guykawasaki that we all know, but third comes @mvolpe which is the VP of “Inbound Marketing” at @HubSpot. This is getting interesting.

But now let’s go and see how am I doing on Facebook with facebook.grader.com. Here things don’t look so shiny: I get 68/100 and I also get some suggestions of the actions I should take. For starters completing my profile which I did immediately and then I definitely need to build a fan page on Facebook. I confess, I haven’t done it yet. Here I find that the best graded of my friends is Lee Lickorish a British Internet Marketer that “makes stuff happen” based on his definition. Well, I will have to follow him more closely.

But now we come to the best part. The third step was rating my own blog, the one you are reading right now, at websitegrader.com. Here the result was astonishing. I got 97/100 which means that I got scored higher than 97.2% of the other millions blogs that have been previously evaluated. And this value measures my “marketing effectiveness”.

Here is what they say in the report: I rank in position 58,388 of 2,112,586 other web sites but they give me immediately a host of suggestions on how to improve my ranking and my ability to be indexed by Google. A very valuable report that I can store and go back for comparison in a few weeks and keep improving.

So there you have it, in a few minutes you can have a complete picture of your main Web footprint and advice on how to improve it. Cool isn’t it?

Roberto Mazzoni