Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

I have was just watching the stream of messages on my Twitter account before starting to write this post and I notice a message that read: “rewrite and submit 15 articles to ezinearticles.com about our product and service…”. I am a contributor to ezinearticles and therefore I clicked on the link and I landed on site that was advertising a freelance job where you would be paid 2 dollar per article, long between 400 and 600 words, on a specific product. They will provide you with original articles, text links and keywords for SEO optimization.

Just two dollars per article.

They require the freelance to be member of ezinearticles and preferably to have obtained platinum status, which is gained after you submit a substantial amount of impeccable articles that get published with no correction. Therefore the freelance that would bid for this job need to have a very good knowledge of English, write in a way that is acceptable to the editorial staff that perform the screening in ezinearticles and still manage to advertise a specific product in 15 different way making a total of 30 dollars. Just the upload of the articles will probably take over 30 minutes.
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Running a business with an online presence requires a substantial amount of planning. It is so easy to be detoured by shiny objects on the web and lose sight of the basic business goals as well as their proper implementation on the Web. I have been working on my own planning now for two solid weeks, in order to focus on my international real estate core, but I want to share with you what I have found to be the seven key factors that will enable or kill any business venture on the Web.

They are listed in order of importance, meaning they give you a sequence that will bring you from the darkness of imminent extinction as a Web entity to potential success (you need to put a lot of work into them to actually achieve the success you want).

1. A good market – if you lack a properly selected market with a reasonable amount of competition you are probably dead in the water even before starting. Beware of niches that have little or no competition, if they didn’t work for others they won’t work for you either.

2. A properly setup blog – yes it takes a WordPress blog to make a strong presence on the Web, and even if you use it as a regular site (not a blog per se), it must still be setup with the blogging platform by WordPress. Being on social media is not enough: the hub of your presence is going to be your blog.

3. Good content that spans multiple formats: articles, video and audio, according to what you like and what your followers like.

4. A reasonable traffic for your market – this requires some knowledge of the Internet marketing techniques that will enable you to grow your visibility.

5. A social media presence – you should have an account in all the major social media networks and specialize in those that are closer to your style. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Youtube to say the least.

6. A well defined personal brand – I am talking about you, not your business. I have for example chosen to promote my business through a domain that carries my name. You can’t be every where so start by securing your own personal domain name and build on it your business or businesses.

7. Relevant products with varying price levels, starting with something free, so to be able to offer an easy entrance in your funnel and then gradually up-sell when people are ready. Here you can also have affiliated products to begin with, but beware of offering junk, and in order to have a strong personal brand you will have to also develop something that is totally yours.

Daunting? Yes, but very factual. How do you eat the elephant? A bit at a time.

Roberto Mazzoni

I have just completed an important step of my professional evolution that comes with the recognition that blogging will constitute an important ingredient of all my activities in the future. There is a natural attraction to this tool and medium that probably comes from my previous long career in publishing, and it is even more interesting for the fact that I have overcome the language barrier and I am able to maintain my blog in English (in addition to the Italian one), which would be unthinkable for me just two years ago.

But now, how does this relate to you? In these first 18 months in the USA, I have heard many entrepreneurs say: “I want to do my blog!” or “I should update my blog more often, but I don’t know what to write”.

Well, first of all if you don’t know what to write, you have no business doing a blog and if you do one then why not do it in a professional way? Would you consider it professional a newspaper that was published this Thursday and then next Monday and then may be ten days after? It takes dedication and a plan to write every single day, trying to share something of value but it is also the best system for improving yourself, since I you are always challenged to go one step further.

Can you be a professional blogger with being a full time blogger? And cultivate your social media contacts at the same time? This is the challenge I am facing and I will share with you in the coming months.

I am right now joining the so called “third tribe” that I mentioned in a previous article. It consists of those people who don’t want to be full time Internet marketers but who want to make more money in their business leveraging the power of the Net.

In the end, this is the new world and you need to master the new media, in addition to the conventional ones. What I like about the “third tribe” concept is that honesty and quality of content gets rewarded and you can make money online even if you don’t have thousands of people in your list or you don’t know all the tricks to convince them to buy.

It is desirable to have a big list, but you can start to gain and expand with a much smaller presence. It all depends on your public and the type of service you want to offer. There are some people that are already successful in doing with integrity and coherence. The more you are coherent with what you like to do, your true personality, the better results you can get, provided you do something that others find desirable or useful.

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When it comes to making business on the Internet or through the Web, there are two major recognized “tribes”. The first and most noisy one is composed of the Internet Marketers: they are aggressive, they have always some system that will make you rich in the blink of an eye, they will only require you to pay a high ticket to get into it. And when you do get in, you find out that it is either hype or that it is very difficult to make it work for you. They are the one making a lot of money while you basically work 90 hours a week trying to build a system that will make money “while you sleep”.

The second tribe is composed of social media cool fellows: they cherish relationships, values and community, they reject hype and aggressive sales tactics, they like to give more than they take, but they are actually not making much money if any at all, and they have little sense on how business should be conducted.

I have exaggerated the description here so to make them stand out, there are of course Internet marketers that actually deliver very valuable content and there are cool social media guys who do make a lot of money with a “regular” business that they promote through social media, but they are very few, on both sides.

So what happens to the rest of us? What happens to the people who do have something to say or share on the Web? To the people who have business models that can take advantage of the huge promotional potential of the Internet, but don’t want to join either side?

Welcome to the third tribe. It is a concept that is taking shape right now and that has gained the attention of some of the top bloggers on the planet as well as of some “enlightened” internet marketer. The third tribe is composed of those people who try to follow the rules, who value good relationships, who provide quality original content, but who also want to make some real money in the process.

I believe that every modern entrepreneur belongs to this tribe by definition and there are already many examples of people that are leveraging very good content and services and some wise Internet marketing techniques to produce good results. Going back to “The Art of Money Getting” by P.T. Barnum we see that rule number 17 says: “Be polite and kind to your customers” which includes, in modern wording, follow the rules of relationship building online, but rule 15 says that you also need to “Advertise your Business” so the third tribe is actually the Web answer to an ever lasting business need.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. The Third Tribe is a blogging and Internet Markerting tutoring project launched by Brian Clark and Darren Rowse, to leaders in the blogging industry. It is very innovative and quite inexpensive. Check it out clicking here (it is my affiliate link).

Time for another story and I will borrow the words taken from “The Art of Money Getting” by P.T. Barnum where he teaches that the 16^th golden rule on how to make a fortune is to create a message that stands out, that surprises and entices people, and maybe orders them to do the opposite of what you want them to do. In this particular instance, the sentence: “Don’t read the other side” was written on a swing sign attracting people to a store.

But the real story is about “Genin, the hatter” a character who bought at an auction the first ticket to the play of a famous opera singer and paid a ridiculous amount of money for it. The news of the outrageous bid traveled throughout the nation transforming “Genin, the hatter” in a star overnight and people would turn their hat to check if it had been manufactured by him and his brand became renown by just this trick, increasing tremendously his sales.

This story fits perfectly with the experience I had today in participating to an afternoon seminar on balancing online and offline marketing held by The Wealth Building Annex in Tampa and leading business consultant Mark Katz.

Some of the key concepts I brought home from this intensive experience have been: you need to market to a need by ensuring an attractive market position for yourself, and there must be a specific emotion, event or need that is a catalyst for your business. In the example of “Genin, the hatter”, he definitely marketed to a need: people used hats extensively at those times, and he has secured for himself an attractive position by leveraging the desire of people of being appreciated or noticed, to win over the establishment. He had in fact won the bid against thousands of people from the Fifth avenue who knew nothing about him.

He had become a star overnight and a some of the emotion connected to this event could transfer to those who had bought his hat. And since he had a good quality product he kept selling from there on out. He had “sold” himself and his company first to the “influencers”, namely the press and the high society, and then these influencers promoted him to his real clients, completing the circle.

Today the cycle is the same, but most of the influencers are now on social media and the Web would be a good channel for standing out.

Roberto Mazzoni