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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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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Article marketing is one of the most effective tools for driving traffic to your site and for making yourself known on the Web, yet this tool must be used properly. There are software and sites that promote automatic article generation. They spin multiple articles starting from a single template so that the quantity “fools” Google into believing there is more original content than in reality. This approach can be effective as a SEO technique (search engine optimization) but you definitely cannot show this content to the public and you cannot present it to the main articles directories either.

On the other side, original content, written directly by you or by a writer that you trust closely, will always stand out and in the long run will bring steady and reliable traffic. Quantity is important anyhow. There are very many article marketers out there and therefore you need to pierce through the barrier of the competition. One way of doing it is to be consistent with your submissions.

If you decide to write and publish one article a day, be consistent and do produce one article a day. If you can produce only an article a week, at least stick with that frequency. Be careful to check your spelling and grammar because article directories are going to scrutinize carefully you product and also make sure you are not copying anybody else’s content.

There are also sites that allow you to submit to a number of directories at the same time. They can be a convenient way to multiply your coverage, but be aware of the fact that some of the sites touched by these automatic submission engines exist mainly for the purpose of stealing your content.

A good article length should be between 250 and 400 words. Actually the shorter articles are usually preferred. You will have to read the instructions given by the main article directories so that you don’t get rejections. The average article marketer writes only 10 articles, therefore you can beat the average in less then a month. The top article marketers range around 900 articles, which is basically the work of 3 years, producing approximately one article a day.

Referring back to the “Art Of Money Getting” by P.T. Barnum, rule number 8 says: “Learn something useful” and article marketing is definitely something you can use and that other people can easily benefit from.

Roberto Mazzoni

Business and private individuals alike need social media to build their brand today, but how much should they do and how can they measure the relative success of their endeavors? First of all, any social media activity is not free: it takes people to implement it, which means individuals who have the knowledge to know what to do and when to do it.

You can’t avoid having an understanding of what it takes because, even if you outsource it, most of the content and the strategical decisions will have to come from you. You simply can’t have somebody else tell your story or the story of your company and at the same time you will need help along the way because you can’t possibly do everything it takes to have a prominent position on the Web and still manage your business.

How well are your spending your resources on social media?

I have found that the selection of the right assistant, as in any other business activity, is the most critical part. You will have to spend a fair amount of time defining and explaining what you want ant checking her understanding, before you can safely outsource some of your social media activity. And again the content will have to come from you or you will have to select it from some other source, ahead of time.

It also takes technology, in terms of computing power, plus specialized software and services that you can either get for free or through a paid subscription. This is an area where you can get help from the outside: I have discovered the majority of the tools I am using today either through the direct advice of an expert I had been networking with, or through the suggestion of a blog post by some other expert.

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You can’t be active on social networks without having an account on Twitter and budiling a following, which means having people who connect with you and follow your updates. Twitter, along with Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Skype is a must have for every professional who wishes to promote himself on the Web as weel as for anybody who wants to develops friends and share some key moments of his life (for personal information only you don’t need to be on LinkedIn).

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Twellow.com is a directory that lists all top Twitter user under their category of specialization

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Gaining followers is the name of the game: the more you have the more you will be able to stand out and make yourself visible out there. And even if you wish to have just a few selected ones, you still need to have a system that allows you to pick the right ones.

The starting point for your building strategy is going to be Twellow.com, also known as Twitter “Yellow Pages”. It is a free site where you can find the most prominent people on Twitter in any given category. The selection is done based on the information that each person writes in her profile’s bio. So it is just as accurate as the information originally provided. Yet it is an excellent starting point for locating the opinion leaders in your area of interest and start growing your followers by piggy backing on their own followers list.

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Under every category you have people listed based on the number of followers, with their bion info in plain view.

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As a matter of fact Twitter is the best way for building a list by using the names collected by somebody else. Let’s say you are interested in marketing you go to Twellow.com and chose the “Marketing” link and get to a page which list all of the top marketers on Twitter, listed based on the number of followers.

You can browse the list and reach the bio of each of the people and chose the one that you feel is closer to you. I would not pick the most followed ones, those ranging in the 100K+ followers and more because you will find a lot of untargeted followers in their list. Initially pick somebody who has 40K or less followers and you will get a very good response: they are prominent enough for attracting the best followers and at the same time they will still have a fairly targeted audience.

Then go to their page and start following their followers and you will have 1/3 to ½ of them following you back. I would actually pick 4 or 5 names out of Twellow and cycle through them every day picking followers from a different person. In this way you will have more variety and more response, as you will be picking up fresh followers all the time: people who have been active recently and are more likely to follow you back.

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Twellow sub-categories

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You can also pick sub-categories like “Internet Marketing” , “Sale” or “Network Marketing” and narrow down your selection even more. In just a couple of weeks, by working on this just half an hour a day, you will start growing an sizable list to drive traffic to your blog or to any site or landing page.

Be sure you have your own bio updated and with a picture of you on your Twitter account before you start this process and also publish some updates on your profile (ten or twenty) before you begin following people. If you don’t know what to say, simply repeat (that is “retweet”) what other people say that you find interesting.

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Roberto Mazzoni