Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

I will be gone with my family for a few days of full immersion in the modern Seminole nation. We will travel through South Florida touching all the major reservations and getting in touch with nature and the modern Indian spirit. Most of the time will be dedicated to my family, but I will bring some key content I want to review in the next few days in my iPod.

An American Indian totem.

Audio has become a key element for keeping myself updated on my business and passions. I rarely have time to stop and read something, but I can listen to my recordings when I am riding on my car or when I am waiting in line or also when I am jogging. There is so much to know and so much to implement at the same time, that I prefer use my time in front of the computer for implementation, while the new digital media world allows me to consume the information wherever I am an in any format I want.

As I reported in my “Eight Rules to Avoid Social Media Disaster”, you cannot predict where your customer will use the information and therefore must be prepared in providing it to her in many different formats. So this time I am the consumer and I will take some quality time with my family and I will put to test, at the same time, the effectiveness of having my whole conference library on my iPod. I am copying right now 3,000 audio tracks, spanning from real estate to Internet Marketing, list building and professional blogging. I have just downloaded the last private briefing by problogger Brian Clark to the Third Tribe project members.

The power of having the whole of it at my finger tips in a small portable device is remarkable and the ability to listen to any selected item while I am in a beautiful location, fully immersed in nature and with the people I love most, I am sure will make all the difference in my ability to capture the key information and transform it into action.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. If you want to delevop your business around your blog  in a very professional mannel check the Third Tribe project (affiliate link).

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 been conducting a very thorough research during the last few days to evaluate which subject could work best in the evolution of my blog. Sometimes your blog doesn’t have to address directly what you do in business, but can rather be something parallel or connected that is interesting and that you have a passion for. I have therefore made a very wide scope research on the key subjects that word and don’t work on the Internet to establish what are the main topics of interest.

And it looks apparent that the three winners are: how to make money, how to have a better health (which includes looking better, losing weight, and so on), how to save time and have a better life, how to get a date or find a significant other. These are the four wheels that make the world go round: money, health and physical shape, freedom from constraints and love (which includes sex of course).

The picture doesn’t include entertainment as a possible way to make money online. It is actually confirmed by several Internet marketers and bloggers that entertaining others cannot be part of a profitable presence on the web. It can be part of a branding presence of course, but people are used to get entertainment for free and when they get to an entertaining site or video they just leave after the entertainment is over. Also affiliate sales don’t work on these type of sites.
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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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