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).

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.

Last week end I have been to a real estate event in Tampa where different real estate “gurus” were promoting their own investment strategy. I was struck by the energy of Nick Sidoti, who runs around shouting at the audience and throwing real money at you to make sure he gets your undivided attention (I did manage to cash 3 bucks in the process). Aside from the unusual but effective presentation style and aside from the fact that Nick self proclaims himself as “crazy”, his strategy seems to make sense also for an international real estate investor.

Nick Sidoti has some unique landlord investment strategies

He has found out a way to secure high rental values by providing special need housing to some types of handicapped people as well as to high end students and retired veterans. The basic concept is to provide fully furnished apartments with full utilities and basic housekeeping provided as part of the rent. You provide a quality of life that is similar to that of an hotel, and at the same time the convenience of an apartment or house. The higher rent comes from the ability to accommodate more than one tenant per unit and get each one paying separately.
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When dealing with special need tenant, like veterans or handicapped people, you get paid directly by the government and the tenant stays in the property for a long time since there are not so many alternatives available on any given market. There are no delays in the payments, most of the maintenance is performed by the government workers taking care of these special people and you can get much more return for your investment with less involvement.

Since it is a very special type of market, you must be thoroughly familiar with the requirements of the government agencies you would be working with and you also need to conduct a very different type of marketing as compared to what is required for regular landlording. I have personally checked with him about the feasibility of this strategy for foreign investors, and he has assured me that these special programs can be performed also by property owners that are not US citizens. You would require naturally a local structure to provide management, but this would be the case also with a local investor.

Nick Sidoti has been involved in real estate investing since 1979 and he has been lecturing for more than 20 years, therefore this is not a new strategy by any means and its longevity adds credibility to it. His conclusions after over two decades of observing other investors is that some people get it and some just don’t (how to make money) So his motto is: “Are you really getting it?” I think I do now.

Roberto Mazzoni

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

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