Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

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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