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Just surfing around this morning and I found a good post by Chris Brogan about how Realtors should incorporate social media into their marketing strategy.

Now some of the points that Chris makes may seem to be a bit futuristic for some, things like videotaping and uploading your listing walkthroughs, but be very aware that others may already be doing this in your market.

The most important thing to do is be aware of what Chris Brogan and others in the social media space are talking about. As the internet has become more social you can follow someone like Chris and he will mention other great minds in social marketing which will really help out your marketing efforts in the years to come

As a computer nerd and marketing guy I love to see a pile of stats that I can analyze and mine the information. When I do any pay per click advertising I can look at my analytics stats and see how well my individual pages are converting.

One of the things that drives me crazy is marketing in ways that are hard to track. One of the most popular methods of doing advertising in real estate is using classified ads. Classifieds are a tough way to track and the only way that anyone seems to track the effectiveness of classified advertising is by the number of calls that they get after they put an ad in the paper. I remember when people would say things like “That was agreat ad I got three calls on it”

Well times change and tracking should also change and get better. I was just tracking a new real estate site that is not getting any Google traffic. I watched and monitored two kinds of advertising. I had Google Analytics set up to track all visits to the site and had the following types of traffic going to the site.

1. Classified ads running that were advertising the site and a phone number to call if the person wanted to.
2. Google Adwords that were costing about 23 cents per visitor.

In the tracking over the last few weeks I noticed that the classified ads were bringing over about 3-5 visitors a day for a $75 per week adspend and the Google Adwords were bringing in about double the people for about a 11-12 dollar per week adspend.

Here is the breakdown per visitor for the classified ad at best $75 divided by a total of 30 visitors for a total of $2.50 per visitor from the newspaper versus 23 cents per visitor over the Google AdWords.

There are of course other factors that we can look at between the newspaper advertising and the Google Adwords including the fact that some people may phone the number instead of visiting the website.

In the end tracking for newspaper classified ads for Realtors sucks because it is not as smooth and can not be changed as easily for split tested as queickly as web advertising is. If you are looking to test how well a page will convert then doing a quick test with Google AdWords or some other pay per click is a lot better use of time or money then almost any other form of testing. Give up the newspaper and find leads on the web instead.

This article will discuss three key points on your market strategy. To look at your market strategy, you will first want to define your market. You cannot make any credible decisions until you have defined the market you are going after along with the submarkets and your acquisition strategy.

The first key points when looking for a market and what to buy is that it must be a good deal. This is easier said than done. There been many companies and individuals who have bought overpriced deals in the past based upon the faith that the property would appreciate. You want your deal to be good enough that you can hold onto the property through a down cycle and still make money. Set yourself up so that in case some kind of disaster happens you are able to hold onto the property and still make money.

A good example is the current market. There has been a downturn within real estate residentially over the last three years but this does not necessarily correspond to the commercial side as well. There have been 10 to 12 years when everything has been going ip but ultimately when it comes on economics, everything is cyclical. At some point there’s going to be down cycle.

The second key to your market strategy is to not put all of your eggs in one basket. Because real estate goes through cycles, you want to have some reserves in place so that if a down cycle does take place, you have an opportunity to take advantage of some of the deals which will occur. The down cycle is almost always one of the best ways to find new good deals due to how many sellers are on the market at that time.

The third key when looking at market strategy is to know what your exit strategy will be. It is very important to know what to look for in buying a property but half the battle is knowing how to sell a property as well. If you buy a property for cheap and sell it for cheap, have you made as much money as you can? Have set guidelines in place for the type of return you would like. Knowing your exit strategy and what the market will allow will allow you to maximize your return. If you are not aware of the market and what is selling, you are cheating yourself out of money that you could have made. You have to work hard to turn around the deal so why not work on getting the most of your hard work that is possible?

You should have both a short-term and long-term view of your market strategy. Figure out what you need to do in the short term to make money but also have a long-term plan in place which you are continually building upon. Your short-term plan should build upon your long-term plan.

Hopefully this article on market strategy has given you some insight into what you need to do to create a good market strategy. A good strategy will help you avoid many mistakes and provide you with more opportunities as you’ll know what you want to look for.

David Lindahl, also known as the “Apartment King” has been successfully investing in single family homes and apartments for the last 10 years. David regularly shares his secrets and experience on the same stage as Tony Robbins, Robert Kiyosaki, and Donald Trump! If you would like a free copy of the Special Report: 27 Ways to Buy a Multi-Family Property with No Money Down, please go to http://www.davespecialoffer.com/

Have you noticed? Senior citizens aren’t as old as they used to be. At least some aren’t. And that means you cannot market to all seniors in the same way.

Senior buyers come in two varieties. The first are those who are actually suffering from the ravages of age - and are only too happy to tell you all about it. They’ll give you a list of ailments and things they can no longer do, so your job in finding them a home is a bit more straightforward.

You can openly discuss issues like stairways, counter heights, doorway widths, and space to install grab bars in the bathroom. They’ll tell you what they need and want so you can go out and find it for them.

When you’re selling to this group, go preview homes before you take them along.

When people are having a hard time getting around, need a wheelchair or walker, or are just unsteady on their feet, they don’t need to be dragged around looking at all the wrong homes. They won’t appreciate you wasting their energy by showing them homes that are obviously wrong.

So pay careful attention to their needs, and if you eliminate a house they’ve asked about, tell them why. It might be because the bathrooms and bedrooms are on the second floor and the laundry room is in the basement - or perhaps because of steep steps leading to the house. Maybe the garage is too narrow to allow them room to put a wheel chair in and out of the car, or the bathroom door is too narrow for the wheel chair to get through.

Do your homework, tell them the straight facts, and you’ll earn their loyalty.

This segment of the senior population may be focused on living within minutes of a medical facility, and they’ll probably tell you which one.

But what about the second group? What about the ones who are officially senior citizens, but have no intention of acknowledging the fact?

You’d do well not to mention the words “Senior citizen” in their presence.

Instead, find out more about them and their lives. Many are still working, so see if they want to locate near the workplace. After that, inquire about hobbies and other leisure time activities. Your new seniors may be avid golfers, they may want to hit the gym three days a week, they make require fast access to a swimming pool, or perhaps want to locate near a boarding facility where they can keep a horse.

They may even want a home with a bit of pasture so they can take care of that horse themselves.

Don’t assume anything. Some seniors are anxious to leave yard care behind so they can pursue other interests, while others have been waiting for retirement to have time to landscape a yard and grow a huge garden.

Take the time to listen. Listening is important no matter who your client is, but when you’re selling to senior citizens, you need to listen to the subtle hints as well as the open statements.

Remember, in the back of their minds, they’re recognizing the possibility of ill-health in the future. How could they avoid it, with the television and newspapers shouting it at every turn?

They know that the day could be coming soon when they won’t be able to easily navigate those stairways - and they know that a wheel chair could be a part of their future. They may even have a secret fear of living too far from a medical facility.

But many simply do not want to talk about that. So don’t bring it up unless they do.

Selling to seniors isn’t really all that different from selling to anyone else. Your job is to listen and pay attention to what you hear. When you do that with each and every customer and client you’ll be head and shoulders above your competition - because listening is almost a lost art.

Marte Cliff is a Freelance Copywriter and former real estate broker who specializes in writing for real estate and related industries.

Marte offers a free mini-course for Realtors trying to build a business, as well as web copywriting and lead generation packages. Learn more about them at http://www.copybymarte.com

Squidoo is another site like hubpages where you can build a page and the community gets to vote for it. There are a lot of options and page pieces to add but first of all we can look at what is important for you to do.

First go to the site www.squidoo.com. Sign up for free and you can then start to build your lenses. A lense is just a page but as you start you should add one text module. Each text module can hold 2500 characters which is around 600 words. Write and add that content and then go to the “add modules” and add (or make sure that you have) a text block, Google Blog Search, Link List, and GuestBook. There are new rules going in soon that will force you to have four modules. In your links list list your website home page and make sure to leave your guestbook at the very bottom of the page.

Now publish your lense and note the web address of the lense.

After you have created your page make sure that you go to the different groups on Squidoo and add your lense to as many related groups as you can. Also comment or add yourself to the guestbook, with your link, to any high ranking lenses like your own.

Now that squidoo is done. Go to pingoat.com and “ping” with the name of your lense and the web address, leave the xml blank. Also make sure that you add your lense to Stumbleupon, Digg (if the page is like news in some way), delicious and any other bookmarking sites that you belong to.

Squidoo is very popular to Google and using your content you can create many lenses that will all drive traffic back your site thanks to your links list. All you need to do now is to build more lenses focused on good keywords for your market.

RisMedia has an interesting article today written by a Real Estate investor and writer about the importance of marketing your services in the social Networking scene

Relationship Marketing on MySpace : RISMedia

Whether you have been paying attention or not there is a whole subculture of the internet that is people talking and associating with other people on the likes of MySpace, Facebook and even LinkedIn.

If you have not searched to see what there is then just go to each of those sites and start to look around. See who is there from the industry, see who is there that you know or can relate too and go from there picking up names and starting to be social with all of the people that you can.

Well the transition is over now for my Realtor internet marketing book. I will be taking the cheaper copy link down tomorrow and I have now moved the link to by the book to my new Realtor Internet Marketing Book page.

I am raising the price of the book to 29.95 but until I take down the links on this site tomorrow I will honor the original price of 19.95. So if you have not bought yet, buy now!

As you know I have made a change to the book based on the input from the people that have bought it from here on the blog. As I wrote this book in the vacuum of this blog and my own head I was not sure how well it would be recieved but am very happy that it has been received so well by the people that read here.

First I want to thank everyone for their support and comments. I have been very excited about the reception of my Realtor internet marketing book. I wanted to though answer a few questions and let you know about an update to the book.

Yes I know there are no pictures. I was so concerned with making the book a realistic length that I dove into copy and did not add any pictures. What I will be working on though over the next few weeks is a kind of flow chart that will pull together all of the concepts and make a nice big map to let you know where you are.

A couple of people had said that they would like to see a little bit more about Realtor Social Networking. The free bonus ebook that I am including talks about My Space and how to use those kinds of sites but I have just written in a new small chapter on how best to get traffic from sites like Reddit, Digg and Stumbleupon. Sorry I should have included that in the first place but I will now be sending the updated copy of the book to everyone tht already ordered. I will be doing the same going forward as I do nay updates I will email a new copy of the book with the changes listed in the email.

Other than that I again just wanted to thank everyone for their orders and am very excited to see the results as people put these proven internet marketing concepts into action for their Real Estate businesses

Oh, one more thing. Even though I am selling this book right now through Paypal you still have the option there to pay by any credit card…and the price of course is $29.95

Realtor internet marketing book

Well I am finally finished. As many of you know I have been taking a good shot at building a book on internet marketing for Realtors based on my experiences on this blog and although I have been very slow to pull the trigger I have now finally completed my last draft and am ready to put it out to you as a product for sale.

As I hope you know, ebooks are a great way to get structured information across and this book is no different, you will be able to read it on your computer or print it up on any printer.

I have toyed with many subjects to cover in this ebook but finally I settled on a bit of a mix of kind of old school internet marketing that all Realtors should use as well as some of the newer techniques that are not being exploited by Realtors at all in the quest to start and complete the conversation with future and present clients that leads to trust and eventual deals. Here are the subjects that I am covering in this 82 page book.

Planning
Copywriting
Email
Websites
Weblogs
Search Engine Optimization
Newsletters
Autoresponders
Promotion
Google Adwords
Press Releases and articles
And more online vs. offline stuff

While putting together this book I wanted to get the content across as succinctly as possible so the book at 82 pages is full of info with nearly no pictures so it is packed with over 100 tips that you should be able to use right away to build your business.

As you probably have noticed over the last couple of years on this blog, I am very cheap and so to take away any apprehension on your part (come on this is only $29.95 as it is) I am including two bonus ebooks,

The first free bonus book is on list building but is actually advanced strategies using FREE tools. It is really good and a natural bonus to my book.
The second free bonus book is all about how to write great sales letters for the internet. As much as we all know how to write ads there is a real science behind writing successful Sales letters to get you more opt ins as well as position yourself better.