The article describes 10 tools, including Zillow of course, that help people get through the buying and selling of reale estate.

So what kinds of changes would be ground breaking to you? Here in Canada the MLS is now mapped with Microsoft Virtual Earth and you can now very quickly see listings on a map with a pop up pic with basic info on the property. For those that just want to see a list of properties available on the map will see a sidebar on the right with all of the listing in the window.

I am sure that we will see changes soon at the realtor.com site but at this point the Canada site is so much better than anything else that I have seen that it is hard to compare.

What do you guys think? Have you checked out the Canadian MLS site? How do you like it?

The Real Estate and Mortgage Conference at Blog World and New Media Expo

They really need to get a better name. Anyway this trade show There will be a seminar, booths and training, here is what they say

A full day of seminars, panels & workshops focused on the nuts & bolts of leveraging social media tools like blogs to enhance the marketing efforts of real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and anyone working within the field of real estate.

This event is taking place in Las Vegas on September 19 with the rest of the Blog World Expo taking place on September 20th and 21.

Here is a page that will tell you the top 5 reasons to go to the Realtor Blog World Expo as well as more info about it

But that does not really mean you should hop on the bike to do showings…just be aware.

With gas prices high, bicycles flying out of stores and a buyers’ market for houses, a handful of real estate agents around the country are touting the two-wheeled appeal of their listings.

Some even show houses exclusively by bike, wheeling through the neighborhood with potential buyers to show off bike lanes and bike-focused businesses and repair shops.

Clad in a purple helmet with plastic flowers dangling from her handlebars, Portland’s Kirsten Kaufman is part of a new generation of agents eager to replace the stereotypes of hauling clients around in fancy sedans or SUVs.

The mother of three starting hosting bike tours earlier this summer, doling out energy bars and apricots to a growing tail of clients whose passion for pedaling weighs heavily in their choice of homes. Some are hard-core cyclists. Others are moving into the city to avoid increasingly expensive and onerous commutes.

“It’s becoming more common to see families committing to driving less,” said Kaufman. “I think it’s a part of the market that will continue to grow as gas gets more expensive.”

Over the summer, sales of homes dipped by more than 15 percent from last year, according to the National Association of Realtors, leaving Kaufman and other agents looking for ways to spark business.

Bike agents say pedaling with clients is providing that boost. Behind a niche market that repsents only a sliver of natinal sales is a bigger trend - a fundamental shift in the way people think about buying homes.

Real estate agents and industry surveys indicate that home buyers are placing more importance on cutting their gas bills and commute times and that homes near urban centers, and subway, train and bus stops are selling faster than those in the distant suburbs.

I have spent the last couple of days making some changes to the book, updating some info and now I believe that it is all complete. If you would like a copy of the book all you need to do is visit the Realtor Marketing book website at www.realtormarketingbook.com.

Have you forgotten what was in the book? I was reminded as well and now that I have looked more closely I realize that I should have probably broken it up in more pieces at the outset, Here are the Realtor Marketing Book chapters

Finding your target market online - You need to focus even more online to find your market then you do offline

Search engine Optimization - Get more people to your site by making sure that the search engines, including Google, know what you page is about

Blogs - Blogs, if done right, are a great way to get people to know your and get more visitors

Websites - It is time to get your website to work for you instead of just look good.

Social Networking - Social Networking is a new and exciting way of getting the word out about your site.

Autoresponders - If someone is interested in buying or selling, then you want to build the know, like, and trust that will keep them with you. That is what an autoresponder can do for you.

Promotion - There are some great ways to promote your internet presence. Lots of people want you to spend lots of money but there are many inexpensive or even FREE ways to promote yourself online.

Newsletters - Do you have a newsletter? Do you wonder why you would need an online newsletter.

Everything that I wrote I wrote from the angle of an internet marketer instead of just from my Realtor background so although you will recognize some of the terminology a lot of it may be a a bit foreign to you…this is of course fine.

Go to the Realtor Internet Marketing Book website and get the book now.

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

The way that Twitter works and what it is for is that you have a blank slate of an account. You do searches through Twitter for people or subjects and when you find people that are interesting then you can go and “follow” these people. As you follow others they will follow you back so that every time that you sent a “tweet” (a comment, a small text message) then the people following you will see the message and on the other side you will get to see all the people in your list of people that you follow.

So how can you use this as a Realtor?

You can lean from other people in the Real Estate industry
You can become the go to Realtor in your marketplace
You can build relationships with other Realtors

It is difficult with Twitter to really hone in on your market but is of course possible. Do a search on Twitter for your city and just start adding these people from your town or city.

So what are you going to write in your comments?

First of all do not try to market to people. The best thing to do is to make sure that you are always helping others. The real problem for us marketers online is that it is really irritating to others that we try to sell to. People think of Twitter nad Web 2.0 sites as a place where there is no marketing and so any heavy handed marketing would be seen as offensive to others.

What you really want to do is add value to people and they will naturally ask questions about real estate to you.

Try Twitter by joining Twitter and creating a username right now and after you have added yourself to Twitter then start to follow me at http://www.twitter.com/billnad

See you on Twitter.

The way that Twitter works and what it is for is that you have a blank slate of an account. You do searches through Twitter for people or subjects and when you find people that are interesting then you can go and “follow” these people. As you follow others they will follow you back so that every time that you sent a “tweet” (a comment, a small text message) then the people following you will see the message and on the other side you will get to see all the people in your list of people that you follow.

So how can you use this as a Realtor?

You can lean from other people in the Real Estate industry
You can become the go to Realtor in your marketplace
You can build relationships with other Realtors

It is difficult with Twitter to really hone in on your market but is of course possible. Do a search on Twitter for your city and just start adding these people from your town or city.

So what are you going to write in your comments?

First of all do not try to market to people. The best thing to do is to make sure that you are always helping others. The real problem for us marketers online is that it is really irritating to others that we try to sell to. People think of Twitter nad Web 2.0 sites as a place where there is no marketing and so any heavy handed marketing would be seen as offensive to others.

What you really want to do is add value to people and they will naturally ask questions about real estate to you.

Try Twitter by joining Twitter and creating a username right now and after you have added yourself to Twitter then start to follow me at http://www.twitter.com/billnad

See you on Twitter.

To lower your cost per click you just need to look at the following variables:

Your ad - Make sure that oyu ad is relevent to your customers. The more often that your ad is clicked the more that Google will trust your ad

Your keywords- Everyone wants to rank for Realtor and real estate but there are many more keywords that are much better to rank for with less competition and lower cost.

Your landing page - Making sure that you landing page that you are sending your traffic to is realted to your keyword is critical. The more relevant that it is the better.

When looking at these three variables you can see that making the most of your ad being seen with the right keyword and clicking through giving a relevant page is a lot of work. I would bet that you can cut that $3 - $5 keyword down to 20 - 30 cents per click.

There is one more thing that can help you a lot besides the above three variables and that is the ad groups. If you are writing an ad directed at First Time Buyers then the ad is going to look a lot different than the ad you have going to First Time Buyers or Real Estate Investors so do not bother trying to mix and match instead set up a few ad groups.

Once you have three or four different ad groups then write the Google AdWords ad and then give it keywords and a good landing page, different landing pages for each keyword if possible or necessary and then move on to the next ad group.

There is no shortage to optimizing that you can do with your Google Adwords using the Ad Groups, ads, keywords and landing page quality.

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.