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LogicClassroom Session 2 – Learning How to Blog Effectively For Your Company

Once again we had a number of attendees both on the phone and in our office for our second session of LogicClassroom. This session was a focus on how to turn a blog into a traffic and lead generation tool for your company. We explored how blogs work, how to start conversations with your readers, and how blog content can be syndicated to social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Don't worry if you missed the second session. We'll make sure that you're not left behind. When we start each LogicClassroom, we'll be careful to start with the basics and then get to the good stuff.

Please view the presentation on effective blogging below. Enjoy!

Our next LogicClassroom will be on 1/12/10. Learn how agents and brokers can leverage free social media to generate leads and a loyal client following.

Logic Classroom Blogging Presentation

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Learn How to Blog Effectively for Your Company!

Please join us on Tuesday, December 8th, at 5PM for our Logic Classroom
presentation on Effective Blogging. We will explore how blogs work, how to
start conversations with your readers, and how blog content can be syndicated
to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. All of this will help
you turn your blog and website into a traffic and lead generating machine!

You are welcome to attend at the Boston Logic office (view map), or participate
through an online webinar. Join us and learn how to generate leads for your
business using online marketing and effective website design.

To attend, please contact Katrina at 617.266.9166 or by email at
ksierant@bostonlogic.com. Please specify whether you will attend the class at our
office or online. We look forward to seeing you there!

Effective Real Estate Website Strategy

To be effective, your website should be easy to find, capture users upon arrival, and give them many reasons to keep coming back. Thus, your site becomes the foundation of the user's buying or selling experience.

This, in 2 sentences, sums up the crux of how your real estate website strategy should be designed. So, ask yourself the following questions:

Can clients that don't already know who we are find our website?
When a user finds our website, will they become engaged and find the information they are looking for?
Is my website as good as, or better than, competing websites?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, then you have some work to do. Let's break these down:

1 - If your website can't be found - we call this the billboard in the middle of the woods problem - then it's a pretty big waste of money. Why spend a dime if it's not going to get you anything? Your website is a marketing medium. People have to see your site to ever be converted into a lead. If they can't find and see it, then there's zero possibility that they'll turn into a lead.

2 - When the user arrives, do they find an engaging site? Are they drawn in? Is the site easy to navigate and find what they're looking for? If not, time for a redesign. Now, if you have a highly trafficked website and people are visiting a number of pages, on average, but you're still not getting leads, then you need to implement some more lead acquisition tools on the site. I'll blog about those another time.

3 - Finally, does the user come back? If your leads aren't coming back again and again, then they're going to someone else's site. That's not what you want. You need to give them a reason to come back. They need to find great tools, a friendly and customized interface, and then you need to communicate with them. Email them! Daily property updates, newsletters, follow ups. They all increase your returning visitor traffic.

These are the basics. I'll be writing more about strategy soon. Thanks for reading.

Working to gether to gain economies of scale

Well, it's conference season. I've spoken with hundreds of realtors who might want to invest in a new website or they might want to invest in some online marketing.

The fact is that most individual realtors don't have the budget to do this well. Lots of the real estate agents that we speak with are spending less than $100/month online. On their own, they're highly UNLIKELY to see any result from that C-note, but let's think about what could be done by working together.

I've also observed that these agents would be happy to spend even twice this much if they thought they would see results. Most would not be willing to jump in and spend $500/month.

Instead of every agent spending $75 or $100 per month on a website that sees almost no visitors, what would happen if everyone in the office invested together. Let's assume that your average office invested $200/agent/month. So, 10 agents pool their $2000 and make an investment. Let's see what they would get, assuming that you sign up to do all of this with Boston Logic vs. every agent signing up with a cheap template provider:

Working Together as a Real Estate Office

Each Real Estate Agent Alone

Aggregate budget: $2000/month/office
The office gets a main website
Each agent also gets their own site using Boston Logic's ONE System
Website features:
1. Integrated Property search
2. Content management
3. Save favorite searches
4. Save favorite listings
5. Email updates
6. Contact an agent
7. Mortgage calculator
8. Take notes on listings
9. Lead management/CRM
10. Blogging
11. Live Chat
12. Real Estate Development profiles
13. Email marketing integration
14. RSS feeds
Integrated lead management from office site and agent sites
Search engine marketing campaign including
1. Search engine optimization
2. Pay per click management.
Email blasts to all leads broadcasted monthly.
Professional SEO services provided
Stable search engine placement achieved
Social media presence management and implementation.
More traffic generated from:
1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Linked In
4. many more sources
Consistent flow of leads
Efficient PPC ad buy
Each agent receives several leads per week on a consistent basis.

Budget: $200/month/agent - Each agent spends less money
Office has no website or must pay for a stand-alone site that is not linked to the agents' sites
Each agent gets their own site
Website features:
1. Property search
2. Content management
3. Save favorite listings
4. Save searches
5. Email updates
6. Contact an agent
7. Mortgage calculator
8. Take notes on listings
Unmanaged, inefficient ad words, and ad buy.
1. Few leads generated.
2. Agent feels helpless and lost
3. Agent stops sped after a few months thinking that the campaign isn't effective.
No search engine ranking achieved. No budget for professional SEO.
Agents left on their own to implement social media strategy
No lasting, consistent traffic, few leads generated

It's obvious that the economies of scare are huge!

I've been bringing this up in meetings lately. I'll report back soon and let you all now whether or not anyone actually gets behind this logic.

Announcing Logic Classroom!

Starting next month, Boston Logic will be offering the Logic Classroom, a series of instructional sessions for real estate brokers and agents about online marketing, technology, and best practices in real estate business growth.

Classes begin 11/19/09 and are free to Boston Logic's clients ($50/class for non-Boston Logic clientele)

To sign up, email Katrina at ksierant@bostonlogic.com

CLASS SCHEDULE

Web Based Lead Generation - 11/9/09
Register Now!
In this session, we will discuss the most effective online lead generation tools and techniques for finding buyers, sellers, and renters. Learn how to leverage your website, your blog, search engines, and social media. We will also delve into the science of generating leads using online marketing and effective website design.

Effective Blogging - 12/8/09
How to turn a blog into a traffic and lead generating machine.

Leveraging Social Media - 1/12/10
Teaching agents how they can leverage free social media to generate leads and a loyal client following.

Search Engine Marketing 101 - 2/9/10
The basics of Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click advertising. Realtors will learn how traffic is efficiently driven to their website from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

One System, Now with Page-Level Permissions

We've pushed a big change to the way CMS permissions work in the One System. Access permissions now reside on the page level, rather then the menu item level, which is were they really belong. When software grows and changes over time, there are always areas you know you'll need to rework, but for the moment it works, and it's a lower priority item, so you save it for another day. CMS page level permissions where one of those areas for us. In addition to more tightly locking restricted pages down, we were able to make some improvements to how the menu is rendered, which speeds up page loading.

For those who've already added restricted pages to your website, don't fear, we've migrated those permissions for you. Menu items are now displayed based on the permission of their corresponding page. So, if you've restricted a page, say for only your agents to view, the menu item for this page will only show up if the user is logged in as an agent. When you create a new page, you'll see a new sub-section in the CMS, called 'Who can see this Page?'. Clicking 'Show' will display check-boxes for the five different user types (admin, broker, agent, lead, anonymous user). By default, all users will be able to view a page, so all these check-boxes will be checked.

For system pages (like log-in, search, etc.) you won't see any editable permissions. We've pre-configured these to insure proper functioning of the system. We wanted to be sure that someone didn't accidentally prevent a user from accessing an important part of the system.

If you have any concerns, please don't hesitate to contact us. We value your opinions and insight. It helps us to improve the One System, and all our offerings.

Twittering For Fame and Fortune

Here at Boston Logic, we've been talking a lot lately about how to find new customers. We've redesigned the website, stepped up our Blogging, continue to do SEO, and have continued to leverage AdWords as sources for building traffic numbers. We've also been suing Twitter for 2 years now, and to build our base of followers every month. One of the challenges has been combing through the Twittersphere for people we're interesting in connecting with. After seeing Dominiek ter Heide's post on building a one line Twitter bot, I was inspired to build something to keep an eye on Tweets relevant to our Boston Logic, specifically Real Estate brokers and agents. For those so inclined, I've included the code at the end of this post.

What we're doing is looking for through tweets with the words 'real estate' in either the tweet or the user's description. If we find that term, we add them as a friend (or follow them). I've been running this for just over 24 hours on a test account (so as not to taint our existing Twitter account), and already have some interesting observations:

1) There is a lot of spam type tweets out there. It makes sense. It's easy to automate the process of both tweeting and following. Just like email, there is virtually no additional cost of an additional recipient, and even if you're response rate is quite small, as your pool of followers is large enough, you're likely to get a few responses. I think to really effectively leverage a bot, we'll need use it simply as a tool for finding people to follow, keeping a human in charge of determining whether someone is worth following or not.

2) People want to network. Yes, I know that sounds quite obvious, that's why we use Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin; to grow our pool of people we are connected with. Our bot has found and followed about 100 people at this point, and about a third of them have started to follow us. This is a bit surprising to me because we've given nothing in terms of relevant or useful information. Remember, we're just doing this on a test account. My one and only tweet is 'First Post!'. I would assume that if we provided value through our tweets, we'd see a much higher rate of people following us after we follow them. We'd also keep followers, instead of seeing them drop off after time.

I'm personally a bit nervous that Twitter will turn into a place dominated by bots and spam. I'm sure the folks at Twitter share similar concerns. I also am not sold on the value it brings. Call me old fashioned, but I like my blogs. I like that a good blog is a means through which to transfer knowledge. Twitter is much more of a notification tool. For me, the number of notifications quickly surpass my desire to monitor those notifications for for personal value.

Given its 'Right now' nature, I'm interested to see if we can convert some of our Twitter audience into customers. I suspect like most forms of online-marketing, it's going to be dependent on our ability to provide value to our base. If we can effectively do that, we'll be successful in converting some of our followers into paying customers.

For those interested, here's the code. I leveraged John Nunemaker's fantastic Twitter gem:

require 'rubygems'

gem 'twitter'

require 'twitter'



terms = ['real estate', 'Real Estate']



httpauth = Twitter::HTTPAuth.new('username', 'password')

client = Twitter::Base.new(httpauth)

friends = client.friends.map{|i| i.screen_name}



while true

  stream = Twitter.firehose

  stream.each do |tweet|

    str_tweet = tweet.text

    str_tweet += ' - ' + tweet.user.description unless tweet.user.description.nil?

    terms.each do |term|

      if str_tweet.include?(term)

        puts "tweet: #{str_tweet}"

        begin

          unless friends.include?(tweet.user.screen_name)

            client.friendship_create(tweet.user.screen_name)

            friends &lt;&lt; tweet.user.screen_name

            puts "added: #{tweet.user.screen_name}"

          end

          rescue Twitter::NotFound

            puts "error: #{$!}"

            puts tweet.to_yaml

          rescue Twitter::General

            puts "already a contact: #{tweet.user.screen_name}"

          rescue

            puts "error: Malformed JSON"

        end

      end

    end

  end

  sleep(30)

end

Real Estate Website Design

Why would we give away the secrets?

At Boston Logic, we've been offering cutting edge real estate website design for years. We're proud of our successes and our clients reap the benefits. Now, we're telling you what works and what doesn't on this blog. Are we giving you the recipe to our secret sauce?

Lots of our clients ask us this all the time. Why start a blog that offers advice? Why tell people what you know? Can't someone else just replicate it?

Plainly, no. As the old saying goes, easier said than done. The effect is that we're happy to give you the following information about real estate website design. Putting it into practice aint so simple.

So, today we're going to start with just a few of the bedrock principles of Real Estate Website Design:

Rule #1 of real estate website design: Your website should produce leads and customers
This must be the #1 goal during the design process. If you cannot directly (not tacitly) demonstrate how a part, element, function, or component of your site produces leads or is somehow contributing directly to the buyer, seller, and lead generation goals of the site, then it has no business being on there.

Rule #2 of real estate website design: If no one visits your site, then it's a waste of money
There's no such thing as a free lunch and the world isn't going to beat a path to your door just because you hang a shingle outside. The first 3 rules of real estate are (as the old joke goes) location, location, location. The same is true for websites. The location you want is at the top of the search engine results. And design work performed by graphic designers and not Web Designers with a firm knowledge of search engine optimization can often lead to a severe handicap.

Rule #3 of real estate website design: The user should intuitively know where to click in order to find the information that they are looking for.
Information architecture is overlooked all too often. We've seen thousands of real estate websites with laundry lists of links going down the left side. The vendors are selling these as lead acquisition tools. That's just false. All the research shows that a user should have fewer places to click, not more. Here's an example of a site we launched recently. Newton Ma Homes There are more than 3 links on the home page, but most folks just click on one of the three main sections. Also, most of the other links lead to the site's lead generating features. It is, in short, a lead machine.

OK there. I gave away 3 secret ingredients. I'll give away more of them too. Just keep reading.

LogicClassroom Session 2 – Learning How to Blog Effectively For Your Company

Related Links:

Learn How to Blog Effectively for Your Company!

Related Links:

Effective Real Estate Website Strategy

Related Links:

Working to gether to gain economies of scale

Related Links:

Announcing Logic Classroom!

Related Links:

One System, Now with Page-Level Permissions

Related Links:

Twittering For Fame and Fortune

Related Links:

Real Estate Website Design

Why would we give away the secrets?

Related Links:

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