Real Estate Web Site Extreme Makeover: If we help Russell Shaw get even richer, he might buy us drinks at BloodhoundBlog Unchained

As I mentioned on Real Estate Radio USA yesterday, Mary McKnight of RSSpieces.com will be joining us at BloodhoundBlog Unchained for a session called Real Estate Web Site Extreme Makeover. What we’re going to do is take a look at web sites and weblogs of audience volunteers and talk about how they might be improved — to be more attractive to visitors, stickier, better-optimized for search engines, etc. It should be a very robust, fast-paced overview of what does and doesn’t work in real estate web sites.

Here’s a news flash: The purpose of a real estate web site or weblog — the purpose of real estate marketing in general — is to sell houses. Pull-based marketing is still marketing.

With that much as preface, consider this: Russell Shaw is one of the biggest newspaper publishers in Northeast Phoenix. By way of Custom House Publishers, Russ prints and distributes almost 50,000 newspapers a month — distributed as the 85022 News, the 85024 News, the 85028 News and the 85032 News. These are the zip codes of Russell’s geographic farm, of course, and the newspapers are one way he has of “dripping” on sellers in his farm.

Russ also has four domains for those four zip codes, each one running a templated web site built and hosted by Superlative Web Systems, one of our local — and lame without exception — IDX vendors. These are the four sites: 85022News.com, 85024News.com, 85028News.com and 85032News.com. As with all templated web sites, if we examine everything with a critical eye and then work up every ounce of salesmanical enthusiasm we can muster, we can dig deep and bring forth a hearty: “Eh…” Not absolutely awful, but nothing that is insanely great.

Now it could be that Russ has that kind of frail and fragile ego that regards every bit of professional criticism as a grave and grievous insult — but not on this planet! Instead, Russell Shaw is the kind of phlegmatic, pragmatic, practical guy who understands that, no matter how well he might be doing today, he can always do even better tomorrow. My kinda guy. So instead of whimpering in the corner and licking his wounds, Russell said this to me in email:

I am VERY interested in what I can do to make those zip code sites something that the residents of the zip codes would actually use. What would you do if they were yours?

I live in a public world, so I said:

Can I talk about your zip code sites on BloodhoundBlog? It’s a good lesson for everyone, I think, and other people might have better ideas.

How game is Russell?

That is a GREAT idea.

So here we are, with a kind of preliminary, blog-based version of Real Estate Web Site Extreme Makeover.

Just to be abundantly clear, these sites are not complete failures now. They get traffic, and some of that traffic turns into leads. In strict cost/benefit terms, these are profitable web sites. The question is, can they be made to be more — or even exponentially more — profitable? Recalling that the purpose of a real estate web site or weblog is to sell houses, can these four little tin soldiers be turned into relentless stainless-steel lead-gathering machines?

This was my initial advice to Russell in email:

You might redo your zip code sites one at a time as blog-sites, then put one staffer per zip code in charge of posting hyper-local content to his/her weblog.

In the summer of 2006, Jim Cronin of The Real Estate Tomato and I, each of us working independently, came up with the idea of the real estate blog-site. Realtors would do all the sales jobs they were used to doing on their static web sites using WordPress’s Page feature, and the main page of the site would be that Realtor’s weblog. The blog is there to provide regularly-updated content for visitors — and to look like catnip to search engines — while the relatively static Pages are there to do the yeoman-like sales and marketing jobs. Even so, the whole thing looks and feels and works like a weblog — and everything is user-editable like a weblog.

The blog-site is the ideal solution for a Realtor’s web presence. Jim went to work selling blog-sites, while I went to work writing a free book about them. This could explain why I still drive a Hyundai station-wagon.

About a year later than I had originally planned to undertake the job, I converted our Phoenix real estate web site, our brokerage’s main web site, to a blog-site. I had built DistinctivePhoenix.com as a blog-site from the beginning, this in August of 2006. Considering how little effort we invest in local weblogging — neither of these sites is really finished — both have been remarkably productive at forging client relationships. My own style of writing is so blog-worthy to begin with — I’ve been writing on-line for 30 years — BloodhoundRealty.com has always made strong connections with smart, ethical people. But the synergy between the three sites, our two weblogs and BloodhoundBlog, is proving to be the surprise hit of 2008. We’re not working like we were in 2005, but we’re working with exactly the kind of people we want to attract — serious, prosperous — and honest as the day is long. This is the kind of target marketing even a half-assed blog-site can do.

So my take is that simply converting Russell’s zip code sites to blog-sites — weblog on the main page, marketing info, an IDX link and a kind of local community white pages on the inside Pages — would make them much more productive. By having one or more staffers assigned to each blog-site, Russ can assure regular maintenance of the sites, and he could offer two awards a month to the staff: Most New Content and Most New Leads. That kind of friendly in-house competition could make everyone stronger, and if the prizes were sufficiently generous, the staff members would get very serious about doing a better job. Everybody wins.

Just as a reminder: The purpose of a real estate web site or weblog is to sell houses.

Okayfine, but what more can we do? In Real Estate Weblogging 101, I go on at length about what we call the Insanely Great Idea: The best sort of community-based weblog is one that becomes the community. In other words, instead of broadcasting to the community, you recruit members of your hyper-local community to produce some, most or even all of your weblog’s content. DistinctivePhoenix.com, among other things, is a failed first implementation of this idea. We never put in the time to recruit community contributors, so the idea never took flight. BloodhoundBlog is an outrageously successful second attempt at the same idea, a blog-site built to host a community of divergent viewpoints — contributors, readers (whether they comment or not) and other weblogs.

Jeff Brown came up with an even more thoroughgoing variation on that same theme, turning a hyper-local weblog into a virtual geographic farm, and using the connections made through the weblog to serve as a sort of virtual door-knocking.

Ideas are easy, and one of the things I admire about both Russell Shaw and Jeff Brown is that they are both so solid on follow-through. But before you can follow through, you need a plan of action.

So let me put Russell’s question to you:

I am VERY interested in what I can do to make those zip code sites something that the residents of the zip codes would actually use. What would you do if they were yours?

We know Russ can get those sites set up as blog-sites. We know he has staffers to throw at the problem of keeping them updated with new content. We know that, with some effort, he can probably recruit local residents to contribute content or to do other site-maintenance chores.

What else can he do to make those four domains big-time money-makers?

But wait: Russell Shaw makes seven-figures after taxes every year. Why should we help him with his marketing problems?

I have three good answers to that question:

1. Because he has so freely helped us with so many of our marketing problems.
2. Because working on problems like this will improve your own marketing — and your mind along with it.
3. Because Russell might be so grateful that he’ll buy you a frosty beverage, should you come to Phoenix for Unchained.

In short, how can you lose?

So take the Real Estate Web Site Extreme Makeover challenge: What would you do with Russell Shaw’s four zip code domains if they were yours?

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