Cathleen encouraged me to take exception to Jeff Brown’s most recent post, and, by the time I was done, I had a whole new post.
Quoting from Jeff:
If you honestly believe your income is higher with you spending time changing your own hi-tech oil, then continue along that path — it’s obviously working for you. On the other hand, if you think putting yourself in front of 50 more serious prospects a year might be more productive for your bottom line, AND that would make you happy, you may want to modify your approach.
This is a false dichotomy.
First, you do not have to change your own oil, so to speak, but if you don’t know how to change your own oil, you are at the mercy of every money-hungry automobile service writer on the planet.
Second, assiduous hi-tech marketing, going forward, is the best path to belly-to-belly appointments. This could our best year ever in volume of sides (not, alas, volume of dollars), and much of it — and all of the multi-home buyers — came from our web presence. There is room to be impressed by lo-tech success stories, but the two details left out are these: Buyers and sellers are increasingly shopping on-line, and the cost-per-conversion of old-school lo-tech marketing is comparatively very high. It’s not how much you make, it’s how much makes it all the way home.
Third, as should be obvious from everything I talk about, the kinds of chores Realtors and lenders need to keep a fat thumb on are those that would be too costly, too onerous or too error-prone if done by vendors.
As an example: Cathy and I made more than 1,400 engenu pages last year. The end result is work product that was done faster and made a much better impression on our clients than trying to communicate by other means. This stuff knocks the socks off clients, which I consider to be our most important sales function in everything we do. But those pages also put 1,400 new, permanent breadcrumbs on the web, so that other clients can find us in the future. As against twittering or making phone calls or handing out business cards at the Circle K, in servicing our existing clients, we “prospected” passively and blindly — but in perpetuity and with no additional effort — for any number of future clients.
Now here’s the cool part, which I talked about in Seattle: Late last year, I decided I wanted to make a change to each one of those 1,400 pages. I wanted to add my “Phoenix Area Headlines” scenius.net scene to each one of those pages. This would serve to make them seem to be dynamic to search engines, which would get them indexed more often, giving each one of those pages more search engine “juice.”
Surely that’s a worthy objective. But if we had to pay to have it done, we could not have afforded it. Nor could you, nor could anyone smaller than a company big enough to pay a full-time body to do nothing else for six weeks — not counting breaks, sick days and goofing around on the internet.
So I changed my own oil. I wrote a little spider in PHP to traverse my entire web server, domain by domain, looking for particular files and editing them, all by software. I don’t remember how long it took, but it was just a few minutes, maybe an hour total, allowing for my time to write the spider.
I don’t recommend that most people learn to write software — though some should, and I worked at bit with Scott Cowan on this in Seattle. But if there are jobs you should be doing, but cannot because the cost to have them done is prohibitive, you need to learn to work my way. Real estate professionals have a publishing problem. Going forward, what is going to matter most is creating the content your clients will need in a timely, efficient and economical fashion.
We know that we are moving from push to pull marketing. If push-based practitioners continue to prosper, good on ’em. But the future belongs to Realtors and lenders who figure out how to maximize their investment in pull marketing. This does not imply that you don’t meet people. All sales is belly-to-belly. But it does imply that, no matter what we might want or hope for, new business is going to be developed on the internet, not by old school tactics.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Genuine Chris Johnson says:
>>>Buyers and sellers are increasingly shopping on-line, and the cost-per-conversion of old-school lo-tech marketing is comparatively very high. It’s not how much you make, it’s how much makes it all the way home.
Skin cats. Doesn’t matter how you do it, but keep your eye on the ball. Don’t get addicted to one method over another, subordinate preference to what works.
I don’t know if I’m 2.0 or 1.0. I used twitter to generate a list of people to call. I called. They paid me money. I blogged startind in 2002 about Real Estate. I got more than ten deals each year from being part of a community.
I’d drop either in a heartbeat if they were not effective. I’d drop 1.0 in a second if it wasn’t. Fact is, it is. Fact is, the job of a practitioner is to build a pasture, get the sheep to show up, then tend his flock so well they don’t wanna leave.
2.0 stuff enhances 1.0 stuff especially well. I can make contact with someone, they can google, and decide to like me or not. Works for me.
February 21, 2009 — 10:40 am
Erion Shehaj says:
For the past two years, we have exclusively utilized pull marketing to generate business and have been quite successful at it. I haven’t made a cold callin that entire period of time either – which is great because I hate cold calling (or so i’ve convinced myself). But I have to recognize that as much as it is a rush to put “breadcrumbs” out there and watch them bring dinner home, there are serious limitations to that strategy if done exclusively – especially in listing properties. As far as I know Greg is probably the first to try a serious strategy with abetterlisting.com and I’m curious to know the results of that. But the factual reality that I see is that successful listers by and large use 1.0 tactics and with great success. That’s not saying you cannot get a listing otherwise – just that as it stands now, one cannot build a successful listing strategy exclusively through 2.0 means that would yield the same or better ROI than typical prospecting.
I guess what I’m saying is that a balance of the two might be the best way to go.
February 21, 2009 — 11:31 am
John Kalinowski says:
Greg- Here’s a newbie tech question. You talked above about adding your scenius.net scene to your 1,400 pages. Right now, I’m using the Thesis theme for my entire website (haven’t climbed aboard the Engenu train, yet). If I add something like a scenius scene in a widget in my sidebar, it will appear on every page. Does this provide the same “juice” effect since it is now a dynamic updating item on each page, but in the sidebar?
Plugging code into a text widget seems to work, as I did a quick test with your ContactMeForm and it worked perfectly. Thanks! – John
February 21, 2009 — 12:58 pm
Greg Swann says:
> If I add something like a scenius scene in a widget in my sidebar, it will appear on every page. Does this provide the same “juice” effect since it is now a dynamic updating item on each page, but in the sidebar?
Yes. From a spider’s point of view, each page in your weblog will be undergoing frequent updates, even if the primary content hasn’t changed in months. This is good for you users, as well, since there will always be something new on your pages.
From the “echo” page, Kevin Sandridge has worked out a way to get scenes to echo from the Thesis theme.
Let me know if you want to share your scene and I’ll put it on the index page.
February 21, 2009 — 1:22 pm
John Kalinowski says:
Thanks Greg. I’m still trying to figure out the scenius scene thing and will watch your tutorial tonight.
February 21, 2009 — 1:30 pm
jay seville says:
Sounds like I need to watch this scenius video thingy….
j
February 21, 2009 — 6:07 pm
Joshua Hanoud says:
Greg – with your engenu pages – how do you find them showing up in the serps? Do you link to them from your main sites to help give them some authority? or do you find that they’re such long-tail specific keywords that they show up on their own due to lack of competition?
-Josh
February 22, 2009 — 10:08 am
Greg Swann says:
> with your engenu pages – how do you find them showing up in the serps?
They’re mainly pretty weak except on the long tail, as you would expect. They’re build to be extremely tasty to spiders, but, of course, they have few inbound links.
> Do you link to them from your main sites to help give them some authority? or do you find that they’re such long-tail specific keywords that they show up on their own due to lack of competition?
Both. We triangulate like crazy. Most of the engenu pages link back to our blogs, and, for a new single-property web site, I will find ways to link back from the high-PR sites to give them a boost. I have no sandbox issues at all, perhaps because everything’s on a trusted IP address. New sites show in G within hours. FWIW, I’m more interested in breadcrumbs, long term, than real SEO. Someone is driving on Willetta Street, sees a house for sale, goes home and Googles, only to find us several times. (I just looked. We’re results 1 through 4 in the data center I hit.) It’s like crowd-sourcing by redundant web presence, the equivalent of peeing on the trees in Zillow.
February 22, 2009 — 11:13 am
Thomas A B Johnson says:
It’s like crowd-sourcing by redundant web presence, the equivalent of peeing on the trees in Zillow.
Does that make it a Zcenius?
-sorry
February 22, 2009 — 3:23 pm