Author: Eric Blackwell (page 7 of 8)

by Eric Blackwell

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

Things have been busy around here lately. This controversy over Trulia’s widget baiting tactics rages on in the internet world. Now Sherry Chris has chimed in as well. (Kudos to you for entering the arena…others should follow). Bottomline is this: Trulia calls us partners. (REALTORS and them) Before someone calls ME partner, there is a fair amount of due diligence needed.

Right now there are FAR more questions than answers. The research that has been going on has been productive, but what we NEED is honesty and transparency. It is what everybody wants from US, now why don’t we get that same transparency from the people raising so much hell about it.

The facts on the table seem very disturbing.

Perhaps Mike Wallace from 60 Minutes could help us get to the bottom of the issue?

This is totally hypothetical, but it would go something like this…

MW: Welcome gentlemen. There has been quite a controversy lately, Trulia, about your aggressive SEO practices.

Trulia:

MW: It seems that according to some bloggers and some search engine marketing professionals out there that you have pulled off quite a feat. You have managed to get tens of thousands of REALTORS to voluntarily ALL use your widgets all at once? How did you do it?

Trulia:

MW: That is how it happened, right? I mean your tools were SO cool that many people just decided that they HAD to use them and put them on their blogs and websites, right?

Trulia:

MW: From the research that a few of these folks have done MANY of these widgets appear at exactly the same place on the same exact pages over and over again on THOUSANDS of Number1Expert Sites all across the country…is that because each of these folks decided to put them there?

Trulia & Number1Expert:

MW: It seems pretty hard to believe that this was not done by Number1Expert… are we to beleive that? How did this come about? Since (according to reports) you have 2 and 3 links on EVERY one of the widgets pointed back to Trulia, it would seem that this is a great benefit to you. In fact, it has been reported Read more

by Eric Blackwell

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

Why would Eric Bramlett post something like this? Or this? The debate rolls on as to Trulia Widgets and their use as a linkbaiting scheme. They are writing these things because they matter. But it has been said that they don’t matter, that Trulia would still be climbing in the search engines **cough**Google**cough** anyway. So I have undertaken to research a bit more deeply. (Authors Note: In ALL of what I say here, please understand that (on an SEO level), I ADMIRE what Trulia has pulled off here. They have found the soft underbelly and have used it to their advantage. Props to you.)

Here is a very brief overview of my findings: (NOTE: I have more which will continue to come out as time goes on…)

Let’s look at the city of Nashville. And at the term Nashville real estate. Trulia has recently popped up onto the first page (#7 in my datacenter). How did they get there?

The page on Trulia’s site that is #7 on Google is trulia(.)com/TN/nashville/. If you look at Yahoo Site Explorer, you can see that there are 3,800 plus links to Trulia (but all links are not created equal). There are only 108 of those links that are coming to Trulia from outside of Trulia.com. Let’s take a look at two of those links, shall we?

On MOST Trulia widgets there are often three links back to Trulia. Here’s an example. Here’s another. Scroll down on each page to see the Trulia Widgets and find the links. Where do they go? What ANCHOR TEXT do they use?

Typically one links goes to the local site (to compete against the very REALTOR whose site it is on, another link goes to Trulia’s home page and a third goes to their widget page. Hmmm…and if we look at the bottom of the latter two of those pages, where is Trulia pointing all of THAT link love from ALL OVER THE COUNTRY?

It appears that Trulia is pretty interested in San Fran, San Jose, Phoenix, San Diego..etc etc…Those are some fairly competitive areas, so they funnel some extra strength Read more

by Eric Blackwell

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

This is going to be a really short post. I keep on promising Teri Lussier that I am going to get some serious Twittering going on in our brokerage. Truthfully, I have been too busy on all of my projects like the contest and the industry newspaper to get there.

This news item might change my mind though! (grin)

Teri and Brian, I promise I will do a better job of Twittering, just in case!

by Eric Blackwell

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

I was working late tonight and listening to the Hugh Hewitt show ( a habit of mine) and was enjoying a new segment of his about entrepreneurs and small business when I heard those two words. I knew then and there that I was going to be working even later. This time on a blog post.

Hugh’s guest was a young man just starting a music instruction business and they promised to get around how he marketed without a budget per se’. They never made it there (although Craig’s List was tantalizingly mentioned) and the next caller to his talk show inquired further stating that she “really wanted to know how to do it”. Hugh replied (paraphrased) that today’s guerrilla marketing was mostly Earned Media and much of it online.

I thought quickly about what it is that we do. I thought of all the real estate agents and mortgage professionals out there, struggling to set themselves apart from the rest. Everyday we grapple with how to expand our reach and serve more customers, with the end goal of financial gain in the process.

Our marketing campaigns, however strategically complex (or not), derive their exposure from either the expense of time, money or a combination of the two. They are the two arbiters that determine the exposure that we generate for our businesses. Simple as that.

Blogging is Earned Media. The glory of the internet is that it affords the little guy / gal the ability to compete for eyeballs, minds and hearts in a marketing world that used to be dominated by the sheer force of money. This new found freedom to market using Earned Media is a good thing. It is more available now than ever.

Earned media is fun. The other day our little blogging group in our office got a pretty good laugh. A couple of the charter members of our team, Jon and Jennifer Karlen (Jon goes by the handle “Malok” online – a throwback from his online gaming days) got a pretty interesting voice mail regarding their horse farms blog. Here’s how it went:

“Umm…yeah…this is XXXX from Bloomberg Read more

by Eric Blackwell

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

A growing trend among REALTORs has been to replace their old school Virtual Tours with a You Tube video that they incorporate into their blog, site and even onto REALTOR.com. Actually, the cool part was that you could put them ANYWHERE.

No problem!

Well ummm…actually there is a problem with that. YouTube’s Terms of Service are for personal or non-commercial use according to a recent article in REALTOR magazine.

I just wanted to pass this along as FWIW (for what it’s worth) to Bloodhound Blog readers who may be currently putting your Virtual Tours on YouTube.

by Eric Blackwell

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

Our brokerage has been trying a NEW twist on a very old marketing method over the past several months. Integrated Voice Response is one thing. I have been doing that since before it was cool…(can you say Dialogic boards in the early 90’s?) and it has come and gone three times since then. I am NOT a fan of plain old vanilla call this # and punch in a code, although in some areas it can work. This new version was the old IVR on steroids and with some interesting twists.

Mind you, that my control group for this experiment was someone simply putting a cell phone # on a rider on a sign. And we are now seeing SIGNIFICANTLY better results than the control group with our method.

Here’s what we have done and where I think the distinctions are… Before we begin…no I am not posting brand names or anything of the sort. If you want to know, drop me a line. I will be glad to share. But I am NOT in the ad copy writing business for any firms. This is simply reporting results on a marketing CONCEPT.

#1) Instead of “codes” our system uses the street addresses to access the data – This seems to provide a significantly higher call rate.

#2) Our system pulls its data DIRECTLY from the MLS / IDX data downloaded every night. This has a HUGE advantage in that the use rate by agents in our office is MUCH higher -since all they have to do is put the sign out to get exposure.

#3) Our system puts english and spanish options up together without agents having to record a thing. We have 120 some odd agents…only 4 or 5 habla espanol…I imagine this is even more important in other parts of the country than Louisville, but it is important HERE as well. Reports back from our native spanish speakers really liked the quality…(was a concern for us)

#4) We tried riders on signs, but have found that a separate signs work better. (Note: I will edit this post in a bit with an Read more