http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwR2dOdsenI
In the above video clip from my RECO certified course “The Awesome Power of Email”, I predicted Barack Obama would win the presidency. Why was I so certain? It’s because Obama made such amazing use of the Internet for his election campaign. Real estate sales people can learn a lot from the tactics he used for engaging his audience and promoting himself. One of Obama’s key tools was his website.
Years before Obama even began running for the Democratic presidential nomination, he surrounded himself with Internet leaders, most notably Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whom he recently appointed to his senior advisor team. For creating his website Mybarackobama.com, Obama tapped Chris Hughes, the 24-year old co-founder of the phenomenally successful Facebook website, currently the 2nd most visited site in the world behind the 3 major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) and YouTube. Obama’s internet campaigning dwarfed Hillary Clinton and John McCain campaigns. Obama even came up with an Apple iPhone application that received rave reviews. McCain was quoted “I’m a (computer) illiterate who has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance that I can get” and admitted that he has “never felt the particular need to e-mail.”
The Mybarackobama.com site is the first ever social network site for a political campaign. In recent presidential elections the Republicans have spent many millions on maintaining their database through off-line methods. In stark contrast, Mybarackobama.com capitalized on internet-based “viral growth” by encouraging visitors to invite friends to join them in supporting Obama. Powered by this simple but effective mechanism, the Obama campaign’s list of contacts, supporters and donors grew at an exponential rate with zero incremental costs of acquiring them.
Like Obama, real estate sales people should create their own unique ways of making their name and website’s information become viral across the internet. One of the best ways is having lots of interesting articles on your website specifically related to Toronto area real estate and especially on your immediate farming area. The two key benefits of having these articles is search engine optimization and the viral effect. The more articles on your website relevant to Toronto area real estate, the higher your site and listings will be ranked in search engines for Toronto searches. The more articles you have on your specific farming area, the more you’ll be viewed as an expert in your area, and so the more people will frequent your website. These articles also help your website’s ranking in search engines for your farming areas. You can also boost your search engine rankins by posting your articles on high visibility websites such as Digg, Stumbleupon and Del.icio.us. When your website has newsletters and articles on neighborhood specific news and information (eg. the history of the area, news of upcoming community events, new commercial developments, local garage or estate sales), your newsletter emails to your database are likely to become viral in and around your farm area. This is important because many people who rent in a given area tend to stay in that general area when they move, and so they will want to keep regularly informed about the local area, the local housing market and who the best local real estate sales people are.
The viral effect through the internet helped Obama in unexpected but humourous and memorable ways. After the Obama-McCain debates were broadcast online over 2000 videos were posted on YouTube about Obama. One of them was a very enthusiastic supporter who posted a series of hilariously over-the-top videos on YouTube proclaiming her undying crush to her favorite junior senator from Illinois. One of these videos (the video for her song “I Got A Crush On Obama”) has received 11.5 million views to date and was named biggest web video of 2007 by People magazine.
So it’s important you have a self-managed website allowing you to personally add articles and make changes yourself. If you have no control over your website updates you will have to pay a webmaster on an hourly basis to do the updates. Updates may only take 5 minutes to do but these webmasters will usually charge you a minimum for each update required. If you are adding articles on a regular basis a webmaster will get expensive very quickly. My Moneymaker website is a turn-key real estate sales website solution allowing you to easily add your own articles whenever you want. An example of a top Toronto real estate sales person using the Moneymaker website is Adil Esmail. To boost his search engine ranking for one of his farm areas (Markham) Adil included in his website a brief article on the area. If you search for the keywords ‘Markham real estate’ in the search engine Yahoo Adil is very near the top of the page: currently the 9th search result listed and the first Ontario real estate sales person listed.
In addition to the Moneymaker website I offer real estate sales people several tools for using the internet and technology to get Obama-caliber results such as my RECO certified courses The Internet & Real Estate E-Commerce and Building Your Ecommerce Business. They’ll get you elected to top real estate sales person in your farm area!
