More and more vacation resorts and foreign countries are internet ready, so in many cases you’ll be able to receive emails on your Blackberry. At any rate, even if you’re vacationing at an exotic locale, a telephone is seldom very far away. Are you that precious that you can’t take 5 minutes to call someone back or email them the same day? If you are, a lot of people won’t want to deal with you. (more…)
With all the wonders of today’s technology, we can still come off as cold and distant to prospects and clients if we rely on it too much or don’t use it effectively. It’s easy to come off this way with email. It’s difficult to convey emotion through the written word, so if we aren’t careful, we can give the wrong impression to prospects and clients. Email auto-responders can be helpful for more than just alerting people to your absences by making you more personable. Here are some dos and don’ts with auto-responders: (more…)
Don’t make squeeze pages for common, easily found information (eg. mortgage rates) because few people will join a mailing list for this info when they can readily find it elsewhere. You should make squeeze pages on your specific farm neighborhoods and any neighborhoods nearby. Make one squeeze page for each neighborhood. You could focus even more and have a squeeze page for specific types of properties in each neighborhood. Have a squeeze page on a listing offering them a link to a virtual tour if they sign up. Be creative! (more…)
One of the most interesting results of the recent US housing market crash is it’s effect on real estate professionals. Of course, the fallout has had tremendous impact on most of them. I recently consulted a company with a database of US real estate professionals. Though the database has about 1.4 million records, they said only about 600,000 of the records are still active. That means about 42% of US real estate professionals have left the business in the past couple of years.
What’s even more interesting is some of the tactics the survivors have adopted for keeping in the business. Trying times force those who don’t quit to get better at their profession.
One of the most innovative, brilliant ways I’ve seen of inexpensively advertising is (more…)
You definitely want to have a double opt-in process for signing up people on your squeeze pages. A single opt-in is where they give you the email address and they are immediately given what is offered. A double opt-in process has them give you an email address, but then an email is sent to that account for verifying the person from that email account did in fact sign up to receive the offering. If you only use a single opt-in process, you will get loads of fake email addresses of people because they’re interested in your offering, but not interested in being on your mailing list. Do you really want such people anyway? The number of prospects you get through the double opt-in process will be smaller than those found through single opt-in, but they’ll be better qualified prospects and you won’t have to weed out the fakes. (more…)
For your back link strategy on Craig’s List, you ought to post ads in other areas of Craig’s List, but these ads shouldn’t be your listings. For instance, you should regularly post ads to the Real Estate Services section. Be creative with the content you post here. For instance, if you have a blog, you could include an excerpt of an article here with a link to the whole article on your blog. You could try doing a cross-post wherein you describe your services and at the end mention you have a new listing and provide the link to your ad in the Real Estate For Sale section. If you have webinars or in-person seminars, be sure to advertise them here. Be sure to put up ads in the Real Estate Jobs section for various jobs, even if you have no intention of hiring such people at the moment. If and when you do need someone for any of those jobs, you’ll have loads of resumes on hand, so you’re hiring process will be much quicker. (more…)
The seemingly obvious solution to getting lost in the Craig’s List real estate ad shuffle is posting your ads multiple times to the site. San Francisco has always been a bastion for left of centre political thinking, and Craig’s List, having originated in San Francisco, has many democratic/socialist kinds of conventions in their rules and policies. In fact, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster has told Wall Street “Craigslist has little interest in maximizing profit”. Not being able to buy your ad premium placement (except in a few cases with job postings in major US cities) anywhere on all Craig’s List sites is one way this “equality for all” stance plays out.
Another way Craig’s List rules are informed by the “equality for all” ethos of leftist politics is (more…)
The Real Estate For Sale sections on Craig’s List get a massive number of new postings every day for most major US and Canadian cities. For instance, the New York City board currently gets over 4000 new postings each day! So it’s very, very easy to get your ads lost in the shuffle. It’s been proven with search engines that few people look at results beyond page 3 of search results (IE 30 results), so you need to make sure your ad has got high placement. Yet unlike many other classifieds sites (including Kijiji) and search engines, there’s no way to buy premium placement on Craig’s List so that your ads appear at or near the top of search results. When you post an ad on Craig’s List, it’s immediately put at the very top of the listings. When someone posts an ad after you, their ad will get position #1 and yours will get bumped down to #2. So timing your ad postings is very important. (more…)
There are a multitude of online classified ad sites, but only a few are really worth posting your listings to regularly. Craig’s List is one of them. It’s the leading classifieds service in any medium. This site has become so popular for buying or selling products/services on a local basis that it’s actually a kind of search engine. The best thing is, it costs nothing to post your listings to it. So it’s definitely worth your time to learn a few strategies on effective ad posting, and this article series will reveal many insights on how to do that. (more…)
During web 1.0, internet bandwidth, computer storage and other computer and technology resources were relatively expensive, so web 1.0 was largely text based web pages with low resolution pictures and not much else. But as the price of computing resources has precipitously fallen over the years, it’s opened the door for mainstream usage of more sophisticated ways of communicating. With internet bandwidth now relatively cheap, video streaming is wildly popular with sites like YouTube becoming a global phenomenon in the past 3 years. Internet audio capabilities have developed correspondingly with podcasts, internet radio and webinars becoming increasingly common. The more levels a medium can engage us on, the more popular it tends to be. For example, when television came along, engaging people on both visual and auditory levels, it quickly surpassed radio as the predominant form of home entertainment and radio entertainment became passé. The same happened to web 1.0 when web 2.0 came along.
