Mary wrote an interesting post on why she believes that the long tail does not work well for real estate bloggers. I found it to be an interesting read… but like so many of the “how to” real estate marketing blogs out there, I found it to be too one sided and unbalanced. It reminds me of the argument that has become classic in the real estate blogosphere: should you write for the search engines or write for readers? The answer is BOTH!!

By the way, Mary: you know I love ya, and I’m not trying to start an argument here, just wanted to share my opinion on the subject.

I strongly believe in the concept of the long tail. It is a sound principal, and it works for many different industries including real estate. By the way, if you don’t know what the long tail is, try this link. Does this mean that everyone should be going after the long tail keywords? Not necessarily… let me explain:

The Problem With Targeting Long Tail Keywords

An example of a long tail keyword for a real estate blog would be something like this: “Seven Meadows community pool hours Katy Texas”. As you can see, it’s very long and specific, and it is probably only searched for a handful of times per month (if at all). I’ve seen many people that will write posts like this thinking somehow that they will really get some great targeted traffic from it. That may be… but there are a few simple problems with that idea. First of all, there are very few people searching for this phrase on the search engines. Even if you get top positioning, you may only get 1-2 visitors per month. Secondly, is this search phrase related to real estate? The answer is no, which means that chances are extremely slim that any traffic coming to the site will convert. I’ve seen many well intentioned RE bloggers try to target phrases like this, and I’m sorry to break it to them, but they will probably never convert into a customer. There is nothing wrong with posting helpful community information, but with the relatively low number of search queries for that phrase you will likely never see anything out of it.

The Problem With Targeting Short Tail Keywords

Targeting the short tail keywords is what Mary is suggesting as the best way to target customers with your real estate blog. As I see it, there are a couple problems with that view. An example of a short tail keyword would be something like: “Katy Texas real estate“. The first problem is that everyone and their mother in the Katy market is trying to target this same keyword phrase. The competition is fierce, and you need to have an authoritative well written, and well optimized site to rank well. It’s not necessarily a problem if you know how to get a site to rank well and have the time to spend on it, but many people have a difficult time achieving this.

The 2nd problem is that the phrase: “Katy Texas Real Estate” is extremely generic. Just because it receives many search queries per month does not necessarily mean that everyone searching for that phrase is looking to buy/sell real estate. Many studies have shown that the short tail phrases do not provide the best ROI (Return On Investment). This is because of the fact that many of them are too broad and do not convert well.

Thirdly, as a blogger, it’s simply not practical to keep targeting the same 5-10 keyword phrases over and over and over… Can you imagine if you used one of your top 5-10 keyword phrases in the title of every single blog post? You’d be arrested by the spam police! LOL (that may not happen, but it will really turn your readers off, and it won’t help your ranking)

So, as you can see, there is a problem with both views. Which is why I present the third view…

The Money Tail

Ok, I know it’s a corny name, but it was better than “medium tail”. Here’s why you should be targeting the “Money Tail”:

These would be keywords like: “katy texas condos for sale” or “real estate listings in Katy Texas”. The benefit of targeting keywords like these is that they are searched fairly often, but are specific enough to not have a high level of competition.

The side benefit of targeting the Money Tail is that the keywords usually have a very high ROI. They are specific phrases targeting real real estate consumers, and they convert extremely well. “real estate listings in Katy Texas”, will always convert better than “katy real estate”. The Money Tail Keywords aren’t too generic like our short tale example, and they aren’t too obscure like our long tale example.

So, in my opinion… a balance must be struck. Target those money tail keywords, and you will see a higher ROI, better rankings, and a higher conversion rate.

Related posts:

1. Is Your Website Eating Itself Through Keyword Cannibalization?
2. Hittail.com: a Revolution in SEO
3. 8 Unique Ways to Use Google Alerts To Capture New Customers

I get asked all the time… what is the best way to market a real estate business online? My answer is always the same: Blogs

The Christian Real Estate Network is proud to announce a new free blogging platform! Thinking about setting up your own blog? Now is your opportunity. Just visit http://blogs.hismove.com to learn more.

Already have your own blog? Add it to our Blog Directory!

Here are 5 reasons to start Blogging Today:

1. Search engines love blogs, and don’t like traditional websites. That’s because there is fresh content on blogs, and traditional websites just sit around and grow stale. Blogs rank better in the search engines, and if done right, they can rank extremely well for local real estate searches with minimal effort. They are also link magnets, and will help to grow your online presence very quickly.
2. People love fresh content. Be honest with yourself. Do you really think anyone is going to read your basic website with the “about me” page. The answer is no. But what if you had up-to-date market information and pictures about a community someone was interested in? Suddenly, your website is something to stick around for and maybe even subscribe to.
3. You have no time to lose! The industry is getting flooded with new bloggers. Have you been to activerain.com yet? It is a very basic blog platform for real estate agents. They have over 30,000 subscribers and their website isn’t even 1 year old!
4. Consumers are looking online for real estate. Some stats say that over 90% of people look online to do their own real estate research before contacting an agent. You could be that agent or loan officer that gets found when people search.
5. You have a free opportunity to start your own blog with our new blogging platform. Take advantage of it! You will always have free tech support when you need it.

Related posts:

1. Book Review: Realty Blogging… I got mine!
2. Is Creating Creative Content a Completely Contrived Curse of Crazy Conspirators?
3. More Reasons Why Quality Content is Important

Conducting local interviews to post on your blog or website is one of the best ways to generate new customers.

Who will you interview, What will you talk about, When will you schedule it, Where will you conduct it, Why is it important, and HOW will you attract more customers?

_______________________

I certainly don’t claim to be an expert in this subject. I know that some traditional journalists scowl at the idea of lay people conducting interviews. Trust me, it’s been known to happen (read the first comment on this post). The game has totally changed since the dawn of the blog, and you; yes YOU have every right to interview anyone you want.

The exciting thing about interviewing is that most of the time you get to choose the topic, interviewee, and format.

Here are 5 interview ideas, and why they could help your business create more customers:

1. The Local Interview — This is one of my favorites. It is perfect for you real estate agents that are blogging about your local community. As a real estate agent, you are probably already extremely knowledgeable about your local market and should have alot to write about. But have you thought about getting some insight from other locals? Here are some ideas for people to interview:

• local merchants
• city officials
• social club presidents
• interesting neighbors
• past clients
• contractors
• local builders
• restaurant owners
• teachers & principals (local schools and Universities)
• local appraisers
• Officials of local attractions: theme parks, state parks, stadiums, event centers

I guarantee you that most of these people would love to give you an interview. Regular “folks” are flattered easily, and probably wouldn’t mind at all answering a few questions for a local real estate blog/website. The small local business owner will be thrilled for a chance to get free press.

People are impressed by this kind of stuff. Interviewing local people has got to be one of the best ways to build your blog.

2. Take the Time to Interview in Person — Like I said before, normal people will be flattered by the chance to give an interview. One neat thing about conducting an interview in person is that you get to know the interviewee… this could create a golden opportunity to create a new customer just by conducting the actual interview. Doing an interview like this is so outside the box, I guarantee you that people will be impressed. What better time to try to win their business?

My advice here is to come prepared with tons of questions, do adequate research before hand, don’t take up too much time with the interview, ask relevant questions that you know your readers will be interested in, and for goodness sake, write a thank you note to the person you interviewed.

3. Bring along an assistant to film the interview — If done right, this could open up alot of doors. Mainly because video is so versatile. Here are some ideas to try:

• Create a special nook in your office to conduct the interviews.
• With small businesses, you could take video onsite and showcase the business owner.
• Gotta have a tripod and a decent camera that easily transfers video to a computer.
• Place the videos on YouTube, and every other video aggregator you can find. Yet another excuse to drive relevant traffic to your site.
• Include a transcript version of the interview on your website for content purposes. Just make sure to mention your keywords in the interview (talk about real world seo!)
• Don’t overdress. The 3 piece suit you wear for closings won’t due while interviewing a local contractor.

4. The Phone Interview (turned into a podcast of course) — This is a good option for the agent in a major metropolitan area where a live in person interview might not be practical. Just call once to set up the interview, and explain some of the questions you will ask in advance so they know what to expect.

The best way to record a phone conversation is to purchase a couple of tools: a Mini Receiver Control, and a Digital Voice Recorder. The receiver plugs into your handset cord, and the recorder plugs into your receiver. Just make sure to test it before hand. Once you have the digital recording on your computer (the recorders come with a USB cable), use a free software tool like Audacity to edit the recording and turn it into an mp3 file for easy upload as a podcast to your website. My thanks to Mary McKnight for recommending some of these tools.

Again, I recommend turning the interview into a transcript so that the hungry search spiders have something to crawl. My last suggestion here is to keep the interview short… people listening to audio on the internet have about a 2 minute attention span.

5. Be Prepared – Before approaching anyone for an interview, plan ahead. How will you present yourself? Instead of telling them that you are simply out to create more business, take a round about approach. If it is a business, tell them that you plan on promoting them through the article and interview. If it is a city official, tell them that your website specializes in community news and events. Basically, try on focus on them. Genuine courtesy and interest will get you a long way. Also, bring your camera along. People love to see pictures of themselves online.

_______________________

Only 5 tips??!!! Ok, ok, I’ll give you a bonus tip:

6. You Posted the Interview to your Blog… Now What? — Don’t stop there!! Submit it to local papers and magazines. Feature it in your email newsletters. Write a blurb about it in your mailers. Contact local government and school websites to see if they will publish it (those .gov backlinks are drool worthy), and last but not least, don’t forget to send a copy of the interview to your interviewee. For local businesses this may even include a nice little frame and pictures of the business in the hopes that the owner will put it up in their local shop. The ultimate goal being: to create a sense of pride and accomplishment for the local business, and in turn being able to promote your own services.

Related posts:

1. Podcast Interview: Andrew Shotland on Local Search Optimization
2. Postcast Interview with NeighborhoodMatch.com
3. More Reasons Why Quality Content is Important

“Let’s not go down the road that “good content” will generate large numbers of one-way links. By and large, the world is not standing at the ready to link to the content of an agent broker site, based on some sort of remarkable content. Anyone who promises that is misleading their readers. It rarely happens that way.”

Those of you who read this blog regularly, will know immediately that I couldn’t DIS-agree more with the above comment. Frankly, I think it’s ridiculous… but I wanted to use it as a spring board to talk about something. Namely, blogging… and the SEO benefits that naturally come with an active blog.

Do you have a blog yet? Are you actively writing articles and posts? Why? What do you hope to gain? The standard answers are: “to generate clients”, “to network with other real estate pros”, “to brand an online presence”…. but how often do you hear someone talking about blogging purely for the SEO benefits? It is widely known in the blogosphere, but I don’t here it talked about that often in the real estate community.

A few years ago when I started taking notice of search engine marketing, I read everything I could get my hands on, I asked questions, I subscribed to special newsletters, read e-books, and studied religiously. Because of that time put in, I can truly say that I look at the Internet differently… through the eyes of a search engine.

The first thing I do when I look at a new site is look at the titles, the internal linking structure, and the text based content. I immediately start thinking about how a site can be improved and modified to rank better. When I first started noticing blogs as a marketing tool back in 2004, I was immediately struck with the Search engine friendly nature of most blogs.

In case you didn’t know, blogs are like candy to search engine spiders. Why is this true?

1. Spiders love new content. The faster you post, the faster the spiders will return.
2. Blogs present this content in a very easy to read, and easy to index fashion.
3. Most good blogging platforms place the title of your post in the <title> tag of the page.
4. The title of the post is also a link to that post that includes the keywords in the anchor text.
5. By listing posts in categories, you are basically creating an easy to index site map.
6. Each post has it’s own individual page.
7. Search Engine’s simply love fresh content and keyword based links.

In short, weblogs were designed with search engines in mind.

Now, in response to my friend that I quoted above… I plan on completely contradicting the comment, and making a bold statement of my own by saying: Creating quality content is one of the fastest ways you can consistently grow incoming links.

That is a bold statement I know… but it is true. Yes, there are hundreds if not thousands of great ways to grow you link popularity… and I encourage many people to use these strategies. But some of these popular ways to grow links include unnatural linking strategies like reciprocal linking, and purchasing links. These practices are considered by the search engines to be unnatural, and there is a very real possibility that you could be penalized if you are caught.

When you write a popular article on your blog or site, and it gets picked up by other blogs and sites, you are instantly creating quality links, and at the same time, are driving traffic to your site. What could be better?

Why would you want to waste your time spamming random websites with reciprocal link requests when you could be creating an online following by writing about an interesting subject that you love, and creating great incoming links at the same time??? To me, it’s a total no brainer.

So, if you are a veteran blogger, or are just getting started, don’t dismiss the value of your blog when you develop your SEO strategy. It is one of the best tools you have. And if someone tries to tell you that good content isn’t all that important in search engine marketing, just try to keep the snickers to yourself…

Related posts:

1. Multiple Categories and Onsite Duplicate Content
2. SEO Quick Tip of the Day —> #15
3. 5 Reasons to Start Blogging Today

Since when did we have official blogging coaches?? This is an interesting phenomenon that has spawned only recently. There have been a plethora of “how to” blogging blogs out there for a while, but since when did it turn into legitimate business?

Project Blogger, is a contest that was started by Jonathan Washburn & Jim Cronin that is a essentially a contest between blogging coaches. Each coach will pick a blogging beginner, and coach them into blogger-stardom.

The “potential” list of judges includes:

* Matt Heaton, CEO ActiveRain
* Robert Scoble, famous ex-Microsoft blogger: Scobleizer
* John Battelle, Federated Media - Author of The Search
* Errol Samuelson, new president of Move, Inc.
* Rich Barton or Lloyd Frink, CEO or President of Zillow
* Galen Ward, Shackprices.com
* Matt Mullenweg, Founding Developer of Wordpress

If this can actually be pulled off…it could be huge. It could potentially catapult the “real estate” blogging category into the limelite. I personally think that it is going to be nearly impossible to get judges like Rich Barton or Matt Mullenweg, but you never know.

The criteria for judging also seems to be ambiguous at best. I mean, it’s one thing to judge the quality of a blog post a-la Carnival of Real Estate, but it’s another thing altogether to judge the effectiveness of a blog. I mean… that’s what we are all going for is it not??

Blogging effectiveness is a very difficult thing to judge because everyone has different expectations and goals. One real estate blogger might focus on national RE news, while another may focus on hyper-local news, and yet another on RE marketing. How do you judge something like that?? I guess the goal for most real estate agents is lead generation, but even that is hard to get a handle on.

________________________________________

I’m going to predict the front runners here:

Jim Cronin is a natural pick as one of the starters of the contest, but also as an experienced coach. His Tomato Blogs coaching and design service has been up and running since late last year. The guys over at the Sellius Blog also have an edge as very experienced bloggers that really think outside of the box.

________________________________________

I’m amazed at how many gimmicks are out there to drive traffic to blogs. Maybe “gimmick” is too strong a word… I mean, there is the RE carnival, the AR carnival, the Yankee Blog Swap, the 101 Challenge, the Meme Exchange… the list goes on and on. This seems like just another in a long line of contests and buzz marketing tricks. I hope that some beginner bloggers actually learn from the experience, and generate some good leads.

Contests have always been the secret weapon of successful bloggers. And there are plenty of good ideas out there that haven’t been tried yet.

Back during the Yankee Blog swap, we had changed over to a new URL for our blog, but then at the last minute decided to keep the blog on our main directory at the URL that it is now. But during that short time that we ran the blog on that address, we participated in the Yankee Blog swap, and because of it, formed a ton of new incoming links. There wasn’t even any content under the blog itself! But just by participating in a single blogging event, we got 50 or so incoming links. That old blog still ranks fairly well for the keywords that we targeted it for, and we didn’t even do anything…. it just goes to show the power that contests and blogging events can have.

Anyways, I’m interested to see how this contest will pan out…

Related posts:

1. 5 Reasons to Start Blogging Today
2. Book Review: Realty Blogging… I got mine!
3. Google Launches New Blogger Friendly Search Service

• AdWords API Blog
• Blogger Buzz
• Google AJAX Search API
• Google Analytics Blog
• Google Base Blog
• Google Blog
• Google Checkout
• Google Code
• Google CPG Blog
• Google Custom Search Blog
• Google Data APIs Blog
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets
• Google Enterprise Blog
• Google Librarian Central
• Google Mac Blog
• Google Maps API Blog
• Google Reader Blog
• Google Research
• Google Talkabout
• Google Testing Blog
• Google Video Blog
• Google Web Toolkit Blog
• Inside AdSense
• Inside AdWords
• Inside Google Book Search
• Inside Google Desktop
• Webmaster Central Blog

And a few of my other favorite blogs about Google:

• www.MattCutts.com
• Google Weblog
• The Google Cache
• Google Blogoscoped
• Google Blog Search
• Google Earth Blog
• Google Maps Mania
• Unofficial Google Weblog
• News.com Google Blog
• Technorati Google Search

Related posts:

1. Google Launches New Blogger Friendly Search Service
2. Do You Ping Your Blogs?
3. A Rare Look Into the Mind of Google…

I finally had a chance to sit down and review Realty Blogging, the new book by Richard Nacht & Paul Chaney of Blogging Systems. I advanced ordered it back in Novermber before it became available in Barnes & Noble… and am just now getting to it.

This is the first truly influential book on blogging in the real estate industry. They lay down a solid argument for why blogging is going to change real estate forever.

I admit, this is the first (offline) book I’ve read on blogging, so I don’t have too much experience, but I was pretty impressed. I immediately recognized the challenges that must have beset Richard & Paul in writing this book. I mean, how do you write a book when 95% of your source marterial is online?? It’s hard.

This would make a fantastic E-book! Maybe after things have calmed down, they will be able to offer an online version. The frustration I found immediately, was that I wanted to visit many of the links they referenced, but wasn’t near my computer.

Suggestion: Read this in a comfortable chair, and have a laptop close at hand.

Diving in… The first few chapters relay the importance of blogging in general, and lay the ground work for why blogging is growing so quickly. They really did a good job here of presenting blogs for what they really are: a marketing and networking tool. After that, it catapulted into the specifics of the real estate industry, and some of the nitty gritty of blogging: writing style, format, comments, trackbacks, relevance, blogrolls, basic SEO, and alot more.

I wouldn’t really recommend the book for veteran bloggers, as most of the information is pretty basic, and if you’ve been around for a while in the blogosphere, it will be stuff that you should already know. But, that being said, they hit a home run with their target audience: blossoming tech savvy real estate agents. I did however find the appendicies very helpful in the way of good resources, and again, this is where an online version would have helped. Maybe they could offer a free online pdf version for everyone that buys the book! hint… hint…

All in all, I was very pleased with the book. It really conveyed Richard & Paul’s hearts for helping real estate agents market themselves. This is a desire and passion that I share with them, and I wish them success with this great book!

Related posts:

1. Book Review: Raving Fans - A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service
2. 5 Reasons to Start Blogging Today
3. Professional Website Review Service (SEO Audits)

Last year we posted an article on marketing on youtube that was sparked by one of Michael’s newsletters.

In his most recent article, he talked about the “200 page challenge” . It was just a personal challenge, and didn’t really have any real significance, but his method intrigued me. He takes PLR (Private Label Rights) articles, and re-writes them with his own keywords. PLR articles can be changed in anyway you see fit. The only thing you can’t do is re-sell them. One popular source for PLR articles is the Article Underground. They sell a package where they send you 400 new articles per month within a particular category.

So, the strategy is to sit down for about 30 minutes per day, pick a few relevant PLR articles, change up the keywords, and post to your site. If done correctly, it could result in a content rich site in a very short amount of time. And since you change the content to your liking, supposedly, you won’t get caught by any dup filters.

Admittedly, this tactic is used mostly by affiliate marketing gurus, and splogs… but used correctly, I believe that it could have some value to the budding real estate blogger or marketer. Imagine a good PLR article written about a specific market. Simply taking one of these articles and changing some of the keywords could be a way to quickly populate a new blog with useful information. Or perhaps you come across some good “how to” articles that you can change to your liking.

The key of course would be to change the content enough so as not to get caught by a filter, and to make it readable and presentable enough for you to want to post it on your site with pride as you would any other article or post.

Related posts:

1. Marketing on YouTube?
2. Is Creating Creative Content a Completely Contrived Curse of Crazy Conspirators?
3. Multiple Categories and Onsite Duplicate Content

I was impressed earlier today when I noticed the launch of TomatoBlogs.com I have been a fan of Jim Cronin’s Real Estate Tomato Blog since it began earlier this year. He is definitely on my top reading list. Probably in the top 5 blogs that I read everyday.

Anyways… he has begun a service that creates custom business blogs. This is obviously not a new idea, but one thing that intrigued me about the service is that it comes with 12 weeks of classes that essentially teach you how to blog effectively. Here is an excerpt from the site:

“Training includes:
Blogging 101 and website management
Elegant and effective writing styles
Participation and syndication
Search engine and traffic statistic analysis”

Related posts:

1. Your Blog is a balancing Act
2. Podcast: Matt McGee From Small Business Search Marketing
3. Do You Ping Your Blogs?

Google has just launched a specialized Blog only search portal. http://blogsearch.google.com From what I can see it looks like a very cool way to search for blog content. So often blog content can get watered down and not rank well in the standard serps. It seems like Google is trying to change that. All of the search results come directly from blogs all over the internet.

There were some people that speculated that Google would only include results from it’s Blogger.com blogs, but Google seems to be clear that they will include content from any Blog that has an Atom or RSS feed. Here is a quote:

“The goal of Blog Search is to include every blog that publishes a site feed (either RSS or Atom). It is not restricted to Blogger blogs, or blogs from any other service.”

One cool feature I noticed right away was the ability to search for posts by time frame. So, if you wanted to lookup a specific news story that you know was posted in the last 12 hours, you can search for it and not have to worry about irrelevant results from posts made 2 years ago.

I look forward to seeing how this service will evolve. Google seems to have a winner here.

Related posts:

1. Do You Ping Your Blogs?
2. Google Launches New Street View
3. All Blogs Google…