This is part two of our "What Is Twitter and Why Should I Care" video series. In this short video I explain the 4 types of Twitter users and how each user or combination of users makes Twitter useful and relevant to their business and personal goals.
Enjoy and feel free to share!
Best if viewed in "full screen" mode
See part 1, What is Twitter and Why Should I Care?
This real estate blog represents the voice and thoughts of Agentopolis, A National directory of Real Estate Agents, real estate brokers and Realtors. Use Agentopolis to find a local real estate agent.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
What is Twitter and Why Should I Care?
I frequently get asked, "what is Twitter and why should I care?" Having 7 Twitter accounts myself and over 75,000 combined followers, I'm a big proponent of Twitter so I created a short video series, two videos to be exact, to answer the question and help people understand just how valuable Twitter can be if you know how to use it. This is the first video which I hope will answer the question, "what is Twitter?" and in the follow up video, I will answer the question, "why should I care?"
Enjoy!
This video is best viewed in the "full screen" mode.
See part 2, 4 Types of Twitter Users.
Enjoy!
This video is best viewed in the "full screen" mode.
See part 2, 4 Types of Twitter Users.
Monday, June 14, 2010
3 Keys to Successful Internet Marketing for Realtors
Attendance is limited and we are expecting this free webinar to fill up fast. The webinar will be held on Friday, July 23, 2010 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM CDT. Simply follow the link below to sign up.
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/625296259
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/625296259
At Agentopolis we define Internet Marketing Success as, "The right number of the right people finding your website and doing business with you." In the early days of the Internet almost everybody with a business had a website built for them. For most of these sites, no consideration was given to getting the website to rank high in Google and other search engines for relevant searches, i.e real estate, homes for sale, mls listings, etc. More importantly, even less attention was given to local searches like, Minneapolis real estate, Minneapolis homes for sale, Minnesota MLS listings, etc.
As the Internet continues to change and evolve, more and more local real estate agents are discovering that with a little work, they can get their own site to rank well in Google. The trick is that there are only 10 spots on the first page of the Google search results and statistics show that if you are not on the first page, you are probably seeing little if any traffic to your site, which makes your site a bit of a waste of time and money.
In this free webinar you will LEARN:
- How to find the 5 best search terms that home buyers are using to find real estate in your area.
- How to organize the content on your web pages to get high Google rankings.
- How to find great free sources for links back to your site.
- How to spy on your competition and see exactly why they are ranking above you in Google.
- How to make it easy for your visitors to share your listings with their family, friends and social networks.
- How to build a list of local home buyer leads.
- How to track your progress and make sure you are moving up and getting more leads.
Who SHOULD attend this Webinar:
- Anyone Realtor who is wondering how the #1 ranked agent on Google in their area got there.
- Real Estate Agents who want to become better website marketers
- Any Realtor who isn’t on the first page of Google for local real estate searches.
- Anyone who hasn’t added or changed content on their web site in the past 30 days.
- Anyone looking for a way to rank higher than their competitors in Google and other search engines.
- Realtors who are just getting started optimizing.
- Real estate agents who are frustrated with their current internet marketing efforts.
- Anyone looking for an easy to follow process for search engine marketing.
- Realtors who are tired of paying someone else for search engine optimization and it’s not working.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Social Media Revolution Video
Stay tuned, Agentopolis will be making three big changes over the next 3 weeks that will make it easier for Realtors to take advantage of the Social Media Revolution!
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Agentopolis is Getting Social
Better late than never right! Yesterday we added an easy way to connect with Agentopolis from our home page with the addition of a Facebook, Twitter and Blogger icon. Simply click on any icon to find, follow, or interact with us on the web.
Our goal with our social media strategy is to help our member real estate agents get more exposure by making it easy for them to share their profile and listings with their social networks.
Stay tuned as we will also be simplifying our recommendation process to make it look and work more like rating systems you are already familiar with.
Our goal with our social media strategy is to help our member real estate agents get more exposure by making it easy for them to share their profile and listings with their social networks.
Stay tuned as we will also be simplifying our recommendation process to make it look and work more like rating systems you are already familiar with.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
How Do You Spell Transparency?
I recently joined a real estate forum and started contributing in what I thought was a respectful, professional manner having been blogging, writing and tweeting on the Internet for the past 10 years. It was a nice forum because it recognized that many people contributing to these types of media want to get some SEO, search engine optimization, value for their efforts, myself included.
As a result the forum allowed it's members to include anchor text links in their signatures, posts and comments. To make sure their members were at least somewhat sincere, it was required that you make 15 contributions before you could actually start linking back to your site. Over all I thought it was a great idea, that is until I logged in and got this message;
This caught me by surprise as I belong to many online communities and I'm very familiar with basic etiquette and I work hard to be professional, relevant and transparent. I thought back over my previous posts to try and see what I might have done or said to "get the boot". But when I noticed that there was no reason specified as to why I was banned, I thought there must be more to this than meets the eye so I decided to poke around a little.
I discovered that the owner of this forum was a real estate marketing company and they obviously didn't want any competition. I kind of wish they would have mentioned this up front as I did read their terms of participation and there was no mention of who could join or not join.
They also could have made it clear who was the owner of this forum. As a real estate marketing company providing a great internet marketing tool for real estate agents, I would want everyone to know who was providing the service. Why hide this fact?
Anyway, at first I was a little mad about the whole thing but then I realized that there was nothing stopping me from launching my own industry forum. When I looked into the software required and costs, courtesy of a link at the bottom of their site, I discovered that it was more affordable than I thought and now Agentopolis is in the process of launching our own real estate forum. This will be free and a great place for real estate agents to develop valuable links back to their sites to help them with their Google rankings and internet marketing. We will even provide free webinars on how to use this tool.
So I guess you could say I'm grateful to the secret owner of the forum who kicked me to the curb, if it hadn't been for them I never would have known about this great free real estate marketing tool.
Thanks secret real estate marketing company, and don't worry, your secret is safe with me ;)
As a result the forum allowed it's members to include anchor text links in their signatures, posts and comments. To make sure their members were at least somewhat sincere, it was required that you make 15 contributions before you could actually start linking back to your site. Over all I thought it was a great idea, that is until I logged in and got this message;
You have been banned for the following reason:
No reason was specified.Date the ban will be lifted: Never
I discovered that the owner of this forum was a real estate marketing company and they obviously didn't want any competition. I kind of wish they would have mentioned this up front as I did read their terms of participation and there was no mention of who could join or not join.
They also could have made it clear who was the owner of this forum. As a real estate marketing company providing a great internet marketing tool for real estate agents, I would want everyone to know who was providing the service. Why hide this fact?
Anyway, at first I was a little mad about the whole thing but then I realized that there was nothing stopping me from launching my own industry forum. When I looked into the software required and costs, courtesy of a link at the bottom of their site, I discovered that it was more affordable than I thought and now Agentopolis is in the process of launching our own real estate forum. This will be free and a great place for real estate agents to develop valuable links back to their sites to help them with their Google rankings and internet marketing. We will even provide free webinars on how to use this tool.
So I guess you could say I'm grateful to the secret owner of the forum who kicked me to the curb, if it hadn't been for them I never would have known about this great free real estate marketing tool.
Thanks secret real estate marketing company, and don't worry, your secret is safe with me ;)
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Google Local Business Center Video Tutorial
Lately I've been running into more and more internet marketers who are preaching the ease and benefits of using the Google Local Business Listing to get on the first page of the Google SERP. I have also noticed more local listings showing up in front of the organic search results for many of the searches I do. This is especially true for local real estate and MLS listings searches.
If you're looking for a free easy way to get your real estate web site found on Google, watch this short video from Google. It doesn't get much easier or cheaper than this, enjoy!
If you're looking for a free easy way to get your real estate web site found on Google, watch this short video from Google. It doesn't get much easier or cheaper than this, enjoy!
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
What Does It Take To Be a Top 100 Real Estate Agent?
A high number of closed deals looks great to a real estate sales manager but what really matters to a home buyer or seller? Client recommendations are one of the more relevant indicators of a successful Realtor. How do I know that the Real estate agent that is highly ranked because he/she sold 75 houses last year didn't make life a living hell for all their clients. Repeat and referral business are also indicators of a successful agent.
If you really want to do your do diligence, you ought to ask for 1-3 references that you can speak to. Fact is most people won't take the time to do that because at some point many home buyers and sellers don't see a lot of differentiation between agents. The bottom line is they simply need to buy or sell a home without a ton of stress.
This is why Agentopolis ranks agents agents by number of recommendations. For busy people it's a lot of work to stop what you're doing and take the time to recommend your real estate agent. For those agents who truly provide memorable service, it's far easier to get past clients to take the time to recommend them. So agents are ranked by # of recommendations versus average rating. It wouldn't make sense for an agent who has only one recommendation with a "5" to be ranked higher than an agent who has ten recommendations with an average rating of "4.5"
If you really want to do your do diligence, you ought to ask for 1-3 references that you can speak to. Fact is most people won't take the time to do that because at some point many home buyers and sellers don't see a lot of differentiation between agents. The bottom line is they simply need to buy or sell a home without a ton of stress.
This is why Agentopolis ranks agents agents by number of recommendations. For busy people it's a lot of work to stop what you're doing and take the time to recommend your real estate agent. For those agents who truly provide memorable service, it's far easier to get past clients to take the time to recommend them. So agents are ranked by # of recommendations versus average rating. It wouldn't make sense for an agent who has only one recommendation with a "5" to be ranked higher than an agent who has ten recommendations with an average rating of "4.5"
Monday, February 22, 2010
Thursday, January 21, 2010
What's driving NAR's new Realtor Property Resource, (RPR) idea?
I have heard a lot of mixed reviews lately as we learn more and more about NAR's new Realtor Property Resource idea. I recently came across a A Forty-Year History of the MLS on another site that reminded me of days gone by. Remember when as a home buyer you could only get a list of homes for sale from a real estate agent who showed them to you in a giant beat up book? The PC made things a lot easier for Realtors but when the Internet took off, I think very few people in real estate were ready for how the industry was about to change.
The Internet has lead in an era of shared information between agents, brokers and home buyers and sellers. Let's face it, being a buyers agent has gotten a little easier as home buyers can weed through tons of houses on the Internet before they want to go out and see a few. Sure it's also easier to lose a buyer as they find a home on the Internet, stumble into an open house without you and are accosted by an overly aggressive agent who tells them how surprised he/she is that they are house shopping without you. But for the really good buyers agents this doesn't happen very often. I haven't been able to find too many agents over the past 10 years who haven't been able to improve their business as a result of the Internet and the plethora of free information available to home buyers and sellers.
So with that in mind the question that comes up is "why would we want to go back to the old days of tightly controlled data"? In my experience control freaks usually operate from a base of fear. Is it possible that the NAR with their super powerful lobby and all are afraid of losing control of their loosely held real estate information empire? Wait a minute, they don't control the real estate info at the local level, your local and/or regional real estate board does and they share it through the local or regional MLS. So maybe it's not a matter of fear of loss but in fact the RPR is a product of a desire for gain. Who wouldn't want to control and distribute all the real estate data in the US, think of what that would be worth. Oh but they say it will be for Realtors only, that makes me feel a lot better and I'm sure that after they sucker in all the local and regional boards and their MLS data that they don't have any plans to deploy a public facing version. Ya think?
Frankly it doesn't really matter to me whether the RPR get's launched or not, but I'm curious about what you think about the RPR. Is this something that will help real estate agents grow their business or just another hair brained idea thought up by a bunch of dinosaurs? Feel free to leave a comment.
The Internet has lead in an era of shared information between agents, brokers and home buyers and sellers. Let's face it, being a buyers agent has gotten a little easier as home buyers can weed through tons of houses on the Internet before they want to go out and see a few. Sure it's also easier to lose a buyer as they find a home on the Internet, stumble into an open house without you and are accosted by an overly aggressive agent who tells them how surprised he/she is that they are house shopping without you. But for the really good buyers agents this doesn't happen very often. I haven't been able to find too many agents over the past 10 years who haven't been able to improve their business as a result of the Internet and the plethora of free information available to home buyers and sellers.
So with that in mind the question that comes up is "why would we want to go back to the old days of tightly controlled data"? In my experience control freaks usually operate from a base of fear. Is it possible that the NAR with their super powerful lobby and all are afraid of losing control of their loosely held real estate information empire? Wait a minute, they don't control the real estate info at the local level, your local and/or regional real estate board does and they share it through the local or regional MLS. So maybe it's not a matter of fear of loss but in fact the RPR is a product of a desire for gain. Who wouldn't want to control and distribute all the real estate data in the US, think of what that would be worth. Oh but they say it will be for Realtors only, that makes me feel a lot better and I'm sure that after they sucker in all the local and regional boards and their MLS data that they don't have any plans to deploy a public facing version. Ya think?
Frankly it doesn't really matter to me whether the RPR get's launched or not, but I'm curious about what you think about the RPR. Is this something that will help real estate agents grow their business or just another hair brained idea thought up by a bunch of dinosaurs? Feel free to leave a comment.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)