Category: Online Marketing

How To Rank: Be Credible, Relevant and Dynamic (and keep at it!)

2013 has been a breakout year for The Set Fee Real Estate Blog.  My number of visitors has jumped significantly and seems to increase every month.  Last month (October, 2013), was the biggest month I’ve ever had, topping 2,000 visitors.  By comparison, through 2011 and 2012, I mucked along at +/- 500 visitors a month.

The improvement in this site’s stats parallels the return to an increasingly normal real estate market, and while this is not the reason my hits are up, it certainly is a factor.  For more than four years, the notion that a home owner could save on real estate commissions was hardly at the top of anyone’s mind, and of course, that’s what I write about here.  Today, with home equities increasing and buyers buying again, people are interested in getting a good deal when it comes time to sell, so their search phrases are helping them find this blog.

I believe there are a couple of other factors – probably more important factors – in the increase.  First is simple longevity.  I’ve been at this since Fall of 2009.  Mother Google has been crawling my posts for four years and has found new material here almost every week.  She likes that.  There has been a consistency in topic here which also speaks to the search engines.   The focus of this blog is pretty concise.

While January  2013 showed a jump in visitors over what I was experiencing in 2012, I didn’t get my big growth spurt until April . . . and each month since April has been better than the month before.  So what happened in April?

Simple:  Marketing.  I invested $200 in pay-per-click, $100 on Facebook, $100 on Google.  The money was exhausted by mid May, but the effects were dramatic.  The bigger surprise, though, was the ‘halo effect’ of my tiny bit of marketing.  My growth spurt has been sustained.

There have been a handful of blog posts that have drawn A LOT of hits.  They are tightly focused on things consumers want to know and have clear titles that reflect the content.  Far and away the biggest draw has been ‘What Percentage Do Real Estate Agents Charge?‘  It lambastes percentage based commissions and makes a strong case for Set Fee pricing and for Help-U-Sell.

That post is followed rather closely by ‘How Long Must I Wait To Buy After A Short Sale?’ Interesting that both posts have questions as titles.  However, the significant thing is topic:  this is what real estate consumers are interested in today.  By the way, real estate sand is always shifting and I probably ought to update that short sale post.

Another high-ranking post is ‘The Ineffective Realtor (or what to do when your real estate agent sucks).’  Hmmm.  Clearly a large segment of our industry is letting consumers down or at least not living up to expectations (again).

The point is this:  if you are blogging, keep at it.  It takes awhile for the search engines to decide you are credible enough to rank high in search results.  Focus your blog on a topic and don’t stray off in a dozen directions.  Think like your target audience:  what kinds of information are they most likely to be searching for?  And make sure that topic is reflected in both your post and your title.  And, for goodness sake!  Invest a few hundred bucks in marketing!  The results will probably surprise you.

(Footnote:  The case for REALTOR blogging is simply this:  it works.  Only 12% of REALTORS blog and most of them do it poorly and/or inconsistently.  We all have websites, some good, some not so good.  Regardless, they usually have at least one thing in common:  they are static.  They don’t change.  The content is set.  That is not particularly attractive to Google.  She wants to see dynamic content that changes regularly but remains focused on a specific topic.  That’s what a blog is.  Your online lead generation efforts can be greatly enhanced by fronting a good blog.  You use your blog to help consumers find you and to help them understand your unique offering.  You link your blog to your static website for home search and for inquiry generation.  If you want help setting up and maintaining your Help-U-Sell real estate blog, get in touch.)

Beware! Facebook Friend Requests

There has been so much written about Facebook and your privacy.  Many are terrified that strangers may be able to see the photo they took of what they had for dinner last night!  Par for the course:  it seems we alternatively love Facebook and revile it every other Tuesday.

Here’s what I have to tell you about Facebook and your privacy:  it’s not a problem if you will take the time to manage your page and your friends.  It’s very simple and here is a link to a post that will walk you through that process:  LINK.  There have been a few changes to the look and feel of Facebook since that post was written but the basics are still sound.  Truth is:  you can limit what anyone sees of your Facebook profile.

But today there is a new threat.  It seems that Facebook scammers are sending out bulk friend requests hoping to get access to your information and your list of friends.  How they may use this information is up for speculation, but think about it:  would you go on television and tell the world what you had for dinner last night, where you dined and what you spent?  How may times you’ve been married and who your best friend in high school was?  How cute your 2 year old is in her new shoes?  Of course you wouldn’t.  But that’s what you’re doing when you accept friend requests from people you do not know.

Here is a list of tasks for you to do now:

  1. Review your list of Facebook friends.  See anybody you don’t know professionally or personally?  Perhaps you might want to un-friend them.
  2. When you click on ‘Friends’ from your home page notice that there is also a link for ‘Followers.’ Today, people can follow you – which means to read everything you post – whether you accept a friend request or not.  Take a look at your followers:  do you know them?  Maybe you’d be wise to block some or all of them.  Funny: when I checked my followers, I saw people whose friend requests I had refused!
  3. From now on when you receive a friend request from someone you don’t know, first send them a message and ask: How do I know you?  You probably won’t get a response, and so then, refuse the request and block them.
  4. Periodically check your followers.  You are notified when you have a new follower, but you are notified about so many things it is easy to overlook.  I don’t think legitimate followers are a bad thing, especially if you are using Facebook as part of your online business strategy, but maybe you’re bugged by the whole concept.  If so, go into your account settings, click on ‘Followers,’ and turn this feature off entirely.

I don’t think Facebook is the Boogie Man many say it is.  I believe in its ability to keep people connected and in its value as a marketing vehicle.  But I do believe that Facebook users have an obligation (to themselves) to manage their memberships, to take control of who sees what,, and to monitor more than the Newsfeed.

And, oh by the way . . . have you looked at Google + lately?  It’s come a long way.  Still, most of my friends don’t have accounts, but at some point it may become a social networking alternative.  My Spanish school in Oaxaca is actively using Google + Hangouts to teach the language over longdistances using live video feeds.  Impressive!

Here is an infographic from Barracuda Labs I found on ZDnet.com with more on fake Facebook friend requests:

What’s App?

Text Messaging is a big part of our lives today.  This relatively new form of communication has become common as we scramble to keep up with family, friends and business contacts.  To begin a discussion of text messaging it’s important to understand how it fits into your phone carrier’s network.

Your cell phone carrier has two networks:  one for calls and one for data.  The networks are based on a system of towers dispersed around the globe that aggregate calls and data within a specific geography (a ‘cell’ as in ‘cell’ phone) and shoot them up to a satellite (calls) or on to the Internet (data).

Text messages – which you would think are data – actually travel over  your carrier’s phone network – not the data network.  This is why you can turn off your phone’s data connection, and still receive calls and text messages.

This is also why almost any phone, smart or dumb, can make calls and receive text messages and why I recommend that you not get a smart phone if this is all you’re doing.  If, on the other hand, you are accessing the internet, checking Facebook, going to the MLS on your phone, you must have data, which means you must have a smart phone.

Bear in mind, we are talking about text messages here, not Instant Messages, which are data and travel over the data network.

We are also talking about phone calls made directly through your carrier’s phone network, not those made via Skype, Google Voice or any other VOIP platform.  VOIP converts the call to data and it happens over the data network.

Before we get too complicated to be practical, let’s stop and talk about the implications of everything we’ve said so far.

Your carrier charges differently for usage of its two networks.  Calls are usually billed in terms of minutes; you may have a monthly allotment of 900 minutes  . . . or you may have an unlimited number of minutes, but the increment is minutes.  Text messages are billed in terms of number of messages sent and sometimes, received.  Again, you may have a fixed number in your allowance or it may be unlimited. The important thing is that the network is counting the number of messages your are sending and receiving.

Data is billed in terms of the amount of data consumed, measured in gigabytes (Gb).  You may have a monthly allowance of 2 Gb of data or you may have an unlimited data plan.  When you stream a movie from Netflix to your phone, you are using a lot of data.  When you send an email – which is data – you’re using just a little (assuming you’re not attaching something huge).

Some smart phone users are employing a strategy to take text messaging out of the carrier’s phone network.  The logic is that text messages are tiny in terms of data but are billed per message by the carrier’s phone network.  Switching them over to the data network will have little impact on data usage (because they are so small) and some savings may be achieved.

Consider my last trip to Mexico.  I made no phone calls on my carrier’s phone network because the International roaming fees were astronomical.  Instead, I waited until I had a wifi connection and made calls using Skype, outside my carriers network.  I did receive and respond to text messages made over my carrier’s phone network, however, and  I paid per message for the privelege:  50 cents to send, 5 cents to receive.

If I had used an app to conduct text messaging over a data network and saved my texting until I had wifi, I’d have avoided those charges.  App?  What App?

Whats App.  That’s the app: Whats App.  It’s one of several text messaging apps that occur over the data network. It seems to be the one that’s gaining ‘traction.’  I’ve had 3 invitations to connect via Whats App this week alone.  I’ve used the service and find it perfectly acceptable for general texting with some bells and whistles that are above and beyond what I have with my carrier’s regular program.  In What’s App, I can create a group and text them all at once.  I can also send a voice recording or video over the app.

Whats App works with Android phones, Blackberries, Windows phones, those weird Nokia phones and . . what else?  what else? . . . hmmmm . .  oh, yeah, it also works with those quaint Iphones so many of you still have.  You can get the app HERE or at your phone’s app store.

When you download and install Whats App, it will quickly rummage through your contacts and tell you which ones are already using it.  I was surprised at how many of mine are already on board!

**NOTE** I am not a mobile phone guru.  I’m not a network genius.  I’m not even particularly technical.  I just use this stuff and try to understand it.  I am sure I have committed  errors in my description of how your phone works with  its various networks. If you are a phone guru or similar I’m sure you will want to jump on this piece with both feet and do the hokey-pokey.  Before you do, try to remember that this post was not written for you.  It was written for me and for every other poor average slob out there, just like me, trying to make sense out or their digital lives.  Thank you.

 

The New Set Fee Real Estate Blog

Do you see the difference?  If you’ve visited here before, you may recognize the new look:  now only one column on the right (not two as before) and the  main column is wider; also, different fonts and feel.  The change is the end result of a complex process involving moving The Set Fee Real Estate Blog to a new server and changing templates to a less complex one that does not require a subscription to maintain.

I host this blog – and all of my online stuff – with GoDaddy.  I know there are less expensive and probably more powerful hosts out there, but I stick with GoDaddy for one good reason:

They have never let me down.

Really:  in ten years of building and maintaining an online presence, GoDaddy has always been there with the answer I needed.

I have my own personal rep who helps me decide what I need (and don’t need ) in my cadre of GoDaddy products, helps me save money by consolidating accounts and products, and of course, helps me buy new things.

The best part, however, is technical support.  I tend NOT to need much support on anything Internet based.  I have a good general knowledge and can Google up a storm when things don’t work.  I usually find my own answers.  But we all get stuck from time to time and when I do, I call GoDaddy.  The support team is stellar.  They are knowledgeable and know when to call in the next level of support.  More than that, though, they are tenacious.  Solving tech problems is often a matter of examining dozens of little things and these guys have hung in there with me, sometimes for more than an hour, as we tried this and tweaked that.   No matter how strange the original problem,  I always end up with an acceptable solution.

* * * End of testimonial * * *

What I wanted to do was to uproot The Set Fee Real Estate Blog from it’s own individual GoDaddy hosting plan and move it into a directory under my personal website, jamesdingman.com.  The move would save me a little money by eliminating a hosting account.

Moving a self-hosted WordPress blog is not an easy thing.  You not only have to move the content – and I had 5 years of content to move – you also have to move the database that makes all of that content work.  My database was so large and weird that it took six attempts – each taking half a day and requiring a change here and an edit there – to get it moved.  Then, once the content was moved, all the links had to be reworked, the images reattached, templates and widgets re-installed.  Needless to say, when it was all done, I had a great sense of accomplishment!

I originally set this blog up on a premium, paid template:  Thesis.  It is probably the most widely used paid template available to WordPress users, and it is excellent in terms of features and flexibility.  With Thesis you can create a site that looks almost anyway you want it to look, that does almost anything you can imagine.  But the truth is, this blog is very simple.  It’s just posts and tags and comments and such.  I’m not selling anything, not taking ads, not hosting a forum . . . so I hardly needed the (paid) sophistication of Thesis.

I’ve been working on blogs with a few Help-U-Sell brokers and have them settled into a free WordPress template, ‘Twenty-Twelve’.  It has worked so well for them I decided to transition over myself, hence the new look.  I was using so little of Thesis that, honestly, I don’t notice the back end difference much at all.

I have just a couple of remaining problems.  First is reconnecting my stats and subscribers.  When I changed hosting accounts (and, therefore, base URLs), the connections to those items ceased functioning.  Now it is as if I am starting from scratch with no historical stats and no subscribers.  I am confident I an resurrect these, but have exhausted my own resources.  I’ve called in help from WordPress.com and hope they can make an adjustment for me.  If you’ve gone through this process yourself, perhaps you could share your experience and success.

Second is getting Google to recognize the move.  I’m getting lots of views in the new location, but none are coming from search engines . . . or at least that’s what my dashboard is telling me.  I used to get most of my visits from search engine activity so I am very interested in reestablishing this link.  I understand it takes some time and am working with an XML sitemap plugin to make it easier for Mother Google to figure out the change.

So thanks for you patience – especially in reading this post that has nothing to do with real estate or anything other than my own personal tech experience!  If you are trying to make the same kind of move and need advice (or a shoulder to cry on), I’m available.

Do You Need a SmartPhone?

I wrote a post a while back called “Do You Really Need A SmartPhone?”  It has proven to be very popular,  and usually gets lots of search engine attention.  Apparently, people are really confused about this!

Today, I re-read that original post and found it . . . um . . . confusing.  Oh, my information was good; it just wasn’t organized as well as it could have been.  So I’m going to make another stab at it here:

‘Do I Really Need A SmartPhone, Part II”

What is a SmartPhone?  It’s a cellular phone that can access the Internet.  That usually means it can access the Internet via a wi-fi connection or over your carrier’s mobile network.  This is important because when you access the Internet on your SmartPhone via a wi-fi signal, there is usually no additional charge.  However, when you access the Internet over your carrier’s mobile network, the usage counts against your monthly allowance, and if you go over the allowance, there is usually an additional charge.    As a practical matter, many have a wi-fi network set up at home, and that works fine for SmartPhone Internet access there, but when we’re out and about. . . that’s where you’ll be running on your carrier’s mobile network.

For what reasons might you want to access the Internet with your SmartPhone?  There are a million reasons.  And none of them may be important to you.  Here are a few of the most popular things people do with their Internet connected Smartphones:

  • Navigation.  The GPS navigation built into the phone uses the Internet.
  • Email.  You can collect your email on your phone . . . but it requires Internet access.
  • Facebook.  When you are on it, you are on the Internet, whether at your computer or your SmartPhone.
  • Google/Searching.  If, like me, you want the answer NOW, you may be using search features on your phone, features that jump to the Internet to find the answer.
  • Apps.  If it’s an App, chances are it operates off the Internet – or ‘In The Cloud.’  How about the one that tracks your morning run, telling you how far you went and showing your route?  Internet.  How about that QR Code reader App?  It’s going to take you to the Internet.  How about that YouTube App or the automatic ‘radio’ you downloaded?  They run over the Internet, and therefore, count against your monthly data allowance.

You see, there are quite a few things you might do with a SmartPhone, on the Internet.  The question is:  would you?  You’re the only person who can answer that, and you may not know until you get a data plan and try it for awhile.

Now that you mention it, what is a ‘data plan?’ and do I need one?  A data plan is what enables you to access the Internet with your SmartPhone when you are away from a connected wi-fi signal.  It gives you Internet access through your carrier’s mobile network.  So, if you are going to be using your SmartPhone for Internet activities when you are away from a wi-fi network, yes, you are going to need a data plan.  And they aren’t cheap.  Usually you pay for a monthly allowance of data use – usually mesured in Gigabytes (GB).  A couple of GB is fine for most average users.  But if you’re going to stream movies, watch baseball games, play cloud games and so on, you’re going to burn that up quickly.

Is it possible to have a SmartPhone and only use it over wi-fi?  Yes.  While in Mexico earlier this year I used my phone only over wi-fi.  All of the Apps and other features I wanted worked fine.  But that was a special situation.  If you’re at home, where you have a wi-fi network, and that’s where you’re usually going to be when you want to use your phone to access the Internet . . . why wouldn’t you just use your computer?  Or your tablet?  The screens are bigger, and there’s nothing you can do on a SmartPhone you can’t do on a computer (except, maybe make calls).

What about text messages?  That’s where this whole discussion gets squirrely.  Most text messages in the US go over the carriers mobile netowrk.  Since they are text, not voice, they are data, right?  Yes, but most carriers charge for text messages differently than they do ordinary Internet data use.  They usually charge for messaging by the number of texts sent/received, within a monthly allowance.  That’s why most cellular plans have three components:  Voice/Data/Text, with an allowance for each component.  But, what if you don’t have a data plan?  Can you still get text messages (which, technically, are data)?  Yes.  Almost all phones, Smart and Dumb alike, can make and receive calls and text messages.

What if you decide you really don’t need to access the Internet when you are away from your home base computer?  What if Navigation and email and Facebook are not important to you when driving down the road?  Then you probably don’t need a data plan.  And if you don’t need a data plan, you don’t need a SmartPhone.  A ‘dumb’ phone (which is a pretty smart instrument) will make and receive calls and text messages without a data plan.  It will probably cost a lot less, too.

It is my humble opinion that unless you are a person who lives on (an in) your phone, for whom your phone IS your computer, OR unless you are in a business that requires you to be richly connected to the full cadre of information and media housed on the Internet . . . you probably don’t need a SmartPhone.

And, if you decide you do need one, rather than get lassoed into a two year contract with a carrier, why not take control of the whole situation.  Start by buying a phone outright.  I recommend the Google Nexus 4 phone available through the Google Play Store.  At less than $400 it’s all the SmartPhone you’ll ever need.  Then, shop various carriers’ ‘bring your own phone’ plans and choose the best one – at the moment – without a contract requirement.  When you hear of a better deal somewhere else, take your phone and switch.  Armed with information about what constitutes data and data usage, and with your own phone, you will finally be in control of this important part of contemporary life.

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