Welcome to Internet marketing: the final frontier for real estate or any other business.

Create Usable Content

On the web, it’s all about content. This shouldn’t be much of a surprise to you since offline marketing is about content too. Think about it. The best advertising you’ve ever had has been word of mouth, T.V. and radio interviews, and an op/ed piece in your local paper. Maybe fliers, postcards, custom pens, fridge magnets, and plain old business cards have worked too, but these are just more forms of content – mini-content pieces, if you will. You might not think of word of mouth as content, but it’s the best kind of content there is: viral content.

Whether it’s print, audio, or video, something that tells your story to your target market is content and you’re going to need a lot of it. Consider writing articles and essays aimed at your target audience that solve problems unique to your market. For example, let’s say your ideal market is made up of 20 to 30 year olds, with families, who make over $75,000. Furthermore, you find that your best clients are professionals – people who are either in the medical, legal, or financial industry. Write articles directed towards those people. What kinds of problems do they face? What types of problems can you help them solve?

Create videos with useful tips or advice directed towards your target audience. Consider creating podcasts too. You could interview other industry professionals, or professionals in a related industry if there is some way their services might benefit your clients.

Create a Usable Website

By far the best resource on the web for usability is Jakob Nielsen’s site on usability (nngroup.com). It should go without saying, but a website that is slow, hard to navigate through, and links that get in the way of users trying to discover information are going to kill the user experience. People are going to leave your site faster than you can say “lickety-split” and you’ll be left wondering why your sales are in the toilet.

Basic principles of usability include minimalism in design, an intuitive navigation menu, usable and engaging content on the homepage that demonstrates what the purpose of the site is. If your web designer isn’t familiar with Nielsen’s principles of usability, ask him to get familiar. If he (or she) doesn’t seem interested, find another designer.

Be Careful With Subdomains – Try Not To Use Them

You might work for an agency, but you don’t have to get lost in the crowd. If you are competing with other agents in your area (i.e. you work for a company like ReMax or Century21), using subdomains might be standard practice. You might have an “agency page” that you’re encouraged to use. If at all possible, try to get a page where you can brand yourself. Don’t use free domains. They look cheap and unprofessional. Having your own website will do wonders for differentiating yourself from your peers – especially if you have control over the content on the site.

Also, which do you think looks more professional on a business card: www.yourname.com or www.yourname.yourcompany’sname.com or www.yourname.blogspot.com? Obviously, the personal web address makes you look more professional and independent.

Do Local Targeting

It’s unlikely that you’ll be doing business all over the world, or even across the country. Hire a marketing firm that specializes in local SEO. The company should be able to help you optimize your website for local search – which is what prospective home-buyers will be using when they’re ready to buy. If you come up first in the search engine, and you have compelling content that sets you apart from your peers, you’re probably going to be considered first.

A Few More Tips

• Don’t get suckered into signing a contract with a web developer or marketing agency that makes outlandish promises. No one can guarantee placement in Google, Bing, or any search engine (unless it’s a paid listing, and even then “guarantee” is probably not the most accurate word to use).
• Don’t pay a web developer for work that’s not done. Like any other business, you should require a schedule for site completion, milestones for progress, and progress reports in case something changes during the design process.
• Stay away from most marketing blogs on the Internet. There are a few really reputable companies and blogs on the Internet. There are even more “me too” companies, blogs that make wild and speculative statements about how to market online, and folks that have no clue what they’re talking about. Generally speaking, you can trust the stuff that comes out of places like searchengineland, SEOMoz, and Search Engine Journal (as well as anything these folks explicitly endorse). Obviously that’s not a comprehensive list of trustworthy sites, but it will keep you in the right neighborhood.

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1.Relevant and useful content

The success of your generating leads online is dictated by your website and the content and information your web pages are comprised of. It’s often easier to produce a website with content that you think should be included. But this is not the right strategy. The better approach is to always put the interest of the end user in mind and don’t simply throw up words about your company/products/services. Ask yourself questions like:

Why would anyone visit my website?

What content would a visitor find useful?

Is the presentation of my content interesting?

If your website offers content that resonates with your web visitors, you not only provide value, but you also increase trust and the “stickiness” of your site that will help increase the chance of converting visitors into potential leads. Some examples of useful content include market reports, how-to’s, neighborhood guides, and resources for buyers and sellers.

2. Use a contact form

Although, there many ways to display your company’s contact information on your website, a contact form is the single most important entry point for users and the “work horse” for your lead generation activity. A contact form can be integrated with web a web analytics tool (see below) to offer rich data regarding who, when, where and how your visitors are contacting you so you can make informed, data-driven decisions on how to make improvements.

Tracking this data also allows you test elements of your contact form (layout, communications, colors, etc.) to optimize and improve for better conversions. You can apply the principles of a contact form throughout your website on various pages; don’t just focus on the contact information page. For example, property pages and product/services pages lend themselves very well to contact forms and can be a massive source for generating inquiries.

3. Optimize call-to-actions

Every page of your website has the potential to generate a lead for your business. Therefore, it’s important to think about the objective of each page and what you would want a visitor to do when they land on the page.  For a real estate business, site-wide call-to-actions like “what’s my property worth?” or “get the latest market information” can be very effective to help create interest and convert visitors to warm leads.

Once you have decided the objective of your pages, you need to optimize for performance. First and foremost, this means the main “call-to-action” of your page needs to be somewhere very visible, ideally above the fold (upper half of the page) as it will drive significantly more clicks than other placements.  Also, there are many variables surrounding a call to action that should be constantly tested and optimized. This includes testing different communications, buttons, layouts, colors, and styles… all of which can have an impact on conversion rates and the success of your overall lead generation efforts.

4. Track leads with Analytics

Google Analytics is essential for measuring the performance of your online lead generation activity and the overall success of your website. With Analytics you can set goals and events for a variety of conversion activities on your website. This includes tracking clicks of links, downloads of files, and successful completions of contact forms.  Tracking these conversion events gives you a laser focused view of what marketing channels are converting best so you can clearly identify where to spend your online marketing dollars and optimize your cost per lead.

Without Analytics and some measurable KPIs in place, it will be very difficult for you to gauge what’s working and how to scale your lead generation efforts. Ask your web developer to setup your goals in Analytics and create reports so you can start making decisions based on hard data instead of instinct.

5. Run targeted Ads

Google Adwords is a power house for lead generation and is the single most effective online channel bringing targeted traffic to your website.  With Adwords, you can run campaigns in a highly controlled and focused manner to target specific keyword queries your customers are searching for in Google. You may also run targeted banner Ads in relevant websites associated with your niche and market.

The beauty of running Ad campaigns on Google Adwords is that you are in complete control of your campaigns and can make changes at a very granular level. Coupled with Google Analytics, you can identify what types of campaign variables (keywords, Ad copy, frequency, demographics) work best in terms of traffic to your website and conversion to leads via your contact forms or other call-to-actions you have set as goals.

Bob Samii is an online marketing strategist and founder of inMotion Real Estate Media, a real estate marketing and web development agency helping companies generate leads and increase brand visibility. You can find him on twitter: @cultureslurp

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I know what you’re thinking. Writing content is time consuming and may not give you the results you’re looking for immediately in terms of traffic and incoming leads. This may be true, but retooling your content now will only set you up for long-term, sustainable success with your real estate website. The idea behind Penguin is to reduce spam and reward web sites that do all the right things and writing quality content with relevant keywords is arguably the most important aspect to a great website.

However, before you start cranking out fresh content, understand that quality content doesn’t mean spinning old content in a new way. What I’m talking about is totally new, re-written copy that is interesting, creative, and properly uses the keywords you’re using to hopefully get a good ranking among various search engines.

If you have a blog or a ton of web pages with already existing content, slightly changing up the words or the feel of the article isn’t going to accomplish much in terms of search engine optimization. Instead, I challenge you to get involved with each article and produce something that you can be proud of and share with all your friends, clients, and colleges. Because once you’ve published your new and improved content, sharing it via Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and Linkedin is the very next step.

Joe Heath is a graduate of Indiana University and also holds a Graduate Certificate in Real Estate Development from Drexel University. After working in the market research sector and authoring published Market Snapshots for Hanley Wood Market Intelligence, Joe now works as a Web Marketing Specialist and co-owns Real Estate Web Creation with his partner, Ted Guarnero, a 25+ year real estate veteran.

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With increasing numbers of buyers and sellers embracing social media and online research to find their new home, we’ve been told that it’s essential to make sure that you have a wide and varied online presence. While this is important, the wide range of social media channels available can lead to information overload – and as we all know, when confusion enters the room, inaction is right behind.

Social Media Time Warp

To prevent information overload by embracing every single social media resource out there, pick your poison. Begin with one or two social media channels that your target audience frequents and focus all of your efforts on them. For example, Zillow.com and Trulia.com are two well known websites frequented by individuals who want to gain knowledge of a marketplace.

After sticking with one or two, if you’ve built up a nice following you could consider adding more channels, however if you do, think about using a social media management tool such as Hootsuite, Tweetdeck and Seesmic.

Paid options include sites such as Sprout and Sprinklr. Using these tools, it’s possible to monitor numerous social media channels on a single dashboard. You can follow one or more keywords, or topics and organize them to make monitoring even more simple.

Content Feeds Traffic

Every social media marketer will tell you that “content is king.” This is true to some extent, however I would add that “good content” is what will drive customers to your doorstep. When you consistently offer quality information that individuals can use – for free, you establish yourself as someone who is reliable, and is likely to be trusted.

According to a recent survey by eMarketer the objective of content curation, according to those surveyed, is varied. Answers reveal that 78.9% believe it is to establish thought leadership, while 76.1% said it was to elevate brand visibility and buzz. Over half – 60.6% use it for lead generation and 47.9% use content creation to boost their website’s SEO.

Narrow Your Focus

Finding the time to create quality content, however, can be difficult if you’re being distracted by the “noise” from so many social media venues. To keep information overload at bay, simplify your social media life. Unsubscribe from emails that are clogging up your inbox or “to read” files. There’s nothing like the feeling of freedom when facing an empty inbox. Don’t worry, there will always be another informative article or industry report – there’s no possible way you could read them all anyway. Just pick a choice few and stick with those only.

You’re certainly not alone. eMarketer’s study also showed that 73% of social media marketers have difficulty finding the time to create content. This isn’t surprising when you consider how much of a time suck social media sites can be.

Keep it simple. Even with the use of a media management tool, it’s not hard to get drawn into monitoring your channels 24/7. To avoid getting sucked back in, limit yourself to reviewing your channels at specific times of the day, and for a set amount of time, say 15 to 20 minutes.

As business owner, you need to remember that your audience is all about the “what’s in it for me”. If you’ve found out where they are “hanging out”, given them quality information that’s useful (and specific) to their needs, (thereby establishing yourself as a professional) and you have engaged them through social media, you’ll be ahead of the pack who just have a vacant blog and profile gathering “dust” with no real connection to readers who stumble across it.

What do you think? Has social media improved your business or been a waste of time?