On Cinco de Mayo (May 5th), HomeGain had a special treat, as Kelly Barnes, a Realtor from Hawaii, came to visit us in Emeryville.

Mr. Barnes has extensive real estate knowledge within the Honolulu and West Coast mainland areas. He owns several multi-family apartment buildings in the Honolulu area and is accustomed to handling real estate transactions of tremendous value.

A BuyerLink subscriber for over a year, Kelly provided some great insight into what’s happening in his market as well as what HomeGain has done for his business.

“I feel confidant investing my marketing dollars with HomeGain, due to the simple fact that it works,” said Kelly.

Ryan Monsanto, Senior Sales Manager at HomeGain, stated, “Kelly had a great time visiting us and the feeling was mutual for HomeGain, as we are focused on building strong relationships with our clients.” Continue reading this post

Why is HomeGain’s BuyerLink program successful for our business? It is just PPC (pay per click), isn’t it? Couldn’t I do this myself and save money? Wouldn’t it be better to just use the natural search and not pay for clicks at all?

These are all valid questions I have asked myself – especially in a tough market like this – and I am sure I am not the only one asking! We all need to run our budgets as lean and mean as possible right now.

Isn’t the BuyerLink program just PPC and couldn’t I do this myself?

BuyerLink is a form of PPC but it is professionally administered. There is a whole learning curve involved with learning to run a successful PPC campaign. You will pay for this learning curve in one way or another. We could run it ourselves and just make the mistakes that are inherent when an amateur attempts something like this. That is one way to pay for it.

Another way is to simply hire someone to teach us. This is another form of payment but what if things change and the skills we learn become obsolete? Will we be able to keep up with current trends? Probably not.

The final way to pay for PPC is simply to allow HomeGain to administer it for us with skilled professionals who do this every day. To me that makes the most sense as I have other things to do and this is not my expertise. Continue reading this post

Linda Davis’ combined comments from her 2 part blog posts, “My Dirty Little Secrets”, on ActiveRain totals to an impressive 234!

She’s honest and frank and voices a side that I’m certain a lot of other agents feel as well.

In Linda’s part 1 ActiveRain blog post she reveals that she still sends out postcards and a newsletter. She doesn’t feel guilty for licking stamps versus sending out drip marketing emails, because her clients respond to her and would lose 40% of her business if she stopped.

Her part 2 blog post reveals that she uses HomeGain’s BuyerLink program, which has been responsible for an extra 25 sales a year for her team for the past few years.

Here are some comments generated by ActiveRain readers:

“Thanks for sharing! I’ve been paying about $0.75 – $1.00 per click on Google AdWords to drive potential buyers / sellers to my website, so I think I may give that a rest for a few months and give HomeGain a try.” Continue reading this post

We’ve heard all the arguments about lead generation companies. It’s been debated on blogs, in real estate forums and at office meetings. I recently read a blog comment which likened a certain lead generation company to a drug dealer.

Pretty strong stuff.

I’m the little guy with a little office. Even though I work for a franchise, I can’t personally compete in my area with the big franchises or the public MLS when it comes to driving traffic to my IDX website. If you do a search using the most sought after search terms in my area, all the big franchises are right there on the top of the first page, along with HomeGain and a few other lead aggregators. They can afford to outspend me to get there.

Blogging does keep me competitive with the big guys. As far as long tail searches, my blog is all I need, and I can outmaneuver the best of them on that playing field. But being the competitive person that I am, I wanted anther tool in my arsenal. In 2005 I signed on to HomeGain’s BuyerLink. At that time I had 3 buyer’s agents and needed to keep them fed with a good supply of leads. HomeGain generated about 30% of our team income that first year by driving traffic to our IDX site. Continue reading this post

Written by Tal Ariel who was previously HomeGain’s AIMS (Advanced Internet Marketing Solution) Product Manager.

Many of the agents subscribing to the AIMS program have enjoyed success, some closing as many as five contracts in their first six months.

Some of those who were less successful initially and decided to cancel actually came back after enough time was given for their leads to pan out.

As with any product or idea, there are bound to be obstacles and problems, both for the customer and the provider.

Interestingly, the biggest obstacles thus far with our AIMS product have nothing to do with features, functionality, guarantee fulfillment or customer service.

Rather it has been the MLS boards’ rules and regulations around IDX that often prevent an interested and willing agent from signing up.

Usually this is due to several possible issues:

• Brokers-only boards – there are the MLS boards that do not allow their agent members to get their own IDX feed from a 3rd party IDX provider. Instead they Continue reading this post

Dear Matt,

I currently pay for driving visits to my web site (with the BuyerLink program), but have a limited budget. Are there any free ways I can get more visits to my web site in addition to what I do with HomeGain?

- Sally Dalhgren, Minnesota (real estate agent)

Dear Sally,

What you’re referring to is Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the art of making your site more findable by the search engines (and therefore getting free traffic!).

While you could get a 4-year degree in SEO and still not know everything there it to know, one of the easiest things to do is improve your site HTML tags. Continue reading this post