Matt Fagioli organizer of ReTechSouth and I were talking last night. “I agree to talk while you are talking” is how I described the practice of following those on twitter who follow you in a bid to get your follower numbers up.

This practice seems near mindless. Most people who agree to take on hundreds or thousands of courtesy followers immediately filter them out using Tweet Deck or some other software (you’re not so clever, they do the same to you!)

I recently asked a couple of friends who have thousands (one has over ten thousand) followers to tweet one of my blog posts with a Tiny URL (a great tool BTW) attached.

Later I checked Google Analytics (another great tool) to see the number of visitors received from Twitter from my friends’ tweets. The amounts of visitors were surprising:

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HomeGain is continually reviewing and working to improve our policies, products, and procedures with our current, past, and potential clients.  In doing this, one wise member of our team, Jim Ridley, uncovered a common trait of the agents and brokers who are successfully growing their business. 

This identified success trait comes down to the basic question:  Are You a Real Estate Professional or Online Business Consumer?

HomeGain has found that the Real Estate Professionals are more likely to be successful.  The Online Business Consumer clients have shown to have a higher dissatisfaction and failure rate. This distinction will affect HomeGain’s way of doing business.  I would highly recommend that you should review your business to see where you fall.

This brings up a few questions:

¨       What is the difference Real Estate Professional and an Online Business Consumer?

¨       Can Online Business Consumer agents and brokers become Real Estate Professionals? 

¨       How can this affect your success and allocation of your marketing budget?

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I know that there are so many of you out there who read this blog and are excited about taking your business to the “next level” by using the Internet. 

Lately, at The eHomes Realty Network, I have been getting a lot of inquiries about the cost to get your Internet business off the ground.  Below are your basic costs to get going.  The marketing program you choose will vary from area to area. 

Website

I’m a big believer in using “template websites”.  There are many choices in custom websites also, but I prefer to put my money into marketing and generating business.  Most template websites are 90% customizable, affordable and already have a ton of generic content.  You can easily spend $10,000 - $20,000 on a custom site. 

IDX

Over 90% of the real estate leads we capture at Tropical Realty of Suntree are from people registering to view home listings on our website.  I highly recommend an IDX vendor versus your free MLS providers IDX.   There are multiple IDX companies available.  HomeGain offers an IDX website with their AIMS product. We will be launching our 100MPH Marketing Software in about a month for the state of Florida.  However, it won’t be available nationwide for some time.  I also recommend iHomefinder.com. Their tool is very easy to use, reliable and has a good capture mechanism. 

Pay Per Click

Using pay per click can be very costly if you don’t know what you are doing.  If you are using Google and/or Yahoo!,

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I love free stuff and am always thankful when I learn about it. Here are some websites that I use very often and they have helped me save time and money.

Slideshare.net

This is a presentation sharing website. You can upload just about any document or presentation and share it with others. I like to embed the presentations on my website. You can track how many times your presentation has been downloaded. It is also fun when your presentations are marked as favorites.

Google Docs

I use Google docs to store my documents online. Documents can be uploaded, saved, printed, and shared. Documents can also be converted to pdf files making them easier to send as email attachments. I got tired of certain documents being on my home computer and I needed them when I was at the office. No worries, now I just go to Google.

Picassa

Another great Google product. Upload your pictures to create slideshows. You can add text and music or voiceover. Google will also send it to Youtube.

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Let me start by saying that for the longest time, I was TOTALLY against “forced registration” (requiring visitors to provide their contact information before viewing the MLS). I not only did not force registration on our brokerage website, but I also wrote about why others should not do it either. In short, I was firmly planted in the “that’s a bad thing to do” camp.

Over time, I softened my position somewhat, when people would tell me that they were having success with it. I still would never do it, but I could not argue with their success.

First, Morgan Carey at RealEstateWebmasters.com told me that I needed to at least try it. Great. Nope. I still would not budge. In my heart, I thought that asking folks for their information

a) was unfriendly

b) it would drive traffic to competitor sites

c) would lower the quality of the lead

d) would result in more obscene emails from unhappy visitors

e) and any increase in # of registrations would be offset with an overall net loss in closings…well, you get the idea (grin).

As more and more people started reporting to me their successes (an example was Wayne Long, who was kind enough to share exactly what was happening on his site with me), I finally decided to TRY it. The folks that I visited with at the REW conference were helpful as well. Almost all of them had already made the transition.

How did it go?

Here are the results:

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One of the things that I often hear as a guy who helps guide people in their online marketing efforts is: “Help me get to the top of the search engines. I am spending WAY TOO MUCH on Pay per Click or (insert marketing venture here).”

That always concerns me to some degree. I want to take what I believe to be basic economics principles, throw them out here, and let’s see whether you agree.

Principle 1:

This is when a given geo-targeted market will have MANY channels that make up its online niche traffic potential. For example, the Louisville real estate market is accessed by MANY marketing channels (TV, radio, natural search engine optimization, Pay per Click, BuyerLink, etc.

Principle 2:

This is when the most effective first step in marketing to a geo-targeted market is to gain dominance of and HOLD a particular marketing channel WITHIN that given market. (Example: someone does PPC and gains a consistent and dominant presence there.) It helps them brand and has SOLID Return on Investment. That return on investment (since it is positive) may be higher or lower than another marketing channel, but it is YOURS.

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