All Forum Posts by: James M.

I definitely make use of internet marketing, but I wouldn't recommend relying entirely on it for your business. It's like the old saying goes "Don't put all your eggs in one basket".

If you put all your marketing time, money and effort into a single internet marketing entity (SEO, PPC, etc.) and something horrible happens, you have to start all over again. Diversify your marketing efforts both online and offline and more importantly, track as much as possible to see what works and what doesn't.

I find this a little amusing. I have been doing this for a little while now, but I never thought about writing a post about it... duh. This is definitely a great way to do for posting vids on CL and kudos to Justin for writing it. Nice work.

I would agree with Antony. When you do mix it up though, make sure you set up some form of tracking factor to know which mailings were the most successful. If you want to send them to a website, make sure you have some form of web analytics installed (i.e. Google Analytics) and send them to a unique page. If it is a phone number, then have them dial a unique extension or number. If it's an email, make a unique email address. Whatever it is, make sure it is unique for each mail campaign you send out. This will allow you to track which campaigns are the most successful. Best of luck.

The letter is alright, but I think it could be improved on. Unfortunately, there is no "magic bullet" for the perfect yellow letter; you need to test and track different letters for their success rates.

If you want some more examples, you may find a few here:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=yellow+letter&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2

Gotta love Google Images :). Good luck.

Personally, I have used both AWeber and GetResponse. Honestly, I wasn't a big fan of AWeber as it was kind of a pain to navigate, but this was years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if they changed their interface since I used them.

GetResponse.com, on the other hand, was pretty easy to navigate and use. Not only did I not have many issues with mail going to Spam, but I could also tell who opened up the emails.

At this point though I am actually using a package on my server.

The important thing is not really which provider will minimize your emails from going into Junk folders, but more about what you put in the emails. One of the biggest triggers of Spam filters is the ratio of content to links. If you have a lot of links and little content in the email, you can be sure it will land in Junk Mail folders, no matter what service you use.

Also, if you plan on using html code (which I wouldn't recommend), make sure it looks appropriate before sending anything out. I know from personal experience that Outlook can be very sensitive to HTML emails and unless a certain attribute is checked (which is isn't by default), then you emails will look like garbled code.

On top of that, it doesn't hurt to make quick video tours of your properties to attract some attention. Some of the results you can have with video can be pretty amazing!

Honestly, this is a pretty difficult question. There are really numerous ways to generate traffic to your site, both paid and free.

The most fundamental traffic sources that everyone at least seems to have head of is SEO and PPC. Whether or not they implement it is a completely different story...

For me, I have ventured both in SEO and PPC and have had some great success with it. In short, the main differences with SEO and PPC are the following:

SEO take Time, PPC takes Money.

Before doing either of them, you really need to learn about them as much as possible (especially with PPC). Trying to do these things based on assumptions will only lead to trouble (this is coming from personal experience way back when...)

But, there are literally numerous ways to get traffic for online marketing: social networks, web 2.0 platforms, syndication tactics... it all really comes down to two things: testing and tracking. No matter what new channel to experiment with, you always need to track your results to see if they are worth pursuing.

Also, its worth it to mention that you shouldn't use these other forms of online marketing specifically for marketing. Other marketing channels aside from SEO and PPC usually deal in the form of offering quality content and establishing relationships.

Heck, I have been doing online marketing for years now, and I still continue to test and track new methods.

Another option you may have (depending on your budget) would be to set up a virtual PBX. Setting up a virtual PBX makes your business sound much larger than it really is. With a virtual PBX, when someone calls, they will get a virtual receptionist which gives them directions such as "Press 1 for Jack, Press 2 for Sam, etc." Of course, you can change the numbers and messages to whatever you want.

While these virtual PBX services are pretty much fixed throughout the competition (both in regards to price and features), it is pretty cost effective. But then again, that all has to do how much time you plan on spending on the phone.

Seomoz is a great resource. While SEO is really an in-depth and constantly changing strategy, here are really the basics you should know.

SEO comes down to fundamentally 2 categories: on-site (the easy stuff) and off-site (the not so easy stuff). Since off-site based SEO is not easy to do and is somewhat out of your control, it will give you better results.

When it comes to on-site optimization, this has to do with the amount of times your keyword/phrase is used on your site. Really, the main places you will want your keyword/phrase to be is in your and <h1> tags. Also, keep in mind that spiders search your page top-down, and left to right, so the higher and the more to the left your keywords/phrases are, the better. In addition, make sure you have internal linking set up, which just means that you have links going to other pages on your site. There are a few other factors to help on-site SEO (i.e. alt tagging photos, keyword emphasis, directory structuring, etc.) but these are the ones that will have the largest impact on your on-site optimization efforts.</p> <p>The other one is off-site optimization, and that is how other sites view your site. The most important thing here is to a.) get other sites to link to your site and b.) make sure they are using your keyword/phrase in their anchor text. Really, the amount of backlinks (links going to your site) and from which sites (the higher the authority, the better) are your key focus on here, which will give you the best results. To get these kinds of backlinks, there are numerous things you can do, but it all really comes down to providing quality content that will entice people to want to link back to your site.</p> <p>Well, hope this quick SEO 101 course helps you out and best of luck.</p>

I would have to agree with all of you. Video is definitely going to be the next big marketing tactic when it comes to real estate. It allows you to make things more personal, more targeted, and it gives a user a much better understanding of the property without having to drive there (that is, if they even have the option).

That being said, I definitely think it would be worth the time to learn how to make quality videos.