All Forum Posts by: Herbert Smith

Nope no fish...just trying to help out a few folks. Not sure what you mean by fishy? The redirect through my site? I track my efforts in most all online activity, Im not gonna post here if there is no one interested and not clicking through. This approach provides me an indicator my stuff is getting checked out. I have met many a REI, brokers, agents etc at my local REIA's that benefited greatly from this very same advice.

Realize, most people involved in real estate are not aware of Freebie courses and such that will benefit their business and show them how to position themselves online as an authority. Now, dont get me wrong, most of these courses will try to sell you later, but the information offered up front is priceless. The for-cost courses may not be what people in this industry need, it is geared more towards Internet Marketing, i.e selling stuff online...You could get an education in online marketing for free without spending a dime, I know I have for the most part. If the information provided does not benefit this site I will simply stop posting and just take information.

My purpose is to give back a little bit as I have taken in the form of free education concerning Real Estate Investing and related activities.

Paying it forward? You Tell Me....

Chris

Many ways to skin a cat indeed! Hopefully folks can pick up a thing or two via posts such as this...

After re-reading this post, I think there may be some confusion as to what I was saying, below is a sample of code you would use to perform what I am speaking of:

meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"

-or-

meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"

As you can see this is not your garden variety "no follow" code which I believe has caused some confusion....hope this clears up any confusion...sometimes the mind is too fast for the fingers:)

Exactly, this way your "hidden" page does not show up on the organic search rankings. If this were to happen, it would deem your incentives for signing up to a mailing list useless.

For instance, If you had a free eBook give away titled foreclosure secrets, and you wanted to use this as an incentive to get visitors to sign up for your mailing list. You most certainly would not want this page popping up on the first page of google results. Otherwise folks typing in "Foreclosure Secrets" might see your download/delivery page on the first page of results, not good!

So by having the "no follow" tag in there, I guess what your calling a "vote", is really the google bots deeming this page not relevant to the desired search. So it will not be displayed in the organic results because google is all about relevance, and you have essentially told google this page is not relevant, Follow?

Sticking this tag on one page will not deem your whole site irrelevant though, just the page in which you insert this code.

If you would like to test this out, take your top organic traffic ranking pages on your site, slap in a no follow tag, wait for the bots to come by and see what happens to your organic search listings. Going, going, gone....I think you would agree this would not be beneficial.

Many internet marketers and business owners have fell victim to this little bit from unscrupulous web designers that just happen to be in the same market as the people they are designing sites for...just a little food for thought....

For SEO I highly recommend Brad Callen and his services. Here's a link to his site, sign up for his eCourse which in and of itself will show you how to get to the top of the search rankings.

I actually use the stuff he teaches on alot of my consulting gigs, my clients range from personal trainers, massage therapists to a couple real estate investors (care to guess how I got into REI?). Anyway, this guy has been around since the advnet of the internet and knows his stuff. His mailing list subscription alone will give enough tips to keep your SEO'ing efforts going for a long time.

Anyway, in my industry this is the gold standard, the dude is in line with all major search engine algorithm changes and tells you how to adjust your SEO efforts accordingly. Check it out here:

[LINK REMOVED BY ADMIN - NO AFFILIATE LINKS ALLOWED]

You will have to wait a second to get the drop down window where you can subscribe to his letter (typical Internet Marketer tactic:) I wouldnt worry so much about the software, just sign up for the letter, its golden.

Hope you find this helpful, it is the veritable holy grail of SEO, trust me.

yes, its a command robots="no follow" or something like that, most internet marketers use this for download pages so their "Freebies" page isnt spidered and indexed, this sort of ensures their incentives arent accessible to just anyone. This code is used when you have an opt-in form set up, after the visitor opts in to your email list, they are redirected to this page with the no-follow tag to download their gift.

I dont use it anymore as i figure if somebody wants to hack my site bad enough for a freebie giveaway, then have at it. A couple templates I used early on in my career actually had this crap in the code, couldnt figure out why my SEO wasnt happening, go figure....

Hope this helps,

Chris

Good post Benjamin, I totally agree with what you said. There are other methods out there that are free that leverage the SEO advatnages of certain websites. Article Marketing is the most popular that springs to mind. Though this is a FREE marketing method, it can be labor intensive...Does outsourcing spring to mind?

That being said, if you run the numbers, learn to do it right, monitor, track, and test your results. Then PPC wins hands down, the unfortunate part is the learning curve, which at times can be expensive. Again, Good post Benjamin.

Regards,

Chris

I agree with Alan, I personally use an answering service that pre-screens the callers then gives me the goods based on criteria I set up with them.

Give these folks a decent script that emphasizes you are a serious buyer & constantly have deals on the table. This will provide a bit of scarcity and intrigue into the seller. They will gain a certain amount of confidence as you have a perception of customer service (to them the phone service will look like an extension of your actual company), this will help to put them at ease that you are a professional and not some fly-by-night con artist trying to scam them.

So anyway, its sort of a screen, but I prefer to call it a data collector...

I think I just confused myself...

Chris

Meta tags are still alive and well. Now, will they get you automatic search engine rankings in google? No. But try whipping up a website for real estate investing with meta tags for a personal trainging site and see how relevent Google finds you. Its pretty simple. As previously stated, this is a small snippet of SEO but an important one, especially if you are going to use PPC to drive traffic.

When google and yahoo run their algorithims on your ads to determine your keyword relevancy and your keywords dont match up with your content, tags (description, keywords, content), title, headers, etc then you get whacked with about $1.00-$10.00 bids as the bots deem you unrelevent. However, (and I have seen this time and time again, go back and fix all that and your bids magically go back down to <.10 cents....so yes it does matter.

This Meta-Tag death rumour has been around for years. Mostly due to the olden days where you could stuff the tags and get tons of untargeted visitors to your site. Google is all about the users experience and constantly changes their search algorithms to make searches as laser targeted as possible so you dont type in real estate foreclosure and end up at Captain Mikes Seafood Hut....

PPC is not a big mystery, read googles/yahoos rules and watch the tutorials and thats all you need. These systems have all the budgeting and controls included, you just need to learn how to use them (Hint: its easy!!)

Lead capturing is nothing more than an auto responder, aweber rocks, but there are others...your best bet is to capture your own leads as you know who you want to target. Sometimes these things are framed as big mysteries when in actuality its all simple, you just need to front load your time to learn it.

Take REI for example, when you started did you know how to do it off the bat? nope, had to learn a little, get scammed a few times, then realize you just needed to sit down and learn a few things before you could close your first deal. Marketing on the internet, setting up websites, optimizing websites, its all the same...before outsourcing you should run through it your self, else how do you know if your getting what you paid for?

Whoa what a rant, sorry....food for thought I guess.

Best Regards,

Chris

P.S in case any of you were wondering, I am an internet marketer and make a living as one, I am now getting into REI as its yet another avenue to line the old pockets if you know what I mean...;-). Not even sure if that was an issue but it appeared to be...

Soemtimes this may be the case. In these instances you may want to drive offline traffic online via more traditional methods. Rather than a phone number, drive them to an opt-in page.

Look into ad's in trade journals, publications, news papers.

Another option is to look into taking out ads in industry related news letters & ezines, contact directly the list owners and possibly pull off a JV with them.

Sometimes there is just not a clear cut solution for some industries, thats when you really need to look at cross promotional type approaches. Explain the benefits and pretty much sell your service to people that might be perceived outside of your niche, but closely enough related to where they would do business with you.

Alot of it depends on your service and what you are trying to achieve. Go where your audience hangs out, are there online forums? Post there... Are there online blogs? Comment there...Take the top 5 professionals in your local area, call them up and ask for advice. No need to make a hard sale, just inquire as to whether your services might be of value to someone in their field...

I know some of this is elementary, but sometimes the most simple solution is the right one....Occums Razor......

Hops I may have sparked some ideas,

Chris