An example of No Market Research

Posted in: Blog, Marketing, Real Estate by Paul McEwan on March 29, 2010

Just had a letter handed to me by an assistant. It was..

• hand delivered to her home by a Realtor this morning.
• The envelope was hand written.
• The content was a very well put together article/guide to selling your home
• accompanied with a nice personal letter from the Realtor who did the delivery. (could have used a second set of eyes)

The person who got the letter doesn’t own the house. She rents it. FAIL

If you’re going to go to this much trouble to market, why not spend some time doing the research? There is a way to know if the home is owner occupied. You can even find out where the absentee owner lives. If you can’t then hire someone like us to do it for you.

This poor Realtor double failed. The person who received the letter not only rents but she works for a top 1% Realtor. Not a hope in hell on this one.

MyRealPage Postcard Marketing Campaign

Posted in: Blog, Marketing, Printing, Real Estate by Paul McEwan on March 22, 2010

You are not JUST ANOTHER REALTOR.

Not if you are a myRealPage Realtor.
You are a SmartPhone Enabled Realtor and that’s exciting!
You also have VOW and many other advanced website features many don’t have or don’t know about.

Why not direct people to your website with a proper marketing campaign.

TribalYell will help you inform prospects of your website features with FREE content on the back of your postcard campaign.

Don’t have a postcard campaign?
TribalYell has that ball already rolling for you too. Here’s our solution to help get your prospects online.

Here’s what you get:

• 1 Custom postcard design (with your branding)
• 18,000 postcards printed with your custom design on side 1
• 3 x6,000 campaigns pre-printed side 2 (marketing aimed at increasing website traffic)
• Delivered to 1,500 owners in your farm area once a month for a full year rotating the message every month.

Each ad rotation comes with a “badge” for your website that ties the message together like this one below.

Claim your area now (We will not deliver more than one campaign per area)

One cost covers

• design
• print
• postage
• delivery to the post office
• 3 website badges

Start now

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Google Goggles and Real Estate

Posted in: Blog, Marketing, Web Design by Paul McEwan on

What is Google Goggles?
Imagine taking a picture of a house with your phone, submitting that picture to a Google search and getting all the listing details on it. That’s what Google Goggles will do.

Thanks to the ever advancing Google, you can now search the web by taking a picture of the item you want to know more about. While this technology is in its infancy, in 2 years it will be full blown so the question is: What does this mean for Real Estate?

Image searching. It’s not new and it works by analyzing the image name and alt tags given to the image within the HTML code. What is new is the ability to take a picture and submitting it to a search – That will affect real estate.

What are image names and alt tags?

Image Names
If you upload an image with a name DC0023854.jpg blind luck will produce any search results. Changing the image names to something like 103-548-main-st-vancouver.jpg has a much better chance of being indexed by search engines and found by someone, which hopefully leads back to your website

Alt Tags
Alt tags are descriptions written into the HTML. You don’t need to know HTML to add Alt tags. When you upload images to Facebook, flickr or Picasa (and almost any image hosting site), there is an area to add tags and many times a description.

Surprising how many images from the MLXchange describes itself as “exterior front” (the default). Please change this to the appropriate room at least. Add to the description in the MLX to help yourself further. Put the address or who it’s listed by or even your website in that additional description area. The question remains whether or not the MLXchange is adding these descriptions into the HTML as Alt tags. We know for sure that it renames the pictures. For now, who cares, let’s get used to doing this and hope the MLX will change.

Here’s the result
When someone (anyone using Google) types in a particular address of a house to get info on it, the idea is to have your listing images show up first. In the future, (a few years away), when someone takes a picture of that house for information on it, your information will show up.

It’s important to note: Adding text on the image via Photoshop (or image editing software) does not help at all.

If you feel like geeking out on this subject, read more about it here:
http://www.realestateseopros.com/blog/seo-news/google-goggles-for-real-estate-coming/

Don’t forget to contact us if you need any help with this or anything else.

Handling duplicate content

Posted in: Blog, Hosting News, Web Design by Paul McEwan on March 10, 2010

Trying to increase search engine relevance by duplicating content within a website is an old trick that search engines figured out a long time ago. In those days some SEO people went so far as to duplicate and publish the website hundreds of times with links all point ot one final landing page at the real site. If you try that today, it will not only fail but it will set you to the back of the SEO bus. When building a new website or signing up to a template site where all the content is provided (and therefore duplicated hundreds of times), sooner or later handling the duplicate content needs to be dealt with. How do we do this? Let me count the ways.

If you are signing up to a site where all the content is provided then please edit it all. Every last bit. No time? Hide the pages you will come back to later.

If you have a high traffic web site receiving most of the visits and another one you are planning to move to as a new re-designed website, (giving it a new URL and a fresh new look),  then you don’t want to lose all that traffic from that old site. But you can’t keep both sites online because they will have duplicate content and that is something often penalized by search engines. How do you proceed?

The best practice is to do a 301 redirect. The 301 message on the Internet is handled by the search engine as: moved permanently. Here is how you can make a 301 redirect for your web page:

With PHP:

The code needs to be placed in the Header section of the website, so that the search engine can read it first.

Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );

With .htaccess:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^old\.php$ http://www.domain.com/new.php [R=permanent,L]

The code above will direct all the traffic from the old.php to the new.php page.

With the rel=”canonical” directive:

If you run an online store and want to sell a custom made handbag, which is available in several colors, and decide to dedicate a separate page on your site for each color, then you have about 3 or 4 identical pages. You can use the rel=”canonical” element to direct all traffic to the page with the most popular color.

This will lead a search engine to point all the traffic from the similar pages to the page you have specified. This code needs to be placed in the header section of all the web pages you wish to lead somewhere else.

With the URL Redirection Manager in the Web Hosting Control Panel:

If you don’t like to meddle with code, or with new file creation, or anything like that, you can use the handy URL Redirection Manager available with all our shared web hosting plans, where a simple web interface will allow you to choose which pages to be redirected and what redirection code to be used.

Don’t forget to contact us if you need any help with this or anything else.

The World’s Best Working Graphic Artist Talks About Clients

Posted in: Blog, Design by Paul McEwan on March 7, 2010

Michael Bierut (his wiki here) is arguably one of the worlds best graphic artists with some of his award winning work on display in galleries around the world. He has mastered the ability to tell a story through visual presentation for any given reason. A visual story that is told without the viewer of his work knowing their subconscious is receiving it.

When a story enters through the subconscious it is locked in place. What’s you’re brand saying?

Michael Bierut is humble about his abilities, as you will see in this video of himself discussing clients and it’s nice to see he is still a true working graphic artist.

Tribal Yell. Say it out loud.

Posted in: Blog by Paul McEwan on

TribalYell is passionate and focused on real estate branding, design and marketing and we will create raving fans for your business or project. We have studied hard the Harley Davidson, Google and Mac phenomena and understand the criteria involved in becoming a leader of your particular community. We call these communities of customers tribes. When a tribe is surrounding you and praising you, the praise becomes louder and louder until it is a so loud it is heard above all the rest. We call this the Yell.

A Tribe is a group of people sharing a common interest. A Yell is a proclamation or declaration in a distinguishable tone or voice that is heard above the rest.

Tribal. Yell. Say it out loud. Go on. It has a nice ring to it doesn’t it?