In the evolving world of real estate Internet marketing, a new and successful real estate website strategy has evolved called “hyper local” marketing. This strategy has been driven by three elements: Google (the usual given), home buyers search techniques and real estate agents’ ability to build great website content base with neighborhood news tools and blogs.

Google decided to steer search terms “yourcity real estate” to larger real estate firms and directory style websites. Theoretically these websites are authoritative lists that give home buyers and sellers more options from which to choose. The algorithm will most likely get tweaked some more as time goes on. When Weather Underground shows up on the first page for real estate keywords, one has to wonder… What this means is that the Google front page competition shifts to the neighborhood, suburb and smaller real estate market areas’ keywords.

Home buyers’ search techniques are migrating to niche markets since A) the Internet can zoom in to any level of search granularity and B) using the broad search term “yourcity real estate” tends to turn up out of state, national websites. To find local Realtors and Realtors with specific areas of expertise, real estate searchers are using keywords that are becoming more market specific, such as “residential single family detached yoursuburb”.

With real estate agents able to research and add niche market specific blog entries to their websites, website visitors are able to find agents by their niche markets. Neighborhood news tools allow agents to post large articles that can encompass an areas history, scenic and cultural attractions, school data and general neighborhood descriptions.

The traffic that hyper marketing attracts is smaller in volume, but higher in quality. The real estate Internet marketplace is ripe for real estate agents to add their neighborhood or niche market content to their websites.

As part of your grand real estate marketing campaign, you write an informative entry on your real estate blog detailing the changes in your local market of homes for sale…but no readers contact you. One small step can make your time blogging time well spent. In fact, there may be several areas in your marketing where one small step will increase your leads and your Internet exposure.

After you have written your blog entry (and checked the grammar and spelling) you upload it to your site. In your blog editor, look for an icon that looks like chain links. This is for adding hyperlinks - a coded link to another page on the Internet. By highlighting words in your article, such as your city’s name, your real estate agency’s name or the words “please contact me”, and clicking on the hyperlink icon you can link these words to your real estate website’s Contact Us page. In marketing, this is anticipating needs and shortening the steps. If your article triggers a website visitor’s interest, make the path to turning them into a lead easy - provide a link to your contact information. Use this technique when you add articles to your neighborhood news tool also.

Similarly, never send out an email without including your real estate website’s address in the signature. There are several reasons:

1. Reinforce your brand (as reflected in your domain name), and
2. Use every avenue to drive traffic to your website (how many of your emails get forwarded? OK, so sending really good jokes is now marketing!).

One of the ways Google measures your real estate website is by the traffic it generates. So while search engines lead traffic to your site, conversely, when the search engines detect your website getting a lot of traffic (directed from business cards, print ads, etc.) it benefits your real estate website’s search engine ranking.

Another underused area is answering machine messages. Include an invitation on your business answering machine to visit your website to search your listings, blog entries, and buyer and seller guides.

These are just a few ideas to examine the real estate marketing steps you are already taking and tweaking them to make the most of the opportunities.

Your real estate USP, unique selling proposition, is that foundational statement that sets your real estate agency separate and apart from the broad market of real estate agents. With Internet marketing, your real estate website should reinforce your USP branding. If you do not have a USP yet or wish to refine yours so it has greater impact, veteran marketers give the following points for USP development.

A USP is a market positioning statement that consists of three segments: a product or service, an offer (preferably an irresistible offer) or promise of performance, and a guarantee. Essentially you are creating the justifiable reason to buy your real estate services.

The USP runs with permeating your passion in your website in that the first step is to match your real estate strong points with the market’s pain point. To paraphrase business systems consultant, Gerry Kendall, “What problem do your clients in the real estate market have that no one is addressing?” Answering this question takes some introspection as to how you are the same as the industry and in what way you can change to meet an unanswered need in the industry, possibly even creating and carving out a new niche market for yourself.

Once you arrive at your USP, make sure it permeates your Internet and traditional marketing and any staff training. It doesn’t do any good to promise prompt attention if your staff delays returning phone calls and emails.

Use your USP to fine tune your real estate website. Make sure your some of your testimonials reinforce the message that you deliver on your USP promise. Testimonials are the third party proof that you fulfill your advertising claims.

Why is it important to know the pain points of a real estate transaction? Because people are willing to pay you solve pain points. Since real estate can be seen as a commodity, tailoring a USP on “low prices” only ensures your love/hate relationship with your credit card. Solving a pain point lifts your real estate marketing proposition from helping buy a house to a wider field of helping someone find a solid and safe foundation for their family’s quality of life - proximity to schools, playgrounds, and outdoor activities.

Now, one last step in developing your USP. Test it out. Run it by people you know are honest and straightforward (or rude and incisive like teenagers). Take in their input and reactions or lack of reactions to refine it. As one marketer advised “Make it brash, love you or hate you, the market will never forget you. Anonymity is equal to oblivion in the market.”

Once tested and found to cause positive reactions, go full speed ahead and use it as a primary driver on your real estate website and in reaching your niche market. A good real estate website design has the design and graphic features ready to place your branding USP in memorable ways to your website visitors.

2008 is the year real estate marketing dollars pour more into Internet marketing and less into newspapers. It almost happened in 2007 with newspapers retaining about 36% of the marketing budget (yet declining) and real estate Internet marketing increasing to 33%.

This trend reflects the increase in real estate clients reached through the Internet. Real estate Internet marketing has already eclipsed the walk-in market. As the National Association of Realtors reported, almost 80% of homebuyers start their search on the Internet. Part of the equation is that newspapers get updated once a day, real estate websites can be updated quickly as new property becomes available. Home buyers and sellers are always interested in the most up-to-date market information.

As Stefan Swanepoel points out in his research on the 2008 real estate trends, this marketing shift means that “as a very general rule, agents need to ensure that their websites are ’sticky.’ In short that means that real estate websites need to be:

• Unique, local, relevant - content that makes buyers and sellers want to stay on your site.
• Constantly changing content - at least daily.
• Visual content - images, podcasts and multimedia.
• Viral content - content that people can share with others.”

From a look at Swanepoel’s short list, two strategic steps stand out:

1. Dive into learning the latest technology. It is part of staying at the forefront of effective real estate marketing. Indeed, virtual tours - video or slide picture tours - of homes and properties are a marketing tool that only an real estate Internet website can cost-effectively provide. Virtual tours on television are costly and usually a one-shot exposure. On a real estate website, the tour runs whenever the website visitor clicks on it. Very customer-centric.
2. Make sure you are working on your real estate website - either adding articles, blog entries, property listing updates. Ranking high on Google is worth the investment of time and money to attract leads. Just remember, even if you don’t think so, all your successful competitors believe it is so.

When entering or seeking to be competitive in the Internet marketing arena with your real estate website, rely on a website design professional such as Internet Marketing Consultants. Just like it is wise for home buyers and sellers to rely on a real estate professional such as you.

Real estate websites, like may virtual offices, mimic the demands of the traditional brick and mortar office. Major difference: the real estate website’s potential market is far more vast and therefore potentially more lucrative. It is an added benefit that it is an office that can attend to potential clients’ needs in many ways 24 hours a day. How are the traditional marketing concepts and principles carried over to the virtual office?

1. Driving business to your office.
Just as hanging your shingle out in front of your office is only effective for a portion of the traffic driving by the office - not enough to create a meaningful business. In the same way, just having a real estate website is also not enough. Driving traffic to your website has at least three main areas:

• search engine optimization to leverage the visibility search engines provide,
• including your real estate website address on all your printed and radio/TV advertising, and
• placing your website address in your signature on all your email correspondence.

2. Networking.
Just as social organizations and acquaintances offer opportunities to network with potential clients, the Internet has both social sites like MySpace and FaceBook for networking. More market-specific networking opportunities are the real estate blogging sites, such as Active Rain. Real estate blog websites can be used to post helpful information along with your website’s address in your signature. Build credibility and visibility.

3. Open Branch offices.
Just as more offices provide more exposure, website pages of information provide the contents that search engines seek. Each keyword-rich page becomes another “branch office” in that is another discrete piece of information for search engines to index and rank. Blogs and neighborhood news tools provide excellent opportunities to easily add content to your site and continue to expand the visibility of your virtual office.

4. Attention grabbing graphics.
Just as your printed real estate marketing materials need visual punch to attract someone’s attention, your website needs to be visually attractive and sell an image. Consumers read into a website presentation: If the website does not look professional, how serious is the agent about getting their business? If the website design looks cheap or like corners were cut, how much will corners be cut in their real estate transaction?

Continuous attention to a real estate website as part of an overall marketing program will reward real estate agents with a growing amount of business. Putting up a real estate website and expecting it to work financial miracles is akin to simply putting up your real estate sign and expecting all the business in your area to find you. You have to prime the pump.

Real estate website designers are well aware of Google’s content guidelines for website content. But many real estate agents who faithfully work on their website’s blog or neighborhood news articles may not be aware of the website content guidelines.

Whether it is pages added to your real estate website, entries added to your real estate blog or articles added to your neighborhood news tool, they are all avenues to add information-rich content to your real estate website. In order to get maximum mileage from your work, apply the Keep It Simple rule. Search engines are try to index a page for one idea or a set of similar keywords. Before you write, list the one to three keywords you are targeting in your entry. If your entry or article begins to get too big and encompass more than one idea, see where a natural break is to turn it into two entries. As Google puts it “write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content”.

When deciding on keywords, check them out on a web browser or a site like WordTracker to see if they are, indeed, the words your target market is using. To cover all bases, design a series of entries that cover on or the other of similar terms. For instance, you can write one article on your area’s real estate market using the keyword “Realtor”. Then write another article on another real estate subject using the keyword “real estate agent”. This way you put your real estate website on the search engine radar for both keywords.

Adding images to your blog and articles tremendously improves their impact with your readers, but the visual content is lost on the search engines. Make sure you describe in your text whatever imagery you are conveying in your graphics. Having a picture of a home for sale is enticing, but having the keywords “home for sale” in the article is search engine attractive, so to speak.

Make sure your titles, file names and any ALT tags are “descriptive and accurate”. File names carry weight with the search engines, don’t lose the opportunity to draw traffic by naming your neighborhood news articles “article_23.html”. Much better is to use variations of “my_hometown_real_estate.html”. Use the underscore (or with blogs use hyphens) to separate words. Remember not to use spaces in the file name - the Internet doesn’t see what is after the space as connected to what was before it.

Monthly or quarterly do your house cleaning and run a link check on your real estate website. Broken links tell the search engine that your website is old and, what is worse, they frustrate your website visitors.

Keep your links on a webpage to a reasonable number (less than 100) and in shorter articles and blog entries 3 to 6 is reasonable.

Make the most out of your articles, both for the information you give your clients and for the search engines, who, along with your competition, read every word you write.

In today’s competitive real estate market, virtual tours of homes for sale are fast becoming a real estate agent’s technology tool for capturing website visitors’ attention. Virtual tours can range from a slide show of a home’s interior and exterior photos to a movie of 180 degree or 360 degree panoramic view of different rooms in a house. Virtual tours can also be effective sales tools by capturing a 360 degree panorama of a house’s exterior and the nearby neighborhood, especially if all the neighbors’ flowering bushes are in bloom.

What does it take to set up a virtual tour? There are several ways to start using virtual tours in your Internet marketing program. The first decision to make is if the tour is a slide show or movie.

For creating slide shows, you (or your real estate website designer) can use Adobe’s Flash software. Less expensive software, such as GIF Construction Set Professional allows you to turn your photos into a slide show using animated GIF technology. This technology can also be used for spicing up the images on your website’s homepage.

Creating panoramic videos needs software to “stitch together” a series of still photos. One option is to use application service providers that hire the photographer, process the photos with their software, and post the panoramic pictures to sites like Realtor.com. Another option is to buy monthly subscriptions that allow the option of the real estate agent providing the pictures to a company that processes the photos and posts the virtual tours to various real estate websites. A third option is to buy the software, take your own pictures and create and post your own virtual tours.

Software such as PTGui Pro allows real estate agents to stitch together their photographs and make color and angle corrections. This ability to make corrections in the software comes in handy when you find that you forgot your tripod when you are at the house ready to shoot.

Just as with most technology, there are ways to get extra mileage out of your virtual home tours:

• Give CD-ROMs with the tour to the home owner to hand out to interested people;
• Send a collection of different home virtual tours to other real estate agents so they know what to expect when showing the house; and
• Have them available at your open house;

Virtual tours of the downtown shopping area and any of the area‚s picturesque city parks can also add extra pizzazz to a real estate websites.

Real estate agents can use the www.del.icio.us site to bookmark their real estate websites. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website that is it is designed to allow people to store and share bookmarks on the Internet, not just on their own computer. Bookmarks stored on the Internet can be accessed by you - or anyone - from any computer. Bookmarks on this site add another area to direct Internet visitors to your website.

You can tag your bookmarks, a process similar to saving in a folder by assigning it a one word descriptor. These descriptors then act like keywords when people look for items. Similar to online file naming techniques, your website can be tagged “real_estate” and be saved as a single word. You can assign as many tags to your bookmark as you like.

A tip to multiple tagging is, on the “Tags” form box, to enter your different tags with a comma separating the tags. Also the tagging dialog box provides suggestions for auto-complete tags from the popular tags others people used for that website.

As with any Internet marketing promotion, the more your clients and real estate agents you trade referrals with bookmark your real estate website on del.icio.us, the more visibility you enjoy.

By adding other bookmarks helpful to real estate buyers and sellers to your page, possibly borrowing some links from your “Community Links” webpage, you can establish yourself as an authority real estate information available on the Internet.

While you are at it, you can look up your real estate website to see who has bookmarked it and read what their comments are.

Mortgage websites utilizing the immediacy of Internet marketing are converting more website visitors to leads that websites that follow traditional loan application methods. Is your mortgage website going down the less effective, though more traveled route of converting leads? Internet Marketing Consultants (IMC) has created successful mortgage broker websites that ease the website visitors’ path to getting you the necessary information to start the loan process.

1. Build credibility with solid loan information. IMC offers a complete package of articles, guides and checklists that helps educate home buyers or people in the market to refinance their homes. At the same time, this information helps build your credibility as a mortgage and real estate expert.

2. Offer a fast method for loan preapproval. Even though the 1003 Application is the main application form to capture loan qualification information, on the internet, it is a major barrier to converting a visitor to a lead. IMC’s mortgage websites offer visitors several methods of sending their prequalifying information. The first offered is a “short form” application that gives you enough information to narrow down the possible loan packages available for that lead’s financial situation. The regular 1003 Application is available, of course, but that isn’t necessary to get the process started. Once you have made contact with your lead, you can help them fill out what to many people is a daunting application.

3. Search engine optimize to your specific market. All IMC mortgage website designs are search engine optimized for your particular mortgage market, whether that is defined by geography or the nature of your clientèle - commercial, residential or investor borrowers. Optimizing for the general terms “home loans” puts your site in competition with the entire world. With Internet marketing, specific keywords is the key to driving lower quantity, but much higher quality leads to your mortgage loans website.

4. Use a blog or neighborhood news tools to keep your site fresh and up to date. Blogs and neighborhood news tools are a great avenue for keeping your contact base apprised of today’s financial news that can benefit their efforts towards getting a home loan or refinancing their current home mortgages. In today’s intense mortgage market, opportunities tend to go to the loan officers with the best communication tools and skills.

5. Check your graphics. Your graphics are tools to reinforce the benefits that your services can bring to your website visitor. The main benefit they are looking for is the American dream - home ownership. Research has found that the pictures of a smiling happy family are not as effective as images of nice homes in which people can envision themselves. Apparently the happy faces images only convey someone else living the dream, not your visitor. Images of homes and lifestyles trump images of someone else’s success.

It is never too late to start or upgrade your internet marketing presence with a mortgage website. IMC has several web designs that have, for several years, successfully helped mortgage brokers convert their website visitors to warm leads and sales.