Fujifilm FinePix Z20fd digital camera has technological improvements that benefit real estate agents with websites in several useful ways.

Where the FinePix Z20fd really stands out is its Dual Blog mode for your real estate website that automatically re-sizes any still image or movie so you can easily post the images or movie to your real estate blog. The compact blog-ready image is also small enough to be sent by email to your home buying clients or property investors.

Real estate agents have to work with a wide range of lighting conditions form interior and exterior property shots to the need for high resolution balanced with uploading acceptable image sizes. The Z29fd has the features that benefit agents in these conditions.

As with many digital cameras, it is small enough for Realtors to slip in their pocket. It has the traditional memory card storage plus an additional 45 meg in-camera storage for times when the memory card is full. Its 3X optical zoom takes in most applications, however, jumping up to the pricier Z100fd allows an increase to 5X optical zoom.

For an extra edge in making your property photos as professional looking as possible by reducing image blur, the camera uses Fujifilm’s Picture Stabilization technology – faster shutter speeds and higher sensitivity. This technology also makes it easier to shoot acceptable low light indoor photos of room interiors. Helping with handling various lighting conditions, FinePix Z20fd has 14 different scene positions for automatically adjusting from bright sun to low light night scenes.

For building a virtual home tour video, the FinePix Z20fd has a Successive Movie mode that allows Realtors to use in-camera software to stitch different videos together into 60 second sections. The 2.5″ LCD view finder helps viewing pictures, especially in cases where the photographers where glasses.

Ease of use also figures in its ability to transfer images wirelessly to any IrSimple(TM) enabled cell phones, projectors, laptops and photo kiosks.

With all the different leverage points real estate websites offer with blogs, vlogs, featured listings with room for plenty of property images, and the growing popularity of virtual tours for moving homes for sale quicker, digital cameras are a must. The well-priced Fujifilm FinePix Z20fd digital camera could well become one of your potent Internet marketing tools.

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.

“Permission Marketing” author Seth Godin gave several great tips for your real estate blog in a recent interview with Wordtracker.com’s Academy, a leading keyword analysis company. Tips from a successful writer who understands marketing and creating loyal customers as well as writing are always helpful.

• Story telling is most effective when told right. “The story has to begin with something compelling enough that you want to learn more about the story. The mistake marketers make is that they tell all the story at once, take it or leave it. People need to realize they have to ensure an unfolding dialogue.” Your stories can be like the jokes in a Crosby-Hope Road Show, a theme that keeps popping up and changing to add liveliness to the scene. Your client’ testimonials can be a great source of anecdotes that add to your unfolding story.
• Create your own feedback loops to spur improvement or cover popular themes. When Seth was asked if he felt under pressure to always be coming up with new ideas, he responded “I do it because I want to do it. Every time I am interacting with the outside world I‚m thinking about why that interaction happened, whether it was a good one or a bad one.” If your entry is a “good one”, the result may be your client receives information helping them with the selling or buying process or impels them to respond to your call to action. Listen to your clients when they give feedback on your real estate website.
• Sit down and write, don’t let the perfect kill the good. “I am not a perfectionist. I think that I am very focused on doing the best I can quickly and fixing it to make it better. A perfectionist doesn‚t do things quickly, it takes them too long to shift.” A short entry with good information that carries your personal enthusiasm is much better than sporadic short pieces that have been crafted with the word crafting ability of Edgar Allen Poe. Plus, by the time you get that blog entry perfect, the real estate market may have shifted!
• Content is king. Asked about search engine optimization (SEO), Seth pointed out there are no short cuts. “The best SEO is great content. Don’t do that and you don’t get much.” The reason real a estate blog helps with your search engine ranking is that it is a great opportunity for adding useful keyword-rich information to your website.

Wordtracker offers a free keyword search trial at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/. You can type in the keywords you are planning to use in your real estate blog entry and see what variation is the most used one on the search engines. Then you can modify your blog entry to use that keyword variation.

You can get great ideas and content for your real estate blog entries from the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) website’s research section. As a Realtor, you are familiar with the extensive realtor.org website. The NAR continually adds articles and real estate market reports and survey results to its real estate research website. This is a great resource for real estate blog entries – find a home buying or selling subject and digest it for your particular real estate market.

The NAR’s real estate website also serves as a comprehensive clearinghouse for real estate associated articles in their Field Guides section. Each Field Guide is a list of articles on a particular subject from various real estate periodicals and government websites (such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac).

As a NAR member, Realtors® also have access to “members only” articles that are very informative and usually accessible by paid subscription to another website or organization. Use your benefits!

Be sure to check out the “Top Ten” Field Guides. From these ten lists you will find plenty of content and keyword-rich information for your clients and website visitors. An additional benefit of the electronic library, is that you can cut and paste quotes for your articles. This both saves you typing and adds a trust building third party quote to your blog entry.

An additional benefit to checking the NAR research is that you can get more ideas of what untapped markets are in your back yard and how you can tweak your internet marketing.

Note of caution: follow the “fair use” guidelines of the copyright laws – besides legal ramifications, Google is watching and doesn’t reward content reappearing.

Do a little real estate research with your helpful NAR and then let your muses loose!