Creating a sales situation in the mortgage and real estate business rests on credibility and the strength of the relationship. Understanding how your clients view your profession, both good and bad, is key to knowing what relationship barriers you need to overcome. Do you know what negative images you must dispel in order to rocket your customer relationships forward?

The first step in the counter intuitive self promotion campaign is to list all the things about mortgage loan officers that people find frustrating. Then introduce step two, which is your personal work habits or expertise that overcomes these barriers - get on the same side of the table!

Your real estate website’s agent bio page is actually a good page to sell yourself in this way. By listing the negative things that happen in loan transactions, you show yourself to be an experienced loan officer who looks ahead so as not to be caught unawares by potential closing disasters.

Address early the frustrations of not knowing where in the loan process the client is and how long the process should take. Give your clients information upfront on the possible delays and what steps need to be taken to overcome basic obstacles. This can be a helpful mortgage guide that you offer for free on your home loan website.

Touch-base phone calls and email reminders can seem like nagging unless your clients are informed in advance the steps and timing you have found necessary to land a loan on time. Always couch the steps in terms of advancing their dream, not just to get the job done. People will absorb the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” as long as they can keep their eye on the great benefit at the end of the process.

List all the other frustrations you hear from people who go through the loan process. Bring them up in your bio and then show, preferably with testimonials, how you help your clients avoid these financing pitfalls. Testimonials from real estate agents as well as satisfied clients add tremendous weight to your loan officer biography.

Often, the problem we face reading our biographies is that we know them from our perspective too well. When going over your website biography, try to read it from the perspective of your potential client. See if you have made your strongest points, not about your best mortgage officer features, but about your clients’ benefits. Counter intuitive as it sounds, your website biography should be mostly about your customers, not you.

Successful businesses always know what their clients think. Real estate websites have a great opportunity to provide customer feedback. With your website’s guestbook, you build a solid database of contacts. As these contacts progress through the real estate sales cycle, they create an important asset for you - their experience of working with you.

Mining your contact base once or twice a year with a short email survey can provide eye-opening insight into both areas for improvement, but especially opportunities to serve the real estate market that you may not have considered. Here are some tips to running a successful survey campaign:

1. Bite sized surveys. Pick four to six questions in areas that you want feedback. Tell your client at the beginning of your email survey how many questions there are. Make the questions easy to answer with multiple choice answers if possible. Always add a follow-up “Why?” question to give the opportunity for more your customers’ to give more feedback on their experiences or expectations.

2. Offer an incentive if possible. One incentive may be receiving a free report on a step by step program to improve credit scores, enabling your clients to get the best loan rate in their future real estate ventures. If you are considering hiring a publicity company to carry out your survey, you may consider doing the survey yourself and re-allocating those marketing dollars to an incentive can benefit both you and your client. Tie reciept of the survey answers to a pledge of financial support, even if its a few dollars, benefiting a third party such as a favorite charity. Add steam to your survey by tying it to a fund-raising event popular with your clientele, like St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital or the Red Cross.

3. Allow for anonymous responses. Suggest ways people can answer anonymously if that helps them be more honest and forthright in their answers. Getting an anonymous45@gmail.com account on Google does not take long to set up. Then your clients are also set up to write their congressman!

4. Take the opportunity for subtle self-promotion by having a responding Thank You email that directs them to a recent blog entry or news piece on your real estate website.

5. To really add mileage to your real estate survey, after a week or so, send emails to respondents telling them of the positive changes or new offerings their feedback set in motion. Letting your customers know when they are right and feel a little gratitude is a marketing plus in the customer loyalty column. Plus, this step is an incentive for you to take your survey seriously.

Surveys are internet marketing’s review mirror. If you want to go back and contact clients to get referrals or future business, it is always easier if you can see the terrain into which you are steering!

Keep tabs on the future of the real estate market so your marketing and real estate website are positioned for buyers’ and sellers’ current and future real estate needs. The National Association of REALTORS® has found several trends in real estate trends that may well be determining the future buying trends. Here are a few of their insights:

Top Nine Methods Veteran Home Buyers Look for Property:

1. Real estate agent - 85%
2. Internet/real estate websites - 80%
3. Yard sign - 63%
4. Newspaper - 55%
5. Open house - 47%
6. Homes for sale book or magazine - 34%
7. Home builders - 26%
8. Television ads - 11%
9. Relocation company - 5%

When these real estate veterans contact you, they are looking for specific help from their real estate agents:

• 53% are looking for help finding the next real estate property,
• 13% need help with negotiating price,
• 11% are buyers needing help determining how much of a home they can afford or sellers looking for what market comparables are, and
• Less than 10% still need help with the paperwork or help in finding financing with a mortgage institution.

The top nine methods of property location help with finding material to add to your real estate website. Make sure your neighborhood news tool is announcing your open houses well in advance. On your community links page, adding links to three local builders you have found trustworthy can help you get positioned with home builder who recommend real estate agents to their clients.

Your real estate website covers the number one reason people contact a real estate agent - looking for real estate. But does your biography cover the benefits of your negotiating skills, which more than 10% of your website visitors are looking for?

The baby boomers have been a force in real estate market for decades and they will continue to affect the market, only now they are predicted to influence it in new ways. The over-building in the Sun Belt was partially in anticipation of the wholesale movement of retiring baby boomers heading to warmer climes. But the effect foreseen in local real estate markets is the increased popularity of single level 2 to 3 bedroom homes. What remains to be seen is if this generations’ wanderlust parlays into an increase in popularity of vacation timeshares.

Using the NAR’s research to round out your own experience in the market can give you insights that are great material to add content to your real estate website and blog. And by anticipating trends, you can spot them earlier when they arrive.

“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.

Real estate agents in markets with international buyers benefit from an Internet marketing presence. A real estate website is your interactive marketing arm that is immune to time zones and available any where in the world that has the Internet. With the dollar falling in value against foreign currencies coupled with the residential real estate market in a slowdown with prices falling in at least 77 of the major metropolitan areas, American real estate has become the international bargain.

Hawaii continues to attract international buyers, especially from around the Ring of Fire. According to the NAR, 47% of foreign buyers bought their US property for vacation purposes. This may account for the fact that condominiums and apartments are twice as popular with international buyers as American buyers.

If buying follows the 2006 trends, real estate agents can expect over 50% of the foreign real estate investments to be in the Florida (26%), California (16%) and Texas (10%) markets. Positioning your real estate website for your market’s international clientèle is an important part of your marketing strategy. With 13% of the buyers coming from Mexico, with an additional 3% from the rest of Latin America, bilingual websites in these markets are positioned to capture the Latin American buyers. Certain real estate websites have also added web pages translated into European and Asian-Pacific languages to attract and educate the international buyers. Europe, at 33%, was the largest foreign buyer in the US market.

The National Association of Realtors in its October 2007 The Global Neighborhood Report noted “The Internet has also provided a vital conduit to potential buyers around the globe, making property details and related market information one click away for anyone with interest and an Internet connection. And if softer housing prices have tempered some U.S. homebuyers‚ enthusiasm to move forward with a transaction, quite the opposite could be said for many foreign buyers, who are witnessing even better deals when weak-dollar prices are converted into their currency equivalents. For example, the British Pound Sterling, worth $1.44 in 2001 rose to nearly $2.00 in mid-2007, allowing a U.K investor to buy considerably ‘more house,’ simply through favorable exchange rates.”

Real estate websites positioned for the European and Caribbean markets have begun including a translation glossary of American to British words. For instance in the UK, a “closing” is a “completion” and a “condominium” is a “flat”. It is a simple addition to a website and follows the sales principle of not having your customer leave your website to get service you can easily provide.

Knowing the attraction your real estate market has for the international buyers and investors, helps you create the web pages and add the web tools that foreign buyers are looking for. Working with a real estate web designer will aid you in making sure your content and page set-up are optimized for the search engines so your potential international clients can find you in their Internet searches.

For real estate agents, getting qualified real estate leads from the Internet can be a frustrating, time consuming process. Buying leads from Internet real estate lead generation companies often brings the same dismal 1% hit rate of a massive direct marketing campaign. A 1% return means sifting through a lot of gravel to find the few sapphires. Savvy real estate agents are finding that the Internet itself can qualify, as well as generate, real estate leads.

Use these time tested techniques to maximize the return on your internet marketing investment:

1. Rely on your own personal real estate website to generate leads. The benefit of a personal site is that it:

• Your website is search engine optimized to your real estate market and area of expertise;
• You control the content and can update the content without waiting for IT;
• Works for you 24/7 and follows you to whichever real estate broker you work with.

2. Work with a real estate web design company with proven search engine optimization methods. You know real estate is a competitive marketplace; high ranking in the search engines is a must. Unlike the traditional marketing, where you want to be the last real estate agent a client talks to, on the Internet, you want to be the first.

3. Use your auto responder to quickly follow-up a lead with your contact information, but then give them a benefit, something useful, with another email. For instance, give information of homes in your listing or interesting articles in your blog or neighborhood news area of your website. Then follow up with a phone call. These are most likely those basic steps you already take to establish “mindshare”, just make sure you do them consistently and in a timely manner.

4. Monitor your lead responses. Track the number of calls and internet leads and the outcomes of those leads. Use your feedback to tweak information on your site, possibly target new keywords, fine tune follow-up techniques and assess where to invest marketing funds to most effectively expand your Internet presence.

Your real estate website is the technology to help you generate leads from a fast-growing segment of the real estate market - the Internet buyer. As well as your website is designed to build a relationship (even if virtual at first) through its information, your follow-up techniques to this powerful lead generating tool are the key to its maximum success.