Similar to radio shows, creating effective real estate website podcasts is more than creating a recording. Effective real estate website podcasts draws upon your judicious use of adjectives to describe real estate markets and the effect of changing economic news. Unlike videocasts, which have pictures and video to help illustrate your remarks, podcasts rely on your descriptive language to paint the whole picture and get your listener involved. Podcasts are one more Internet marketing tool to boost the visibility and helpfulness of your real estate website.

Podcasting mirrors the marketing principles found in writing for blogs, article managers and web pages. Start with as riveting and attention-getting a title as possible.

Many people may be downloading your podcast or getting it sent to them on an RSS feed so your title will be a large determinant as to whether they play your message now, later or never.

For the body, review your real estate scene and go with news; education; tips for selling, investing or buying; reviews of local attractions; or a commentary on the real estate economy. Don’t be afraid to be opinionated! People may love or hate what you say about the local economy and real estate market, just don’t be lukewarm and boring. With something out of the ordinary, listeners will tune in to see what you have to say. Best length? Stop before you start repeating yourself. If people can trust that every time they get your podcast that they will get a nugget of information and you won’t waste their time, they will check in more often.

Just as in real estate sales – ask for the sale! Create a closing that is both a call to action and a reinforcement of one of your real estate services. Any facet of real estate news can be creatively brought around to selling the sizzle on your services. For instance, this blog entry on podcasts is part of an overall online marketing campaign for real estate web designs by IMCD Web Design.

Whether you write out your podcast (and double its use as one of your real estate blog entries) or simply jot down your ideas in an outline form, do a dry run. For beginner podcasters, a little practice helps you get an idea on your timing and how many topics you can cover in 5, 10 or 15 minutes. If you find that using notes causes you to stumble or get distracted, simply go over it and then talk without notes as if you are talking directly to a customer. Remember to smile, people can hear the smile in your voice.

Subscribe to your own podcast so you hear what your real estate website visitors hear. Do you sound professional and focused on your message? With a little practice you will begin to sound like an old pro. For tutorials, listen to NPR radio shows to see how the news folks provide news and information with the descriptive language, knowing their audience can’t see the things on which they are reporting.

Once you get used to podcasting, you find more areas to use the technology in your real estate company. Training, company updates and recording important meetings for missing staff are just a few business areas made easier with podcasts.

For more help on your podcasting skills, stay tuned to Part 3, where IMC web developers bring home the technology needed to create your own podcast. If you need a boost in your real estate website’s visibility on the search engines, contact the IMC web design team to get your real estate website going by the website developers who know how to help you generate sales leads.

Part 2 of 3 – To be Continued…

Podcasting is on your real estate website gives you greater ability to sell your Realtor services beyond the scope of the website. Podcasting, a name created by blending “iPod” and “broadcasting”, is simply a way of creating and posting audio files that can be played on an iPod, any computer or MP3 player. Audio files are stored in the MP3 format, a universally accepted portable file format that compresses the audio file for a smaller memory footprint without degradation of the sound.

By using an entry on your blog or a web page on your real estate website, you can make your podcast available for your web visitors to listen to or download. Without any attendant video, podcasts allow your visitor to play your pre-recorded message while reading other areas of your web page. Note: podcasting is only used for audio recordings – video recordings have been named “vodcasts” and take longer to download due to their larger file size.

Podcasting has the added component, similar to real estate blog entries, of building RSS subscriptions. Your real estate clients can receive your podcast file as soon as you post it. Besides the RSS subscription, software, such as Apple’s iTunes, can automatically retrieve and store podcasts.

With the MP3 file format, you can allow your website visitors to download the podcast to their computers for loading on their MP3 players or burning a CD. By making the recording portable, your clients can play your podcasts in the car when visiting the neighborhood or property you talk about. Your listener is not tied to being on their computer to play the podcast. This portability factor allows your podcasts to move your Internet marketing beyond the confines of the computer to a greater level of accessibility for your real estate market.

Podcasting is similar to having your own radio show with the additional benefits of no need to obtain government licenses, adhere to strict federal regulations, constantly find show sponsors or be limited by broadcasting signal strength. With your real estate websites up and operational, you are already your own sponsor and the world is your broadcast area. Any “commercial break” you take will be to extol your real estate services and to reinforce your businesses brand.

Though podcasting may be a new technology for many real estate agents, the simplicity of recording a talk, its portability, and growing popularity, may quickly drive podcasting to become a more heavily used Internet marketing venue. IMCD Web Design has found that online marketing with real estate websites follows traditional marketing trends. The wider you cast your marketing net online with a content management system, blog, targeted Realtor marketing web pages, feature listing tools and IDX web solutions, the more web visitors and sales leads you gather. Podcasting joins this list of online real estate marketing tools. Next, marketing secrets for creating an effective real estate podcast.

Part 1 of 3 – To be Continued…

Real estate agents routinely save time and promote their real estate website using email signatures and autoresponder messages. Unfortunately for targeted online marketing, many use the same signature on all their emails. The following is suggestions that will both improve your online marketing and spruce up your email signatures.

First, take your current signature and edit it for home seller, home buyer, foreclosure property buyers and property investors. Instead of just pointing everyone to your home page, provide links to the specific categories or web pages on your website, real estate blog or article manager that would interest that specific market.

Second, put either your real estate agent photo or an eye-catching JPG or GIF image in your signature. Where email recipients may tend to ignore signatures, by adding color photos it attracts the eye just long enough to reinforce your tag line.

If you use a funny or thought provoking quote in you signature change it out as another way of keeping your real estate clients interested to the end of your email. Maybe when sitting down to compose your New Years resolutions, provide yourself with a needed diversion and pull 24 quotes off the Internet so you are primed for the year.

Signatures do not have to be short. Follow on direct mail marketing technique of adding a postscript in your signature. It can be a plug for your real estate blog or a request for referrals. The statistics on reading habits of your audience show most people read the title or subject line, the first sentences or so and any post script.

Always personalize your autoresponder messages. Besides their role as a sales lead generator, real estate websites serve as part of your customer service with all the helpful information. By personalizing your autoresponder emails you can both reinforce your brand, market your real estate services and refer your new prospect to view specific pages of your website.

At IMCD Web Design, we offer online marketing services and guidance to our business and real estate web design clients so they cover all bases in making the most of their real estate Internet marketing investment. Call our real estate web design sales team to put our formidable Internet marketing team working to increase your search engine visibility, website optimization and sale lead generation.

Denver real estate websites have an interesting challenge: what is the best marketing for so diverse a home buying and selling population. Denver is well situated in the center of Colorado’s Front Range with several top-notch universities, large corporate employment opportunities, an international airport and one of the biggest all season playgrounds out the back door.

Denver’s real estate market, with its many property acquisition drivers – need to be close to work, near a particular school, in a condo near downtown, in an upscale luxury home, or close to a road that heads out to a second home at a ski resort – demands multiple online marketing messages.

IMCD Web Design has helped several Denver real estate agents stake a claim on the gold rush of Google’s first page results for Denver homes for sale and property searches. Without the need for pay-per-click advertising. Behind each successful real estate Internet marketing strategy was a thorough research of the current market and an analysis of what was necessary to be competitive. The rewards of successfully marketing with a Denver real estate website are profitability in this active Colorado market.

IMC utilizes its array of real estate marketing tools, sales web pages marketing specific market niches, to help Denver Realtors attract and prequalify their sales contacts. By targeting several markets as once, Denver real estate websites cast a wide, yet specific, net that will address whatever part of the market is active at a given time.

From Broomfield down to Highlands Ranch, real estate agents have depended on IMC’s Denver real estate web designs to consistently bring leads and a return on their online marketing investment. Call our Colorado sales team if your Internet marketing campaign is not positioning you for the best results in Denver’s diverse real estate market.

A step up from creating real estate website marketing podcasts is to add video to your multimedia blogging. “Vodcasting” or “Vlogging” is web-speak for video posts or blogs that use simple digital video technology to create short online videos for their real estate website. Real estate agents can easily create short video presentations of a new property listing or a short video guides for potential clients who are buying or selling a home. These video-on-demand real estate productions add to the 24/7 information content of your Realtor website.

For educational purposes, vlogging is a way to reach the MTV generation and people who learn better by hearing than by reading. With a little practice, agents can learn to ignore the camera and just chat as if they were face to face with a client. A good vodcast contributes to building your “expert” standing in the viewers’ mind and you website’s credibility.

For marketing purposes, the ability to create short videos expands your marketing reach into highly visited sites like YouTube. By also posting your listings’ virtual home tour videos on YouTube with a links back to your real estate website, you both add an incoming link and promote your property to an audience with a proven affinity for video presentations.

IMCD Web Design offers real estate agents an easy-to-use blogging platform with the capacity to host vodcasts. By allowing real estate web visitors the ability to download a vodcast, they can view it later. The Featured Listings option allows real estate agents to promote their properties both with static photos, slide shows and video virtual tours.

In the Internet’s technology driven marketplace, vodcasts are a cutting edge tool for gaining a competitive advantage for your real estate website. Call IMC’s sale team about improving your real estate online marketing campaign with a real estate blog with vodcast capability. Meeting customers with the information that helps them narrow their property search benefits both real estate agents and their online clients.

Looking to improve your real estate website marketing? You may want to take a look at email. Since email is based on the tradition of writing letters, the foundation of emails is text. However, because of the capacity of email programs to fulfill real estate web design tasks, email can be sent as an HTML document – a page that looks like a web page.

With HTML’s ability to bold, underline and italicize words and change font sizes and colors, your text has greater impact. Studies by marketing firms have found that the more colorful approach almost doubles the number of responses a sales email receives.

Direct marketing companies have long adopted HTML emails, while individuals and small businesses were slower to adopt the technology. Original hurdles were small bandwidth, email services that were not set up for HTML and spam blockers that zealously blocked all HTML mail. With the evolution of a more graphic centric Internet and cheaper high-speed Internet connections, HTML email has become mainstream and used by many non-spam, legitimate retail stores.

Real estate agents do not need website creating software, such as Dreamweaver, to create their sales letters. Most email software can be quickly configured to send emails as HTML. Once configured, a familiar formatting tool bar remains visible so changing colors, font sizes, fonts and alignment are similar to working in your favorite word processor.

Venture beyond the bland and brighten your email and your real estate sales prospects by sending HTML emails. Adding pictures and links to your real estate website’s virtual home tours only increases the potential exposure of your Internet marketing campaign.

For a sales generating place to send you email list clients, contact IMCD Web Design for an affordable real estate web design with a track record for turning web visitors into active real estate clients. IMC real estate agent-friendly websites excel in their ease of use for adding images of properties for sale and managing content in blogs and article managers so your website is always current and interesting.

When deciding how to position your real estate website in today’s online real estate market there are two strategies to choose from. One leads to surviving, the other to thriving. The recent book “Shift” by Keller, Jenks and Papasan give survival tips on real estate agent positioning that relate directly to an agent’s philosophy towards marketing on the Internet.

In Shift, the authors point out, “The number one determinant of thriving is lead generation, but the number one determinant of surviving is expense management.” IMCD Web Design creates real estate web designs that help agents thrive. Our philosophy is that your real estate website is your number one sales lead generation tool in the age where the majority of home searchers begin their home viewing and real estate agent picking online.

The survival method of expense management leads to minimizing an Internet marketing investment viewing it as a marketing expense. This leads to buying sub-optimized web designs that never create a return on the investment since they seldom get anywhere near the top of the search engine rankings. At IMC, we treat your Internet marketing investment as a way to reach your market – by appearing very high in the search engines.

Custom real estate web designs have a greater investment up front, but they offer to very good long term benefits:

• PPC advertising can be scaled down as organic search engine ranking rises and
• high visibility returns a growing stream of qualified sales leads.

Often, less expensive real estate template designs offer a lower entry cost into the Internet market, but require large monthly investments of pay-per-click advertising to appear on a search engine’s first page of results.

With the surveys by the National Association of Realtors and the California Association of Realtors finding that most people go with the first real estate agent they contact online, you realize the importance of staying high in the search engines and being the first website a home searcher clicks on. If your website is not showing up, it isn’t the lead generation tool bringing you the return on your investment that it should be.

IMC also offers semi-custom template website designs that offer real estate agents the best of both worlds: an affordable real estate website and the potential for an Internet campaign that builds visibility on the web. Contact us to see how we can boost your sales leads with our proven formula of attractive graphic design, effective SEO and professional copywriting. Your market awaits you!