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.

Internet marketing or eCommerce is a — powerful tool that real estate brokerages can leverage to increase lead generation from their real estate websites. A best of all possible worlds may be all the sales agents attached to a real estate brokerage showing property and closing deals. Not spending any time finding and qualifying leads. Admittedly an unrealistic scenario, but by scientifically positioning your real estate website’s message, you can get closer to that perfect world.

Positioning #1:
Talk to each client. Traditional advertising takes the shotgun approach a blasting a general message to a general segment of the population. Internet marketing, by its nature, is one-to-one marketing. In your message use the keywords that an individual looking for a specific piece of real estate will use. Maybe only 10 people in your market use those keywords in a month, but when they contact you, they are a qualified lead looking for exactly what you have to offer.

Positioning #2:
Measure and adapt. Use your keywords in a testing of the market manner. Measure the traffic certain keywords or pages draw to your site. Tweak pages or keywords with low draw and create more pages with the keywords successfully driving real estate leads to your website.

Positioning #3:
Don’t profile. This goes against the prevalent advertising strategy of targeting demographics. Internet marketing is most successful when it targets a buyer’s or seller’s behavior or activity. For example, instead of targeting middle income, male, householders, target people looking to buy their dream home in the mountains near a skiing resort or on the waterfront near boating access ramps. No one does searches for real estate using the keywords “homes for sale for male householder”, but they do search for “Breckenridge mountain real estate near ski resort”.

Positioning #4:
Utilize the Internet’s capacity for interactivity. Your real estate website client used the mouse and keyboard to arrive at your site. The brain is in the typing, clicking mode. Make your call to action initially a call to simply type or click to request information of give contact information. Do not push them to call initially. Keep them on your real estate website. The more information a website visitor reads on your site, the more likely they will convert into a warm sales lead.

Several successful real estate companies redefined their marketing position by measuring the warm leads directed to sales. Traditional marketing that was ineffective in attracting leads fell in the category of “not doing your job”. By following these simple Internet marketing positioning steps, your brokerage office can harvest the leads generated from the site and feed them to sale agents. Real estate sales agents working on warm leads close more sales than the ones who are trying to find the leads that saw a magazine ad and are thinking of buying in the near future.

Real estate agents and brokerages need to pull out all the stops to effectively keep their real estate websites positioned on Google and Yahoo, the two leading search engines, and to adapt to market trends in today’s slow real estate market. There is a two pronged real estate situation causing some real estate agents to get corralled into unproductive labor to secure listings.

Google and Yahoo have apparently tweaked their search algorithms to give priority in front page ranking to mega real estate websites such as Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com. The slow down and price drop in the housing market has caused 12% more of the sellers in the market to try the “for sale by owner” route, instead of listing with a real estate agent.

With listing information more available and a slow housing market, some real estate agents have taken to painting houses, doing clean up and maintenance to build relationships and win listings. While extra help, such as giving a client a lift back to work after a showing, is usual, recent efforts to secure clients has raised liability and loss of sales time concerns.

Is there a better way to roll with the internet marketing punches? Yes. Trulia has a free linking section and an Agent Feature Listing program that provides even more opportunity to funnel traffic to your personal real estate website. Realtor.com also has a feature allowing real estate agents that are MLS participants (and who’s Multiple Listing Service must be a REALTOR.com® data content provider) the ability to upgrade their listings with more photos, contact information and web links. Zillow allows real estate agents to add their picture and contact information, such as your website, to your listings for free. Top real estate companies such as RE/MAX and Prudential are actively utilizing Trulia’s additional market reach.

The Trulia Voices section allows real estate agents to further their market presence by answering questions from active buyers and sellers. In your answer, you have an opportunity to guide the reader back to your website for further information. Most effective, of course, is finding the questions from people in your market area. Trulia Voices can also serve as part of your market feedback loop. After reviewing questions posted to the site, you can create an informative blog entry on your real estate website and direct your reader to that entry in your answer.

According to Trulia, 68% of their visitors checking their website listings are not working with a real estate agent yet. By increasing your visibility on Trulia and Zillow, you can ride your part of the 10 million visitors a month wave and harness Zillow’s and Trulia’s commanding search engine presence to capture those untethered warm sales leads.

By integrating Trulia and Zillow into your internet marketing strategy, you gain exposure to a larger market that can show your listings, but better still, drive traffic to your real estate website so you can capture the leads. The greater visibility translates to the potential for a faster sale. Real estate agents now have even more to offer the “sale by owner” sellers who would willingly trade their perceived savings for the quicker sale.

Real estate websites, using the best techniques in internet marketing, are riding the wave of change in the advertising world. Maurice Levy, the CEO of Publicis Groupe, talked about this change “It’s not about cosmetic changes, it’s about profound and unsettling changes” Fast Company magazine note that “The advertising business is in the midst of an upheaval more profound even than the arrival of TV…The arrival of digital has shifted power to the consumer, and the money is changing accordingly.”

Your investment in your real estate website in 2007 was part of the surge in internet marketing, part of the overall advertising sea change. Just in the first half of 2007, internet marketing was up over 26% of 2006 spending. Due to the way people use the Internet, marketing is also changing the way it approaches the markets.

Direct marketing, the closest traditional marketing method to internet marketing, sends massive amounts of advertising out, hoping to get a reaction out of a small percentage of the recipients. In effective internet marketing, marketers craft their message to that small percentage that is their target market through the use of keywords, images and content. With the internet, marketers know, especially with “shopping cart” software, that buyers are closer to the point of purchase than in traditional marketing. Precision, not scale, is the key to successful marketing campaign.

If the internet is the new direct marketing channel, are there fundamentals of direct marketing that apply to your real estate or mortgage website marketing? Yes. The five points of a successful direct marketing pitch remain the same, because the introduction of the internet has not changed people’s psychology of buying.

1. The title or headline of your article, webpage or blog entry must be informative, curiosity raising and at least hint at a benefit.
2. Content must list the benefits to the consumer, gives the consumer something to identify with, not features of the seller or the product.
3. Establish trustworthiness, either through testimonials, a guarantee or third party validation of your track record and capabilities.
4. Call to Action that is specific and tied to the consumer’s benefit.
5. Add a PS. The two areas most people read are the title of the article and any post-script. At Internet Marketing Consultants, we have found that reiterating the call to action in the post-script is an effective way to boost the percentage of real estate website visitors responding.

Use this short list to double check the way you present yourself and your real estate company on your website. Is your internet marketing including all the tried and true aspects of direct marketing?

When providing material for your real estate website, beware of two copywriting traps that diminish the effectiveness of your website content.

Trap #1: Writing for other real estate agents.
Every profession develops shorthand words, initials or acronyms for part of their daily process or products. Keep in mind that your new home buyers, which may be 40% of the traffic your real estate website receives, are novices. They do not necessarily understand real estate acronyms that are second nature to real estate agents. Writing over someone’s head leaves them feeling like they need to use another agent who is used to talking on an introductory level. Especially do not write as if your material is going in a classified ad where everything has been broken down into a type of classified ad shorthand.

On the other hand, if you are real estate website targeting practiced commercial and investment buyers, you can use a certain level of market specific language to prequalify your potential clients.

Trap #2: Writing page content as if it is a blog entry.
Blog entries can be written in a more conversational style. When writing content for a webpage, make sure you are using a descriptive adjectives and keyword nouns instead of pronouns. Actually, keeping this in the back of your mind will help you write better blog entries.

When reviewing client testimonials, tweak their quotes to add punch (keeping it in their style of talking/writing, of course) and get them to approve of the changes. A positive testimonial such as “He was a great guy to work with and we are very happy with our new house,” can be tweaked for the search engines with minor edits. A better testimonial would read “Seymour Lystings was a great real estate agent to work with and we are very happy with our lovely new Denver home in the Cherry Creek neighborhood.” This adds your name and three keywords: “real estate agent”, “Denver home” and “Cherry Creek neighborhood”. Hopefully your testimonials are a little longer also!

With these copywriting traps out of the way, the real estate information on your website should appeal to first time buyers as well as seasoned home buyers. Don’t worry about getting your explanations too simple, your seasoned buyers will skim over that text to find what they need.