Here is a post I picked up from Broker Agent News -

Why You Miss Most Internet BuyersBy: Mike Parker

“The Internet doesn’t work for me.” That odious phrase is all too common among agents and brokers. NAR echoed those sentiments for 90+% of all agents when they stated that less than 10% of agents with websites were pleased with the production from them. On the other hand, NAR also tells us that over 84% of all residential real estate sales involve the Internet. How can so much business go to such a small percentage of agents?

Contrary to what you may expect, the answer has less to do with money spent than on poor technique. The most beautiful website in the world is of no value to an agent if it doesn’t produce leads on a regular and consistent basis.

I don’t mean to say that effective Internet marketing for Realtors® and real estate professionals is not without cost. It costs money to bring buyers to your website. First, you must build the website and hope they’ll come. They usually don’t. Second, you must subscribe to organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or Pay per Click (PPC) and then they start coming because they can FIND your site. Now what? How do you get them to be more than a blip on an analytics tool and turn them into a living, breathing lead? Traffic is not the panacea, either—a strategy is required to succeed.

This is the real issue in online marketing for Realtors® and for everyone else, too; traffic means nothing but that people are finding your website. Being found is just the first step to succeeding online. Page views and unique visitor data are of value, but the ratio of conversion from visitor to lead is what matters, and you won’t ever get enough leads from your visitors until you wise up to the best kept secret in internet marketing: you’ve got to offer them something to get them to sign in to your site.

How many unique visitors do you need to make your site produce?

Most agents who receive 300 or less unique visitors a month do just fine - the most successful have a conversion rate of 10-15%; that is, 10 to 15% of their unique visitors sign in to the site and are added to the prospect list for drip emails and regular contact. With 300+ unique visitors for an average agent each month - they should receive enough leads to make a living; as more unique visitors come, the agents income should rise accordingly. On the other hand there are those who receive thousands of unique visitors each month and sell little. What explains this?
Not using lead capture is like going fishing with great bait, but no fishing pole

The biggest factor in your site becoming a valuable tool (after optimization and design) is lead capture. Those using effective lead capture have good results with realistic visitor totals; those not using lead capture rarely get any results at all. To visualize this, please close your eyes and imagine yourself going fishing on a pretty summer day: Just toss the bait in the water and the fish will come to it. After the bait is gone, so are the fish, leaving you empty handed if you left your pole at home. But, bring your pole and you could end up catching your limit. Internet prospecting is much the same: a good site and enabling it to be found serves as all the bait you need to succeed, but if you can’t capture the lead, it’s like you forgot to bring your fishing pole with you-- lots of fish in the water, but none caught.

What exactly is lead capture?

Lead capture can be defined as the practice of converting people who window shop into people who you can communicate with, identify and farm/prospect/cultivate. Hard lead capture is the practice of requiring a visitor to sign in before allowing them to view information, like MLS listings. Soft lead capture is the practice of offering a premium or incentive to incent the visitor to sign in and join your information network. Hard is bad, soft is good; hard makes most visitors exit your site, soft makes them want what you offer them and creates feelings of good will. Lead capture seeks to ‘capture’ simple information from a visitor; name, email address and phone number are really all you need to communicate on the most important levels: email and telephone.

What does hard lead capture look like and where should I put this?

"Log In (Not a Member? Sign Up Now"
Any site requiring a log in is death for lead generation. A few visitors may docilely give you their personal information, most will not. You should not employ this technique. (Now that DOJ and NAR have settled, perhaps the MLS in certain areas will drop this kind of requirement to view properties—a good thing for clients and a good thing for agents and brokers!) If your site does use this mandatory sign in, my advice is to contact your webmaster right now and have it changed.

What kind of premium should I offer to attract visitors’ sign-ins?
How about a map of the town? How about the town fact sheet as furnished by the town government? How about anything interesting about where you sell homes? Lacking that, your newsletter or a relocation kit is good. Where I grew up, agents gave away lots of Town calendars, booklets, ice scrapers and thermometers, hot plates and oven mitts; those still work, too—as long as they have your name and website address on them. Best is some kind of promo that gives good information about where the visitor is looking to come to. One successful agent I know made a list of all restaurants in town and another of all important local phone numbers. She put her smiling face in the center, laminated it, and Viola! Another successful premium was created. Use your imagination-- this isn’t rocket science.

No matter what certain agent marketing programs claim, the Internet is where the action is today.

Every time I see that marketing ad that claims that only 11% of sales come from the Internet, I shudder. Look, your own affinity group, NAR, says that 84% of all residential real estate sales begin on the Internet and that 74% of Internet buyers find their agent through a search engine. You absolutely need an Internet presence if you want to stay in this business.

Employ good lead capture today and sell houses tomorrow

It takes only moments to implement this recommendation into YOUR website. Provided it can be found by Internet buyers looking for homes online, this simple change can make the difference between a billboard in space and a real lead generation device. If your site can’t be found, however, all the lead capture in the world won’t help. You must be one of the sites that come up on the first page of the major search engines when your town is being shopped online; once you are there, implementation of good lead capture will work wonders for you. You wouldn’t go fishing without a fishing pole, don’t go Internet prospecting without good lead capture!

Things to do when you're trying to stay cool...

Wow - it is HOT out there! Hopefully everyone is staying cool and remembering to drink lots of water.


If you're looking forward to getting into the office because the air conditioning is on, then you recognize the frustration many of us without central air feel on days like this. You can use that to your advantage and perhaps revive some old business in the meantime.

Like many people without central air, I spent part of the day Saturday hauling the window units out of storage and into the house in anticipation of the scorching heat. Throughout the process, I thought about why I didn't act on that estimate I got for central air last summer. Then I remembered that I didn't do the upgrade because the investment had me on the tipping point of whether it was time to look for a new house (I have my own license and see all your listings...no need for prospecting here). But I know that I can't be alone in this line of thinking - and it might just be time for me to talk to my favorite Realtor about what to do.

So how can you promote this? Well, for starters go back through all the listings you have sold and find the ones without central air. Are those people likely to move? Well, the national average says people move every 7 years. There's a start. Have they had any life changes lately that may make them consider new housing? The main drivers of housing change are marriage, birth, death, divorce, job changes and new family issues (sick parents, etc). While some of them are hard to know (I doubt your clients call to tell you they got a promotion) hopefully you have stayed in touch enough to know if they had child #2 since they moved or are starting to think about retirement options. This week you should make contact with those people! In the conversation just talk about how hot it is....and ask them if they ever had C/A put into the house you sold them. If they say NO, perhaps it is time feel them out about whether they are putting it off because they are considering a move anyway - or maybe because they want to buy a house at the shore instead (referral possibility???)

Or maybe they're from the Sahara and they are glad to finally have some nice weather....

Enjoy the week - Stay Cool!
Chris

Management Changes in Lahaska - what it means to you

You may have heard the news by now, but if not let me tell you that the management has changed in the Lahaska office. With the addition of the 6 Diamond offices, everyone realized that Barry needed to focus solely on his legal responsibilities, so he was named General Counsel and moved into a private office instead of managing Lahaska.

The team of Marianne, Bob and Chris begin managing Lahaska today. Team management was an experiment when it started in Yardley, Washington Crossing and Newtown. Nobody was really sure how rotating managers with different skills would work for the benefit of the agents and the business. Everyone now agrees that it is a great idea. Knowing that if you have a technical question you can ask Bob, a sales question you can ask Chris or a business question you can ask Marianne has made finding answers much easier for those agents. Adding Lahaska seemed a natural fit - it is close to Newtown, has a mixed group of agents with different skills, and it is a fun bunch with a great office culture! We'll all watch together as it plays out.

What does it mean to you? Well, even if you are in an office way far away from Lahaska, you benefit from having our company lawyer focused full time on the law. Remember that your manager should be your first contact (since often Barry has given them that answer before) but if there is a situation they think should be elevated to him they know he is available. Additionally, be sure to read Barry's Real Estate Law Blog for helpful pointers on running your business effectively in this litigious world.

When looking for new places to prospect, don't forget those chamber of commerce events! I was at one the other day and ended up placing a referral to Naples, Florida. Not only that but I learned something for my business too.

Advertising Challenges after Memorial Day weekend

It is almost as constant as the holiday itself; I always know we are going to have a backload of advertising issues when we come back from a three day weekend.

So why don't we advertise? Quite simply because nobody is reading. Check out the Sunday paper (in my case it happens to be the Intelligencer) and you can tell right away that many businesses have learned over time that readership is low. The only ones who insist on being a part of the paper the day before Memorial Day are the big-box stores, and that is because Memorial Day happens to be one of the biggest retail days of the year (sort of that uh-oh moment when you decide you need new flip-flops and a styrofoam cooler). Certainly not the time when you are going to get into an important decision about engaging a Realtor or picking your next house.

Nevertheless, the weekend after always presents unique challenges. First, we often have a slew of open houses. People who sit one every other week meet up with those people who need to have one because their sellers don't recognize what I said above about activity and think we need to do something. So we end up using more space to present our opens. Second, we have more new listings and reductions than usual, because we didn't have an ad to present them to the public. Finally, and this one is unique this year, we have a new merger to announce and new offices to present to the public.

To top it all off, we have a short work week and very little time to get our Sunday ads together. Definitely some midnight-oil time for the marketing department at CBH.

Why do I tell you this? Because I want to make sure everyone is concious of what you are asking for. If you want to have an open house but you don't have an agent yet, perhaps this isn't the week to try to pull it together last-minute. If we have to pull an open at the deadline we don't replace it, and that valuable space gets wasted. If you're taking a new listing and you don't have your photos/ad copy to your admin already, don't expect to see it in this weekend's paper (and don't promise that to your clients). Finally, if you are listing a house for your family/best friend/dearest client who doesn't particularly care whether they are in the paper this week or next (or if they are in the paper at all) don't insist that we get them in this Sunday just because you want to look like super-agent to them. All that is going to do is make your admin's life more miserable (which probably isn't going to win any points for you).

I will make the decision on ad size later today based on discussions with the admins and the ownership. We don't want to buy newspaper space without reason, because as many of you know newspaper space is getting more expensive and the effectiveness continues to decline. I would much rather use that money on more productive endeavors - but as I said I will look at all variables and present my recommendations to the owners later today.

Here's to a great week!

Post Those Open Houses!

One of the tools I haven't talked about during the introduction of Your Hearthside Space is the open house tool. Look under the "Plan Appointments" header and you will see there are two links available to you - one says public opens and one says brokers opens. By cataloging your stuff in either of these two places you can get all your fellow agent's attention without having to email them!

When our revised public web site goes live in June it will also take advantage of this open house area to tag our listings with open house banners - so the public can quickly find out where our open houses are each week.

On a side note, one question I have received since the launch has to do with the link for the personal calendar. When you click it your email opens....not your calendar. Believe it or not that is what we intended. We have talked to the people at our email provider and they are working on code that will launch the calendar directly. For now, however, you just have to click the calendar tab on the screen. Sorry, but once again we are ahead of the curve!

Of course if you use Outlook you won't have to worry about that calendar. Not used to Outlook, or wish you knew more about it? I will be teaching a class or two about the program during the summer. If you have other ideas for technology classes - let Donna McKenna know.

"Your Hearthside Space" goes live

Hopefully now that "Your Hearthside Space" is live more people will have a chance to read this blog. I encourage you to use the comments link at the bottom of each post to send me additional comments, news items, or things you want everyone in the company to know. Perhaps this way we can even eliminate some of the all-office-emails everyone despises so deeply.

Look for an email from me explaining more of the functionality of YHS soon, and also keep me informed of fun things you would like to see your Intranet do!

Have a great weekend!

Following up from the Hearthisde trip

Wow...what else can I say. Even a week later the place still seems like a mirage. If you haven't heard about it yet, be sure to talk to the people around you who were there and listen to their stories - in some cases they're better than mine (since I had a bad habit of falling asleep early in the evening). If you haven't seen photos of the resort before, check out this link.

The links we don't have are the ones eveyone wants to see - the link to the video of Todd McCarty wildly dancing around the karoke bar, or of the volleyball match held late Saturday afternoon with some Yardley folks, or even of Keith Harris' amazing drive down the road on the fifteenth hole of the golf course. I did include a few (tamer) photos of us from the first evening's dinner that was offered by Cross Keys and Mortgage Mobility.

I know this year is a hard one - hopefully seeing these folks enjoying themselves will continue to motivate you to join the club next year.