Dec
10
The Cult of the Real Estate Agent
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Perhaps you could follow this Trappist command: thou shalt not buy too much of our beer.
As Ben McConnell states, “Besides being what people describe as an excellent beer, Westvleteren has developed into a cult brand based on its rituals.”
Some of those rituals include:
- You must make an appointment to buy the beer
- You have to call the Beer Phone to make that appointment
- The monks, from an order of silent monks, may talk on the Beer Phone only
- You may buy only two cases at a time
- The beer is sold only once per month
- They only make 120,000 bottles per year
- Tales abound of people driving 16 hours across your Europe to get their monthly supply
- And the monks truly believe that sell beer to live and not “live to sell beer”
The key to creating this kind of cult is essentially being religiously devoted to your craft.
The Horror of Scarcity, the Pain of Exclusivity
Those who brew Westvleteren are serious about their business, “their craft”, but they aren’t trying to maximize results, track eyeballs, post records…
What they’ve done is created a cult: They’ve developed a need for their product that is borderline addiction.
A short supply sends people into horror-stricken panic. Think scarcity. Like the Great Depression type run on banks when everyone thought money was going to be scare.
Or it creates a sort of exclusivity…that it is a prize to have this product.
On an update to his original post, McConnell, an Austin resident, shares the fact that the only way he could get his hands on one of the beers was through a beer connoisseur’s collection.
How about that for being shut out?
The Cult That Spreads Without Help
Another creation of a cult occurred when Hugh McLeod created a the Blue Monster sticker campaign for a winery.
The blue stickers, which read “Microsoft change the world or go home” where a hit and people clamored for the stickers. In the small print on the sticker was a pitch to buy wine and a web address.
He also encouraged bloggers to request free bottles of wine if they blogged about it. They did. Happily.
That is cult via viral.
The Largest Cult in the Smallest Market
There is another kind of cult: the cult of community. Think Star Trek fans. Or medieval Renaissance week enders. Or Green Bay Packer fans.
The Green Bay Packers thrive in the smallest media market to be home of a major professional sports league.
Why is that?
It has a lot to do with legendary history.
The Green Bay Packers won five league championships in seven years and then went on to win the first two Super Bowls. In fact, the Super Bowl trophy was renamed the Vince Lombardi Trophy in 1970 in recognition of these awesome accomplishments.
And tons of lore:
Because Curly Lambeau’s employer, the Indian Packing Company, paid for the team’s first uniforms when they played their first game, they were called the Packers. Initially, due to Lambeau’s affinity to the University of Notre Dame, the Packers’ team colors were blue and yellow. When it was time for a change in 1959, new head coach Vince Lombardi introduced the current green and gold we have all come to know and love. Just two years after the new colors, the oval G was created by Green Bay Packers equipment manager Dad Braisher. [via]
The other towering figure head of the Green Bay Packers is Brett Farve: “The Green Bay Packers have been spoiled to have their quarterback, Brett Favre not miss a start in well over a decade - a record no one has ever come close to touching.”
A Profile of a Real Estate Cult
The thing to remember about creating a cult is that it is slightly religious. A better way of saying it is that it is ritualistic, or rich in ceremony or practice.
As an agent this could mean several things. Let me create a profile to give you an example:
- If you have significant or unusual history, share it. Create that story of your early days as an agent, the history, the lore.
- If you are successful, or if you can manage it, work only six months out of the year. When you come back from your six month hiatus, your waiting list will be the length of your arm.
- If you are charismatic, flaunt it. Use it to make people happy, fulfilled. Use it to entertain or perform on a high level. Cults are built around highly influential people. If you are not an irresistible person, get started on becoming one.
- If you can arrange it, perform certain functions of buying or selling homes differently. Instead of a closing at the title company as usual, see if you can’t do it at an old historic home, maybe even in the old historic court house. Think ceremony and different.
Finally, if you want to be the best, create the purple cow…
What you deliver should be something people instantly recognize, without being told, as something that’s extraordinary and almost impossible to imitate.
Think the iPod. Or the Wii. Or the Four Seasons Hotel George Paris.
Nov
9
You Website Is a Room Full of Furniture for Half Blind People
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Lately I’ve been thinking about landing pages as we’ve been going through a phase of testing copy for our landing pages.
During that time I brushed up on what I know about landing pages and actually came across some stuff that I didn’t know. Good insights.
I thought it would be useful to share these with you.
What Is a Landing Page?
Let me answer that by saying what a landing page isn’t because landing pages are often confused with splash pages, bridge pages, jump pages and microsites.
Splash pages are usually flash introductions. And users dislike them vehemently.
Use a splash page and your site traffic will generally plummet as a result of having placed this barrier in front of it.
Imagine your website as a room full of furniture and your users as half blind visitors.
A splash page is like a stained glass door without a knob. And they have to figure out how to get inside.
Many splash screens are graphically rich to entice users to explore the site. Unfortunately, splash pages decrease credibility, traffic, search engine rankings, and web site performance.
And don’t think that by adding a “Skip Intro” link is going to solve your problems.
Skip intro splash pages degrade performance, increase bailout rates [because of frustration] and decrease your search engine rankings.
Most importantly, studies have shown that splash screens reduce web credibility with up to 71% traffic loss.
Ouch.
Examples of splash pages if you are a cat lover. [I'm not. Never mind. Don't visit that website. I feel bad I even shared it. Please don't go.]
Doorway pages are designed to be particularly enticing for search engines, but not visitors.
Back to our room full of furniture analogy: doorway pages is like architecture that appeals to the builder of the home, but is not functional, or even practical.
Like this glass bathtub.
Doorway pages are sometimes referred to as portals and gateway pages.
Here’s the problem with gateway pages: they must be closed or navigated through to get to desired content.
A gateway page is like a smoky sheet of plastic in front of your door. This is bound to cause some pain and frustration. A good example of a gateway is the full page ad that appears in front of you when you are trying to visit Salon.
Microsites are a cross between a landing page and a website.
They often have their own domain names. You may even brand them with separate colors from your company’s brand. Maybe even its own logo.
They are small, self-contained web destinations that are separate from a company’s primary site, have their own distinct URLs, and consist entirely of content focused on a particular product or service.
They’re more easily optimized for search engines and, if their content is good enough, can drive word-of-mouth or viral marketing through linking and pass-along.
With the prevalence of keyword contextual advertising, (more commonly referred to as Pay per click or PPC), microsites may be created specifically to carry such contextual advertising. Or along a similar tactic, they’re created in order to specifically carry topic-specific keyword-rich content with the goal of having search engines rank them highly when search engine users seek such content topics.
Because of that narrower focus, these small web sites can be used as hubs for a specific marketing campaign.
They are used when a real estate marketer wants to offer a user an extended experience for branding or educational purposes.
Think Philips Bodygroom.
Or the Tedst, real estate sales legend. [Ted will live on forever in my heart.]
A good micro site is in fact a site the visitor might even return to as a destination. Or share.
But it’s not a landing page.
Why Does It Matter
A landing page is where a person “lands” when theyclick on an online ad banner, search engine result, email link, or when they visit a special promotional URL that they heard about on TV, radio or other offline media.
Very few perfect landing pages exist.
The perfect few are usually the result of exhaustive multivariate testing.
However, like most people, you probably don’t have the budget or time to dive into multiple tests.
You need to launch something today on a shoe string budget.
But the problem with most landing pages is that they are asking your prospects to do some pretty unpleasant stuff:
- Read a bunch of copy
- Type their name and address
- Hand over a phone number
- Give an email
- Dig out a credit card
- Pay for something
The trick is to get them to see doing these things as a something they want to do. Something that sounds beneficial, even in the smallest of ways, to them.
If the next several posts I’ll get into exactly how to do that.
But first: do you know of any successful landing pages?
According to industry numbers, typical conversion rates are low.
Depending on whether it was emails to a house list to a free offer through search to an email to a 3rd part list, you’re looking at something as high as 11.31% to 6.1% to as low as .97%.
I’ve heard of 50% conversion, but the low teens and high single digits is the norm.
Nov
5
Marketing in a Real Estate Recession
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When the sky is close to falling in, what should you do when you need every penny to sustain your earnings? Stop advertising?
If you are new to real estate, you will probably kill your career. For ever. Studies of the last six recessions have demonstrated that companies which do not cut back their advertising budget achieve greater increases in profit than companies which do cut back.
This applies to real estate advertising, too.
In a survey of 40,000 men and women involved in the purchase of 23 industrial products over five years, it was found that share of market went up in bad times–when advertising was continued.
I have come to regard advertising as part of what you sell, it’s part of your real estate services, to be treated as a “production cost,” not a selling cost. It follows that it should not be cut back when times are hard, any more than you would cut any other essential ingredient in running your business.
Why Advertise at All?
Many agents secretly question whether advertising really sells their services, but are vaguely afraid that their competitors might steal a march on them if they stopped.
Others–advertise to keep their name before the public. Others, because it helps them to referrals.
Only a minority of real estate agents advertise because they have found that it increases their profits.
On a train journey to California a friend asked Mr. Wrigley why with the lion’s share of the market, he continued to advertise his chewing gum.
“How fast do you think this train is going?” asked Wrigley.
“I would say about ninety miles an hour.”
“Well,” Wrigley said, “do you suggest we unhitch the engine?”
Advertising is still the cheapest form of selling. It would cost you thousands to call a thousand homes. A yard sign can do it for $4.69.
The True Task of Advertising
Back in the early 80’s, one A. S. C. Ehrenberg of the London Business School said that consumers mostly ignore advertising for brands they are not already using.
He went on to say that real conversion from virgin ignorance to full-blooded long-term commitment does not happen often…sales levels of most brands tend to be fairly steady.
Advertising expert Dr. John Treasure agreed.
He said that the task of advertising is not primarily one of conversion but rather of reinforcement and assurance.
Sales of a given brand may be increases without converting to the brand any new consumers, but merely by inducing its existing users, those who already are sold out to the product, to use the product more frequently.
What This Means to You
Clients that you have already worked with are more likely to use you again in the future–and sooner–as long as you continue to advertise, since they are already loyal to you. [This is only true if you served them well.]
Your advertising maintains the awareness that you are out there and consistently available .
In other words, that you are here to stay.
Furthermore, advertising allows you to promote new services or suggest ideas, like a new development in a new area or a resort condos you caught wind of.
These are things your clients will never know unless you tell them. Thus you advertise.
Finally, what advertising does for you is allow you to win over those clients who are not loyal to anyone agent.
Perhaps they’d like to use their last agent, he did such a swell job, but their agent has fallen off the map and they can’t find his business card or phone listing…because he’s preserving his money.
See how that will drain your resources?
So many people back off of advertising in a recession that it really isn’t a surprise that those who maintain their advertising grow market share. The economy abhors a vacuum and those who fill it are rewarded, right?
Oct
30
Greg Swann at Bloodhound Blog and his weekly blog post writing competition inspired some very good writing.
And we happened to be one of this week’s winners! Thank you for your support.
This week’s three winners were as follows:
- Geno Petro wins the Odysseus Medal for his post Memoirs Of A Big Fat Liar.
- Krista Baker takes home the Black Pearl Award for writing Negotiating Commissions with Buyers.
- Gary Elwood grabs the People’s Choice award for: The Curious Secret to Getting People to Believe You.
Head on over and read this week’s winners if you haven’t yet.
Again, thank you for your support. This blog would not be successful without you.
Oct
28
I could really use your help. I can’t give you much in return immediately, but…
Just came across this: one of last week’s blog posts “The Curious Secret to Getting People to Believe You” was nominated as last week’s best real estate post by Bloodhound Blog [which is considered one of the top 25 most influential blogs in real estate]!
The final winner is driven by votes, so if you haven’t voted, vote now. You won’t want to drag your feet on this because voting ends on October 29, Monday, at 11 AM CST.
All you have to do to vote is enter your name and email address, choose “The Curious Secret to Getting People to Believe You” and press “Submit.”
That’s it. Takes less than 14 seconds. [Seriously, I timed it.]
The only incentive I could offer you for voting is somewhat of a stretch: vote and you could be part of a growing community of networked real estate agents. [Watch me as I try to connect the dots.] See, by participating via comments on our blog, you open yourself up to contacts across the nation who could send you business. And the larger our audience, the greater your exposure to that audience and the higher your chance of getting some kind of referral.
If our post wins, that’s some pretty significant exposure for all of us. See how that works? [Not an airtight kickback, but the best I could do at the moment.]
In all honesty, vote for the best blog post. There are some killer articles we’re up against. And don’t vote for me if you don’t think I had the best post.
However, if you did think that my post was the best in last weeks blogs, please vote for it.
And if you do indeed vote for my post, trust me when I say that I’ll be very honored.
This blog is not successful without you.
Gary Elwood
Oct
17
5 Real Estate Websites You Can’t Live Without
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Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the real estate websites I spend a lot of time on [not the viral ones]…the websites that keep me informed, on the cutting edge, out there on the frontier of real estate marketing.
In particular I’ve been thinking about why I go back to these website so often. And because four out of the five websites are blogs, I started asking myself what makes blogs so enticing and valuable to me.
The answer, I believe, is that they own their space. They are clearly authorities in the topic–whether it’s technology or online advertising.
I think if you visited just these five websites throughout your day, you’d have all of the current and most important information that is being discussed out there.
What are the 5 industry-related websites that you learn the most from - the 5 that you couldn’t live without (or at least, couldn’t earn as much without)?
I’ll share my answer:
1. The Future of Real Estate Marketing
By reading FOREM I can be virtually assured that there will be no “big” conversations in the blogosphere or the tech world that I’m missing out on. That alone is worth its weight in gold. I really can’t remember how I survived without it, but I’m pretty sure I had to do a lot more skimming to find the signal.
When it comes to real estate blogging, there’s no better source for blogging-specific tips. On the other hand, I find enormous value from their guest bloggers who provide invaluable ideas and strategies for online advertising. Every article is in-depth and comprehensive, giving the full picture and walk-away points that are worth using and sharing.
I’ll let their Bio say it, since it says it best:
Bloodhound Blog is everything you wish were in Realtor magazine — but isn’t.
That’s pithy but inadequate, because there’s more here already than Realtor magazine — or The Specialist — would ever take on. We have three lenders to take us inside the mortgage industry. We have two investment experts to brings us hard-core, hands-on advice. We have some of the best writers in the RE.net — who produce some of the best reading in real estate writing, period, web logged or printed.
When I need help with a topic or a resource on foreclosure, the current market, housing rates, I go to the place where plenty of folks smarter than I will rush to the rescue. This place is Inman News blog. Brad Inman provides data on the industry that is 100X better than forums 100x its size, thanks to the quality of people and contributions - no small feat.
I know, I know, technically neither of these are in the real estate industy. However, the stories I find at these sites [which they are kind of the same, but not really, that's why they tied], particularly some that never make it past page 3 give me a view into what the influencers of real estate are enjoying and reading. It’s also the best way I’ve found to have good stories to share at dinner conversations when everyone gets tired of talking about the latest top blog list.
Now it’s your turn–which 5 sites would you be unable to live without? Feel free to leave live links to the URLs and don’t worry about needing to explain your choices if you don’t want to.
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