Every real estate agent who has flirted with blogging needs to pick up a copy of Hugh Hewitt's book Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World. Better yet, read it, and see how it impacts your strategies for real estate marketing. I'm adding the book to my homeschooled kids' required reading list. It's that important.

Why would I recommend a book by a nationally known political commentator to a readership of real estate agents across the political spectrum? That could be dangerous, as I certainly don't want to lose readers over politics.

Ever heard of drip marketing or drip newsletters? It's method of sending newsletters to leads and clients in a more personalized way. In fact, this this article you're reading right now will be delivered on day 28 of my own drip e-mail system (also called an autoresponder).

There are several reasons a drip marketing system is superior over a standard broadcast newsletter system. First and foremost is the ability to dramatically boost your conversion rate of leads to listings or leads to sales.

Have you ever wondered how some of your Realtor colleagues got to become the experts in a particular area of real estate?

Whether it's commercial real estate, development land, vacation properties, or even a neighborhood, city, or county, it's possible for you to become a real estate expert by combining your experience with focused search engine optimization strategies.

Everyone wants to be all things to all people, but sometimes it is better to narrow in on your strengths and really get that message out clearly.

When I talk to Realtors and real estate agents about their websites, one of the things I talk about is the importance of unique content—in other words—written content that is not boilerplate, that is not simply one copy of 10,000 copies out there on the web.

Boilerplate content is content that comes standard with most agent websites. But if you want your site to show up on the search engines, you need to either replace it or add significantly to it. Otherwise, your site will be exactly like the sites of the 10,000 other customers of that particular Realtor website factory.

Are you a boilerplate Realtor®? Are you a clone of all the other real estate agents out there you are competing with?

"Of course not," you say. But is your most important marketing tool, your website, a boilerplate site? I thought so.

Why do so many real estate agents get sucked into boilerplate sites that just don't perform—that just don't bring in leads, listings, or sales? It's easy to keep paying for them, month after month, year after year, with the same dismal results when it comes to search engine ranking and search engine traffic.

Sometimes Realtors® forget that in order to market their properties, they need to market themselves and their own websites. One can't simply focus on advertising her or her properties, and not spend time and resources dragging a wide net to collect leads. That should include plenty of offline promotion of you and your website.

If your job is to match buyers and sellers, it stands to reason that you need to get in touch with a lot of potential home buyers and a lot of potential home sellers before you'll be able to effectively sell real estate.

I can do some amazing things with search engine marketing techniques to drive organic search engine traffic to your site, but online efforts can be supplemented with great results through the following offline promotion techniques.

Want to lose business to your competitor? Then wait a day to respond when fresh leads contact you from your website.

We live in an era of instant gratification. Most Internet visitors want their e-mails, voicemails, and website inquiries answered yesterday. When they don't get that fast response, they'll just move on--to your competitor, of course.

Too many professionals with websites think of their site as an overhead expense rather than as a lead- or sales-generating tool. But in order to get ahead of your competition, you need to think of your website in terms of its cost per lead (CPL).

It's all over the news; we're in a real estate market downturn, or "softening" depending on what you want to call it.

The good news, according to this Reuters story by David Lawder (at the time of this writing), is that we've only "softened" to January 2004 levels. This was still in the midst of a good market, if you recall. One broker friend said to me recently, "Yes, it's cooled, but it's cooled to 98 degrees." By the time you read this, perhaps it's cooled to 95 degrees, or maybe even 90 degrees in your market.

Nevertheless, it's wise to take steps to ensure that you not only survive, but thrive in a cooling market. There are still plenty of home buyers and sellers out there, it will just take a little more work to find them and match them up.

Start preparing now to stay ahead of your competition

In any economic shift, there are those who are perceptive and start to make adjustments early, and those who refuse to acknowledge the changes underway until it's too late. Although we remain in a decent market, those who take steps early to adjust for changing real estate market conditions will be rewarded by steady sales.

A website is only as good as the words on the page. Without words, your site is virtually invisible to search engines. Because search engines have become the gatekeepers of the world's information, it is imperitive that a real estate agent's website contain more than pretty pictures and boilerplate content. If your site is going unnoticed by the search engines, it is probably going unnoticed by your potential clients as well.

You'd have to have lived under a rock not to know the value of the Internet in marketing your real estate business. But simply putting a webpage out there doesn't really constitute brilliant marketing, any more than sticking a sign on the front of your place of business. That's the bare minimum you need to do, but frankly, everyone else is already doing that.

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