The ARE-TEC Blog: All Things IDX, Website, and Techno-geek

Explaining Address Searches - Jim Asks, I Answer.

ARE-TEC IDX Solutions (Applied Real Estate Technology) — Tue, 05 May 2009 21:42:23 -0500

A little while ago, Jim Marks asked a question about whether address searches were valuable or not, trying to spur some discussion on that, among other things.

Allow me to answer. To provide the agent perspective on address searches.

Yes, they're valuable. In fact, on my listings search where all listings are searchable by Google by address and subdivision and zip code and whatnot, 30 of my top 50 keywords in the last month were address searches.

People Google property addresses for lots of reasons. Some have driven by the property, made a sign call, and the agent hasn't called them back. Many times, the house they're looking at is already under contract, so the agent doesn't call back immediately, and they turn to the internet for more information. Some drive by and just google it for more information when they get home. Some are checking out their neighbors homes for sale, and some are just looking to see if their own home on the market is ranking at all.

So they Google the address, and then they call me, because my site shows up with all the information about the house. Would you want those calls? I sure do. Those are the calls that keep my buyer agents busy in a down market.

Worthwhile to compete on address search in your market? It is in mine. Absolutely.

Twitter-fabulous and Facebook-chic

ARE-TEC IDX Solutions (Applied Real Estate Technology) — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:59:43 -0600

I'm so excited.

We just added the ability to send listings to Twitter and Facebook from our IDX.

So the people searching for homes on your site - if you're one of our customers - can tweet about that cool new house they just saw.

Or they can post a link to Facebook to tell their friends and family about that new duplex they purchased.

Or you can tell all your twitterpals about that lovely house you just listed, or link it easily to your Facebook wall.

It shows up with a link back to your search, of course, so anyone who sees your Tweet or Facebook link can click on it and it goes back to that listing ON YOUR SITE.

How's that for sending traffic back to you? And anyone using your listing search can do it, if they've got a Twitter or a Facebook account. Can you imagine all the twitterfolk in your area using your IDX, linking back to you, every time they find a cool home? Can you imagine how many other people will see those people tweeting and can click on that link and see your site? Crazy opportunity. Crazy sharing. Awesome social media opportunities.

Seriously cool.

We're in a huge expansion phase right now. Send me an email and we'll get started integrating into your MLS.

How I Compete With Trulia with my MLS Search - and Win

ARE-TEC IDX Solutions (Applied Real Estate Technology) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 13:51:27 -0500

I work hard on my little local blog and website. I'm the local expert, with fabulous information that I'm trying to get out there - and it's frustrating being the little guy with limited resources when the big national players can walk all over me in the search engines.

But I fixed that - or I'm in process anyway. It's building momentum.

You have any idea how many people search for an MLS number? A property address that they drove by and are now typing into Google? A subdivision name? LOTS. And that's where players like Trulia tend to win in Google - for individual property addresses, subdivisions, that sort of thing.

So working with ARE-TEC, I got around that. And I'm starting to beat Trulia at their own game.

And in all fairness, I now work with ARE-TEC - it's my hubby's company. Which means I got to help develop this stuff to really meet my needs as an agent. I get to make sure all this new stuff really works before we make it available to everyone else.

So here's what we did.

See, most IDX companies, when you put their MLS search on your site, it is all framed within a tiny piece of code, and all the data - all that lovely, keyword rich, search engine delicious information - isn't found by the search engines on your site. The ARE-TEC search cube? It embeds so simply into any blog - including ActiveRain and Wordpress - but it doesn't let Google look at all of those listings.

But ARE-TEC fixed that, several months ago, quietly tweaking and finding the best way to fix the problem.

It looks like this:

Looks pretty unassuming, doesn't it? But it packs a punch with search engines.

Every tiny little bit of information in the MLS - is now nicely tagged and indexed in the search engines - on MY site. All those keyword rich descriptions and subdivision names and street names - Google finds them on MY site, and relates them to ME. So when people type addresses into Google, my site comes up. When people Google subdivision names, MY site comes up.

How frikking cool is that? Soon, every address in the MLS, every home for sale - if someone types it into Google, my site will appear. Just stop and imagine that for a second.

And once it was installed, it takes no effort or maintenance on my part. Nada.

Which means my little local blog site is starting to win. Not every time, just yet. But we're getting there...

Now, there is an exclusivity element to this. If every agent in my area had it, it'd lose power. So I have an exlusive deal in my city. In fact, ARE-TEC won't sell it to every agent in a city anyway, so availability is on a first-come-first-served basis.

So sweet. I love being the little guy with an edge.

Get More Out of Twitter - Stop Wasting 20% of Your Tweets!

ARE-TEC IDX Solutions (Applied Real Estate Technology) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:57:53 -0500

Do you auto-tweet your posts from here on ActiveRain?

Can I ask you why?

Did you know you can do that in a vastly better way that will
- brand yourself
- give you an idea of the power of your Twitter network
- not waste 20% of your tweet!

As a Twitter old-timer, here's why I don't think you should auto-tweet from ActiveRain:

1. You waste 20% of the available text by saying "Just posted on ActiveRain: ". That's 27 characters that you could be using to entice people to actually read the post, instead of letting them know they're about to be auto-spammed. 27 characters is a lot when you only get 140!

2. You can't track your traffic. How do you know if your Twitter network is working or not? You can't track clicks from those auto-tweets to your post.

3. It doesn't brand yourself. First words of those auto-tweets brand ActiveRain. Which is all well and good - but I'd rather brand myself, thankyouverrrymuch.

4. If you've got an outside blog, the auto-tweets don't link to it. The point of the outside blogs is to have your own domain and a prettier blog, right? But those auto-tweets send people to the "inside" version of your blog. Think about that. Your outside blog has how many links across the top that can take people away from your site? Mine has none. The AR inside blog has 9. 9 links *away from me* up at the header - in the exact place most people look for navigation and global links. Why pay for an ouside blog if I'm not sending all my traffic there?

5. And finally, auto-tweeting doesn't really engage anyone. Jeff Turner wrote an awesome post today about engaging others on Twitter - why follower counts don't matter if you're really successful at engaging the ones you have. Twitter is about interaction. Auto-posting doesn't interact.

So how do you do it better?

First - turn off that auto-tweeting. It's in your "Settings" link in your Home.

Second - go to BudURL and sign up for an account. BudURLs let you track click traffic, and you can make custom URLs.

Third - use the link from the post on your Outside blog, if you've got one, and make a BudURL. Plus, I hear Google Analytics works now on the outside blogs, so you've got two methods to help you figure out if your post tweets are getting you any clicks or not.

Fourth - tweet your new BudURL with an interesting headline, something that will be intriguing to your Twitter audience and compel them to click on the link.

Fifth - don't tweet every post you write, unless you think that post will honestly be interesting to your Twitter network. Think about who you're trying to engage there. Is it other agents or non-agents in your area?

And Finally - go back to BudURL and see how many people actually clicked on your link in your tweet. This is a sign of both the power of your Twitter network, and the interesting-ness of the headline you used. By looking at those numbers, you can start to create more compelling tweets - a successful headline will get a lot more clicks than a boring one.

Yeah, you'll have to remember to do it. And it's an extra step you'll have to take, another 2 minutes you'll need to spend every time you post. But the reward is worth it. You'll be more engaging, attract more followers, and generally have better interactions both here and on Twitter.

If you want to see how I do it, you can check my account - I'm @housechick.

IDX Solution by ARE-TEC

ARE-TEC IDX Solutions (Applied Real Estate Technology) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:41:24 -0500

Behold, the Search Cube.

Welcome to the ARE-TEC IDX Solution - created by agents, for agents. Go ahead, play with it a little, get a feel for how it works. This is an example that displays the Tucson MLS.

The whole idea behind this IDX solution is powerful simplicity. There's a lot of capability here, but not a lot of flashing whiz-bang not-sure-what-it-does type of stuff. Just a clean, simple, flexible and highly customizeable IDX search.

Just about everything you see here can be customized: size, colors, the fields that users can search on, the fields that are displayed in the search results. Want to make users register to use your search? No problem. We'll even put their registration information into customer relationship management software, so you can stay in touch with them later.

How about having a special MLS search on a niche site for just a certain area of town? Done.

What if you want to embed an MLS search on your Outside Blog here at ActiveRain? We can do that. Want one on your regular website too? We say go for it. You can put this search on just about any website, size it to fit, and do it all fast and easy.

Questions? Interested? Send us an email and let's chat.

Is the Listing Router an Effective Call to Action?

ARE-TEC IDX Solutions (Applied Real Estate Technology) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:51:01 -0600

More buzz today as Listing Router hits the new ActiveBlogs...

Basically, Listing Router is just a call to action for your readers, right? It gives them the opporunity to search for homes, and if they type in your area on your page, then that person gets sent over to your IDX search.

So if we think about Listing Router as a call to action... how do we know if that's the best one, the most convincing way to persuade people to search for homes? Because - certainly - we want to present this call to action, this opportunity for our site visitors, in a way that convinces them to use that feature.

In fact, on my own real estate business site, I've been testing my own IDX search, trying different headlines to see which makes people stay and use the search longest. We had the original headline:

    Search Tucson Homes - Listings Provided by the Tucson MLS

and 3 different variations. So far, this is the winner:

    Tucson MLS Listings - Search for a Home or Land Here

which makes people use the search longer than they do with the original headline nearly 75% of the time.

The loser:

    Search the Tucson MLS Below

actually makes people leave FASTER than the original headline.

So I'm curious: is that Listing Router actually effective at driving people to your listing search? What percentage of your site visitors use it? Could it be made more effective with a different headline, a different placement, a different call to action? How does it perform compared to, say, a little quick search widget embedded in your post or sidebar? Can you take what's given, and find out what parts of it work or don't work, and then tweak it to make it better somehow? Can I make it more or less prominent, depending on the kind of information I'm providing in my blog alongside it? How do I differentiate mine from everyone elses?

Very curious.

What's your experience?

Spring Cleaning, Screaming Me, and Other Special Offers

ARE-TEC IDX Solutions (Applied Real Estate Technology) — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:15:02 -0500

Spring has hit my city! The palo verde are in bloom, the weather is warm - which all means it's time for a thorough house cleaning to clear out the winter dust and clutter.

It also reminds me to do the same with my blog.

I've been working on some course materials for a new social media designation, a group I'm honored to be part of. It's all based around the concept of leveraging these tools to engage with real people. So every once in a while, I like to go back to my site and my blog and make sure that's what I'm doing.

I was peeking around AR today as well - I went to eleven of the top ranked agent blogs for eleven random states here at AR to check out their blogs. And would you believe, out of those 11 blogs, only one had any kind of call to action, any kind of offer in their sidebar that might entice a client to explore further, to stay and click around in some information that pertains to that site visitor, or to go look at homes?

Oh there were plenty of "come see me over here" type links - which sort of scream "hey you - come learn about me!" But is that really engaging others? I don't think so.

So if we're trying to attract clients to our blog given the various content that we write, what kind of calls to action, what kind of offers should we be making in our sidebars?

People generally want two things: information and listings. And yet not one blog I went to today here on AR had a prominent link to their listings search anywhere where I didn't have to scroll to see it, or where I didn't have to look through a huge list of text links down near the bottom.

If we know people want information and listings, why not give them huge, obvious opportunity to look at those things? Why not make a nice button and put it in your sidebar up at the top, something a user can click to look at homes. Or another button that links to all of your buyer or seller or city articles by using your tag links?

Make it easy for people to get to the information they want - engage them by offering them what they want, not by blasting them with more information about yourself. Give them what they want on their terms - take care of them, and they'll take care of you. So what can you add or rearrange in your sidebar that would better address a visitor's potential needs? What offer can you make that would be helpful, what information do you have that you can group together for them?

Putting Together the Pieces

ARE-TEC IDX Solutions (Applied Real Estate Technology) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 14:30:22 -0600

I love when a plan comes together.

Introducing -> Marin Fine Properties.

Tres chic, no? See what can be done with the right tools? I love the combination of things that are powerful on their own, and yet work so well together: the Altos market charts, the Google neighborhood map, the integration with her blog, and the ARE-TEC search widget and IDX.

All in one sleek package.

She's still got some work to do, fleshing out the neighborhood pages a bit, but I was too excited to wait. You can already see what an incredible site this will be. Clean, simple, engaging.

Oh - this also means if you're in the Bay Area, especially a member of BAREIS, we can get you up and running with our IDX search in a matter of minutes.

And if you have a second, go congratulate Ginger on creating an amazing site. We provide the tools, but you guys are the ones that put them to work.

Getting the Most out of Listing Router - Picking a Strategy

ARE-TEC IDX Solutions (Applied Real Estate Technology) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 12:56:40 -0500

I’ve been watching the new Listing Router roll out across ActiveRain, reading the various explanations and reactions from the community. As a successful real estate blogger and proficient user of AdWords (Google’s Pay-Per-Click system), I feel there are a few aspects that I haven’t seen addressed.

If you’re concerned that you’re buying ‘clicks’ that will never be ‘clients,’ you should address these four issues when you set up and use Listing Router.

#1 – Consider the User First

#2 – Decide on a Strategy

Granted, Listing Router is such a new feature that actual traffic volumes sent and received on an individual level is completely unknown. However, assuming there is any respectable traffic to your larger market area…

You’ve got a few options. How many cites do you serve? I can think of 7 in my area. Tucson, sure. But also Oro Valley, Marana, Vail, Sahuarita, Picture Rocks and Corona de Tucson.

Most people’s instinct is to throw their money at the cities that they think will have the highest traffic, but high traffic tends to go hand in hand with high competition. In the real pay-per-click world outside of ActiveRain, high traffic, high competition words are also high cost.

If you only go after the big cities, you may blow through your budget fairly quickly, or you may be competing with so many other agents that your turn in the round-robin-o-clicks comes around infrequently. And if pricing per visitor starts to vary based on volume, as has been hinted, then the smaller cities with cheaper traffic might be the way to go.

But that’s going to depend on the amount of traffic to those smaller cities too. Those smaller cities may not produce the same amount of traffic, but maybe there’ll be less competition, or maybe your site can convert visitors from those cities very well.

How will you decide? Well, in its current form, you have to guess – try one or the other and see what works and what doesn’t work. What you *really* need is data about which cities get how much traffic and how much competition you have.

Next Time – You’ve got visitors! Now what?

Making a Good Scent Trail

ARE-TEC IDX Solutions (Applied Real Estate Technology) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:55:34 -0600

I firmly believe that if you show your web visitors the right information at the right time, they'll love you for it. But in order to do that, you need to understand a little bit about how people behave online, what they see and do.

There was a study done a while back, the Lincoln Study, by Jared Spool, where they gaged user's confidence and success in finding something online, to try to figure out why some sites consistently are good at helping people find their target content and some just aren't. Among other interesting discoveries, they found that when users were successful in finding the target content, the description words of that content appeared on the page 72% of the time. And when users were unsuccessful in finding the target content, the descriptive words only appeared an average of 6% of the time on the page.

Which means...

Users like to see words describing their goal on a site, it helps them have more confidence that the thing they're looking for is indeed there to be found. It's called a scent trail.

In practice, that goes like this: If someone is looking for townhomes in Tucson, and they search Google for "townhomes in Tucson" and just happen to click on that page in my site from the search engine results page, then that page needs to - very prominently - repeat the words "Townhomes in Tucson." We're not trying to be subtle or fancy here. We're trying to be clear and clean and highly usable.

Which means that if I create a page on my site just for people looking at townhomes, then I need to very carefully optimize for those kinds of words, and then I need to restate those words plainly on the page.

Remember - a web page should do one of two things: it either provides the content that someone is looking for, or it provides links to that content. Otherwise, users stop looking and click away.

Why I Want To Be Clicky

ARE-TEC IDX Solutions (Applied Real Estate Technology) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:33:30 -0600

On my mind today: I have this frequent conversation with one of my pals regarding her website. She wants to do these lengthy explanations of things, not try to direct her site visitors down any specific path. Which would be great - if she were running an information site, making some revenue from ads on the side. But she's not, she's a real estate agent, trying to persuade people to do business with her.

If you're not trying to persuade someone to do something, why do you have a website?

We go back and forth about what makes a site "sticky." I'll describe some feature or widget as "very clicky" and she'll ask me why that's a good thing.

Very simply put -> if they're not clicking, you've stopped communicating.

Clicky is good.

Clicky means you've got a conversation going.

People stop clicking either because they didn't find what they wanted, or because they found exactly what they wanted. Which hopefully was you, or something you've got.

Can you get to Times Square next week? Don't Miss REBarCamp New York!

ARE-TEC IDX Solutions (Applied Real Estate Technology) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 17:13:33 -0600

It's too late to get a free lunch, but don't let that stop you. REBarCamp takes place Tuesday, January 6th at the Marriot Marquis in Times Square, New York, 9am - 5pm. You can register here. You'll have to pay for your own lunch at this point, but given that the rest of the conference is free, that's a small price to pay.

What's REBarCamp? Well - an unconference. A gathering of people who get together on a specific day and time and share their ideas. It's the casual conference, the fun, open way to learn about cutting edge stuff in Real Estate. You can listen, you can interact, you can meet all nature of cool kids.

The schedule is made on that morning, but a few people have already pitched sessions. If you go to REBarCamp, you can hear:

The Fabulous Altos Research boys talk about better marketing using real estate stats
The bald-fabulous Jeff Turner, Roost's own Derek Overbey, and Mike Price of MLBroadcast talk about how to use video, from vlogs to video conference calls, and beyond.
Social Ninja Todd Carpenter and the lovely Ginger Wilcox discuss how to use social media to develop and create offline relationships
And lowly me, talking about how to better listen to and understand your site visitors by using some cool Google tools like the Website Optimizer.

If you're in the area, if you can GET YOURSELF THERE on that day - DO IT. I promise. Go. Be wowed. It's really that good. RSVP NOW.

I'll be the dork talking about Google with Housechick on her nametag - hope to meet you there!

Getting the Most out of the Listing Router

ARE-TEC IDX Solutions (Applied Real Estate Technology) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 03:07:13 -0500

If you’re concerned that you’re buying ‘clicks’ that will never be ‘clients,’ you should address these four issues when you set up and use Listing Router.

Let’s start with the big one that I haven’t heard anyone talking about yet: It’s all about the user.

How a web visitor enters and experiences your site will make or break your web business. If someone types in Tucson, AZ, into the Listing Router, and the click goes to me and I send that person to my IDX site that is ugly, or has a huge form, or isn’t already filled out to search Tucson and not some other city, chances are, I just wasted the money on the click. A web visitor is going to give your site about 2 seconds before they decide if it is relevant to what they wanted. So if a user types in Tucson, AZ and gets sent to my site, then that user better know – in 2 seconds or less – that they’re on the right site to search real estate in that city.

Open a web browser and look at the site that you’ll send your Listing Router visitors to. Give it 2 seconds, close the browser. What did you see? Did it look difficult to fill out, like it’d take a lot of time to actually look at listings? Did you know right away what city that the site was for? Did it load quickly or did it take forever?

A huge reason that we blog and are visible online is to attract clients, and clients often start out as visitors to our site. And when web visitors hit a new site, they don’t spend 20 minutes reading every word and carefully perusing it. They give it 2-8 seconds and move on if they don’t think the site is what they’re looking for. If you’re going to start paying for web visitors, first make sure your site is worth visiting, from the user perspective.

Step Two – Picking your battles.

Step Three - Planning for success.

Step Four - Measuring your results.

Getting the Most out of Listing Router - Measuring the Effectiveness

ARE-TEC IDX Solutions (Applied Real Estate Technology) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 11:58:09 -0600

Something that caught my eye when Listing Router was introduced, a comment by ActiveBob in his whiteboard explanation:

There are thousands and thousands of searchers every day that come to ActiveRain and leave after viewing one page.

This is typical for search engine traffic. That’s called a ‘bounce,’ in internet lingo: a short, one-page-no-click visit. Part of the point of Listing Router (in my humble opinion) is to try and capitalize on those bounces – to take those visitors who would have clicked away and give them the opportunity to go to a site that might interest them – to send them to your site with listings.

So now you’ve got to deal with the same problem. Bouncing users. Especially as you’re paying for those visitors – a bouncing user is wasted money. So how do you measure bouncing users on your site?

How do you know if Listing Router is working?

You need a system to measure and monitor the traffic sent to your IDX site from ActiveRain. Because if you’re going to spend the money, you better know if it is working for you or not.

Depending on your IDX site, that may or may not be difficult. Some sites only give very basic user analytics, if any, and then you’ve got to decide if you’ll continue to use that site or not.

One of the best free ways to better understand the users at your site, if they bounce or not, and how they found you is to create an account at Google Analytics and install a snippet of code on your site. That will tell you exactly how much traffic you’re getting from ActiveRain, how often those users click away immediately, and how many spend some time clicking around on your site.

Another simpler, but still good and free solution, is to use GetClicky, which will also help you learn where the traffic to your IDX is coming from and how long they stay on your site.

And then, once you know what the users who clicked over from ActiveRain are doing, you can try to improve those visits by improving your site. Maybe you send those users to a different page, or configure the existing search differently. Maybe you start using a different IDX, or maybe you send people to a list of search results instead of to the page where they enter their criteria. And now you can measure the results of those changes, using your web analytics.

Measure the traffic and behavior of the users who click over from Listing Router, so you’ll know if the money you’re spending is worthwhile.

Making Something out of Nothing

ARE-TEC IDX Solutions (Applied Real Estate Technology) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:47:16 -0600

Yesterday, I made a new website, just for bank-owned homes. It really wasn't that difficult, I just made a pretty Google map, embedded it on a blog page, and bought a domain for it. And then the Google map has links to lists of bank-owned homes for that area on the map, it just links out to a different site.

But it looks pretty cool. In reality, it's stuff I already had, I just framed it a little differently. And now I can promote that I have these lists of bargain homes to attract buyers.

I was reminded of that when I read ActiveBrad's excellent post today about a woman who put a nice looking search at the bottom of her posts. Now, buttons at the bottom of posts to search homes isn't all that new, but hers has dropdown boxes so that a reader can select what kind of home they want to search. Now, imagine if she had a post about a specific neighborhood or home, and could have those boxes already set to search homes in that area. That's incredible power.

It's an iframe, which means that little search widget is a tool provided to her by her IDX, so all she has to do is copy and paste that little line of code in wherever she wants a search. So incredibly easy. And that's the whole point of having an MLS search on your site is that you should be able to integrate listings and your posts with extreme ease.

Now, with that tool, that little quick search widget, think about what else you could make out of it. If I wanted to target a neighborhood, I could buy a domain for that neighborhood, make a page with that quick search, write a few paragraphs about it, and promote that. I could whip one of those up for a listing pretty quick, use that special neighborhood domain on my listing advertising. I could put it on my single property websites - if people look at the single property website and don't like that particular house, then they can search other homes easily, right from that widget. Heck, if the widget is the right size, you could embed it in your AR sidebar and provide a listing search - in a prominent location - for anyone that visits your blog.

With the right tools, making something from nothing is easy. And making something that your site visitors will appreciate and return to is even better. Sometimes, it's not about adding more stuff, it's about using the right stuff in new ways.

(By the way, our iframe quick search looks like this, and embeds just about anywhere too.)