Guest Blogger Stephen Pacinelli has delivered presentations to thousands of REALTORS® on the benefits of sales automation, social media, blogging and online marketing. Stephen’s strategies come first hand from some of the best Realtors around the country. Steve co-founded Tech Savvy Agent and helped build it from the ground up to provide the best technology and marketing information to REALTORS® seeking the latest strategies and tools.

Let’s face it, Google pretty much runs the Internet.  It dictates where we go and what we see.  So if I want to play nice with anybody, guess who it’s going to be….Google.

There are 4 indispensable tools that I feel everyone should be implementing in their current business.   These tools are easy to get, and free, simply by going to google.com and signing up for an account on the upper right hand side of the page.  We’re going to start with the most basic, being your profile and touch upon some more advanced tools like, the Keyword Tool, Google Alerts and Analytics.

1. Google Profile

We can’t control what appears on the first page of Google, right?  Wouldn’t it be great to at least know that a hand-typed profile and a nice looking bio created by you, would be guaranteed to appear on the first page?  Well, guess what?  We can do that by simply filling out your Google profile.

After getting your Google account, go to Google.com and click on Google Account Settings.  You will see an empty profile screen on the upper left hand side.  This is where you want to add some information, such as a short bio or other variations of your name.  The information entered onto this screen is guaranteed to show up on the first page of Google (on the bottom) when someone searches for your name.

2. Google Alerts

The next important tool I would recommend is Google Alerts.  The Internet is a wide open space for anyone to say anything.  Do you know what people are saying about you?  You spend a lot of time making sure your reputation is secure off-line.  How about on-line?   Under the Google Account Settings screen, look for the small yellow bell and click on the Alerts link.  Key in your name here but be sure to put it in quotes as shown below, to lock your first name in with your last.  Otherwise, in my case I would get notified of all “Steve’s” or all “Pacinelli’s”.  Answer the next few questions and Google is now set up to send you an alert the second it finds any reference to your name on the Internet.

3. Google Analytics

Everyone has a website these days.  But it seems as if only a small amount of agents are truly harnessing the power of their on-line presence.  To do this, you need to have an understanding of your consumer and know what they liked most as well as what they didn’t like or did not find beneficial from your website.  Google Analytics to the rescue!  This tool will compile and save data about your visitors on your site including location, time spent, pages visited, their entry page and exit page as well as a myriad of other statistics that will give you better insight to cater towards their needs.  Google Analytics will work on almost any website and most reputable website providers will have a custom box to enter in the code that Google supplies.  Simply find the Google Analytics button under the same Google Account Settings screen I referenced earlier.

4. Google Keyword Tool

In this blog post, we definitely saved the best for last.  Knowing what your target audience is searching for on the internet can give you a competitive advantage in trying to meet the needs of this fickle group.  Since Google knows where everyone is going, it keeps detailed information about what people are searching for on the Internet.  This fantastic feature is the Google Keyword Tool.  Any tech savvy agent that is looking for a good domain name, has a website or enjoys blogging will find this tool invaluable.  The easiest way to take advantage of this free tool, is to Google “Google Keyword Tool”.  The first entry to pop up is what you are looking for.  Type a phrase into the space and instantly see the amount of searches completed for that phrase.   This is a component that has limitless use, since knowledge is power in understanding consumer behavior in the real estate industry.

I hope you find these four tools as useful as we all do at Tech Savvy Agent. What are some other free tools are you using in your business?

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Word today from the Official Google Mobile Blog, Adwords advertisers can now target their ads to searchers using iPhones, G1 or other mobile devices.

Now, advertisers will be able to display ads exclusively on these mobile devices, create campaigns for them, and get separate performance reporting. If you prefer not to show your desktop ads on these phones, you can opt out and show ads only on desktop and laptop computers.

The upside here is that real estate advertisers who are aggressive targeting city-level or neighborhood level searches can create unique campaigns with mobile-ready landing pages as well as mobile-specific calls to action (e.g. “Call 1-800-XXX-XXXX for help with your home search).

This video posted by the Adwords team goes into more detail about how you can set up one of these campaigns.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4R-wF6sdDg[/youtube]

google adwords, mobile adwords, real estate marketing

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With all the talk this week of the new online advertising options for Realtors (see John Cook’s HouseValues, HomeGain and Zillow for a good rundown), I thought I would zig as everyone else figuratively zags (or is it that I’m zagging while they’re zigging…), and talk about an interesting new way to take some of your advertising offline.

Google has finally integrated their acquisition of dMarc automated advertising platform and launched Google Audio Ads, which now allows advertisers to purchase radio spots through their AdWords account. They are currently rolling out a limited test of the system.

From the Inside AdWords blog:

Google Audio Ads brings efficiency, accountability, and enhanced ROI to radio advertising by providing advertisers with an online interface for creating and launching radio campaigns. You’ll be able to target your customers by location, station type, day of the week, and time of day. After the radio ads are run, you will be able to view online reports that tell you exactly when your ad played.

This is a win-win for everyone (well except for media buyers, I suppose). Google hopes to use its weight to negotiate more competitive rates and lower the barrier to entry for smaller advertisers. For radio stations, they have access to Google’s huge network of online advertisers and the ability to unload any of their excess inventory to advertisers who may not have previously considered radio.

A radio campaign works much like your online advertising buy. You set the budget and determine the maximum amount you’d like to spend each week. Audio Ads will show you exactly how the budget will be spent, based on the specific criteria (station format, time of day etc.) you have established.

As far as creative, all Google requires is a 30 second MP3 file. If you need help creating an ad Google has created a directory of talent that can help you with each step of that process, from script writing to recording and delivering the completed file. If you go that route rather than DIY, Google estimates it will cost between $100 and $1000 to create an ad. (More on the Google AdWords Help Center)

If this sounds like a familiar, it should. SpotRunner (which I wrote about in On the Tube, On The Cheap) has been doing pretty much the same thing with television advertising, as Google Audio Ads hopes to accomplish with radio. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Google were to buy SpotRunner and expand their portfolio of offerings at some point in the very near future.

Radio advertising may still be too expensive for all but the highest-producing Realtors, but for Brokers looking to make more of a brand specific statement, Audio Ads might be a good option to explore.

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Zillow is spending between $13.67 to $21.44 a day on its PPC advertising and seems to be marketing itself to the functionally illiterate.

Some of the terms it’s buying:

• zindex
• third street
• 7th ave
• first street
• horlando
• orlanda
• orlande

Redfin, on the other hand, is spending between $23.06 to $170.34 a day and getting a little creative with its search terms – breaking out of the real estate box:

• seattle traffic
• seattle traffice
• seattle real estate

Trulia seems to be the heavyweight champ of online ad spending, running up a tab of $524.38 – $13,130 a day on its geographically based search terms.

• bay point ca
• gaviota ca
• geneseo ny
• jackson heights ny
• lake view terrace
• lamoore ca
• north castle ny
• oak view ca
• sun valley ca
• valhalla ny

How did I find this out?

By using Spyfu, the successor to the popular research tool GoogSpy, which has recently rebranded and relaunched itself as it has now evolved to track more than just the Google Adwords. From their press release:

The site is powered by Velocityscape Web Scraper Plus+, which constantly extracts data from search engines, Alexa, Dmoz, Wikipedia, and other sources.

The goal of Spyfu, like Googspy before it, is to help you discover the PPC keywords your competitors are buying. The search results give you a general overview of their daily ad buy, their cost-per-click, number of clicks and several other metrics – you can also see how they ranks on organic search results.

While fun to play around with, I’d take any of Spyfu’s results with a grain of salt; I manually entered some of the search terms into Google and rarely found any live campaigns actually running. But, the site is currently in Beta and promises that its database will grow (and theoretically get more accurate over time).

At the very least though, it’s an interesting exercise to conduct periodically. Spyfu shows there are 8266 real estate-related companies using 11309 popular search terms, so at the very least it should provide you with some inspiration in your own PPC advertising campaigns.

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Techcrunch is reporting that Google is launching a new beta program for webmasters or web site publishers who have AdWords accounts. Website Optimizer is designed to allow you to design different versions of your landing page, which will get served up randomly to visitors entering your site through the AdWords keywords you’ve bought.

The idea is that you’ll be able to see which versions results in the most activity and therefore, the highest number conversions from your ad buys.

I’ve signed up to be part of the beta and I think this would be a very useful tool for any Realtor either currently running AdWords promotions or actively considering Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. Though I’m not running any PPC campaigns right now (this blog gets pretty good SEO results on its own) I’d be very interested in seeing what results anyone who is, has with this program.

Personally, I still think it’s more effective to concentrate on developing highly placed organic search results through good content and effectively linking strategies. Though supplementing that with a few Long Tail Adwords couldn’t hurt, I suppose.

To that end, HitTail is another beta optimization service I’ve been playing around with lately. HitTail analyzes the content you post on your web site or blog and suggests underused keywords for you to buy as part of your marketing campaign. Interesting concept, though it remains to be seen if it works in practice.

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