Hey FOREM fans – I wanted to make sure you received a special invitation to attend Inman News’ FREE Webinar next week. This webinar is specifically for Brokers.

The theme is:  Internet Marketing for Brokers: Converting Online Traffic Into Sales.

Wednesday, April 28th 2010
: 10:00 AM (PDT)

Register today! >>

Sponsored by:

94% of homebuyers start their home search online. How can brokers get more of that homebuyer traffic to their web site and convert that traffic to leads?
In this webinar, you will learn the valuable tips and techniques you need to master for your brokerage to thrive on the Internet.

You’ll learn:
• An Internet strategy that is easy to understand and implement
• What drives consumers on the Internet and how you can give them what they want
• Proven techniques for attracting people to your website and getting them to come back again and again
• How to use internet tools to drive business and increase conversions
• How to empower your agents and make it easier for them to convert the leads you are generating

Whether you own or manage a small brokerage or a larger multi-office brokerage, you will benefit from this FREE webinar!

If you are an agent reading this, please tell your broker about this webinar – he/she won’t want to miss it! We have over 300 people registered so far. Hope to see you all there!

What other types of webinars would you like to see? Leave me a comment below!

P.S. You can access all past webinars here!

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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Yahoo! Inc., just released the results of a study they did on how the Internet influences home buyers and sellers and specifically how it influences consumers when it comes to selecting a real estate agent.

No great surprises in the results (which were tabulated from a survey of 500 participants)… Yahoo’s found that… Yes… the Internet plays a “pivotal role in the selection process and was central in helping consumers identify agents”.

The numbers are good brain fodder though.. here’s what Yahoo! found:

• Home buyers and sellers consider approximately two agents on average before making a final decision.
• The Internet impacts consumer trust. Forty percent of respondents credited a site in increasing their trust in the agent.
• 74 percent of people who accessed an agent Web site got there with the help of a search engine. [emphasis mine]
• The online research process is quick and intense: consumers spent an average of 12 hours online researching agents and 75 percent selected an agent within one week of starting their search.
• 45 percent of respondents used the Internet to learn about agents they didn’t know existed.
• 41 percent discovered special deals and promotions offered from an agent through the Internet.

Struck me that maintaining a blog might still be the best way for Realtors to deal with the discovery and introduction process.

But the biggest find reinforces what many of the online search sites are banking on (see Trulia Gets Beaucoup Bucks) – there is still a massive disconnect between Realtor’s advertising budgets and where consumers are looking for information. According to Yahoo! (bias noted) 77 percent of respondents searched the Internet for information during their research process compared to 34 percent for print.

And guess where Realtors are still spending the most of their money? A Borrell Associates report quoted by Yahoo says that newspapers continue to get biggest share of Realtor advertising dollars at 40 percent (though online is catching up – and now stands at 32 percent).

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Five things that caught my eye today:

• Google Local Business Center redesigns itself, making it even easier to update your company’s information into its small business database. Why is this important? Google supplements organic search results with entries from this database, often ahead of even the top ranked destinations (see Google Implements Local Search Results).

• Like Google Alerts “on Steroids”… Trackur.com was created by Marketing Pilgrim Andy Beal and helps you monitor your online identity (see Rise in Internet Use Reinforces the Need for a Cohesive Identity Strategy).

• Twist monitors trends in Twitter. Interesting tool that monitors and compares the volume of daily tweets contain search terms (see Do You Twitter?).

• BuddyPress is a new initiative to turn Wordpress MU into a social networking platform. Like Ning, this may make it even easier to build your own ‘niche’ social network (see Niche Networks and Marketing Real Estate).

• Top Non-ActiveRain Real Estate Blogs. Skewed of course by the data sources, but interesting nonetheless. Kudos to Jon for putting it together every month.

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Earlier this week, Apple released a firmware upgrade for the iPhone (and the iPod Touch) that allows you to set any web page as a “Web Clip” (basically, a shortcut icon) on your phone’s start screen.When you do this however, the default image it uses is just a thumbnail of your homepage – which, to be honest, is kind of boring.

Thankfully, Apple has allowed web publishers to create their own custom icons. And it’s easy to do – fire up your image editing program and create a new document that is 57 x 57 pixels. Once you’ve finished your design, save the image as a PNG and title it “apple-touch-icon.png” (no quotes). Then just upload it to the root folder of your web site. Safari will now choose your icon instead.

I decided to do this for FOREM. Here’s what I came up with:

iPhone users, if you want to see it on your phone – hit this site in Safari and the tap the ‘+’ button to add FOREM to your start screen.

Look how much better it looks than some of the other sites I bookmarked…

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