If Blogging, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Linkedin mean nothing to you or if your looking to understand more about social media marketing then Darren and Julie’s new ebook is for you. It is an easy read with examples tips.

You can buy their ebook here for $29

Here is a little video they put together explaining more about their book.

Think of your favourite website… look at it today and then think, would this still be your favourite website in 6 months if it was exactly the same?

Lets say your favourite website is the clothing company Banana Republic. If you look at their website today (screen shot here) you will see their Christmas specials and some widgets that are pushing certain products and promotions. How would you feel if you went there in July and the site was still pushing their Christmas sale.

Or how about WhistlerBlackcomb.com? What if you went to their website and you saw the snow report from 2005… or if you came across their big new announcement is a new lift that was launched 8 months ago. Would you keep going to their website? or would you find your Whistler news somewhere else?

Make your website relevant! Make your website matter!

Here are 5 tasks you can do in 2007 to help your website gain the exposure and return visitors that it deserves:

1. Seriously.. Get Blogging
INMAN News named blogging as one of the top real estate stories of 2006. They reported that the “Real estate blogoshere comes to life. Real estate blogs really took off this year, with more solo agents getting into the mix and more blogging on collaborative sites.” Zillow‘s CFO & VP of Marketing Spencer Rascoff says that one of the top online real estate stories for 2006 was that blogs went mainstream.

2. Expose your Listing in a new way
Get the massive exposure that your listings deserve. Flyers, Open Houses, local Newspapers are all good ways to attract attention to your listings but services like craigslist.org, zillow.com, oodle.com, edgeio.com, hotpads.com and trulia.com are all excellent ways to gain massive exposure to your listings. Adding your listing to these sites should be standard practice when advertising your new listing.

3. Expose yourself to new ideas
2006 will be remembered in online real estate as the year that more information than ever became accessible to consumers, for free. The creation of Zillow.com, Redfin.com, and Trulia.com are a few among a rapidly growing group of companies that are pushing the envelope. Are you up to speed with what is going on? Do you know what a blog is? how about RSS? craigslist? Make 2007 the year of learning new things. Plan to attend a conference that you have never attended before. There are lots out there. Here are a few places to start looking www.realestateconnect.com or www.realtor.org.

4. Track Everything
Take the time to track what you do so that you can replicate what works and stop doing what is not working. Here are a few ideas to help you get tracking your results:
a. Ensure that you are using Google Analytics to track the stats of your website
b. Use multiple email addresses to track what is working.
– On your open house flyers use steve@yourdomain.com
– On your busines cards use sjagger@yourdomain.com
– On your just listed flyers use justlisted@yourdomain.com
You get the idea. Doing this will allow you to track which inbound emails are coming from which marketing effort.
c. Multiple domain names is a great way to track (yourdomain.com, yourdomain.ca, yourdomain.info)
d. Your Open Houses can even be tracked… ask everyone how they heard of the open house. Even tell them that your testing to see which of your marketing is pulling its weight. Run a survey to track the results. Do this for all of your open houses. I bet the results will surprise you.

5. Learn the complete capabilities of your website.
Even if your website is not an Ubertor website you should take the time to learn the complete capabilities of what your website can do for you and what technologies are available to help take you to the next level. Take some time to learn about Feedburner, RSS, Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, WordTracker, Blogs, PageRank, Link Baiting, etc.

With all of these new tasks you will need to Systematize your business. A good book to read about systematizing your business is Michael Gerbers E-Myth. His book talks about small business owners and the need to operate like a franchise. Definitely worth a read.

Need help with any or all of these tasks… Ubertor Support can help with some, Ubertor Training is another option, RET Meetups will bring you together with like minded agents, services like realtysupport.ca can do the work for you, or even a real estate coach might be the answer.

Keep in mind the California Association of REALTORS® survey found that “The typical buyer is now an Internet buyer“

Any questions… feel free to contact me directly.

One way to hurry this process along is to open a Feedburner.com account. Feedburner is free (there is a paid version) and has many tools that will help promote your website, blog and RSS feed.

There is so much you can do with a Feedburner account but for this post, I’m just going to talk about their Email Subscription service.

Do you want to have an Email Newsletter that is quick to setup and automatic so that when you update your blog, your subscribers will receive an email with your latest posts?

With Feedburner and your Ubertor website it is easy. We have done all of the integration for you, you just need to open your Feedburner account and follow the quick steps to setting it up. (want us to do it? click on enhancements in your control panel and we would be pleased to setup your account for you)

Here is the Email Subscription feature of Feedburner and what it did to Linda Linfoot’s website.

1.

After opening your Feedburner account you can activate the Email Subscriptions tab. Right away the Feedburner system will give you options for how your subscribers can signup to receive your email newsletter. It can be added to any page within your website or as a widget (similar to Featured Listing, Recent Blog widgets) Here are 2 screen shots of the options:
Built into any page:

As a Widget:

2.

Also from this tab you can customize the welcome email that your subscribers receive. Here is a screenshot:

3.

Feedburner also allows you to customize how the emails will look upon arrival into your clients inbox. You can change the text color, add your logo, change the font plus much more. Plus they show you an example of what it will look like:

4.

When a user subscribes to your email newsletter, Feedburner uses a double opt-in list to eliminate spam. I added my email address to Linda’s website, the system asks me to type in the letter I see within an image and then states that it has emailed me to confirm I am who I say I am. Here is what the email looks like (and keep in mind, Feedburner allows you to customize this first email as well):

5.

When the user clicks the link in their email they are redirected to a Feedburner confirmation page that tells them what they can expect:

Take a look at Linda’s blog page to see the feedburner tools build right in.