If you can use a computer well enough to be watching this video, you can establish a successful online presence for your business!
That’s the premise of this new series, “KISS RE”, brought to you every Tuesday on ReboReports (and archived, so you can watch them later if you miss one). In today’s technology environment, it’s important for small businesses, like real estate agents, to have a strong online presence. Don’t let that overwhelm you; as you’ll see in this video series, it’s actually quite simple. Let Eric “TheRECoach” Bryant guide you through the process. He is a professional consultant who specializes in making internet marketing accessible, particularly for real estate professionals. He is a featured author on Zillow’s Geek Estate blog, and has a strong presence on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. In short, he’s just the expert whose advice you need.
We’re going to start with what’s called the “On-Line Outline.” Basically, it’s like training wheels for internet marketing. You always have that question of “where do I go?”, “what do I do?”, “how do I do it?” It’s mind-boggling how many places you can go with your marketing on the internet. So let’s just break it down, keep it simple, give you a few ideas, and then use some free tools on the internet to make it simple for you.
The On-Line Outline starts with a hub. It’s that center piece of what you do. And your hub is going to be a blog. So I want you to get past the website thing, because, website, that’s kind of an older word now. Let’s just call it a “site” because if you were going to WallStreetJournal.com, that’d be a blog, and if you went to CNN, that would be a blog, so let’s get past it a little bit. And I’m going to focus on the number one blog on the internet, and that’s WordPress.
Why am I going to focus on WordPress? Why not! It’s thought that over 20% of the sites on the internet right now are powered by WordPress. That’s mind-boggling when you think of the millions, maybe billions of sites that are on the internet. And one-fifth of them are on WordPress?! There’s a reason. So we’re just going to… we’re not going to fight all the big guys, we’re not going to fight the fact that Google’s the biggest search engine, we’re just going to go with the flow and do the best that we can to market your business on there.
After we talk about that hub, we’re going to introduce the four largest social networks to you. Are there more? Heck yeah, there’re more, there’re hundreds more. But why mess with that? Let’s just stick where the people are, right? That’s what the little mermaid told us. So I want to be where the people are. The people are on Facebook business pages, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And yeah, you could argue that YouTube might not be a social network, but I’ll argue the opposite, that it is a social network and it is really vital, not only today, but in the future.
Once we’ve talked about the social networks, I’m going to give you the two Number One places a small business, which you are, needs to be on the internet. And that’s Google Places, and Yelp Business Pages. You might ask why, and we’ll talk about that in a future video.
Lastly, I’m going to give you these cool free tools on the internet that actually make it so simple to do this, anybody can. And I guess that’s the whole point of Keep it Simple, Stupid, is to make sure that anybody can do this. The video series is about 20 videos long. They’re short, 5-10 minutes, you can take them as you want, one at a time, try to get them all in if you’d like, take a break after 3, whatever you want. But that’s the whole point of making it simple for you. So I want you to tune in and be there for the next video, #1 in the series, and that’s Branding. And this is probably the most important part of all. Branding is everything. And it’s different on the internet. It’s not like the old days where your mom and dad were in the real estate business and they used to say “Number 1 Lister in ABC Community,” “I’m the greatest real estate agent.” Nobody cares on the internet. What they care about are three very specific areas: geography, industry, specialty. We’ll break those down in a future video for you. Come along for the ride, on Tech Tuesdays, for KISSRE.
And by the way, if you’d like to talk more about this or anything else, call the Coach, 562-646-6710, or email me, theREcoach@gmail.com. We are there to help you with all of this. Stay tuned for some more videos! And by the way, if you’re a broker or an office manager, and you need the Coach to come talk to your people, that can be arranged too, so just give us a call. I’ll see you on the next video.