Poll: Hourly Realtor Fee Agreement?

Most of the real estate agents in the United States work for a commission- which means they do not get paid unless a property is sold. This of course can translate in endless hours of showing properties to clients who are not serious in purchasing a house. The work that real estate agents perform, in other industries can translate into $100 per hour or more. How do you think real estate industry would look if there was some sort of “hourly fee agreement” for using your services? People have no problem paying their doctors, accountants, lawyers and other professionals hourly fee. Why is real estate different?

I personally think an hourly fee agreement would accomplish two very important things:

  1. It would change the attitude of clients. People tend to value more the services they pay for.
  2. It would filter out serious buyers or sellers from those who are “just shopping around”.

What do you think? Feel free to leave comments as well as participating in the poll:


[poll=5]

If you are not an real estate agent, you are welcomed to participate in the above poll as well. It would be great to know your feedback.

Content Spooling Network

Not so long ago Content Spooling Network came up with a great solution for Hittail users. The video below explains the product:



If you could not watch the above video, the Content Spooling Network is a solution for article marketers. Content Spooling Network allows you to submit your articles to variety of article marketing websites simultaneously, it offers “ghostwriting” services in case you do not have time to write the articles. But most importantly now it has integration with paid version of Hittail Puls account.

Being a huge Hittail fan, I knew I had to try Content Spooling Network. At the time they offered a 21 day free trial of their product. While I found product to be very innovative, I wish people behind Content Spooling Network would learn a thing or two from Hittail:

  1. Offer a free version of the product or at least extend the length the trial period to 60 or 90 days. I believe that the 21 day trial is two short for an average website owner to notice any results. And if he decides to use the “ghostwriting” services, the 21 day trial can turn into an expensive adventure.
  2. Pricing. I think more users would consider using Content Spooling Network if the monthly fee was let say $5.99 per month (or even free). If, with $29 monthly membership, you would like to submit 4 articles while using ghostwriting services to create 16 variation of 4 original articles you are likely to end up paying well over $60 per month for Content Spooling Network solution. If Content Spooling Network would consider a free version of their services, one of the way to defray costs would be to increase the price of ghostwriting services.

I see the value of the service provided by Content Spooling Network. However while considering my experience (which I think is above average) in article marketing, I have canceled my account with Content Spooling Network. But my decision is not final, and I still would recommend to look into what this company has to offer. Especially if you want to outsource article marketing. Do not forget to subscribe to to their blog where you can find more information about their product.

Working With Hittail Suggestions: Short Guide For Real Estate Agents

Among all different statistics that Hittail is able to provide you with, what is listed under “suggestions” proved to be by far the most beneficial information. Working with the suggestions can help you dramatically increase the traffic from natural search results while saving you some money on PPC campaigns.

There are several things that can be done with Hittail suggestions in order to achieve the best results. For the sake of the argument I am going to presume that you have already installed Hittail code on your website or blog and there are already suggestions offered to you by Hittail. While every website will probably receive suggestions that are more relevant to your website, to make the example more vivid, I am presuming that one of your suggestions was “rentals in New York”.

Step 1: Create Content (Article) On Your Website That Will Contain The Hittail Suggestion
If your website permits to publish articles or you may even have a blog on your website, the first thing to do is to write an article about “rentals in New York”. If you are a real estate agent working New York such an article should not be that difficult to come up with. In fact you probably have enough knowledge and experience to write such an article on a monthly basis, maybe comparing the market condition specifically regarding rentals in New York. It is good idea if this suggested by Hittail keyword appears not only in the title of the article, but it is also found a few times in the body of the article as well as in the URL of the article. It would be also to your advantage if the key word is present in the title meta tag of the page containing the article.

Step 2: Write An Article For Article Directory Containing The Hittail Suggestion.
In one of the previous posts I have mentioned the importance of article marketing when working with Hittail Suggestions. In doing so I would advise to not submit an exact copy of the article you have created in the step one. Doing so will inevitable create what can be looked at as a duplicate content, which will not be into your favor as far as search engines are concerned. If you have no time for yet another article, you can consider modifying your original article from step one for the article directory of your choice. However you should be diligent enough to paraphrase your sentences so it does not appear like a duplicate of your original article.

Some article directories allow you to place links back to your website inside of the article. While others permit you to do so in so called “resource box” which generally appears at the end of your article. In either case it is an opportunity to gain an incoming link back to your website as soon as your article is accepted and published on of of the websites. When your articles are republished on other website, you will gain even additional incoming links.

When creating links that will point back to your website, it would be in your interest that those link use the suggestion offered by Hittail as the anchor text while linking back to your original article in step one. I know this may sound something like “and wheels on the bus go round and round….” But that is not necessarily a bad thing and may reinforce what Andy Beard calls a “link juice flow”. If you are new to SEO Andy’s article may be a little over the top, but I highly recommend to bookmark his article for the future. As you become more familiar with SEO, his article can help you in more than just one way.

Step 3: Increasing Number of Links pointing to Your Website Or Blog
Step number two on it’s own can increase the number of links pointing back to your website when other webmasters begin publishing your articles on their websites. However there are other ways to gain backlings to your website. Becoming active member of online forums can prove beneficial and can be used to gain some valuable links back to your website. After posting certain number of posts, some of these forums may offer you a privilege of including a signature along with your posts. I would like to underline the word privilege because it is very easy to show up at these forums begin leaving links. But doing so you will earn a reputation of a spammer. However if you earn some authority first among the members of the online forums, it may be more beneficial than an opportunity to have a link back to your website.

Afterthoughts
If you search the internet for information on how to increase incoming links to your website, you will inevitably come across websites that promote buying and selling links. While in the past this strategy worked, the search engines had become increasingly impatient with websites selling links. Personally I would discourage every real estate agent to buy links. There are other ways to increase incoming links without compromising the status of your website in the search engines.

I realize that not every real estate agent has a blog on their website nor do the agents have time to regularly write articles. However I am not stretching when I say that many real estate agents were skeptical about building e-mail lists just a few years ago. Today there are number of successful companies that help real estate agents with e-mail marketing.

Hittail Is Helping Me Save $1,725 Each Month

Yea, right!!! – If that was your first reaction when you saw the headline for this article, do not worry you are not the first one. In fact when I recommended Hittail as must to have tool for every real estate website, I have received somewhat similar reaction by some one from SEO Web Design:

Erm… still requires money? The features work exactly the same as Google Analytics and Webmasters Tools. However, i think Google is far better because it allows us to set goals to track our landing page conversions, shows the query terms that your website appears in, search terms that get you visitors and much more. It is free and has no limits on the number of visitors. Isn’t it better? I don’t know, it is up to our friends here and i am just sharing. Cheerz

I am not going to argue that Hittail is better that Google analytics. However, it was Hittail and not Google who brought me through their “suggestions” to a point when I can say without slightest exaggeration that with Hittail I am better off by about $1,725 each month.

As they say pictures are worth more than words, so I have taken some snapshots from my Hittail Account to demonstrate to you how much Hittail really helped me. The images below are the snapshots from the “Keywords” tab. If you are using Hittail you can find that info just above the list of keywords under the “Keywords” tab. That info changes from day to day depending on the search hits to your website. As you will see from the snapshots below I am currently tracking 5 websites with Hittail. All of them are listed under the “free account”. All of the websites below, had virtually no natural traffic from the search engines wen I started to use Hittail.

Website #1

Hittail Stats
Website #2

Hittail Stats
Website #3

Hittail Stats
Website #4

Hittail Stats
Website #5

Hittail Stats

It is true, the figures in the above images are calculated on $0.50 per click basis. It is also true that if you optimize your lading pages well you can maintain $0.10 per click. However there are niches, including real estate, where even well optimized PPC campaigns can cost you a $1 or $2 per click. Sometimes even more. So at the end of the day Hittail’s calculation is not that much off after all.

One very important part that Hittail users may miss is that by using Hittail suggestions it is much easier to maintain those coveted $0.10 per click campaigns. Hittail has helped me not only to increase natural search traffic. It also helped me to keep my PPC nice and clean with hundreds of keywords at $0.10 per click.

Am I saying you should abandon Google Analytics? Absolutely not! Hittail and Google Analytics can work with different data providing different analytics and you can benefit greatly from both.

In my next article I getting down and dirty with showing you how to make use of Hittail Suggestions. So please, stay tuned and subscribe to my blog.

Real Estate Forums

Participating in online forum can benefit you on many levels. You can network with other real estate agents and even can bring some extra visitors to your website. I have compiled a list of five real estate forums that you can not afford to ignore. I will later explain who it can be used on occasions while working with Hittail. However there is one very important thing to remember when joining an online forum. You will benefit form online forums by contributing to them. If you join a forum only as an opportunity to leave links back to your websites, soon you will earn a reputation of a spammer and no one will take you seriously.

Many online forums reward active users by offering a signature which can accompany every post you write on the forum. Some use this signature to promote their websites. Many forums will require to write certain amount of posts before allowing you to use the signature. Some forums grant you this opportunity from the time you join the forum.

Forums in the list below are particularly focused on real estate. If you are not member of any forum on the list consider joining them. Should you be already a member of some of them feel free to leave your feedback.

Real Estate Webmasters Forum– probably my favorite forum. You can find there great webmasters tips for your real estate website.
Real Estate Webmasters Forum
Bigger Pockets- Real Estate Investing Forum– another great website to network not only with real estate agents but with potential clients as well. As an expert real estate agent you can really shine on this forum and earn good reputation.
Bigger Pockets- Real Estate Investing Forum
Real Estate Forum– is another highly recommended forum for real estate agents. With over 13,000 members it is a busy place. You can find and/or share your expertise on anything from web design to mortgage and loans.
Real Estate Forum
Agents Online– another “must join” forum for any real estate agent. This forums is more exclusively focused on real estate and everything that comes along. There are 9,333 members on this forum today. Why not to join the crowed?
Agents Online
The Pro Real Estate Network Forums– although this forum has only 457 members today, it deserves credit for the outstanding efforts in SEO and marketing. I will not be surprised that the forum will have few thousand members by this summer.
The Pro Real Estate Network Forums
There are many other online forums that real estate agents can benefit from. Especially if they are looking for webmasters, SEO, PPC and other tips. I will write about those in the future. The above forums were chosen specifically because they are closely related to real estate. I hope you find the above list helpful.