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Its All About Your Connections

 

 If you have kids at home, I am sure that at times you begin to wonder – what are they doing online all the time?  Their answer many times is Read the rest of this entry »

Price Wisely!

One of the main challenges for Real Estate agents is how to price properties.
We have to make sure:
*Our sellers get as much for their property as possible
*Potential buyers/cooperating brokers find it attractive enough to get traffic and realistic offers to present to our sellers.
*Once we are in Contract the property appraises Read the rest of this entry »

At EWM Realtors we are always celebrating something !

This was  the awards 2008 brunch held at our office in Aventura, Fl on March 19, 2009. We had a great time and as always lots of great comraderie among the associates, I must say it is a great place to work ! Of course I am biased beacuse it is my office!!!

But its true!!!! Ask anyone !

 

Now that we have learned a bit about how Google works and maybe you have even checked out the results for your name, it is time to turn an eye toward your market and see your real estate market like Google does.

 

 In a Google search you can get results in two ways.  First, you can pay for results – you will notice this when you see sponsored results or the right hand side bar of any google search.  Second, you can earn “organic” results which come from the information and backlinks you have on your website.

What search terms do you think are important in your real estate market?  Let’s start with big area searches like Aventura Real Estate, Miami Beach Real Estate, Sunny Isles Beach Real Estate, etc.  Maybe your focus is a little more narrow -  think of subdivisions and condo buildings like Acqualina, Aventura Lakes or The Beach Club in Hallandale Beach.  Whatever your terms are – you need to set up a Google Alert to keep an eye out on the competition.  Here’s how: (the end of the video gets a little more advanced, but you will get the idea)

1. Your Market area and real estate.
2. Your name – hint:  if you have a common name  make sure you put it in quotes and maybe use one other word ( like the city where you live or work).   This way you willonly get Alerts for yourself not someone else with your same name.
3. Just your market area – keep up on all the news
4. set up a link: yourwebsite alert for your website and maybe one for a competitors website so you can “spy” on what they are doing
5. Anything else of interest to you !

Google was founded in 1996 and is the most popular search engine around.  You can view this video to learn more about how and why google works!

 

 

Learn About the History of Google

What does this have to do with real estate?  The consumer turns to search engines like Google to look for everything, including real estate .  Understanding how Google works is the first step to improving your internet marketing. 

As the video mentioned, what made the Google experience different from other search engines was the concept that ideas and information on the internet are related and that relationship in the internet world is demonstrated by links.  The relevance of any website can be judged or ranked by how it links or relates to other sites.  Here are a few new geeky terms for today’s vocabulary lesson (all from Wikipedia) :

Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of backlinks is an indicator of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as PageRank, are likely to be more important). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal or cultural  interest: they indicate who is attracted to that page.

 

Search Engine Optimization  is the process of editing and organizing the content on a webpage or across a website to increase its potential relevance to specific keywords on specific search engines and importantly ensuring that external links to the site are correctly titled and in abundance. This is done with the aim of achieving a higher organic search  listing and thus increasing the volume of targeted traffic from search engines.

 

Page Rank is a link analysis  algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web ,with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.

Now that you have added Backlinks, SEO and Page Rank to your geek talk , let’s look at a tool that will show how your website might be doing.

 Meet Website Grader  Go to the website and enter any website you want – yours if you dare – and get your site scored.  There may be things on the report that you don’t understand but with your new found geek skills, you will get the  idea.  As an example, you can find the report for ewm.com here.

 Put your new skills to use.  Google yourself – see what comes up.  How many entries are there for your name that are you and not that other person with your same name?

Grade your website – how did you do? 

 

 

There is alot of talk about setting goals in the Real Estate business.

Every year we, the Real Estate Brokers, set out to help our associates  achieve their goals.

Often they are just words and numbers on a piece of paper. There is no real plan or accountability set in motion.

The goal is important and I am going to suggest a little roadmap to get to where you are going! Read the rest of this entry »

Negotiating with different people is not always the easiest thing to do. There are a lot of factors to consider; like what it is that both parties are trying to attain, and the temperament of each party involved. In Ki Gray’s article, “Avoiding Sour Negotiations”, he breaks it down step by step. Read the rest of this entry »

We come into contact with people everyday, this is a given.  Much of that daily contact is based on us trying to get what we want.  Whether it’s our opinions heard in a conversation, or that last parking space in the front of the mall every driver is eyeballing.  What does it take to get what we want? NEGOTIATION!  Read the rest of this entry »

In these days of limited resources thank goodness for Google. I will be writing a series on the free tools you have access to when you have a google account. First thing is to sign up for a google account by going to www.google.com.  Get a gmail account and when you go to settings  you will see all the wonderful google tools. Let’s start by checking out …. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know about you but I know that I want my middle name to be “the”… Randi “the” Manager to be with in Aventura, Fl. Randi “the” Manager with the most productive office in Aventura, Fl.  Seth Godin writes a great blog that I receive every day. I particularly thought the blog about “The” middle name was relevant to our business. Read the rest of this entry »