However, when my colleague introduced me to the BoomTownROI platform, I felt that same jolt of excitement one experiences when stumbling upon a new technology that could actually make life easier…you know that feeling all too well – a reserved excitement; not wanting to fully invest yourself emotionally, just in case the technology fails to deliver and you end up with the bitter taste of failed expectations. So I began to investigate and scrutinize this BoomTown solution under the careful eye of consumer-centric bias, and what I found next was simply satisfying…to be continued

It worked too. For a few serene innings I forgot that I had quotas waiting for me back at the office. I left all the emails, phone calls, and reports behind me at the stadium entrance. I was just an A’s fan at that moment enjoying the strike outs, double plays, line drives, until all of this came to a crashing halt in a very “jumbo way”! To my utter horror, I found my best friend who happens to be a co-worker of mine at HomeGain selling himself out on the jumbo-tron, parading our company’s one liner “we connect consumers with real estate professionals!” during an inning switch over… So much for my mental escape.

Little progress report on my online reputation management efforts;  this is the original intent of this blog series after all.

With just two blog posts I’ve managed to get on the first page of google for the search term “HomeGain Buyerlink” in the respectable 4^th and 5^th organic spot. My articles are still below the negative tirade that birthed this project, so I still got some writing to do!

In my last post, I ended with a reference to one of our most successful real estate brokers, Mitch Ribak of Tropical Realtyof Suntree in Melbourne, FL who is on track to sell more than 350 homes this year from his online lead generation efforts. He has been using HomeGain’s Buyerlink exclusively for the past 2 years, saving him time and money from managing his own pay per click campaign with Google Adwords and Yahoo PPC. Admittedly,  his results are exemplary and much like the poster child who lost 60 lbs in 60 days on a weight loss supplement commercial, let’s delve a bit deeper into the nature of pay per click marketing and why Buyerlink is a cost and time effective solution.

Buyerlink addresses the age old tension of running a business with limited resources. In an ideal world, every realtor would hold a degree in marketing and computer science, and an MBA from Harvard business to top it off. These super agents could conceptualize, code, and design a search engine optimized website with the latest and greatest functionality integrated and could execute a return on investment positive google adwords campaign focused on a super targeted and lucrative basket of keywords. And more impressively, they would be able to whisk these serious all cash buyers around on a buyers tour and write offers the same day. Well, unfortunately we live but one life and everyone is subjected to the limitations of a 24 hour day.

So where do you want to focus the limited time you have? Sitting behind a computer screen with your face buried in a google adwords for dummies book trying to figure out what “quality score” and “negative keywords” mean or interacting and servicing home buyers and sellers in the real world?

I’m not questioning the aptitude and technical capacity of realtors. I’m sure that anyone who really wanted to learn how to run a successful pay per click strategy for his business could eventually achieve a moderate level of success with the plethora of do it yourself guides out there. But what I am questioning is the practicality and economics of such an endeavor. Can you afford to spend the hours a day conducting A/B tests of different combinations of ad copies and keywords? Can you afford the trial and error period of learning the nuances of google adwords? Lastly, can you compete against the traffic aggregators that utitlize proprietary pay per click management software that automatically analyzes data and shifts dollars according?

If you don’t, then utilizing HomeGain’s Buyerlink is a no-brainer decision. Consider these facts once again and determine if HomeGain is someone you want to partner with or compete against: Homegain manages a mulit-million dollar search engine marketing budget encompassing millions of keywords. HomeGain also has millions of indexed pages on the search engines, thousands of high quality and reputable inbound links, and industry experts dedicated to search engine optimization strategies to rank organically for the most prominent real estate keywords. More impressive than that is the 200+ affiliate partnerships that HomeGain has built over the 10 years it has been in operation to drive more traffic to its site. You combine just those three fundamental elements and you’ve got a company that can get you the kind of traffic you want to your individual website.

With HomeGain’s Buyerlink you can say goodbye to the days of managing keywords, start bid prices, ad copies, etc. All of that is done by HomeGain and the only thing you get is a visitor that wants to search for homes in your specific farming area.

I will be starting a new series entitled google adwords vs. homegain buyerlink where I will highlight the key differences to consider when it comes to these two formidable pay per click options. Stay tuned!

To put this into perspective, 10 years ago Alta Vista and Lycos got more unique visitors than Google, who was the awkward new kid on the block  in the search engine realm. Anyone still use Alta Vista and Lycos today?

Now just because you’re old doesn’t mean you’re good, but there is something to be said when a business model can survive 10 years in a sector as volatile and brutal as Real Estate, and real estate online marketing in particular.

How many entrepreneurial ideas that were hyped up to be revolutionary and industry-shaping actually materialized through the dot.com bust? How many supposedly life-changing online services that were being conceptualized, funded, and released in audaciously rapid succession actually delivered more than a cheap, temporary IPO stock rally?

10 years ago, Brad Inman founded HomeGain.com claiming that it will change the way homes are sold. He evangelized that it will dramatically cut down on the time and expense of selling a home, and will save real estate agents valuable time and energy, allowing them to get back to the business of selling homes. Well, Brad sold enough venture capitalists to get out their check books and bankroll his idea to make www.homegain.com a reality.

And  HomeGain has been delivering on this promise for 10 consecutive years, while adding Buyer-centric marketing tools such as HomeGain’s Buyerlink and a slew of other marketing services for Realtors to connect with prospective homebuyers and sellers.

HomeGain may not be a media darling and get the kind of fanfare that Trulia or Zillow has garnered over the past couple of years, but they’re fine with quietly posting profits year after year and providingdemonstrable return on investment to their clients for 10 straight years.

So kudos to you HomeGain for delivering on your promise 10 years ago to change the way Real Estate transactions are made, and in honor of this commendable acheivement, here is a Yims Blog Top Ten Facts about HomeGain…Drum Roll Please:

10) HomeGain released the 1st ever instant home valuation tool in 2000. Yes, even before Zillow turned it into a circus and allowed people to find the value of Bill Gates’ house.

9) HomeGain receives 4-5 million unique visitors per month

8.  HomeGain surveyed over 2,000 real estate agents nationwide and configured a list of the top 10 moderately priced home improvements that will benefit sellers most when they sell their homes and released this return on investment calculator to the public as HomeSale Maximizer tool.

7) HomeGain released the first virtual blogging school where Realtors can receive free blogging lessons for their Agentview Blog platform from “blog professor” Joseph Ferrara of Sellsius Real Estate Blog, a veteran in real estate blogging.

6) HomeGain has 5,000+ real estate agents and brokers in its clientele. This is paying clientele mind you. I’m not sure Trulia nor Zillow can say the same, although their Weight Watchers and Netflix ads provide very entertaining distractions to consumers searching for homes (please take note of the sarcasm, it’s very purposeful)

5) HomeGain launched a Green Real Estate Campaign on Earth Day 2009 to promote green real estate practices and give a platform for this movement.

4) HomeGain has produced 50,000+ real estate transactions representing over $10 Billion in home sales in the past 10 years.

3) Over 800 real estate agents have earned in excess of $50,000 in commissions from HomeGain’s Agent Evaluator program.

2) HomeGain announced 2 real estate agents who have earned over $1 million in real estate commissions using the Agent Evaluator program.

1) HomeGain redesigned HomeGain.com in the 4th quarter of 2008, and good thing because the old site was plain ugly.

Before:

After:

This world is so hyper connected that it’s almost impossible to be “unavailable”. Remember those days when you could just screen your calls on your cellphone and use a lame excuse like, “Oh, I had no reception in the area?” and you received immunity from annoyed friends and family? You try that tactic now and you’ll hear crazy things like,  “I called you twice, left you a message, texted you, instant messaged you, emailed, twittered, facebook poked you! Where were you?!” You could reply back, “well obviously you didn’t get the message that I was trying to send you by not replying back!” but you might lose some friends that way.

As with any technological advance in the social realm, the medium inevitably encroaches into the business sector and the lines between “social” and “business” become blurred in a hurry. An entire industry has arisen out of social media marketing, and I have to admit, at first I was quite skeptical.

I hated the idea of businesses on facebook creating profiles and fan pages, or companies twittering news about their products because it seemed to defeat the purpose of what these social mediums aimed to create: a way to stay connected with friends and family. But where there is a new concept of communication there is always a buck to be made, and if there is a buck to be made, there will be 1000 vendors  trying to make that buck.  So instead of folding my arms from the sidelines in stubborn resistance, I’ve decided to embrace the undeniable and wrap my head around this new social marketing beast.

I shouldn’t be so surprised after all. Things have always been this way. Radio and Television advertisements have become so embedded into our social lives that we don’t bat an eye when a Geico ad interrupts our favorite prime time episodes or morning commute talk radio segment. I can’t even watch Youtube clips of Susan Boyle’s jaw-dropping performance without seeing an advertisement pop up in the window. So the question isn’t whether Social Marketing platforms are a viable way for real estate agents to reach prospective clients in non-traditional ways, but rather, how can it be done in a fun, creative, personalized manner.

Realtors, please mark my words. Putting up a link to your MLS listing on your facebook status or twittering an announcement of an open house for your listing is not creative, definitely not fun, impersonal, and does not fall in line with the normal user experience of the people using the social medium.

If you walk away with anything from this post, just hone in on this one point

and commit it to memory. People use facebook to connect with friends and family by looking at photos, videos, reading little blurbs about their friend’s mental musings. Thus, your social marketing efforts must seamlessly interface with the most common user experiences of your facebook users or else they will be utterly ignored and in some cases harshly received.

In my next post, I will attempt to demonstrate a way of marketing yourself as a Realtor to your facebook-using prospects in the context of their social mingling norms, utilizing  features that these uers have come to love and become addicted to. Stay tuned!

Come jump on the green real estate bandwagon while you can! It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what “going green” really means. It’s come to a point where green lifestyle has influenced business practices, so don’t be late on this realtors!

As I wrote in my last post, promoting yourself as a green real estate agent is imperative in setting yourself apart from your competition. Of course, there’s the whole doing good for the earth component as well, for those of you who actually care.

HomeGain jumped on the Green Real Estate bandwagon this past week and has even created a whole new page dedicated to raising green awareness in the community and real estate industry as a whole. The bandwagon is big enough for all of you real estate agents, so jump on!

I will be the first one to admit that HomeGain.com’s Buyerlink, or any of its other programs for the matter (Agent View, Agent Evaluator, or AIMS), is not a generic, one-size –fits-all solution for every realtor out there. That would like saying the Atkins Diet Program will work for every single overweight person. Simply not true. I’m open to constructive criticism so let’s delve a bit deeper into the logic behind this agent’s argument.

The realtor’s argument is summarized in the following order:

• HomeGain is at the top search engine results on Google for just about any “city, state real estate” keyword combination because HomeGain spends big dollars to make sure they it stays at the top of Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc

• HomeGain’s BuyerLink is a program where HomeGain redirects website traffic from their website to a real estate agent’s websites for a pay-per-click fee

• The HomeGain site advertises that you can search for homes. Consumers click on the search for homes button, then they click on their state, then their metro area, and finally they click on the town they are interested in.
• Suddenly, the consumer finds themselves on a completely different website, a real estate agent’s IDX search page.

CONCLUSION:

6) They are hijacking the real estate agent’s website content and listing search functions and selling them back to agents at $0.75 – $1.50 per click.

This realtor was on such a good start, making some valid objective points, but then unashamedly abandons logic to fumble to his malicious conclusion.

If HomeGain.com attracts millions of visitors a month because we have put forth great effort in our Search Engine Optimization Strategy, built key strategic partnerships with over 300 affiliate partners, and manage a fine-tuned Search Engine Marketing campaign, and then connect these consumers directly with Real Estate Professionals through our Buyerlink program, are we guilty of Hijacking?

His logic would not hold even in Judge Judy’s court of law. If we extended his reasoning to its logical ends then I could argue that even he himself as a realtor is a middle man “hijacking” buyers and sellers who could conduct a transaction by themselves if they really had enough time to worry about all the legalities and details and save 6% while they are at it!

Heck, using this line of reasoning, we should perhaps start picketing outside of Costco and Walmart. They leverage their multi-million dollar budget to aggregate consumer products in quantities and prices that no individual consumer can get and pass that on to their members for a little mark up. Sounds eerily similar to HomeGain’s Buyerlink strategy, no? Perhaps we should churn our own butter, grow our own vegetables, make trips to Wall Street to trade our own stocks, buy cars directly from Detroit, you get my point.

All sarcasm aside, a world with no middle men simply does not exist. While waxing eloquent about this “idealistic” marketplace may make great blogging material, but it is utterly futile in practical application.  In a free market capitalistic economy, or what is left of it today, there will always be technology vendors that provide TOOLS to empower agents to run their business efficiently and productively.

Can HomeGain’s Buyerlink be used as a TOOL for a realtor, which if yeilded correctly can great return on investment for realtors? 350 transactions good enough for you?

To be continued…

There’s nothing more painful than the experience of performing a google search for your own company’s name, or one of its flagship products, only to find that the highest organic results are blog rants from a furious consumer who thinks you are the worst thing since Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. Unfortunately, there is no way to “unapprove” those comments no matter how incredulous or unreasonable they may be. As you will discover, I speak from personal experience…

I was performing a google search for my own beloved company’s program, Buyerlink when, to my unpleasant surprise, the second organic result was a blog post written by an agent on Active Rain entitled, “HomeGain Buyerlink –You’re fired”.  My stomach turned into a knot and I felt like one of those poor contestants on the The Apprentice, who just heard those fateful words from Donald Trump.

In a mad fury of research I managed to find some techniques that would hopefully deal with this rogue review of HomeGain’s Buyerlink program. I found some amazingly practical and easy ways to help with HomeGain’s Reputation management, such as creating multiple profiles on social media outlets and piggy backing off of their SEO value to bury negative comments. However, every single source of information unanimously agreed on the value of providing rich new content via blogs for the google bots to gobble up. So I’ll be starting a series of posts in an attempt to kill two birds with one stone. Hopefully I’ll be able to aide in HomeGain’s Reputation management with more informative posts on Buyerlink in addition to sensibly addressing and refuting this agent’s conclusion about HomeGain’s Buyerlink product. Stay tuned!

Kentucky Fried Chicken has taken its “finger-licking-good” show on the road, literally. The iconic purveyor of America’s ultimate comfort food, ridiculously greasy deep fried chicken, has committed to fill 350 potholes in Louisville, KY. The only catch is that Colonel Sanders will be legally allowed to graffiti on the ground “Refreshed by KFC” stenciled drawings (KFC assures the citizens of Louisville that it is street chalk, so it’s not permanent).

Whether you assess this as a brilliant, pioneering marketing move or a just further perpetuation of unwelcomed, annoying, and invasive marketing techniques (a la the flashing banner ads of the early 2000′s) there is a lesson to be learned.

No, don’t go to the city council and ask the mayor if you can fix the potholes in your market area in exchange for your advertisement spray-painted on the ground…

In essence, KFC is providing goodwill services for citizens of Louisville that will benefit thousands of people and are getting some well-deserved press in the process. People tend to appreciate acts of goodwill and usually have a favorable perception of them. Some consumers even consider this a decisive factor in whether to patronize one business over another! In the world of real estate marketing, it’s essential for realtors to be involved in some act of goodwill that conveys to the consumer that they are more than just commission hungry salespeople.

One way I’ve seen realtors do this recently is by becoming Ecobroker certified. Going Green is not just a buzzword but a movement that is being forged in the forefront of consumer’s minds, as more and more Americans is thinking greener about their purchasing decisions. When you become Ecobroker certified, you don’t just get additional letters at the end of your name on your stationary (although that is cool and I’m jealous), but you’re communicating to your clients that you are a person who cares about the environment and can help them make important decisions that are consistent with their commitments to environmental awareness.

While news stations will not be lined around your office to cover your Ecobroker designation and it won’t be nearly as entertaining as seeing Colonel Sanders fixing potholes, it will provide a competitive edge as a realtor in a much more subtle and non-ostentatious way.

Will going green produce actual generate the kind of green real estate agents are looking for? That is yet to be seen. Will the 350 potholes that KFC “refreshes” in Louisville produce more chicken sales? Well, perhaps it’s not a fair comparison because the 350 potholes will cost KFC effectively nothing -according to an inside informant KFC will “allegedly” fill the potholes with the grease left over from their deep-fryer, which anyone who has had left over chicken from KFC could tell you is not a bad idea =)