Whether that's in the form of blogs, local area information or downloadable 'how-to' guides, not only does it give your company more visibility on Google, it also helps you soft-sell your experience (and as a result, your services) to your audience. 

Some 18 months ago, Neil Young of Young London wrote a guest blog for us - Why how-to guides are good for business - and the topic is just as relevant today as it was then. 

We followed that up by mentioning the guided walks that Marsh & Parsons had put together for out-of-area house hunters. These were very shareable (think Twitter, Facebook and good old fashioned email) and paint a great picture of the lengths M&P will go to on customer service. 

Kudos to Knight Property Management for their 50 1/2 killer landlord tips ebook then. Directors Jan and David have put together a very professional branded PDF guide, full of advice for new landlords.  

And by requesting contact details as part of the process to download the guide, they are adding to their leads database (to help find new landlords) and opening up opportunities to build new relationships. 

In fact the one bit of constructive criticism I would make is that using the word 'Killer' in the title feels a bit 'get rich quick' for me - but that's just a personal preference.

When we contacted Jan, she was very happy to let us post a copy of their guide up as an example for other agents to follow.

After all, the landlord just starting out today is the potential portfolio landlord of tomorrow!

If you're in the business you won't need telling that, as a result of being the growth part of the industry, lettings has become much more competitive in recent years. Plenty of start-up agents (often with with cut-price management services) have popped up, previously sales-only estate agents have added lettings departments, and established agents are often finding their fees being pressurised as a result.

A good letting agent will maintain a database of local landlords of course. They'll have built their CRM up over the  years through advertising responses, networking, tenant referrals, land registry information and the like.

But when we saw a residential landlords database being marketed last October, we realised that not many of the agents we were talking to had been doing anything with bought-in contact lists.

Having checked the company and list out as being reputable, we passed the details on to some of our core customer base. A few of them went on to buy their local postcode areas and, a couple of months later, we're hearing some good things back.

One told us about a portfolio landlord with nine properties they were just tying up. Another had been instructed on a couple of extra properties here and there.

And so we decided it was about time we mentioned it on here too.

The company providing the list are Targets Located. Their data costs around 30p per record and is collected via seminars, events, conferences and the like - a total of 87,000 names which are being sold (with an exclusivity period) by postcode area.

Anyone interested should contact Joe Cunningham on 0151 353 7462, or by email at joe.cunningham@targetslocated.co.uk for further information.

We'd love to hear back on how you get on.

Review websites are a big part of the internet these days - and the property industry is no different to any other. In the past few years, the trend has accelerated and the list of estate agent specific review websites is getting longer:

• www.whichpropertyagent.co.uk
• www.allagents.co.uk (the ones who force their logo onto your website header, yuk!)
• www.referenceline.com (one of the more credible sites)
• www.estateagentreview.co.uk
• www.theadvisory.co.uk
• www.meetmyagent.co.uk
• www.agentright.com
• www.agent-tracker.co.uk
• www.estatepropertyagents.co.uk and sister site www.uklettingagent.co.uk
• and more..

Factor in all of the cross-industry sites - such as Google Places, Thomson Local, FreeIndex, CheckaTrade, Qype, Bview, Yelp, Yell Trusted Places, TouchLocal, The Disc Directory, etc. - and the list is endless.

The concerned comments to today's article on Estate Agent Today are not an unusual response from any business owner. But here are the facts:

1. These sites exist and are here to stay.
2. People like to read reviews (not as much as personal recommendations, but enough to matter).
3. People believe what they read (though they appreciate that you get the occasional whinger).
4. There's more incentive to write a negative review than a positive one.
5. Most sites don't give you the option to remove or respond to a review.
6. Most importantly: you cannot control or change any of these facts.

Business owners cannot afford to stick their heads in the sand any longer on this. The potential threat that these sites pose must be taken seriously - and reputation management is now an important part of doing business in an increasingly online world.

Here are 8 things you should be doing:

1. Do a good job. This shouldn't need saying, but poor companies cannot hide as easily anymore - so don't be one.
2. Commit to being open and encourage reviews from happy customers. The only way to cancel out negative reviews is to have more positive ones.
3. Make it clear to customers that you take complaints seriously. Be approachable and deal with problems when they occur, in order to prevent 'revenge' reviews later.
4. Send every customer an email asking for honest feedback on completing your business with them. Encourage them to use third party review websites which feel more independent.
5. Have a page on your website which does the same thing.
6. Consider subscribing to a service like ReferenceLine or The Disc Directory to help outsource the process.
7. Set up Google Alerts on your company name to help you monitor what people are saying about you (and respond where possible).
8. Take negative comments seriously - they should be treated as an opportunity for improvement.

It's unlikely you'll never get a negative review, but if you do the above at least it will be easier for you to put it in context.

I've often found that Christmas is a time of year when marketing people get inventive.

Kudos to Kimberley Lane at Berry Recruitment then, for scoring points by arriving unannounced at reception this morning bearing gifts and smiling like a Cheshire cat.

I don't mind confessing that anyone who gives me chocolate immediately breaks down a barrier or two! The diary may or may not come in handy, but it scores points for being good quality.

Are you planning anything similar? Have you been won over by someone making a similar festive effort?

Eighteen months on from the ASA ruling against Spicerhaart and they are still struggling to come to terms with the personal Estate Agent model.

A new ruling against Century 21 concluded that the public are still likely to make the assumption that an 'office' must be a physical one.

It's clear that 'office' is not a good word, but the ASA statement is a concern: "We told Century 21 United Kingdom that they should only list locations in which they had physical offices."

iSold say they are 'available in .. locations'. Does that help? We have asked the question of the ASA and will post an update when we have their response.

The online franchise model is a growing influence in UK estate agency - indeed, is part of the vision Government have for modernising the industry.

It's time the ASA got a grip on how to handle it.

The new features include visitor and goal flow charts, real-time visitor stats, the ability to monitor slow pages - and a favourite of ours, a keyword cloud.

The lucky readers who possess a Modern Estate Agent mouse mat will have seen similar clouds many times. :o) 

The keyword cloud tool is all about visualising the keywords your visitors used to find your website on Google. The bigger the word, the more people who found you using it.

But it is quite well hidden..

To find it click into Traffic Sources from your Dashboard, expand Sources > Search and then select Overview. From there, you need to select Keyword from your 'Viewing' bar and finally the Term Cloud option from the 'View' dropdown.

Easy huh?

He also has a few books to his name and is last year's winner of the Prime Location Property Blog award for www.propertynewshound.com. Despite which, I asked him to put together some tips for today's blog on newspaper publicity.

"In a tough economy, it’s vital for every opportunity for exposure to be optimised. Therefore newspaper editorial is a valuable boost for publicity.

Estate agents who provide material for the low-circulation struggling-to-get-by local newspapers can get the wrong impression. These local papers survive because of large-scale advertising such as house sales, so they willingly throw their property pages open for articles written by estate agents shamelessly plugging their latest home on sale, even if it looks distinctly similar to another one down the road.

When it comes to national newspaper property sections, the reverse is true. These are written by journalists and thrive on their editorial independence, irrespective of who advertises. But that is not a reason to assume your properties and business cannot get a look in... you simply have to work harder to seize the opportunity.

Here is my five point guide to getting into national newspaper property pages.

Firstly, accept that some things are NOT good stories. A home on your books that may be the most expensive in an area, or the largest, or the most recently built, or one with the most detailed documented history, will almost certainly NOT make a story by itself.

Secondly, remember that HUMAN ENDEAVOUR makes a great story. Analyse photos and subjects in the weekend property pages (Daily Mail, Times and Independent on Fridays, Telegraph and Financial Times on Saturdays, or Times and Telegraph on Sundays) and you see one common denominator in over 50 per cent of stories - they are about people. The stories tell how people have made or lost money from homes, or built their own homes, or have moved home 10 times in five years despite the downturn, or have bought the home next door and knocked through - that sort of thing.

Thirdly, list CASE STUDIES as you win instructions. These case studies are people who have interesting stories to tell, as in point two. The agencies whose names appear most commonly in national papers are those who ask vendors up front why they are selling and find out a little more, which could make a story - I bet every agent in the country has a potential story through at least one client, but does not know it.

Fourthly, have PHOTOGRAPHS of properties that are hi-res and professional. Those property features in newspapers that are not dominated by case studies are often instead about themes - for example, houses with thatched roofs, those on a commuter line, or homes with fantastic libraries. Even a humble terraced house may fit the bill if it suits the theme but a paper will only use a good quality photograph. Submitting one with a wheely bin and next door’s van parked in front will lose you a chance of free national exposure... getting the photo right could sell the property for you.

Finally, have some sort of CONTACT who can be emailed or tweeted by journalists looking for stories. Journalists hate being cold-called by agents (they do not have time to explain all this to each person who makes contact). But journalists often use email or Twitter to appeal for case studies or pics of certain types of properties. Your contact does not need to be an expensive public relations executive - just an efficient, effective person who has an understanding of how journalists and agents work.

Good luck... and I hope I’ll see you in one of my stories very soon."

Graham Norwood
@PropertyJourn
07779 595964
graham.norwood@btinternet.com

P.S. Graham also provides media training and first class corporate copy-writing, if you're ever in need!

Being aimed at agents, rather than the public, we've never won one - and we don't expect to this time (though it has given us a warm glow to be nominated for the third year in a row).

If you'd like to vote for us or any other blog, click the image above and nominate your favourite reads. There are links back to the last two years winners as well - well worth a look.

Yet too many agents are still frightened about alienating property owners. They worry that being too niche or too different will lose them instructions.

This ignores the golden rule: people buy differences.

How refreshing then to see Michael Hardy in Wokingham put their personality front and centre. The opening paragraph of their website does a great job of positioning them against the competition.

"We aren’t the biggest agent nor are we the cheapest, none of us drive a Mini with the company name emblazoned on it and nobody wears gel in their hair because most of us haven’t got enough hair! We don’t wear flash suits or loud ties. If we were a car we would be a Volkswagen Golf, not too flashy not too staid but get the job done with a little bit of style! If you instruct us to sell your house we won’t give you cause to regret it!"

OK, so the punctuation could be better.. But still, the Volkswagon Golf must be one of the most ubiquitous symbols of quality at a fair price in everyday life all across the country. And the lack of hair hints subtly at experience (or so I tell myself).

We all know the type of wideboy estate agents they're distancing themselves from. As a homeowner, maybe even a VW Golf driver, wouldn't you see the appeal of their pitch?

With nearly 200 sales and letting properties listed, their local marketplace clearly can.

It's a tactic that has long been recommended for taking stunning shots of Estate Agent window displays - and CJ Hole have made great use of that with their Bishopston branch photo certainly.

The property stands out in the Rightmove listings, but does the photo really do the property justice? I'm not sure. Having been on the market nearly two months, maybe it's the sort of photo-refresh tactic worth trying.

Simon Fisher of Absolute Estate Agents in Torquay has agreed to put his mo growing abilities on the line for our amusement (and a donation), with the promise of regular photographic updates on his upper lip hair growth.

If you'd like to thank Simon for keeping us amused, you can donate to the cause here.

Day 4

Our first update on Simon's Rufus Hound style efforts are upon us.

Simon - we expect close-up evidence of actual hair growth next time! :o)

Day 11

Eleven days in and there are definite signs of hair growth this time Simon. But is that the same shirt as last week? :o)

Day 20

It's clearly dress-down Sunday at Absolute this week, but which is the real Simon Fisher?

Day 26

Might be time to add a little colour to the mix Simon? (Original image)

Final update to come in the week. Please remember to thank Simon for keeping us amused by donating to the cause here.

I might have been briefly qualified as to my suitability to buy and on my own property requirements, but a viewing has rarely been anything other than feature led. "This is the kitchen" and so on.

The belief is that properties sell themselves of course.. Each viewing results in either a "yes", or a "no".

It's a subject I was prompted to think about while interviewing for a business development role here at PropertyADD recently.

In a small sale, where there's no ongoing relationship between the buyer and seller, it's easy for the buyer to separate what they are buying and the person they are buying it from. When you go into Comet or Currys looking for a new kettle, it's not hugely important if any sort of rapport is built by the salesperson. Rather, it's the quality, features and price of what you are buying that counts.

In a larger sale – which will normally take longer to complete – being liked, trusted and respected becomes more important. Particularly so when there will be an ongoing relationship afterwards.

This is common sense: a larger sale comes with a higher price and a higher level of risk, and so the buyer must be more certain of their decision in order to go ahead.

A genuinely consultative sales process is clearly a good thing then. Questions allow the salesperson to get a much better feel of the buyer's needs and priorities – and trust is earned as a result of the process.

As a high value deal without any ongoing relationship, perhaps a property sale sits somewhere in between those two extremes. Maybe the need for home buyers to feel that feeling makes our industry a bit different. Perhaps the lack of direct competition many properties face has an impact too.

But you only have to watch Phil Spencer's (quite dull sadly) Secret Agent TV show to see that some people need help with their vision. They need your questions to clarify their thoughts. They need to see something wrong to help them understand what something right looks like.

Even allowing for TV's poetic licence, a lick of paint and better definition of the function of a property can change someone's opinion of whether a property is right for them. One property I viewed a couple of years ago had locks on the outside of all of the internal doors – and that just felt creepy. Maybe there was a logical reason for it, but feelings and logic are very different things when it comes to buying a property.

Which gets on to Phil's other point – something I've mentioned before too – Estate Agents aren't offering their vendors enough advice on how to improve their property for sale.

Going back to the interviews, one candidate mentioned that they had adopted the SPIN selling method advocated by Neil Rackham. It wasn't a technique I had heard of, so I bought the book and read it before our meeting. It's a very interesting study on the types of questions you can ask and their effect on the sales process – and I recommend you read it too.

When we first started writing the blog in December 2009 – quite incredible to think that it's almost two years ago – our aim was to offer advice on the sorts of questions that we were regularly being asked by clients (and prospective clients) of PropertyADD.

Over time, and with the help of lots of other industry experts, the site evolved into a "brain food" resource for helping estate agents who wanted to modernise their businesses across a whole range of issues.

Despite taking an eight month break from posting, it's been fantastic to see the number of visitors continue to trend upwards. Proof positive that, done properly, blog writing is one of the most powerful marketing tools an estate agent has at their disposal.

With the new website, our hope is that it's now easier for you to find whatever you're interested in. We've also added a LinkedIn group where you can discuss the topics posted (and any others) if you wish.

Thanks to everyone who asked when the blog would return – we hope you like the new site and, of course, we welcome any feedback.

And thanks as always for reading,

Martin

P.S. Over recent months, we've also acquired the online estate agent directory, WheresMyProperty.com. For those of you interested in local SEO, a free company listing there takes less than a minute to add and offers another little boost to your search rankings.

In its heyday back in 2007, the site was averaging nearly 350,000 visitors every month. Despite being well down on that by the time we took it over, it's still worth being a part of.

There's little doubt, you have to be a brave or foolhardy business owner to get involved with a show like Mary Portas' Secret Shopper. That said, the doubters on EAT who are criticising last night's episode as an attempted hatchet job have missed the point for me.

The simple statistic that 79% of people don't trust estate agents (and I think that's probably fair overall), shows that there is massive room for improvement. Rather than focusing on the bits that Mary got wrong through not knowing the industry inside out, I wanted to focus on what she got right.

1. Wasted viewings are a big frustration for vendors. Better that it's not your fault because something important about the property was spun or hidden and/or the buyer's requirements were not fully understood..
2. .. So qualify buyers for what's really important and where their red lines are drawn!
3. Constantly being interrupted by callers is rude, as is not standing to meet walk-in visitors.
4. Lying and applying pressure damages everyone's trust in you. 47 'appointments' at ten minutes each with no travelling time is nearly 8 hours straight. Even if that's true, it's not believable.
5. Being armed with answers to obvious local questions is basic service, but still impresses. Research the nearest schools, transport links, etc. or better yet - take factsheets with you.
6. Sometimes the seller knows best - how do you collect and include their knowledge, experience and opinions?
7. Properties do sell themselves, but you are the local expert there to point out the bits that might get missed. Do your research on the direction the house faces, the year it was built, the boiler, the windows, the square footage, the storage, the possibility to extend, the other houses in the road, etc. See a property through the buyer's eyes.
8. Cliches are poorly understood, add nothing and best avoided.
9. An hour of "one mouth, two ears" training isn't very impressive.
10. A USP of "you have to use an agent to get on the portals" doesn't put you ahead of the competition.
11. Trophies on display are not cool!

Although your customer is the seller and their needs should be top priority, let's not forget that the buyer is a potential future customer - why waste the opportunity? First impressions count, so if you nail the experience this time and provide an excellent viewing and follow-up, your firm will be in pole position when they come to move in a few years.

Well done to Martyn Gerrard for turning the programme around and coming out of it reasonably well. "People before property" is how this business should be done.

If you missed the episode, you can see it on 4OD here.

Don't forget to look back over 27 things the public want from the perfect estate agent if you don't believe what Mary had to say!

Much of the advert is quite good - people buy people, so showing team photos is often a nice touch. Perhaps even more so as three of them appear to be family (why aren't they highlighting that?). Also. the contact details are clear and they identify themselves as well established in the area, etc, etc.

So, what on earth is that cartoon for? If anything, isn't the joke a bit off-putting about the properties they're marketing?

I think humour can work well in marketing, but only if it is genuinely funny and not open to misunderstanding. I can't help thinking that these guys might have been better off playing it safe..

How many agents who are using Twitter do searches each day to see what people are talking about?

For instance, on seeing one agent offer up a lead outside of his area, I ran a quick search for "recommend estate agent" and "recommend letting agent" and look what I found..

• Can anyone recommend a *reputable* estate agent in the area? Looking for rental houses that *aren't* already let! (North London)
• This is a bit of a punt, but can anyone recommend an estate agent in Coventry? I have a family matter to attend to that needs one.
• New forum post - Can anyone recommend a letting agent?: We are moving abroad for 12 months and would like an age... (Harringay)

Although Twitter is mostly about building good long term relationships with people, it pays to keep an eye out on what's happening outside of your follower network once a day too.

For the customer we were working on this week, the research and planning resulted in two campaigns (one national coverage and one limited to their local area), with 19 ad groups based around 373 different keywords.

If you've tried Google AdWords before, but found that you didn't generate sufficient interest, or it was too expensive - I'd hazard a guess that you hadn't gone to that level of detail?

On the results side, take a look at this article on where people click, that I posted back in July. If your AdWords advert appears in the top three, above the organic listings, you can expect between 4 and 11 percent of impressions to earn a click. If the advert appears down the right hand side, perhaps it's more like 1-3%.

It's worth bearing those figures in mind when you're calculating your daily budgets - after all, if your adverts are converting into more business than their cost, you should be spending as much as possible!

Happy New Year to all you modern estate agents out there.

So, it's 2011 already - a year of initial uncertainty where no one can quite predict the direction the economy is going to head in. A time for sensible and calculated decisions rather than unduly aggressive and optimistics ones.

But as with all new years, also a logical time to make a few minor adjustments to your day-to-day business to keep it on the right path.

A good first job is to weed out any over-valued properties that have gone stale, and where the vendors refuse to move towards a more realistic asking price. There are agents in my town consistently guilty of marketing properties at perhaps 20% over and above what they are worth.

If you're not going to sell a property and the owners are not sufficiently motivated to move, the time and effort you spend on it is completely wasted. In a tough market, probably the last thing you can afford is waste.

We all pick up these kinds of customers occasionally - those that expect something for nothing and cost you time and effort that could be better spent elsewhere. Don't be afraid to apply the 80/20 rule and drop the 'customers' that do not add up to a profit.

On another note, it's good to see Zoopla continuing their investment in reaching home-movers early on in the buyer cycle by acquiring HousePrices.co.uk (announced this morning). I've written before about how reaching an audience earlier in their thought process makes customer acquisition cheaper and Zoopla do an excellent job of this.

I haven't ever used the HousePrices.co.uk website if I'm honest - but it's a good fit for Zoopla and putting their brand in front of an extra one million website visits a month is not going to hurt.

Perhaps that might give you your second and third resolutions - to put more effort into a blog to help reach out to potential movers earlier on in the cycle, and to sign up to Zoopla and give them a try if you haven't already done so.

Whatever decisions you make, I hope 2011 will be a positive year for all of you.

Martin

Another two weeks have flown by without me managing a posting. I even missed an opportunity to wish the Modern Estate Agent a happy first birthday on Saturday just gone. For 2011, we're going to have to drop the "daily" from "daily brain food" - and just keep it as regular as we can I think!

For today, I just want to mention a growing trend I am a big fan of - adding a 'Vendor Comments' section to property details. This adds a nice personal touch to the marketing, perhaps helping buyers picture themselves in the current owner's shoes a few years previously - or taking the opportunity to subtly clarify why the vendors are looking to move (always to be near family one assumes!).

It's something one of our oldest customers, Inspire Estates (congratulations on the Crawley Letting Agent of the Year award!), have been doing on and off for some time.

Take a look at these examples I found on Rightmove by Googling for rightmove "for sale" "vendor comments": (click the images for larger versions)

How many other agents out there use this technique?

I've mentioned in the past about how reviews and recommendations are an important part of how Google Places decides where to rank your business in their listing. The trouble is, not everyone has a Google account and that makes it a hassle for them to leave a good Hotpot review.

You'll notice from quite a few agents out there that it seems to be more worth their time to leave a bad one!

You can of course watch out for customers with gmail.com or googlemail.com email addresses - they're the low hanging fruit, but it's also worth mentioning to customers that they can leave reviews on other websites too.

All of the following are currently being picked up by Google and shown on your Google Places listing:

• Thomson Local
• CheckaTrade (assuming you're a member)
• Qype
• Bview
• Yelp
• Yell Trusted Places
• TouchLocal

It's nice to get testimonials, but if you can push customers towards giving their feedback publically, so much the better! Perhaps try a postcard or letter to encourage it.

(It should go without saying that you will be found out if you leave your own fake reviews!)

Search engine optimisation, particularly for local search, is one of the topics I come back to on this blog time and time again - and for good reason. Many estate agents fail to understand the level of investment that their website deserves in comparison to their other marketing spend and are losing out because of that.

And I don't say that just because we build estate agent websites! :o)

Having an attractive and interesting website built is a good first step of course, but it should also be capable of generating you new business on its own - rather than just a tool to help you encourage leads you've already got.

And in order to do that, as we all know, the first step is to get visitors making tracks to it. (A subtle enough snow reference?)

The site listed at the top of Google will probably get 40% of the total number of visitors. If you're an estate agent in Brighton, that top listing might mean as many as 600+ qualified visitors a month. How does that compare with the response you get from your newspaper advertising and leaflet drops?

If you're not top, it goes without saying that one of your competitors is. Fortunately, they'll have done a lot of the hard work for you - and you can now piggyback some of their efforts.

All you need to do is find out the other websites that they are listed on or linked to from, and get yourselves added alongside them.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to run a Google search for "[competitor] directory". This will find all of the directory websites that your competitor is listed on. (And the fact that Google already knows about every page returned means you are not wasting your time adding yourself to a website Google isn't interested in.)

Visiting each of those websites to see how you can add your company to their directory takes just minutes.

Set yourself a reminder to do a couple on a Friday afternoon before you go home and, over time, these links and mentions of your company (called citations) will help you rise up the Google rankings.

When you're the top listed site it gets a bit more interesting, but those are the sorts of problems that football managers call "nice to have"!

What a nice easy way to grab a bit of PR!

I'm not sure I would normally have mentioned it, but over the last few weeks I've spoken to both a Mr A House and a Mrs D Homes - I kid you not!

Newspapers are always on the lookout for a good light hearted story - if you're similarly named, why not make the most of it and enjoy some easy coverage?

Back in July, before Google changed the layout of its results page for local searches, I put together a post on how estate agents can get the most out of their Google Places account.

It was important then, but even more so now.

One of the things I recommended was adding a link to one or more online videos that are relevant to your location.

Now, it goes without saying that putting your own branded videos together and hosting them on YouTube is the best option. As well as the extra exposure running your own YouTube channel would give you, you'd also end up with a lot of other unique, interesting, informative and interactive content for your website.

Like Howard Cundey have.

But that's clearly not a realistic option for every agent. If you don't have the skills or budget to put together some good quality content (having nothing is definitely better than having a few poor quality videos which damage your brand), there is another way.

Take a look at the excellent flying location map animations from fantasticplanetgb for ideas.

What a strong headline title for an article that is.. Yet, just how many agents do you know that spend their lives looking for the latest and greatest gimmick, gadget or trick in estate agency?

• The next big thing
• The secret to success
• The marketing gimmick that your competitors aren't aware of yet
• Etc, etc.

The thing is, big innovations don't come around all that often. Little ones do, sure - and yes they help to keep life and work interesting. It's partly why this blog exists, to highlight what other agents (or different industries frankly) are doing that your company could adapt and put to good use.

But seven months ago, I wrote an article on the 27 things the public want from the perfect estate agent. If you read it, you'll know that mostly the points revolved around providing a good, simple and honest service.

It might not be as interesting, but in that search for new ideas, don't forget that improving the basics might well have more of an overall impact!

Your company logo says a lot about how your company is positioned against your competitors. Have you been ignoring it for too long?

Today I am prompted back onto the topic of estate agency photography by a thread over on the excellent 4Networking forum. Indeed, a thread I might have accidentally helped to hijack from an 'is now a good time to sell my house?' query to a 'those photos could definitely be improved' discussion..

Oops.

Good photography plays such an important part in property marketing, I'm amazed that a £1m house (well, it was two years ago) doesn't automatically deserve better photos. With such a beautiful sunny day (assuming VizziShots aren't involved), a bit more thought could have produced much better results.

Getting back to the local search optimisation theme, there is no doubt that having your company listed on Yell.com (the online Yellow Pages) is still a worthwhile thing - with or without the website link.

It's not necessarily that people look to Yell when trying to find local estate agents, though I'm sure some still do, but more that you increase your local authority by continuing to create citations for your business (online mentions of your company name, address and phone number).

If you're not already listed, there is a link to the free business listing from the front page at http://www.yelldirect.com/.

Readers of Estate Agent Today might have noticed a story about the newly launched firm Property Leads - a company who you can use to outsource your cold calling for valuation lead generation.

It's always a potentially risky strategy letting any client-facing function outside of your control, particularly one as important as sales. However, there is something to be said for expert telemarketers - particularly an army of 50 of them!

There's no doubt that it would be better to have in-house staff that are good at the job as well as knowing your brand inside out, but what if you don't? What if you're a start-up estate agent without the capacity, struggling after losing a key team member or a personal estate agent?

Property Leads are certainly offering something different and I'd be interested to hear from anyone using them as to how successful they are being.

Who can believe that it's November already? The cold, dark and early nights that make the life of an estate agent that bit tougher. Everyone wants to be in "in time for Christmas", or put off doing anything until afterwards.

But the bills won't stop coming - and improving December might have a big impact in your annual performance. The big question is, how do you work around the challenges and overcome late year objections?

There was a good article on the HomeGain blog last year which I spotted too late to share, but bookmarked to mention this year.

Late autumn causes its own problems too - untidy leaves, difficult viewing times, bad weather and the rest.

For those of you agents who blog, there are a good few topics in this to keep you busy for the next couple of weeks. For those of you who don't, perhaps it's inspiration for a leaflet or canvassing letter.

Be informative and help encourage your vendors to make the little efforts that make all of the difference.

I was interested to see that an agent not too far from us, Howard Cundey, has launched a new TV driven website http://www.howardcundey.tv/.

I can see a lot of potential for video as an online engagement tool, and this agent has put quite a lot of thought into how to make the site a useful resource.

Looking at the positives first.. I like the site introduction video, if not the presenter. On websites with a lot of information and 3 or 4 different elements of navigation, welcoming visitors and offering a few quick pointers of how to use the site is a nice touch.

Equally, the consistent attempt to engage visitors through video, rather than taking a short cut and using plain text on internal pages - even to the extent of information about the company and local areas - is positive.

Taking this site as an alternative, rather than primary method of marketing properties, the property 'videos' (animated photos) with voiceovers work well. Much more so than I have seen on examples integrated into the main estate agent website elsewhere where visitors can get more information more quickly by simply browsing photos and reading bullet points.

It's also good to see good 'book a viewing' style calls to action, along with social media bookmarking icons to encourage sharing.

The website isn't perfect though.

The biggest no-no for me is that the videos are preceded by adverts. While that might provide a useful contribution to running costs, it is intrusive and out-of-place in a commercial setting like this.

The videos are also a little jumpy for some reason, but there are often teething problems with newly launched websites, so that might be forgiven.

Finally, the lifestyle directory at the bottom of the site seems completely out of place. I'm not sure what fine wine and private charter boats have to do with estate agency, but here I think they are an unnecessary distraction which might damage conversions.

I think Howard Cundey should be commended for taking an innovative approach - but what do you make of it? Can you see it becoming a worthwhile investment?

September and October was a bit erratic for this blog, but the aim is to resume normal service from this point forward.

Inspiration today comes from the Mouseprice local market update email which popped into my inbox over the weekend.

The emails themselves are something that Selwyn Lim (MD of Mouseprice) blogged about for us back in February as part of his article on uncovering the free tools that property portals provide. However, we haven't really gone into any great detail about how these tools can be used outside of the valuation process.

I am a big fan of personalised canvassing letters that go into more specific detail about what your agency can do for the vendor of a property, particularly versus any agent that they are already marketing with. Including some details of comparable recent sales can obviously help to qualify any potential problems with current asking prices.

Why stick with average canvassing letters like everyone else? Spend an extra 15 minutes on each one and I suspect the value will soon become strikingly obvious.

Equally, you could do something similar for applicants who register with you. I've mentioned local area factsheets a few times in the past and there's no doubt that this approach can help qualify advice on appropriate budgets, as well as positioning your agency as the genuine local experts for any potential sale instruction - this time or when they next come to move.

These ideas take effort, but when you look at how quickly iSold is growing in the areas it has targeted, it might be effort you can ill afford to save on.

It's always nice to be appreciated and Emma's flattering words on her recent Cases Xalo blog do not go unnoticed - thank you! :o)

Emma has recently had a bit of a disappointing response to a brochure written from the perspective of the house for sale - an attempt to do something a little different. (Click the image for a larger version)

For what it's worth Emma, I like the idea. It's always good to stand out from the crowd and there's nothing wrong with showing a little personality.

In some ways it goes back to one of my first posts on this blog, back in  December 2009 - losing customers to win customers is a no bad thing. Being able to suitably differentiate your company from your competitors is ultimately what will determine how successful you are.

What does everyone else think? Have any of you tried anything similar in the UK?

It's probably also worth pointing out that flattering other blog owners into mentioning you is a nice way of building the profile of your blog! :o)

Following the high profile news of an ex-Foxtons employee being sued on claims that they 'stole' large amounts of valuable property, vendor, landlord and tenancy information, data security is one of the hot topics of the moment.

While you can limit access to information for junior roles who do not require it, a senior staff member needs more freedom to be able to do their job to the best of their ability. So, non-compete contract clauses aside, you will need to work on a trust basis to some extent.

However, as Global Edge points out, there is something that every business can do to protect themselves at little or no cost. Occasionally including a couple of honey trap phone numbers and email addresses in your database is a good idea.

That way if the information should ever be mis-used, at least you will be alerted to it and have some evidence to support any claim.

Henry Yates (of EstateCreate fame) is one of those people with a knack for finding thought-provoking videos online. One of his tweets today was a link to another one.

It was a talk by Dan Ariely on irrational decisions, which is both amusing to watch and makes a very good point about pricing.

By adding product and service options which are obviously poorer value than others you provide, you can direct people's behaviour. By making some options appear to be better value, you encourage people towards the purchases you would prefer them to make.

How could you apply this to your estate agency?

The topic of writing a blog has come up quite often in my conversations with PropertyADD customers recently. I often enthuse about the effect it can have on the traffic an agent's website generates, so perhaps this message is starting to hit home!

One of the typical objections people have is the limited amount of time they can realistically devote to maintaining their blog on a regular basis. A perfectly legitimate worry, just look at the last two days on here - it's taken me until the evening to find the time to post an update!

And so (in addition to those mentioned in my 17 blogging tips for estate agents article previously) I thought it would be worth sharing five more suggestions for lessening the load:

1. If you can, split the effort between different members of your team. If you're trying to post a blog every week and there are four of you, share the load. One 500 word blog a month isn't going to kill anyone!
2. Make it easy for prospective guest bloggers to get involved by suggesting headlines that they could write articles around.
3. Build a list of themes that you plan to write about and tag your blogs with those as labels. It will keep you 'on topic' and also help people find related articles on subjects they're interested in. You'll have to accept that not every reader will be interested in every blog!
4. Write on topics that you're often asked about - it's a time saver to be able to point people at something you've written before.
5. Make every blog count by sticking to search-phrase based headlines.

If you're blogging for your agency and have tips to share, please do post a comment.

There's a bit of a conversation thread ongoing over at 4Networking at the moment about estate agents who try to be a bit different with their boards. Something I've blogged about in the past.

Personally, I like things that help set estate agents apart from the competition - help get them remembered.

But what of Gatehouse Estates photo boards? I like the principle, though for me it forces attention away from their branding. I suppose it depends whether boards are more for branding, or are still effective property marketing tools, in your area.

Might it be better to show an internal shot, or even a floor plan? In which case, maybe a full on plastic box of brochures on the post beats the lot?

What do you think?

I've lost count of the times I've noticed someone in a vinyl decal covered car behaving in a way that reflects badly on the company being advertised. Particularly in a social media savvy world where gripes can be aired in no time flat.

How do you make sure your staff recognise that they are representing your brand, even after clocking off following a hard day?

It made a lot of sense - the rest of the portal market were focussing their online marketing efforts into more location-focused searches. Getting involved at the start of the process was cheaper and more logical, the sort of thinking that I have always respected them for.

Of course, Zoopla have come a long way since then. That element of the site is still important, but they're now developing the real brand awareness that they need to be able to compete with Rightmove, as you know from the questions owners will ask you on valuation visits!

The early thinking was based on a principle of the buying cycle - that an active buyer is not the result of an on/off switch, but of a gradual process. The earlier you get involved in that process, the more chance you have of winning the business.

And not only that, the buying cycle is also a loop where, over time, people go from dissatisfied, through to identifying potential solutions, making a decision, being satisfied for a period and then starting over. The housing ladder is an almost perfect example of this.

All of which shows why the best businesses engage their audience across the whole cycle. They don't live hand-to-mouth, but on the basis of long term relationships that offer value throughout.

How can you engage potential customers earlier - and continue to support them after their move? It could be as simple as an ongoing market newsletter by post, or an annual valuation guesstimate letter.

How many of your competitors are doing anything like that?

A quick thought for the day..

For those agents who feel uncomfortable targeting other agents' stock, there was an interesting snippet of information in Richard Rawlings' RAT email this morning.

Apparently, 43% of sellers eventually switch agents.

If that's accurate, surely it's too big opportunity for you to be ignoring?

But don't just do what everyone else does and drop a standard leaflet or letter through the door - instead, spend 15 minutes identifying specific things you would do differently. Add some value.

Send a custom letter (a proper one with a stamp and envelope!) offering an easy way to discuss options in more detail. If you honestly critique the photos, market competition and price point, it will come across well and set you apart from the other canvassing letters they receive.

Tackle the objections:

• Why will you be any better, isn't it just the state of the market?
• Match or beat the agency fee.
• Explain how easy it is to switch agents by giving notice.

Picking up second hand instructions is a big part of being a successful estate agent, so up your game compared to your competitors and you'll see the results.

In the main, it's not a bad follow-up canvassing letter. It empathises with a potential problem, gives credability to the agent's expertise and calls the owner to action. The wording might be a little strong, but it's a reasonable basis to work with.

But if I received two of these, from two different agents, that credability is instantly dashed. The agents are left simply looking lazy and my business goes elsewhere.

Are any of you also using this wording?!

When you're starting up an estate agency, expanding into new areas or just keeping an eye on an existing strategy, it pays to be well informed. Particularly so when it comes to the volume of local market activity.

Which is why I wanted to mention a little snippet of information gold that I've spotted on Rightmove - the count of how many people are searching for property within an area each month that appears at the bottom of the first page of the search results.

The same information is obviously available on the Demand report in the RightmovePlus login, but as it's public here, not only is it something that agents without Rightmove accounts can use and monitor, it's also something you can easily point to in conversations with vendors, landlords and house-hunters to help illustrate a point. Well worth noting once a month.

The market trends data available when you click the link is also very useful of course.

One of the most common ways that people use Google is to search for companies by name. It's actually one of the things Google are very good at - listing the right site at the top for these kinds of searches.

And the way that they do it? Simple - websites with domain names that exactly match the search phrase are given a boost. Those with a partial match (perhaps one or two of the words) get a smaller boost too. What's more, it's a boost that is naturally amplified when people link to your website using your company name as the link text.

For those of you who think a little outside of the box, you might already have spotted the opportunity and be thinking "why don't I register the domain name that matches my main search phrase?".

Search for "Brighton estate agents" for instance and Sawyer & Co come up third with their domain, http://www.brightonestateagents.com/. Not bad in a competitive area.

The value of exact match domain names has been well known for some time, and because of that, you won't necessarily be able to register a similar .co.uk or .com domain in your area. Indeed, several of the portals have been snapping up these sorts of domain names as part of their SEO strategies.

However, if your local equivalent is available, it would be worth snapping up for a few reasons:

• You could use it to develop a second website to sit alongside your main own. Showcase your company in a different way, be informative about the local area and win extra traffic. Perhaps even do something innovative like an 'Ask Your Local Agent' service.
• Adding a link back from that website to your primary one with the same phrase will give your main website rankings a boost.
• By getting the domain yourself, you'll stop any of your competitors doing it - or indeed a start-up coming along and getting an easy jump on you in the ratings.

You don't have to build a second website straight away - you can always just ask your web hosting company to redirect it to your main one in the short term, exactly as we have done for Redditch Estate Agents, Arden Estates.

A great little idea this, from Marc on the 1000watt blog - adding local market stats to your window displays.

How many of you are just displaying properties?

You might want to try simpler, easier to read graphs, but there are plenty of other options too:

• Vendor/landlord tip of the week (easily re-purposed from a blog or newsletter).
• An 'open surgery' offer which invites people to open the door and start a conversation with you, help without the hard sell.
• Testimonials.
• Your social media contact points.

So much the better if you can use a digital screen and do all of the above in one!

I'd be interested to hear what else you're using your windows for.

I think most web-savvy estate agents (and hopefully all of the readers of this blog!) are coming to understand the importance of social media in estate agency. And I'm not talking about Facebook or Twitter, but the real essence of social media - opinions.

Opinion based marketing, the word of mouth of old, is becoming a big deal on the internet. Review websites are cropping up all over the place and sooner or later they're going to have an impact on how much business you do online - potentially even your search rankings.

The latest site to come to my attention is Referenceline, "where reputations count". How does your company do? And, what's more, what are you going to do about it?

After the series we ran a couple of weeks ago, I hope that you're all still setting aside a little time on a regular basis to promote your business on directory websites?

Even if it's just 5 minutes a week, you'll reap the benefits over time.

As a nudge in the right direction, please take a look at Brownbook - a free directory for the UK, US, Australia and Canada.

If you compare creating a listing to the time and effort you spend each week on putting together newspaper adverts, etc. it quickly starts to make sense!

• Don't overestimate the number of instructions or sales you're going to complete on, particularly in smaller local markets.
• Don't expect to earn anything in the first 6 months, it will take time to win your first instructions, tie up the deals and complete on them.
• If you can't afford Rightmove, come up with a strong justification for not listing with them. Vendors will challenge you on this, but it is possible to be successful without Rightmove.

Well, it's day five of our focus on your local search rankings. I hope you're keeping up with this - not only is it a valuable exercise in driving directory traffic to your website, this sort of ongoing activity is exactly how you improve your general SEO.

Five minutes here and there getting your site listed on yet another relevant local directory website does drive business your way.

Your freebie site of the day is BT TradeSpace. However, I think it's time to up our game a little bit today to try to find a more local site to you to get added to.

This should be pretty straightforward:

• On Google, search for "free business directory your town"
• E.g. "free business directory brighton" returns http://www.brightonbiz.co.uk/, http://brighton.yalwa.co.uk/ and lots of others.
• Pick one and sign up!

Today is day two in a series of posts helping you to break down the process of increasing the number of citations for your website into quick and manageable jobs.

Your next task is to add your business to WeLoveLocal.com - listings are completely free and will help you get found in local searches.

And we know how important local search is!

As part of the blog I wrote on ranking in Google local business maps, I recommended that you list your company on as many local directory websites as possible.

Over the next couple of weeks I'm going to break this down into quick 5 minute jobs that you can do each day to make a difference.

Today we start with Yelp. To get your business listed on the Yelp website for free, click here.

Forgive me, but today's post is along the lines of what has become a bit of a recent theme, educating your audience.

Following on from Neil Young's guest blog on estate agent how-to guides and some ideas for topics which were prompted by Phil Spencer's Telegraph article on adding value to a home, today it's tours.

Marsh & Parsons have put together guided walks for people that are new to Balham, Clapham and Battersea. No, it's not the free frisbee that grabbed me either, but the guides themselves are another great example of an estate agent going out of their way to offer something different and useful to prospective buyers.

Buyers that might well remember that service when it comes to selling again.

The idea ticks all of the boxes:

• It's different, shareable and potentially newsworthy.
• It helps illustrate local expertise.
• It shows a high level of customer care and service.
• It helps sell the location to buyers who might previously have been nervous through lack of information.

If I have a criticism, it's simply that they could have done more to take advantage of the SEO opportunities. A great idea for other estate agents to "learn from" though! :o)

Following on from yesterday's criticism of Primelocation, we loved the announcement from Zoopla that they are showing listing history on advertised properties.

Here is a portal who consistently get it absolutely right. Their website is clean, logical and easy to use, they have grown an impressive network of well recognised brands to carry their listings and their PR machine does a very good job of getting the message out.

The introduction of this type of price and date history for property listings was only ever really a matter of time once Google became involved. Zoopla have made a great decision to steal a march on the rest of the portal market by adding the extra transparency straight away.

How long before Rightmove follow?

If there's one thing for agents to be wary of , it's price increases. I'm not sure that the public will be very receptive to seeing properties that go up in price!

Following the guest blog from Neil on how-to guides for estate agents last week, Phil Spencer popped up and showed exactly how it's done with his top 20 ways to add value to your home in the Telegraph at the weekend.

Here are 13 suggestions for other titles for guides you could write in order to help build relationships with your clients:

1. How to plan your search for a property.
2. Where first time buyers should look in the local area.
3. How to make the most of viewing a property.
4. Quick and good value fixes for achieving a maximum sale price.
5. Typical buyers for each local area - who to target for your property.
6. Costs and recommendations for typical post-move building projects. Turning a nearly house into the right one.
7. Parents guide to property for the best local schools.
8. Suggestions of cheaper alternatives for the most popular areas.
9. Local area factsheet: statistics, costs, companies, services, etc.
10. Conducting the best possible viewing as a vendor.
11. How we realistically value your home - so you can too.
12. A guide to saving for a home for renters - the buyers of tomorrow.
13. How you can help us sell your home.

Putting together guides like this is useful for your clients and helps to differentiate you as the thoughtful local estate agent. It also saves you time when answering the same questions over and over again!

A while ago now, I read an article on the excellent Sellsius blog about adding a feed of tweets onto your website, using one of Twitter's own widgets.

Which is quite a nice touch, giving your website a kept-up-to-date feel, so long as you tweet regularly.

But, as with most web plug-ins, as it uses a technology called Javascript to do it, which isn't very search engine friendly.

Lucky then that all of the websites that we build and host are able to consume XML feeds directly from Twitter (or any other web resource, such as a YouTube video channel, or your blog) in real-time, and then spit them out as normal page content, which can be customised exactly as you wish.

Take a look at the (fairly basic) PropertyADD tweet feed on our website to see the sort of thing that's possible.

The Young London property management agency in Central London is a company with an approach I really admire. CEO Neil Young, who founded the Young Group back in 2003, is one of those people with a habit of getting his name and face in all the right places as a commentator on the state of the property sector.

I'm pleased therefore to have Neil provide today's guest blog on the value of informing your customer base.

"Why do estate agents do how-to guides? They don't charges readers for them. In some cases they could make the agent's job more difficult by educating the reader.

I accompanied one of my consultants on a viewing recently (it's good to see them in action). The property was not appropriate for the applicant, however I was really pleased when I heard my Consultant saying to the applicant that she would email over a link to our Viewing Checklist guide.

The applicant looked surprised – I think she was more used to a cold shoulder seeing as she was not interested in the property just viewed rather than a helpful guide.

Why was I so pleased?

Well, think about the last time you went to a restaurant and the service was great, or when you went to a shop and got really good advice. Most people's reaction is to tell others about the positive experience. Too often in our industry people expect bad service and dread having to deal with a letting / estate agent. However, when they experience good service they remember it, and better still, they tell others.
These guides are in fact more than good service, they show we are willing to share information and spend time putting together helpful documents. To me this shows a company that is willing to invest and build relationships, rather than just look for the next transaction.

Encouraging relationships is important in a service business, as is giving good unbiased information. Others guides we have written include:

Choosing a Reputable Agent – this is the type of guide that can easily be thrown back at you!
Moving Guide – helpful especially for the less experienced mover
Viewing Tips – best used in association with the Viewing Checklist

These simple downloadable guides have had a positive effect on our business. Why don't you do some for yours?”

Neil Young

Blog: http://www.neilbyoung.wordpress.com/
@NeilBYoung

Young Group: http://www.younggroup.co.uk/
Young London: http://www.younglondon.co.uk/

These guides are also very shareable of course. Just the sort of useful content that is good for SEO because the value of the information encourages people to link to it.

Today, I wanted to post a link to an interesting article I found on the Dakno blog, putting together a Twitter welcome page.

It's the same principle I've talked about a few times in the past.. You don't get very long to convince people that they've found what they're looking for when they arrive at your website, so make sure you feed them quickly.

Tailoring landing pages to their specific wants and interests gives you the best possible chance at 'converting' them into customers.

Bobby's recommendations for a subtle page that says a bit more about you and your values is a great example of this.

The maps that appear at the top of 'local' (location specific) Google searches are an important way of gaining visitors to your website. However, like with your website, getting listed in the top 8 (those that are shown) isn't necessarily that straightforward.

Here are 8 tips to help improve your listing:

1. Complete 100% of your Google Places listing, using the maximum available space (and your most appropriate key phrase) in your description, and providing as much information in the other fields as possible.
2. Add all 5 categories that you can, including custom ones for your main search phrases (you don't have to select from the list!), but do not duplicate any keywords too heavily - we have seen listings be suspended for this.
3. Ask your customers to complete reviews for you on your Google Places account. Give them a how-to guide to make it easy.
4. Create a 'My Map' on Google Maps, called the same as your primary search phrase and add your location pin to it.
5. Use location@yourdomain.com style branch email addresses.
6. Add several images and photos (your logo, staff photos, office front, local area photos, typical property photos, etc.) and include some of your keywords and phrases in the image filenames.
7. Upload a location video to YouTube and link to it on your Google Places account (or link to one of the ones already on YouTube - e.g. from fantasticplanetgb).
8. List your website with as many local directory websites that allow you to include your (local area code) phone number as possible (these are called citations).
9. Not so easy, but being in the perceived centre of town seems to help! You can use Google Maps to search for the town to investigate this if you are looking to move office!

Edit: As of early November 2010, Google has rolled out a new layout for local search results which places an even higher priority on completing Google Places information - don't miss out!

Last Saturday, the Telegraph published a great article, Are you a Coke or a Pepsi?

You probably know the Pepsi Challenge story - in a blind test, most people prefer Pepsi, but when it comes to handing their money over, they choose Coke.

The article was actually targeted at job hunters looking to stand out, but the basic theme is just about branding.

The buying decision is generally an emotional one. Logic plays its part, but deep down, your preferences and perceptions are steering you. You choose the supplier that gave you the right feeling. Perhaps you use your other options to negotiate a bit on price with them, but you're going to choose them anyway.

There are lessons for estate agents in this.

The first is to correctly identify the potential customers that have already bought emotionally before they sign on the dotted line. You don't need to price match to win these instructions, just encourage the decision.

The second is to spot when buyers have emotionally bought into other agents. Here, you have to comprehensively beat the other offer to turn the buyer's head and have them switch alligence.

The final lesson is the strategic one. It's about understanding what makes your target market tick and using that to define and communicate a brand that is attractive to them.

Buying signals are powerful things - make sure your staff are trained to spot and act on them!

Reports on the varied things people are searching for when they happen upon this blog are always an interesting read. The one that caught my eye most recently was "reasons to change your estate agent" - let's hope that was a pro-active agent, rather than disappointed home owner!

I've mentioned before that blogs are great for generating this sort of varied search traffic, but there is another benefit too. When it comes to websites, did you know that bigger is generally better?

It's a little known fact that the more pages a site has, the more valuable Google perceives that site to be.

Without getting too technical, the maximum PageRank (one of the components that Google uses - think of it like a vote count) for a whole website is the same as the total number of pages that site has.

This is increased and decreased by incoming (good) and outbound (bad) links, but that's the essence of it.

So, by adding more pages, your site's maximum potential PageRank increases.

Now, I'm not recommending that anyone adds lots of pages just for the sake of it. It's more important that pages are substantially different, provide useful content for your visitors and, in doing so, target a wider range of search phrases.

But it's a nice side benefit (and the starting point for a lot of the more technical SEO stuff you can do!).

In January, Graham Jones blogged about firing up home-hunters by focusing on them and their needs, on how the property fits them - and not on the property itself.

Of course, the majority of us know that in sales, it's always better to say "you" and "your" rather than "we" and "our", whether that's face-to-face, via email or on your website.

Do the reverse and the potential buyer goes away feeling nothing other than an over-powering sense of your self importance.

There's even a tool I've been meaning to post up for a while that tells you if you're doing it right. Take a look at the We We Calculator (yes, I know!) to see if your website has a good balance. And don't just look at it - change it.

Subscribers to Richard Rawlings' free RAT newsletter (recommended) will have read something similar this week, with the comment about 'About Us' pages. It makes you wonder if they should be ditched in favour of an 'About You' page that sells the company personality through the benefits, rather than being so direct.

As Richard says, it's how you interact that clinches the deal.

Reading an article yesterday, it struck me that while most people understand that higher search engine rankings are better, perhaps they don't realise just how much better!

Back when Google didn't include any paid adverts or maps at the top of their search results, Laura Graka's well referenced study at Cornell University, New York, found that the website listed top received over 56% of all traffic. This fell to just over 13% for 2nd position, with the total number of clicks for all websites not listed on the first page being minimal.

It's worth acknowledging that there's a difference between people searching for an definitive answer and people who are gathering information where clicks are typically distributed more evently. But the lesson is the same, the higher the ranking, the larger the share of visitors.

Interestingly, further research on eye movement conducted by Laura after the introduction of sponsored links showed that eye movement - and clicks - stayed at the top of the page - searchers were not deliberately ignoring the adverts, as they do with banner adverts.

Having seen a blog last week More evidence that online advertising does not work from Graham Jones, someone who has guest blogged for us in the past, when Zoopla's latest banner advert caught my eye, it got me thinking..

If all online ads were this targeted, wouldn't they generate a more positive response?

If you haven't seen the Zoopla advert, it's running on a number of large national websites right now and uses data about properties you have personally looked at on the Zoopla website to target those shown in the advert at you very specifically.

Very clever it is too, if a little contentious here in the UK.

When I think about the companies I actually enjoy doing business with, either personally or with PropertyADD, it's almost as simple as saying that it's the ones who do what they say they will.

Isn't that sad? That we're so used to being disappointed by people we pay to do a job that them just getting the basics right leaves us celebrating!

This is exactly the reason that the companies who do just a little bit more than they have to, exceeding your expectations, are the ones who win your recommendations, as well as your repeat business.

For business owners, the starting point for this is creating a "can do" culture with happy-to-help staff. But it's also about trying to think of how to be memorable.

With the mecury hitting the 30s marker in the South today, you could be handing out branded bottles of water to people suffering in the heat for instance. Not outside of the office as a promotional campaign (though that could work), but in a show of consideration for people who walk into the office, or meet you at viewings.

It's a future win sure, but being memorable for the right reasons is certainly something that many estate agents could do with improving!

Back in November last year, we added a 'tweet this property' function to PropertyADD to try and encourage more estate agents to get involved with social media in a way that didn't hit their productivity, but also kept one eye on what Twitter is really about.

The idea being to tweet the occasional property that really merited a mention - be that aspirational, unusual or provocative.

You see, Twitter isn't a property search website, it's for conversation and relationship building.

Tweeting every property to your followers is just like emailing every property to each of them - most of what you send will be irrelevant and you'd simply be expecting them to dig through everything to find what they're looking for.

Where's the attentive service in that?

So this week, Vebra's annoucement that they have added functionality to automatically tweet all properties raised a bit of a smile. Ask any social media expert and they'll tell you - Twitter is not a broadcast marketing tool, it's for interaction.

In a business like estate agency, where only a minority of companies have a true USP or a locked-in local market, mostly you will find yourself competing on just two things: branding and price.

There's nothing wrong with offering a fair deal, but competing on price risks turning into a dangerous game of 'who has the deepest pockets'. Competing on brand is much more fund. Having such a clearly defined company message that people recognise you as the obvious choice for them.

I recently blogged about how email signatures can be a valuable part of this, but older communication methods still count too. For instance, business cards still help to cement a face-to-face meeting and can almost feel like a little gift when done well!

Here are 10 things that every estate agent's business card should have:

1. All the basics obviously: company name, logo and address, your name, job title, phone number(s) and email address.
2. Website and blog links.
3. Twitter/Facebook account names (or at least the icons).
4. A succinct branding statement of what you do and why people choose you to do it.
5. One strong colour (apparently coloured business cards are kept for longer!).
6. An extra reason to keep the card printed on the reverse (a promotion or links to useful guides hosted on your website perhaps).
7. Your face.
8. Your areas of operation (if you need more space, you can always use a folding card).
9. Opening times.
10. And, of course, a call to action!

The real secret to good branding is showing lots of attention to detail at every customer touch point.

It's amazing how often we get emails from agents that aren't using a footer at all. Here's 6 other things the perfect email signature should have:

1. Including your logo helps make you more memorable.
2. Adding your contact details makes it very easy for the recipient to get in touch. Making it easy to communicate should be rule number one!
3. Showing testimonials from previous clients helps to validate your brand.
4. Links to your website, blog and social media accounts help to build traffic and relationships.
5. Mentioning offers and promotions helps get the word out - and a strong call to action combined with the ease of getting in touch is very powerful.
6. If your strapline doesn't cover it, a summary of your expertise and USP.

Can you think of a 7th?

While the message is different to the typical agency leaflet in this area and therefore quite strong for owners of properties in the commuter belt, the execution is awful:

• It's printed on very flimsy glossy paper.
• The printing doesn't quite go to the edge of the leaflet, leaving it looking cheap and badly cut.
• You can barely see the local branch name and phone number in white on the front.
• The layout of text on the back is very amateur.
• There is a typo, "think gain" rather than "think again".
• Much like the Cubbit & West leaflet I mentioned in February, it uses unnecessary jargon such as "market appraisal".
• The call to action is very small.

In fact, it's all so out of character with the King & Chasemore brand that it almost makes you wonder if someone else is sending it out to damage them!

I finally managed to get a chance to catch up on some of the blogs I subscribe to this weekend - one of them well worth sharing. Six weeks or so ago, Guy Kawasaki wrote a great article on 5 Ways to be Persuasive for OpenForum, a good community for small business owners.

He highlighted some very powerful suggestions that many of you will already do, subconsciously or otherwise and I recommend you give it a read.

Your ability in negotiating a win/win - firstly between your company and the vendor or landlord and then subsequently between them and their applicant - is essential to the reputation and growth of your estate agency.

I'd recommend Guy's own blog too.

One of the most common objections I hear against starting a business blog is not knowing what to blog about. Yet, your blog is the perfect cornerstone for your social media activity.

Here's my A-Z of things estate agents should blog about:

• Advice on preparing a property for the market.
• Bargain listings.
• Case studies and success stories.
• Dates for the diary.
• Events.
• First time buyer guides.
• Guest blogs with tips from related local firms.
• How-to guides (‘How to conduct a viewing', ‘How to handle a negotiation', etc.).
• Industry news.
• Job adverts (not only a good way of reaching a new audience, but also a subtle communication of your company's core values!).
• Keyword focused headlines!
• Local area information.
• Market activity, trends and statistics.
• Noteworthy properties.
• Opportunities to add value.
• Price guides for different types of local property.
• Questions your customers should have answers to.
• Reasons to use an estate agent.
• Staff profiles and opinions.
• Top 10 lists (‘Top 10 things to do on a second viewing', ‘Top 10 reasons for living in ‘Brighton', etc.).
• Useful resources.
• Valuation advice.
• Weekly list of wanted properties for applicants struggling to find.
• X-factors for property appeal (OK, I was getting desperate!).
• Your company personality.
• Z-A lists (there's nothing wrong with being different!)

Gail Gibson is someone who really sees the value of business networking. She must do - since joining 4Networking almost two years ago, she's eaten 126 such breakfasts!

Today, Gail's guest blog outlines some of the essence of her book, “Making Connections – How to Network Effectively to Build Better Business Relationships”.

"Business networking is a highly effective tool to market and increase the brand awareness of your estate agent business. It's your chance to showcase your business in a face-to-face setting.

Networking is about having conversations, listening, asking and learning, building long term relationships with customers, associates and suppliers, and delivering/receiving business.

When you attend an event do you find the process of meeting new people and presenting your business a daunting task?

Don't despair. Armed with the right networking skills you could soon be creating a great reputation and achieving the success you deserve.

Here are 10 ways to make networking a success every time:

1. Be Yourself. Don't try to be someone you're not.
2. Be Confident. Prepare your one minute pitch. Smile and present the best you.
3. Build Relationships. Become a good listener and ask questions.
4. Be Consistent. Networking is NOT a quick fix. Grow your reputation and an awareness of your business.
5. Be Open to Opportunity. Sometimes it's right there in front of you! See the bigger picture and discover more as you develop relationships.
6. Be Helpful. Share market advice, knowledge and experience. Refer and recommend.
7. Be Curious. Ask for help and advice. If you don't ask you don't get!
8. Have Fun. Enjoy the experience. Mix social with business and build your confidence.
9. Follow Up. ONLY with those you had conversations with or promised information to. No Spamming.
10. Be Inspired. Develop and grow you and your business to realise your true potential."

1. Some people didn't think the photos were very well put together.
2. Some thought more tidying up was in order.
3. Some wondered if more of a lifestyle needed to be sold.
4. Some were disappointed that the Rightmove listing didn't have the full room details, forcing potential buyers to go digging into the attached brochure.

But the point I noticed above all else was the criticism of a lack of floor plans - and the response that none of their local agents offered them!

For me this proves two things. There is an expectation from buyers to see floor plans and, more importantly, floor plans are seen as a competition factor by owners looking for an estate agent to market their property.

In the immortal and slightly amended words of Harry Hill, "Which is better, floor plans or no floorplans? There's only one way to find out.." VOTE!

It's the core element of what makes 4Networking so successful a network and it's a big part of my vision at PropertyADD, the friendly and flexible software partner. No we're not as big as Vebra or Expert Agent, but we're proud to be different. Proud to be smaller, more agile and more service driven. Proud that every customer knows they have the MD's mobile number - and that they are welcome to call for a chat or advice at any time.

Brand values aren't just things you mention in adverts, they make your company what it is. And more importantly, they give you something other than price to compete on.

Today I'm going to mention two FREE and useful tools for working with photos that I sometimes recommend to clients.

Firstly, a batch image resizer. Relentless progress means that your digital camera is probably now capable of taking picures of up to 12 megapixels. This has left many estate agents storing photos that are much bigger than they will ever have any use for.

There are advantages to having bigger images from better cameras of course - you've generally also got a better quality lens, and importantly, you've also got the option to crop the image down to focus on a smaller area, remove a problem feature and produce a better end result.

Getting back to size though, a full page A4 photo is approximately 11x8 inches. To print a good quality copy, say 240dpi, requires an 5 megapixel image (2640 x 1920 pixels). Other than for high end properties, how many of you use full page A4 photos? No, thought not. For a more typical 8x5" image, the size of the photo required drops to just 2.2 megapixels (1900 x 1200).

And that is many times the biggest photo you will realistically need to display on your website (perhaps 1024 x 748).

For estate agents uploading lots of property photos into their web-based estate agency software, cutting the size of the files uploaded (by as much as 60-70% if using a modern digital SLR camera) is a real time saver.

This free image resizer from VSO software is for Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 and can process photos in batch, so that you don't have to change the settings on your camera. Very handy.

Secondly, a web service for converting images into different formats, http://www.zamzar.com/. How often have you ended up with a PDF version of your floor plan, which you need to save in an image format (jpg, gif or png) so that it will display properly on your website or in your property brochure?

ZamZar's free service just requires you to complete 4 simple steps on their homepage. An email is sent to you when your converted file is ready to download. It takes a short while for the email to come through, but if you're using it a lot, there are paid accounts you can sign up for.

Hopefully these will prove useful to you. Do you have any other must-have tools you'd like to share?

Over the weekend, I came across a nice way to increase the exposure of your own website on Rightmove. Think that the only way of doing this currently is to pay for their Featured Agent adverts? Think again.

The problem is, officially it's against the rules. Still, that hasn't stopped some of the industry's biggest names, such as Knight Frank, Kinleigh Folkard & Hayward and Foxtons, doing it.

It's actually very simple. Rather than uploading a PDF brochure for each property, you upload a link to the property details on your own website. This in itself is not against Rightmove's rules:

"All links to Floor plans, Brochures and Virtual Tours must only link to the physical media and not to a web page consisting of the media and external links."

However, the example links for those estate agents above all have their website's normal menu structure and site links in place, pushing visitors to browse the site further.

The question is, how will Rightmove respond to this?

It's surprising how often we get asked for advice on logo design at PropertyADD. Possibly because our Express package and website combo is very popular with start-up estate agents.

Of course, we do have a couple of designers that we know, like and are keen to recommend, such as Gareth at Dot Design. However, start-ups are often working to a tight budget where professional logo design feels like a bit of a stretch.

It's worth remembering that brand recognition is very important in an industry like estate agency and that makes your logo a big deal. Professionals are experts and already know all of the logo design basics, but if you just can't afford one, here are my tips for some cheaper alternatives:

• Use one of the myriad of cheap (under £100) online logo design companies out there. http://www.logoinn.co.uk/ is one firm that has been mentioned to us more than once in the past and whilst some of the logos are a bit basic, you can at least take a look at their portfolio and revise what they produce until you are happy.
• If you have a bit more time, consider running a logo contest at http://www.logomyway.com/. From $200 upwards, you can have designers submit their ideas and then pick from the best.
• Use a student from your local college or university. You can get ideas to help you explain what you are looking for from resources such as:
  • http://www.logooftheday.com/.
  • http://www.logobliss.com/ (which has links to the designers).
  • http://www.logonest.com/category/selected-logos/
  • Searching for logo style icons on iStockPhoto, such as http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-illustration-12829967-abstract-design-elements.php.
  • 73 essential logo tips.

Don't forget my previous blog on colour psychology either!

When the latest issue of The Negotiator's email newsletter dropped into my inbox this morning, yet another article about the ASA banning a Spicerhaart advert caught my eye.

Where Haart have clearly over-stepped the mark in previous run-ins with the Advertising Standards Authority, on claims to be the number one agent based on Vizzihomes research, penalty fees and advert style, the latest confrontation (the seventh) might have wider industry implications.

It all boils down to the phrase "haart of Shenley" and whether the ASA has caught up with the concept of regional or virtual offices - and is being consistent in its approach (Haart had previously held off similar claims from Taylors).

From the adjudication:

"The ASA noted the ad made multiple references to "haart of Shenley" and considered most consumers would understand the phrase to mean that Haart had a specialist base in that immediate area. Furthermore, we considered that the phrase was also likely to be interpreted as a play-on-words around "heart of Shenley" and that consumers were likely to assume that this element of the Haart group were based in the centre of Shenley. We considered those consumers would expect any such base to be a physical office where they could easily visit staff straight off the street or through pre-appointment."

While Spicerhaart may well be treading on some toes with their iSold project, I believe they've been a little hard done by here.

Something to be watchful of in your own regional advertising though.

One such pioneer is Kevin Hollinrake, Co-founder and MD of Hunters Property Group. Hunters are one of the agents (alongside a customer of ours, HomeXperts), leading the way with a network of personal agents.

Today, Kevin guest blogs on why he feels it is the industry growth area.

"Bill Gates once said that we overestimate the change that will take place in 2 years and underestimate what can happen in 10 – it may take time, but I believe that the UK estate agency industry is being catapulted towards the most far reaching changes we have ever seen.

It is a testament to the tenacity, resourcefulness and sheer bloody-mindedness of estate agents in this country that our industry has not been totally decimated by the market collapse of the last 2 years. No industry could suffer a 65% fall in transactions unscathed, yet we have seen relatively few branch closures; generally agents seem to have preferred to reduce headcounts (50%) rather than the number of offices (25%)*. Of those that have closed, some are apparently just ‘mothballed' and will re-open as the market recovers. The question we need to ask is why? Have agents based this business decision on today's facts or because that is how they have weathered previous recessions? I am sure that this has been effective in the past, but I believe that things have changed – and that the buying habits of our customers have changed too.

I think the reason that technological changes have so far had little impact upon the structure of estate agency in the UK is that we have all been making too much money – we haven't needed to change. Internet only agents like Wow Property and National House Network have hardly taken the market by storm, so possibly we have believed that our industry would be changed little by the internet revolution – but I believe that it may be worth taking a little time to consider how these changes may now affect us.

Of course, the fundamentals of estate agency have nothing to do with technology – they are about people. Great estate agents don't sit behind a desk bashing-out emails all day; they get out there and talk to as many potential new clients as possible. At its best, however, IT can help to remove the things that stand between a good estate agent and his customer, such as office and people management, bureaucracy, sales reports and all other non fee-earning activities. Without these time-consuming hassles the agent can be much more productive and more successful.

Having made the difficult decision to close 3 of our suburban York offices in August 2008, we offered the managers the opportunity to cover those areas without an office or staff as a self-employed, home-based franchisee. We call them ‘Personal Agents' because they cover a small, defined territory and have a one-to-one relationship with the customer. Our first two Personal Agents are the no. 1 selling agents in their patch despite the fact that their competitors have an office and a team of three, not because they are uniquely gifted, but because that's all they do - sell. And how! Our top agent earned over £150k last year. Even more compelling are the comments we are getting from our sellers, who absolutely love the one-to-one service they get from our agents and their effectiveness at generating viewings and sales. We now have 34 agents trading in this way in various parts of the country and have 6 new franchised offices opening in the next couple of months who are converting to the Hunters brand with the intention of rolling our this model in their area.

It is all very early days of course, and we are making our changes gradually and watchfully. But the initial results have been startling, and we believe we should go where the customer wants us to go. We cannot avoid making changes just because we have invested time, money and have an emotional attachment to our office networks. The logic and facts are clear – footfall is a fraction of what it used to be, our customers now search primarily online, they want a more personal service and they generally move very locally and, therefore, want a local agent. The localised nature of the service may also lead to more cooperation between agents and possibly a multi-listing approach, another evolution that would be very well received by buyers.

There are no new ideas under the sun, of course, and I do not claim that our model is totally unique - similar systems operate in many other countries including the US and Australia and there are other early adopters in the UK – but I think that this model will be a child of our time.

We believe that there is even greater potential with our model by building a network of agents under a big, well-recognised national brand. Brands are nowhere near as strong in the UK as they are in the US - the top brand in the UK (Your Move) has only 2.8% of the market, whilst in the US the biggest agent (Remax) has 13.5% and we see this as a huge opportunity for our own brand to become the UK's largest.

I think offices will still have their place, as they provide name-awareness, help to build successful teams and provide administrative functions, but we will need a lot less of them and they won't necessarily need to be on the high street. What we will see more of, however, are willing, motivated, customer driven individuals who want to work for themselves, earn a lot of money and provide a superb service to their clients."

* Source, Daily Telegraph

Kevin Hollinrake
http://www.huntersnet.co.uk/

Some of you may remember that, back in March, I signed up with StumbleUpon's paid advertising to test whether or not it was a cost effective form of pay-per-click marketing.

As I noted in a recent comment on the PropertyOwl community website, it's my opinion that PPC advertising is one of the three most underused marketing tools that estate agents have access to (along with email newsletters and blogging).

Well, the results are in..

Our $50 campaign ran for 38 days from the 31st March to the 7th May, costing 5 cents for each of 1,000 visitors.

To begin with, we only advertised the PropertyADD website and the results did not make pretty reading, with an astronomical 98.44% bounce rate.

Figuring that blatantly paid stumbles would have significantly less of an impact on the audience, I then switched to advertising The Modern Estate Agent.

Serving up ads for (what I hope is) useful blog content fared a little better, the bounce rate dropping to a still eye-watering 84.35%.

My hope that votes from the paid traffic would increase the number of free visitors was also left unfounded. Just 7 free visits were reported by the StumbleUpon management tool during the same period. What's more, the further 25 stumbled visits to this blog since the campaign ended are barely any different to the numbers seen beforehand.

Of equal concern is the fact that Google Analytics captured only 735 of the supposed 1,007 visitors.

So, what are the conclusions of this experiment?

• Targetting visitors based on a location of 'UK' is near useless for the majority of estate agents.
• ''Real Estate' is simply not a tight enough definition of a topic in our market.
• Of the 34,000 stumblers that are alledgedly subscribed to the 'Real Estate' topic, the vast majority are unlikely to be in the UK. The potential audience is just too small to be of any interest.
• The 'stumbling' model encourages visitors to view a single page and then stumble off elsewhere.
• Because there is very little focus or control over what type of sites you stumble onto, as a visitor, you are more likely to be looking for inspiration than anything else (as I've mentioned before when discussing how to combat writer's block).

In summary, StumbleUpon is best viewed as a social bookmarking website. StumbleUpon ads have the potential to be useful with a viral marketing campaign that really captures the public imagination, particularly if you manage to get a page bookmarked by a stumbler with some clout. But they're not any use for typical business marketing campaigns and certainly not a competitor for Google AdWords.

1. Include keywords in your ad text (no, really?)
2. Improve conversions with a strong call-to-action.
3. Test your ads.

1. The headline (match the keywords being searched for)
2. Line one (sell the benefit)
3. Line two (trigger an action)
4. The display URL (reinforce brand and message)

• Book your free valuation today
• Call now for free expert advice
• Click now for no hassle valuation

If you're not sure, when we talk about Click Through Rate we are referring to the number of times a home-hunter chooses to click through from seeing a property's summary details on the search results page, to view more information about the property on its own details page. At Rightmove we see Click Through Rate scores as being vital for agents for the simple calculation…

Higher CTR = More people viewing an agent's properties = More chance of leads!

The presentation of properties is not just a good way of attracting leads. Vendors are becoming increasingly savvy as to how their home should be presented online and a well presented property can also be good way of alerting potential new sellers in the local market to your abilities as an agent.

We have seen great results from the simple act of swapping and updating property images. One of our lettings agents, Martin & Co in Leamington Spa, contacted us recently asking for some tips on upping the CTR they were achieving around some of their properties. We advised changing the main image on five of their properties to refresh them in the eyes of potential tenants, and within a week all five had been let. If a property isn't getting much interest then something as simple as using a front shot from a different angle or an internal shot from another room as your main image can often make a difference.

Within the information text alongside the main photo on the search results page, agents have a set number of characters to play with. Our advice here is to make the most of the space and really consider what information is necessary to get across the best features of the property. In the above example the description may seem ok, however is it necessary to describe the type of house and location when those were the initial criteria that the user will have searched by? That description takes up around a third of the information given, which could have been used to get across more of the properties key details.

There are tools which you can use to analyse Click Through Rates on your own websites such as Google Analytics. For Rightmove members we provide Rightmoveplus for free as part of an agent's standard membership. Through RM+ agents can get a breakdown of the CTR for each of their properties over a set time period. This is used to pick out which of their stock may need attention in terms of tweaking the way those properties are presented online, and can also be used to provide as an update to sellers and landlords to show how their property is performing."

Tim Muir, Rightmove

I completely agree with Tim that CTR is the most important metric for online marketing. With PropertyADD, the ratio of the number of times a property appears in search listings to the number of click throughs to the full details from the agent's own website forms an invaluable part of the property performance warning indicators that help identify underperforming property listings.

Just as your typical social media guru would advocate in fact.

By coincidence, the answer came in a 4Networking forum post from Helen at Yumi Creative. Helen is offering stylish Twitter backgrounds for the bargain price of £20, so I bit her arm off.

Click the thumbnails to see what a big difference she's made (new design on the left, as if you need telling!).

I don't know how many of you subscribe to Business Link email newsletters, but if you don't already, you should do. They're not always 100% interesting, but usually contain something useful.

I don't mind admitting that I have used them as a source of blog inspiration in the past!

As well as offering these newsletters, Business Link are a useful source of advice and offer a free annual business review, which can give you a useful outsider perspective to help with target setting.

Today they emailed me a copy of an e-marketing guide, which may be a little basic for most of you, but offers a reasonable top-level summary of things to consider. Worth a read if you're new to it all.

Friday's post was the 100th since I started this blog back in December last year and so today I thought it would be interesting to put together a bit of a review of progress.

Those of you who have blogs (which isn't enough of you I might add!) will appreciate that it takes quite an effort to keep it up, but here are some numbers from Google Analytics which prove that blogs ARE worth the investment.

• In just over 5 months, 3,477 unique individuals have visited 5,823 times, on a continuous upward trend.
• 1,362 of those visits have come as a result of a Google search, using 1,074 different search terms. That's a lot of phrases to be ranking highly for.
• The most popular single search term was "estate agents property particulars".
• The most popular overall topic was estate agent canvassing, with 123 visits across 93 different search phrases for people interested in improving their letters and processes.

I've said it before, but it's still worth saying again. Search engines love blogs with regular unique content. We've had 14 readers of each blog on average just from Google. These are people that were searching for solutions and who possibly weren't aware of PropertyADD previously.

Leads, not to put too fine a point on it! Not that this is a selling game, oh no. Blogs don't need to sell - they build the trust that allow people to buy instead. Isn't that a much nicer way of doing business?

The varied number of search terms proves what a wide audience you can target with a blog. In comparison to the PropertyADD company website, where content must be more tightly focused, there are nearly twice as many search phrases pulling people into this blog - and again, on a continuous upward trend.

Most importantly, I've had a lot of positive feedback from you all - and a number of enquiries directly as a result.

The top five most popular blogs from the first 100 are as follows. Special thanks to renowned trainer Julian O'Dell, who we have been lucky to have contribute with 4th and 5th spot:

• A good example of an estate agent canvassing leaflet
• Top 6 most important property portal networks
• 9 faults and fixes for an estate agent canvassing letter
• How estate agents can maximise instruction opportunities
• The trick to gaining quality instructions

If you aren't blogging for your company yet, isn't it time to ask why not?

When my wife is at the gym, she often grabs me a copy of Sport Magazine, a free weekly affair with a light-hearted outlook and the occasional interesting interview.

Last week's edition had a number of top sporting stars talking about how they made it to the top, what drove them and set them apart from the crowd. As an autobiography-aholic, I'm always interested in reading the lessons people have learned in life, but the message that stood out this time was one of my old favourites.

Both Ryan Giggs and Lewis Hamilton hit on the same theme: they might have had a big picture at the back of their mind, but what got them to the top was an innate attitude of setting and achieving lots of small goals. At the end of every season they sat down and set targets for what they'd like to achieve next. Small, specific and measurable goals.

It's the same thing you hear from most successful entrepreneurs and something I learned from managing massive IT projects in a previous role - the 'baby steps' approach.

You take the first step and then just keep walking.

The guest blog today comes from Jane Penson of Grammar to Go, a business born out of Jane's love of writing and focused on improving your writing skills.

"Is this a good headline?

'Reliable gardener – South West Cornwall'

Yes, if you are in SW Cornwall looking for people with out of control gardens, but not if you are an estate agent in Twickenham. So we have established right away that you cannot judge the effectiveness of a headline until you have answered this vital question.

Whose attention am I trying to attract?

Who is your target market? What are they looking for? What kind of language are they likely to respond well to?

Let's suppose that you are selling a big, impractical rambling house with character but needing a lot of money spending on it. Can you visualise the kind of person who will like it? Will they be immaculately dressed and driving the latest BMW or a bit scruffy with paint on their jeans? You don't know of course, but I strongly recommend that you have a guess. Think of a specific person that you know or can imagine who would love that house so much that they would be willing to spend more than they could really afford on it. Now think what language to use. What words would they respond to: charming; elegant; period; delightful; needs love and attention... you get the idea.

I accept that if you go out on a limb you may turn some people off. On the other hand, if you always stick to the same old ‘extensive, well maintained blah blah' you will never turn anyone on. Headlines have to miss a lot of people if they are going to target the right ones precisely. To put that another way, a headline's job is to focus; to grab the attention of the most likely people to respond to the message below it. Clearly, you can't focus on everyone.

Rules for good headlines

• Choose words that make the most important point. If a house is priced very low because the sellers are desperate to get rid of it – that may be your key message.
• Be as concise as possible or the reader won't get to the end. Research has shown that people often don't read headlines on the web unless the first two words grab them. So 'Crawley Estate Agent opens new shop' is far better than 'Estate agent has recently opened a new shop on the high street in Crawley'
• Start with the most important words. In this example nobody cares unless they live in or near Crawley – so start there. Notice also that the verb ‘opens' in the present tense is better than ‘has opened' in the past tense. It sounds more immediate and exciting.
• Don't try to be clever. It is much better to be clear and concise so that people know what you are talking about than to use a play on words that twists the message. After all, nobody is going to type your word-play into Google are they?

... and an idea

• Try using the same ad on several occasions with completely different headlines and find out which one gets the best response.

Keywords for search engines

When it comes to headlines, follow the same rules for search engines as for people. For body copy, there are more complicated rules which involve needing to understand how search engines operate and what terms people are actually typing in. Headlines use very few words and they are the ones that differentiate this message from everything else out there. Concentrate on readers when writing headlines and worry about search engine optimisation when writing the body copy."

Jane Penson
@JanePenson
http://www.grammartogo.co.uk/
01494 873093

I've mentioned before that headlines are important for blog SEO so I can't quite agree with Jane's last statement, but I do agree that you should always write for the reader. Particularly when writing headlines for Google AdWords.

If you like learning about headlines, you might also like to take a look at the guide I mentioned back in this blog post on building a personal brand.

How many of you are doing more than just writing "4 Bed Detached House" as the headline for your portal listings or brochures I wonder?

It's good looking, slick and fast. You can save five different searches for alerts to pop-up the moment a new property is listed. You can save favourite properties and it remembers your recently viewed properties too, all without sharing an email address.

The photos are only minimally bigger (and not big enough), the floor plans are too small to be very useful (no browser zoom available) and there's no Google Street View, no agent search and only minimal branding.

All of which leaves me wondering where this is heading a little bit. Is it simply a pre-cursor to a Rightmove iPad application. Or to a tool which can help agents show comparables while on valuations?

We'll have to wait and see but I fear this might just be a bit of mis-directed PR fodder.

Following on from a thread on Julian O'Dell's 22 point checklist on the applicant qualification process, here's my A-Z of things estate agents should discuss with applicants.

(Suggestions for J, X, Y and Z particularly welcome!)

• Address, availability, approach, advertising
• Budget, bedrooms, bathrooms
• Contact details, compromises, chain details, current contract, conveyancing, costs
• Desirables, deal breakers, diaries
• Email address, EPCs
• Features, fees agreed elsewhere, finances
• Guides and information packs
• History of search and sale, HIPs
• ID verification, insurances
• Job history (thanks to Sam @VirtualLetz)
• Knowledge of market
• Locations, local facilities
• Motivation, mobile number, mortgage, must haves
• Names of all parties
• Other requirements, objections
• Price range, phone numbers, properties, permission for marketing, preferred contact method, point of contact, process
• Qualifying questions
• References, relationships with solicitors, etc.
• Status, source of enquiry
• Time frame, type of property, testimonials, transport links
• Upfront costs, utilities, updates
• Valuation opportunity, viewings
• Who, what, when, why, websites
• X-factor sought (thanks to @IglooLets)
• Y
• Z

Six weeks or so ago, I kicked off a poll asking one question: how many of you are using SMS text messages to send out details of property matches.

It's a fairly even split in customers of our estate agent software - some love their immediacy and use them to reduce time spent on the phone, others prefer to stick with calling, or email.

Despite that, I have to say that it was a surprise that only 28% of you are regularly sending text messages - and 61% never doing so (though 44% were keen to).

Here are my top 5 reasons you should consider marketing properties with text messages:

1. It's cheap
   A text message costs around 10p, but importantly no negotiator time. Even if your negs are only earning £28,000 (the average estate agent salary according to WorkHound), each three minute phone call costs nearly 80p. Send out a property to just 50 applicants and you could save £35.
2. It's fast
   Text messages arrive (and are generally noticed) immediately after being sent, so you can get your property marketing out there quickly.
3. There's no spam getting in the way
   Text message spam is still pretty rare and phones don't have spam filters in the same way that email accounts do, so you can be confident of your message getting through and being read.
4. It's unintrusive
   Busy people who are unable to access personal email during the day and find it difficult to take personal calls still get the immediacy of service, without the intrusion.
5. It's ubiquitous
   Most people have a mobile phone, even if they don't have an email address.

Just occasionally, the FindaProperty Winging It blog has something quite interesting on it. This week, the launch of a potentially useful gadget for estate agents - a widget they've made to allow you to show local house price trends on your own website easily.

What's more, it's completely free for anyone to use (though probably better for those agents who advertise on the portal - otherwise you just end up sending buyers to the FindaProperty website where they can only find your competition's properties).

A great way of continuing to educate your customers and perhaps the perfect accompaniment to those about the location pages I've been encouraging you all to add?

It's also worth saying that FindaProperty might have come up with a bit of a viral marketing coup here too.

For those of you that don't follow the PropertyADD Twitter account, yesterday I posted a link to a Hubspot webinar on how a good blogging process can be compared to a factory production line. That link also has slides for people who'd rather not watch the hour long webinar.

The headline news for me (and our experience with The Modern Estate Agent backs this up) was that 90% of companies who blog daily have won business directly as a result of doing so.

However, one of the challenges facing any blogger, journalist or author is writer's block. That feeling that yesterday you had lots of good ideas, but today, nothing. There's no two ways about it, blogging can be hard work.

In 17 blogging tips for estate agents last month, I mentioned how valuable I find keeping a swipe file of ideas for future topics. Right now, I have over 200 ideas for articles in my swipe file, which is a great resource to fall back on when time is short or inspiration dries up.

In the webinar above, Jeffrey Henning takes this idea further and shows you how you can turn your swipe file into a conveyor belt - a blog factory:

• Research (sources of ideas)
  • Blogs you subscribe to
  • Google alerts
  • News stories and events
  • Interesting or debateable statistics
  • Questions from customers
  • Conversations you've had
  • Your own previous blog posts
• Warehouse (part-finished ideas for blogs)
  • Use themes you would like to write about to group ideas
  • Headlines or keywords you want to target
  • Bullet points for a topics
  • Links
  • Paragraphs or snippets of content
  • Images to go alongside the articles
• Assembly (putting it all together)
  • Turning notes into posts
  • Combining ideas together
  • Using topical stories to give posts an interesting slant

The number of past posts I've written on blogging is a good illustration of how important I feel it is to business. This approach can help you to keep it up and reap the benefits. The more you post, the more visitors you generate..

Internet Psychologist and regular contributor, Graham Jones, is back today with a look at how you can make a valuable first impression.

"First impressions are lasting impression, so the song goes. But is that true? Actually, first impressions are often forgotten, especially if we don't like someone or visit a website we just cannot stand.

Research shows that we tend to click away from websites we take an instant dislike to. And, be honest, can you remember those websites which you rejected within a second or two? The chances are they are gone, forgotten, never to be recalled. Your first impression didn't last – it came and went, along with the website.

It's the same when we meet someone face-to-face for the first time. We are making all sorts of conscious and sub-conscious analyses to judge the individual and see whether or not we like them. If we don't see what we are looking for, we virtually ignore anything they may say and we tend to disconnect from them, hoping we'll never have to see them again.

The only first impressions that really last are the good ones.

The people we like instantly or the websites that we immediately think are brilliant are the impressions that last. So, the trick is making sure your first impression is so good that people take an instant liking to you personally, or to your website.

When a potential new client comes into your office they will have made up their minds whether or not to do business with you before the first minute is up. Your company may have a fantastic local reputation and the people in front of you could well have been given a recommendation. But they still want to know are you the right person they can trust.

It's the same online. Even if someone has recommended your website, or emailed someone a link, that individual still wants to check your site and see if your company is the kind of organisation they can work with.

If those initial seconds in front of you, or looking at your website, don't tick the right boxes, the potential client is looking for the exit signs as fast as they can. And that negative first impression is mostly forgotten as they wend their way down the High Street, or along the Information Superhighway, searching for someone who will make a better impression on them.

So, what can you do to make sure that your first impression lasts, because it is positive?

The first step – and most important step – is to view things from the perspective of the individual approaching you. What exactly are they looking for and are you truly matching their needs? Online this is a particular problem. People looking to buy a flat, for instance, will be immediately put off with a website that has pictures of expensive-looking country houses. Equally, someone looking for a country pile won't be impressed by website pictures of blocks of new flats.

People click away from websites within less than a second if they don't see what they are looking for. Your website's first impression could be turning business away if the landing page people see is not focused specifically on their needs and requirements.

In the office, face-to-face, it's also important to see things from the perspective of the client. Look at them as they come in and see where they are looking; that will give you a clue as to their interest. Build rapport at the outset, of course, but make sure you ask questions and listen carefully to the answers to spot where you can fit in with their requirements.

One of the most neglected office skills is listening, but used well it can transform your business.

Ultimately, your best first impression is made when you show how much you are caring for the needs of the person you are meeting.

But seeing things from the perspective of your client is only part of the answer. Online, people check you out for three key things within less than a second:

1. Firstly, they want to know whether or not your site is easy to navigate.
2. Then they want to see if your headline has the keyword they are looking for. Hence if they want to buy a “Bungalow in Bognor” those are the words they expect to see – not “Welcome to our website”.
3. Finally, they check to see if you are likely to be trustworthy. This is done with a cursory look to the bottom of the page to see if you have a real, physical world address and landline telephone number listed. You need them on every page of your website.

In the office, people make similar checks. They look to see if you have a section dedicated to their property requirements, or if selling, a specialist in their kind of sale. They also look at your literature to see how professional it is.

So, whether it's online or offline, your first impressions will not count unless they are good ones. Do what you can to help make sure the impact is positive."

Graham Jones
Tel: 0118 336 9710
http://www.grahamjones.co.uk/
http://twitter.com/grahamjones
http://facebook.com/internetpsychologist

Just a quick post today as I wanted to share a blog from Marc Davison over at 1000 Watt Consulting in the US earlier this month: the language of benefits.

Marc put it nicely as "connecting the feature dot to the benefit dot."

What's in it for me (WIIFM) is a concept we've posted about several times in the past:

• How to write a great canvassing letter
• The psychology of persuasion for estate agents
• The trick to gaining quality instructions (people don't buy features, they buy benefits)
• 9 faults and fixes for an estate agent canvassing letter

Taking the time to understand the benefits you offer is the key to improving your sales process. It's worth saying so more than once!

1. http://www.tepilo.com/
2. http://www.bethemiddleman.com/
3. http://www.owner-direct.eu/
4. http://www.vivastreet.co.uk/
5. http://www.gumtree.com/
6. http://www.ebay.co.uk/
7. http://www.usforhomes.com/
8. http://www.houseweb.co.uk/
9. http://www.propertiesdirect.co.uk/
10. http://www.movehomeonline.co.uk/
11. http://www.homesonsale.co.uk/

• Monitor the sites for properties in your area being sold privately.
• Consider how long it would be appropriate to leave before getting in touch with the owner. The object here is to help not hassle the owners.
• When a property comes up that you are able to recognise, drop a canvassing letter in the post, or visit the property personally to up-sell your service.
• Do not get in touch with them directly through the website.
• Make sure that the letter is well targeted and enticing: "Struggling to sell your home privately?" Educate and sell subtly.
• Recognise that they may have a negative impression of estate agents and adapt your offering appropriately: fixed fee, no fee if privately sold, etc.

Yesterday, I wrote about the nearly, but not quite instruction - where the opportunity for a deal was there, the potential customer wanted to buy, but you failed to answer their objections and concerns well enough to close the sale.

One of the sales hurdles was too high for them to jump.

Google recently announced that they were going to start using the speed of your website as a minor factor in calculating your search engine ranking. It's a logical step. Slow websites are another one of those high hurdles - visitors try to use your site, get bored and disappear in search of an easier answer.

To make the sale, you have to make it easy.

A few years ago, Steve Krug (a respected usability and design guru) wrote a book called Don't Make Me Think! It's the perfect summary of how to design a good website. Don't make your visitors have to search for what they're looking for - make it obvious for them.

People don't really read websites, at least not initially. They scan them. We already know the problems estate agents solve - make the solutions jump out and the hurdles get smaller!

You've nearly convinced someone to instruct you, but suddenly they stop returning your calls or fail to send the signed contract back.

Why?

Over their lifetime, your potential customer has had their trust knocked by so many unscrupulous suppliers that their natural trust has been eroded.

Have you failed to generate sufficient trust and credibility to beat these fears? To allow optimism to triumph over experience?

• Fear of wasting money (or time)
• Fear of mockery
• Fear of feeling stupid

The blog suggests some fairly obvious ways to kill the troll on your website, such as having proper contact information and including staff photos, testimonials and FAQs.

Good negotiators and sales men and women are skilled at identifying and resolving objections. Is your website?

As a psychologist I could offer all manner of ideas and models to help you with persuasion – ranging from emotional intelligence, empathy, rapport, trust and motivation and through to personality, thinking styles and relationship type preferences. Some people even recommend a series of techniques packaged up as NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming). In my influencing toolbox I offer people a range of techniques including: personal impact, marketing and sales theory, psychological models, influencing styles and techniques and rational/data driven approaches.

However, for this short blog entry I will recommend a best seller and fascinating to read book by a brilliant psychologist, Robert B Cialdini. He explains that humans often operate – for efficiency purposes - using fixed action patterns which means that they have automatic responses from a single trigger feature.

He proved, for example, that you are more successful if you provide a reason when requesting a favour (even if you say, for example, "Please may I jump in and make a copy because I have to make a copy" – the 'because' is the trigger that makes people allow you to queue jump, not the rather content-free excuse). And he explains the effectiveness of common set up examples used by estate agents (e.g. presenting a few poor options before an acceptable/good one).

He offers six key techniques to persuade – all based on proven psychological research:

1. Scarcity – The rule of the few
   • Opportunities seem more valuable to us when they are less available. For example: "This sort of property rarely comes onto the market…"
2. Reciprocation – Give and take
   • We try to repay what another person has given us and if we reject a big request then we are more likely to accept a smaller request. For example: "I know that four bedrooms was too many, but how about three instead of two?"
3. Commitment and consistency – Hobgoblins of the mind
   • Once we make a choice, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment and that a small commitment usually makes us take a bigger commitment. For example "I know you said you really wanted RegionA but as you have already looked at some properties in RegionB…"
4. Social proof – Truths are us
   • We view behaviour as correct in a given situation to the degree we see others performing it (especially in uncertainty). For example: "Most young couples want as big a house as their first time mortgage will allow."
5. Liking – The friendly thief
   • We prefer to say yes to the requests of people we know and like. For example: "My colleague Joe, who you got on really well with when you met him last year, suggested that you take a look at…"
6. Authority – Directed deference
   • We have a deep seated sense of sense of duty to authority. For example: "My manager asked me to show you this property."

From my experience, what makes people say “Yes” is your ability to meet their needs or match their principles and values, beliefs and opinions and needs and wants. To do this you have to have a deep understanding of the “What's in it for me?” by describing relevant features, advantages and benefits.

But please remember in all conversations: “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated” (William James, a psychologist) and, of course, the words of George Burns: Sincerity - If you can fake that, you've got it made."

Kim Tasso is a psychologist and management consultant specialising in business development for the professions and the property sector. She has written books on selling, media relations and growing a property practice (the latter two for EG Books). http://www.kimtasso.com/

In comparison, Rightmove's trend line continues to look fairly positive (the lower graph relates to news coverage, as opposed to search statistics):

Or perhaps the competition excluding Rightmove, which is clearly way out in front on brand recognition?

 


Note that these trends are really related to brand recognition (people actually searching by name), rather than traffic. They do show very positive growth on Zoopla's part, but with some distance to go still.

More pleasingly, Zoopla versus Tepilo looks like this:

If you'd like to run your own comparisons, you can do so at Google Trends.

Have you ever thought about what your company colours say about you? Colour psychology is a fairly well established part of marketing and can either reinforce or weaken the brand values implied by your estate agency name.

Possibly because a good proportion of customers that use the Express version of our estate agency software signed up as start-up estate agents, I've had a number of discussions on colours for logos and website designs over time.

Here's a quick break down of the impression colours give (taken from Branding Strategy Insider, an article with further information relating to the different meanings of colours in other cultures):

• Red: excitement, strength, sex, passion, speed, danger.
• Blue (the most popular color - ahem): trust, reliability, belonging, coolness.
• Yellow: warmth, sunshine, cheer, happiness
• Orange: playfulness, warmth, vibrant
• Green: nature, fresh, cool, growth, abundance
• Purple: royalty, spirituality, dignity
• Pink: soft, sweet, nurture, security
• White: pure, virginal, clean, youthful, mild.
• Black: sophistication, elegant, seductive, mystery
• Gold: prestige, expensive
• Silver: prestige, cold, scientific

Looking to market high end properties? Consider purple, black, gold or silver (like Carter Jonas, Astons, Wetherell or Fine & Country). Flats to first time buyers? Perhaps orange, green, pink and white are a better choice.

Does that mean iSold.com have gone for 'fresh and cool'!?

Interesting isn't it. What do your colours say about you?

Did you like that headline? A couple of days ago I found an interesting PDF on writing good headlines on the PsychoTactics website - well worth a read for any of you bloggers out there. The headline for this post was my attempt at inspiring curiosity!

Now, I've written about USPs and niches a couple of times this month already, but then I found this article on how to manipulate personal branding. That title sounds a bit underhand, but I don't mean it like that.

It's really just about knowing what you are - and then constantly communicating it to drive the message home. Much like the story in Jun Loayza's article, there's a chap on the 4N networking group who has branded himself the Excel Expert. It's a simple, but catchy message isn't it?

Politicians and PRs are very adept at giving the right sound bite - why not estate agents too?

• What performance indicators agents are using to measure the health of their business.
• What the benefits of monitoring KPIs are.
• How to ensure that monitoring these statistics doesn't become unduly time consuming.

Coincidence perhaps then, that estate agency trainer Julian O'Dell's latest guest blog is on exactly this subject.

"Our management training tends unsurprisingly to focus on managing people, however it is dangerous to ignore the discipline of managing information which can assist in influencing performance in similar fashion to concentrating on staff.

As an industry, estate agency is fortunate insofar as there are whole rafts of data and statistics at our fingertips. Despite this advantage, many managers/owners are unaware of both the information itself and how to assess and use it, yet those who do so typically find it enlightening and rewarding as it often highlights areas of weakness yet to be identified. This allows appropriate action to be taken before the problems are too great to solve.

Fundamental management information within estate agency includes the valuation appointments to instructions conversion rate, sole agency strike rate, fee levels, percentage of for sale boards on new instructions, instructions to sold instructions success, properties withdrawn without selling, number of applicants registered to mortgage appointments, number of viewings to offers, agreed sales to exchanges ratio, sales process time from offer to exchange and so on.

On my training and consultancy travels, it is alarming how many managers/owners do not know any of the above information – and in some cases don't actually know where to look to find it!

Those that do know, or seek it out having been made aware of its importance, find it useful to benchmark themselves against other estate agents' figures elsewhere around the country. We provide these figures without attributing them to any identified company, and this information is often useful in helping establish a suitable target for the future.

One Company for whom we have carried out a lot of training over the past few years had a valuation to instruction conversion rate of 33% when we began our work with them. They had never measured this prior to our involvement, and we suggested that with the appropriate training and support, a conversion rate of 50% could be secured given what we had witnessed being achieved elsewhere.

Following the figures through, achieving a 50% conversion rate (assuming other ratios such as instructions to sold instructions and agreed sales to exchanges remained broadly the same) would be directly responsible for an increase of approximately £50,000 extra income per calendar month as a result of the extra completions across the company in question. In fact, they are now achieving 52% so the bottom line is looking very healthy indeed.

Calculating one's own performance statistics and benchmarking those against others have proved to be very useful exercises for a vast number of my clients as it allows them to place their own company's achievements into a broader context, and to readjust their aspirations as appropriate. A firm who typically saw 65% of their agreed sales fall through before exchange were surprised to hear that elsewhere 20% and lower was not uncommon, thereby recognising the need for change and we provided the key players with relevant training which has led to a huge reduction in cancelled sales, thus securing extra income and happier staff!

My company has assisted a number of lettings firms to massively increase the percentage of managed properties they handle compared to what they thought was an acceptable level – this work has led to guaranteed regular monthly income and longer-term security.

Market and geographical variables mean that it is important not to get hung up on the detail of the performance of agents elsewhere, but the bigger picture can be useful if analysed objectively.

Another Company who started to monitor and measure the aforementioned range of data discovered an interesting insight into their valuers' performance. In one particular office, the primary valuer, who carried out the majority of the valuations, and was widely regarded as having an admirable appointment to instruction conversion rate was actually pinpointed as a weak link in the process as his instructions to sold instructions ratio was horrendous.

The second valuer whose conversion rate was not as good was adding far more to the bottom line as a much greater percentage of her instructions were selling. Furthermore, she was securing a higher ratio of for sale boards than the supposedly 'better' valuer. Having identified these issues, the manager was able to tweak the way the office was run accordingly and to provide appropriate coaching and training support to the individuals involved.

Managers should measure, monitor and above all manage the information that is available – they may not always like what they see, but the lessons learnt are invaluable milestones on the road to success."

Julian O'Dell
TM training & development
01480 405583
@agencytrainer
training@tm-royston.co.uk

I'm planning a follow-up blog to this with a list of lots of statistics you could be measuring to understand and improve your business. If you have any suggestions or thoughts you think others would be interested in, please post a comment below.

It brings me back to a post I wrote last week which queried whether or not estate agents still need to match applicants to properties, or if the portals mave made house hunters self-selecting.

If your portfolio is quite varied in terms of type, size, location and value of property, the chances of an applicant registering with you and being interested in only a single property are quite high. Which makes that person relatively expensive.

If your portfolio is generally more similar, the chance of an applicant finding more than one interesting property goes up - as does the chance that you'll have new properties of interest to them in future. Therefore the value of that person to your business rises.

Of course, in a restricted market with so few valuations, the temptation is to take every opportunity to win a listing - and probably quite rightly so. But with a little targeted marketing, you can massage your property pipeline in the right direction.

I think this is also quite a refreshing way to look at your business. Your customers are looking for solutions too - that's why they pay you! Viewing your services from their perspective can help you clarify your sales message, particularly at such a time of change.

• They need advice about the process or related legal issues.
• They want to know more about the local area - the facilities, properties, prices, etc.
• They want properties that match their needs.

Add FAQ pages or guides to your website, use a blog and list your properties widely and these boxes are ticked.

Vendors and landlords have more varied needs, some of which they may not even know about before first speaking to you. Qualifying your potential customers properly will help you understand their specific priorities and needs:

• They need advice on value (though are increasingly capable of determining this themselves with the amount of information available online these days).
• They need advice on positioning - on their target audience and likely buyer profiles.
• They want advice on making the most value from their property.
• They need expert negotiators who have a professional distance from both parties involved and are able to act without emotion.
• They need advice on the process.
• They need someone who can devote appropriate amounts of time to their asset.
• Sellers need to be ready to move in the right timeframe.
• Landlords need good quality tenants and ongoing management.
• Most of all, they need an audience.

Proving that you can solve these problems at an acceptable price is the key to winning their business.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I believe having a USP gives your business a real advantage. Indeed, one of my first posts back in December 2009 was about the concept of losing customers to win customers.

Here are some ideas for estate agency USPs:

• Focused on types of property:
  • Chain free or new properties
  • Period properties
  • Oast houses
  • Farms
  • Live-in businesses
  • Barns
  • Waterside locations
• Tailored to your audience:
  • First time buyers
  • Singles
  • Friends buying together
  • Divorcees
  • Probate
• Based on your service:
  • 24 hour agency, with an owner login area on your website
  • Price related innovation
  • Educational approach
  • Use of video

Many of these niches require specialist industry or legal knowledge, where experience becomes a huge advantage. This has the added benefit of making it harder for new competitors to target your market, protecting your business at the same time as helping to grow it.

If you're an agent that focuses on a particular niche, please post a comment with a link to your site to show it off.

 Here's a quick summary of 27 points from the thread, in the order they were raised:

1. Listen and respond to specific requirements, not just price and number of rooms.
2. Responding to enquiries, answering and returning calls, actively using email and doing some of the running during the sales process.
3. Communicate the benefits of using an estate agent, versus a private sale.
4. Confirm and show up on time for viewings (or, particularly for lettings, cancel them if the property has already let).
5. Provide interesting information, rather than tell you that you're standing in a kitchen.
6. Don't behave like a friend, treat customers professionally. Acknowledge and welcome any foot traffic. Keep in regular contact.
7. Qualify applicants properly and report their status accurately.
8. Cultivate a plan B, ready for if a sale falls through.
9. Make the effort to identify and recommend only good, reliable conveyancers and mortgage advisors.
10. Offer advice on how to maximise the chance and value of a sale or let.
11. Encourage the vendor to influence the property description.
12. Use floor plans and indicate the total square footage.
13. Use Google Street View.
14. Give the size and aspect of the garden, as well as the rooms.
15. Avoid judging people based on appearance - keep an open mind - and don't treat them like idiots.
16. Be honest. Provide as many (professional quality) pictures and details as possible.
17. Avoid complacency (if you know what to do, keep doing it!).
18. Provide weekend and out-of-hours services.
19. Use a good CRM system. ;o)
20. Give timely and honest viewing feedback.
21. Allow adequate time for viewings.
22. Explain to house hunters that you will show them some properties that aren't quite right, but that this will help you better understand their priorities (as per Phil and Kirstie).
23. Systemise your business to improve quality, using checklists and the like.
24. Educate first time buyers.
25. Spell accurately.
26. Empathise and be respectful.
27. Keep property statuses up to date on your website and property portals.

All good advice!

However, along with suggestions of highlighting key features using capital letters and rotating the main photo occasionally (good advice), Rightmove suggest that you hold something back. That you show enough information to show a property off, but not so much that buyers have no reason to contact you.

I can see the logic of this. Getting people to register in order to receive the full details of a property helps you build and qualify your contact database, helps begin a relationship with people ready for future properties. But is this an old fashioned attitude from Rightmove? I can't see Google taking the same approach.

Aren't we in an age where house hunters simply expect better access to more information?

A couple of months ago, there was a discussion on PropertyOwl about whether estate agents need to bother matching applicants anymore, or whether property portals have effectively taken over that role.

Do people buy property or do estate agents sell it?

I suspect that the truth is somewhere in between. The answer to Rightmove's suggestion probably is too.

I did like the advice of trying an image rotation as a pre-cursor to a price reduction though. Anything that helps clients understand that you are trying to market the property appropriately, not just force the quick sale, must be a good thing.

Antony and his partner runs their business, MCM Dordogne Property, from home in the centre of Ribérac and the informative posts he writes are pitched perfectly in line with their goal of "complete integrity". There's a genuine attempt to share interesting, useful and educational content.

It's very readable - and exactly the sort of content you could see people seeking out too, so perfect search engine fodder.

You might argue that the 'Englishman in France' perspective gives him more to say than the average local residential agent in the UK, but, if you're honest with yourself, isn't that just an excuse?

PS. I added a one-question poll over to the right hand side of the site - about using text message marketing - please spare 30 seconds to give your opinion for use in a future blog. Thanks!

Estate agency as an industry has been a little slower to make use of video, but interest really started to take off last year. An increasing number of agents are using 'about us' videos on their home page to quickly sell their company and USP, and a small but growing number are beginning to adopt property videos - virtual viewings - as part of their marketing packages. The use of films to educate web visitors about an agent's local area is also growing.

Sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are now massive sources of search traffic - exposure to that new audience alone may be a good enough reason for your company to get involved.

One industry supplier, Estate Agents on Film, only launched officially a few months ago, but has booked a stand to show off their services at the Property Professional Show (where they will also be running a raffle to win a year's worth of the HD TV Portal service and the production of some local films). They offer both property (from £150) and location videos (from £300) in HD and are seeing some very positive results.

MD David Varley told me that they are equally popular with vendors at the lower end of the market, with agents upselling the service as an additional income stream. One of their customers HousesEtc is selling 5-10 videos each month to their local market where the average property price is just £110k. Their quote was "one buyer bought because she fell in love with it online".

The content produced by their network of freelance cameramen and women is certainly impressive enough to understand this. They bring a professionally trained eye - a "TV advert viewpoint" in David's words - to the work. Take a look at this example. It's also possible to add video links to your Rightmove adverts.

What a great way to stand out from the crowd.

Animoto is another site worth considering. It allows you to put videos, photos, voice and text to a soundtrack to produce enticing and professional animations quickly and easily. Evolution Business Services also offer a quick and interesting way to use the Wordle style keyword cloud graphics I have mentioned previously.

The common theme is that online video is still growing, however you use it:

• A succinct way of explaining your company's personality
• An exciting way of marketing properties
• A differentiator to your competition
• A new revenue stream
• A way of generating traffic
• A way of providing interesting and educational local area content on your website

The only note of caution I would sound is to ensure that content isn't only available on the video - for the moment you should still offer a textual version for those that prefer it.

Online aside, you could also consider using the videos in digital window displays.

The golden rules of any good blog

1. Develop a personality for your blog and be consistent with it. Be friendly and informal enough to be enjoyable, but don't cross the line.
2. Post regularly - be that daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly. It'll be easier for you to retain your readers if they know what day and time to expect your posts.
3. Make your posts interesting and relevant to your business.
4. Keep each blog post to a sensible length - I try for between 300 and 600 words. Long enough to say something, but short enough to avoid becoming boring (I hope!).

Generating content

1. Keep a folder on your PC's deskop or in your Outlook inbox where you can post quick notes and links about future ideas for content when inspiration hits. That'll help you avoid writer's block.
2. Sign up to other relevant blogs and use their posts for inspiration - link to them and add your thoughts into the mix, then post a comment on their blog with a link back to your post).
3. Ask relevant local businesses to contribute content (removal firms, solicitors, local planners, school heads, etc.)
4. Comment on local news and events (Google Alerts are a nice easy way to keep updated)
5. Post local market trends and statistics (use the free tools from property portals)
6. If you don't already have any local information on your website, educate buyers about the area.
7. Post 'How To' advice on how sellers can achieve the best value for their property.
8. Don't be afraid to mention company achievements, such as awards or the sale of interesting properties, but don't hard sell.
9. Expand on themes you've only covered briefly in previous posts.

Marketing your blog

1. Keep a list of keywords that people search for, to use as part of your blog headline. This will help you to theme your posts appropriate to generate traffic.
2. Sign up with a handful of social bookmarking websites (Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and any of the others mentioned on AddThis) and bookmark each blog with a short summary after you've posted it. This fires up the search engines to come and index your post, as well as publicising it to the audiences of those websites.
3. Tweet your blog posts to your Twitter followers and link to them on your Facebook page.
4. Add a link to your blog to your email signature.

As usual, the overriding rule is content, content, content, but with a bit of organisation, you can reap the benefits of a blog without it becoming too a chore.

Not something that everyone will use, sure, but a good option to provide nonetheless.

And this is why so many businesses appear to think that email is a distraction. Because we are deluged with email, business owners often think that sending out any promotional messages to the inboxes of the world is futile. Either those messages will be perceived as spam, or they will simply be ignored amongst the morass of messages people receive.


In fact, this is untrue. Email remains the “number one” way of doing business on the Internet. In fact, email campaigns outsell websites by a factor of five to one. If you ignore the power of email, you are effectively throwing money in the waste bin.


However, email marketing only works if done properly. Otherwise it does get disposed of fairly instantly because it is perceived as spam that somehow was missed by the spam blocker. You don't want your emails to fall victim to that perception. So, what can you do to ensure your emails get through – and get read?


The first step is to target your emails using segmented lists. If you have people looking for bungalows, they'll dismiss your emails if they contain details of flats or houses. In other words, a single email marketing campaign is worthless – you need individual campaigns to target each sector of your customer base.


Once you have that sorted, you need to provide two things to your email readers; practical information they can use straight away and what might be called “regularity”. Consider your local radio, for a moment. It has news you can use – traffic information, weather and so on. And it gives it to you, say, on the hour every hour. If they only broadcast it when they felt like it, you wouldn't know when to listen.


The same is true of email marketing. The most efficient email marketers know that their audience gets a sense of when the next message is due. So, if you are going to send out emails every Friday morning at 10am, do that – always. As soon as you deviate, you lose your readers.


And make sure the email contains useful information, such as a guide to the private and NHS dentists in each of your main property areas. Or perhaps, an article on choosing schools in the area. In other words, make your newsletter valuable to people.

If all it does is try to sell property, on its own, it won't get the level of readership you want. But once you do get a good level of readership for a regular promotional email, you could well find more visits to your office and more phone calls about properties all driven by email. Don't dismiss email; it could make you plenty of additional money."

Graham Jones
Tel: 0118 336 9710
http://www.grahamjones.co.uk/
http://twitter.com/grahamjones
http://facebook.com/internetpsychologist

Graham's last point about avoiding using the emails to direct sell properties is particularly valid. Your matching and marketing process should take care of this in a more immediate fashion anyway. Leave the property mentions in your email newsletter to highlight upcoming open day events, or mention testimonials from recent completions.

Nigel is one of those energising characters with a fast paced style and the first half of the 40 minute webinar was very watchable as a result (the latter half gets a bit over-salesy for me). The theme being "The single biggest thing you can do this year to step change the growth of your business."

For the moment, a copy of the video can still be found here.

Nigel steps through a number of worthwhile suggestions for the big thing that you can do to improve your business before happening upon his actual answer: learning from the very best - those who have done it all before.

This is a theory I'm a big fan of. It's one of the reasons this blog exists and also the reason I like to take part in sites like PropertyOwl's online estate agent community: sharing knowledge.

It's also something that could help you with generating your USP, as part of educating your vendors. You're the expert at selling or renting property - why not include half an hour of expert advice on helping them get the best price for their home? Showing knowledge and empathy to help your independent agency compete with the likes of iSold.

"Yes," you say. "We already do that as part of our service." And of course you do. But that comes back to one of Nigel's other points: selling something differently.

Currently, people might think that you are simply justifying your valuation. That you're helping make your sale, not theirs.

Turn that around and take the current property value simply as a starting point. Then you can help them learn from the best: you.

Unfortunately, their "Right here, right now" message falls a bit flat in Crawley, as the leaflet only has maps of Horley (their nearest branch), Charlwood, Salfords and Smallfield!

Now, they're actually quite a well thought of agent - they've simply gone for totally the wrong message here. If you aren't local, don't try to compete on being local!

The leaflets that work best have more clarity and relevance in their message. It this case, it might have worked better to target people considering moving to Horley, who could then be persuaded of the benefits of a single agent handling both the sale and purchase.

Today, I'm going to announce a competition. Send me your best and worst canvassing letter, postcard or leaflet. Two winners (one best, one worst) will get a bottle of something nice and a chance to bask in some glory/shame a competitor on this blog!

All entries via email to martin@modernestateagent.co.uk.

We won't spoil it by revealing our thoughts in full today, but will link to their article when it gets published.

In the meantime, one of the ideas we had was a property portal equivalent of TripAdvisor. Where the public can post their comments directly against listed properties: viewing feedback, comments about the street, etc. Can you imagine the uproar that would cause?!

How do you see estate agents' use of the internet changing?

Update: That was quick! LuvTheCity have already posted the article and my answers are listed alongside an illustrious band on industry names including: Sarah Beeny, Rosalind Renshaw, Duncan Dunlop and Angus Edy.

Read the full article here

Today's guest blogger is Neisha Santamaria who is part of Ben Wood's Local Search team at Google. Neisha builds on those initial AdWords articles with a description of how you can closely target a campaign at a specific region or city.

"Once you've set up a new AdWords campaign you have the option of targeting that campaign to a specific region or city within your chosen country.

Region and city targeting can be a great tool for Estate Agents, especially for independents operatating in defined areas. This type of targeting allows you to capture a smaller population segment and therefore more qualified clicks. This in turn, helps keep your ad relevancy high and your costs low.

Additionally, it allows you to create more customised ad text and landing pages that highlight the area you are focusing on. For example, if your business offers properties to buy or let in Brighton, you can target generic terms such as “flat hunting” to Brighton only, allowing you to bid on a broad term in a local auction with a Brighton specific ad text and landing page being served against it.

AdWords also displays your chosen region or city (whichever is the most specific) in the last line of ad text to distinguish them from country and territory targeted ads. These ads appear on Google and on some of our partner sites.

So, if you're interested in using region and city targeting we'd recommend setting up 2 separate campaigns.

1. A nationally targeted campaign containing location specific keywords e.g. flats in brighton, buy a house in brighton
2. A regionally targeted campaign containing generic keywords e.g. flat hunting, house buying

The ads in both campaigns could then benefit from increased relevancy not only through location targeting but also the ability to customise the ad text and landing page by location. If you operate in multiple regions across the UK, regional targeting also allows you to test different advertising messages in different regions.

You can set up a locally targeted campaign quickly and easily by following these steps:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com./
2. On the 'All Online Campaigns' page, click the name of the campaign you wish to edit.
3. Click the 'Settings' tab.
4. Click Edit next to 'Locations'.
5. Select your new locations. You can choose any combination of the following options:
   • Target countries or territories.
   • Target regions or cities.
   • Target custom areas, such as a radius around a location, a custom shape, or another area on the map that you define.
   • Add a list of locations to target.
   • Exclude locations from your targeted areas.
6. Click Save.

Now you know how to target users in your local areas, let's discuss how AdWords technology knows where they are.

The AdWords system uses several techniques to help show your ads to users located only in your targeted areas. It looks at the following factors:

1. The Google domain being used (.co.uk, .fr).
2. The search term the user submits (known as “query passing).
3. When possible, the user's general location based on Internet Protocol (IP) address.

If you're interested in finding out more about how regional targeting works and how to use it effectively you can read more in the AdWords Help Centre. You could also find some advertiser success stories on Google for Advertisers. Alternatively, feel free to contact us directly at team-property@google.com.

The arguments about how this will affect property marketing have not changed since we first saw Street View in the UK almost exactly a year ago. Prospective buyers and tenants will love the extra information and property owners will be anything from non-plussed to rather concerned about an invasion of their privacy.

But what about you - the estate agents?

When the internet gained popularity, it levelled the playing field. The small company could suddenly compete just as easily as the big one.

The majority of estate agents in the UK are small independent firms and a growing number, particularly new start-ups, are turning their back on High Street offices and becoming online agents operating from out-of-town premises or a home office.

The reasons for this are well understood within the trade - buyers start their property searches on the internet and owners expect you to go to them, rather than the other way round. So why have the expensive office overhead?

However, understanding how to communicate this to your customer base has perhaps just become that little bit more important. The curious may take a look at your address on Street View and some may feel a lack of reassurance.

You will need to be prepared to counter this with logical incontrovertible argument. Like many other businesses, agency is a people business.

Make sure that a lack of clear understanding of your model doesn't undermine your approach.

• Type of property – terrace, semi, detached, bungalow, etc.
• Budget – how much can you afford – who offers a buy/shared ownership option?
• Local schools – distance and time to walk/drive – school bus option – standard of education (Ofsted reports) – after school care.
• Transport links to neighbouring main towns and villages.
• Shopping facilities – local shops and major supermarkets.
• Leisure facilities – recreation ground, gym, swimming pool, sports clubs.
• Medical services – dentist, doctor and vet.
• Entertainment facilities – pubs, restaurants, cinema.
• Local areas of interest and history – nature trails, monuments, museums, famous landmarks and people.

Providing useful and relevant information to a potential buyer indicates how much you value their custom. Your buyer is enthusiastic and is open to finding out as much as possible about the benefits and reasons why he/she should consider moving to your great town. Putting together a bespoke guide for your buyer to take away or view online also adds high value to your business.
You demonstrate that your real estate service is prepared to go an extra mile, to deliver an experience for your buyer, increasing the value of your service and promoting the hidden gems of your town.

So how do you compile an easy to read and useful area guide? The key ingredient is relevant and up to date market and town information. A PDF is easily updated and emailed on a regular basis, but the same content could be added to local area information pages on your website and you could also opt for a smaller print run on a tactile brochure-style guide, with access to make updates when they take place.

The style of content is important to make a success of your guide. Don't over elaborate on the points to be considered as you will turn your buyer off. Write short and concise snippets of information – bullet points work well. Keep it simple, punchy and easy to read. Add attractive images and photos to complement the text – all of the time selling the gems!

Write your guide in the style that you would find interesting to read. Perhaps add a flavour of the local history with a humorous twist? Include “Did you know…” about the town, a school, or a local famous person. Put yourself in the buyer's shoes when you describe the elements they should consider.

Enjoy sharing the gems of your town. You never know what you might learn as a result!"

Gail Gibson
01793 762705
@gailgibson
http://www.trueexpressions.co.uk/

Gail's comments are very much inline with my thinking here. Once your agency has a website that does the basics, adding good local information and linking it into your property search is a great next step. It'll help build your search engine profile and give visitors a positive impression of your company personality.

1. Build your brand in the local community
2. Identify potential customers

So how do you find these people?

Unfortunately, if you're using the web interface, the quick search down the right hand side is next to useless. Fortunately, there is a much better Twitter search screen at: http://search.twitter.com/ and an explanation for using it at: http://search.twitter.com/operators.

For instance, try these searches:

• London ("moving house" OR "move house" OR buy OR rent)
  Anyone trying to move house in London


• Crawley ?
  Anyone with a question about Crawley


• Estate Agent ? -real
  Anyone with a question about an estate agent (the "-real" helps remove international tweets)


• Estate Agent :) -real
  Anyone with positive comments about estate agents

Twitter searches are a bit like being given access to conversation at a private dinner party. There are plenty of people out there looking for advice!

• http://twitter.com/angelcgrant/statuses/10080351831
• http://twitter.com/Fovant_Hut/statuses/10130530389
• http://twitter.com/hellomilo/statuses/10070377449
• http://twitter.com/Quaristice/statuses/10071251096
• http://twitter.com/ParkaBoi/statuses/10069907264

• Giving your name
• Identifying need for other services
• Suggesting suitable properties to view
• Explaining what happens next

How many more key points do you have your staff cover?

It does a couple of things quite well. Firstly, it is professionally produced and plays nicely on the house theme with a door to open, which makes it a bit more interesting.

More importantly, it uses real life SSTC examples to give their service credibility, listing the number of viewings, offers and the percentage of asking price achieved. It also includes a subtle hint about the power of open day viewings.

It also doesn't mention the competition or any fees: the "results speak for themselves".

OK, so there are a few holes in it too. The properties listed haven't completed yet. The leaflet doesn't tell you how many of their offices the listings come from, the time period that the properties were marketed across, how long the properties were on the market or what percentage of their stock they represent.

There's also a property that received 6 offers from 4 viewings, which makes you wonder if multiple offers from the same applicants are included.

But it overall, it left me with a positive impression. Job done then.

"Links from other websites are incredibly important in search engine algorithms. Search engines use the number of links to try to tell how important a site is. For instance, if your estate agency is always being talked about in the national newspapers Google will think that your site is important and your ranking will be high.

Generally search engines look at the number and ranking of sites that link to your website and the relevancy of those links i.e. high ranking property related sites are the most valuable for estate agents. In bound links will improve your overall search engine ranking which will therefore generate more traffic to your site.



estatecreate has recently launched a new product offering to help estate agents improve the number of leads they get from search engines. By using individual websites to showcase properties on key street names in your estate agency's neighbourhood, over time you will increase your search traffic and drive more leads to your properties.

How does it work?

• Identify key roads where you sell houses in your neighbourhood;
• Set up estatecreate sites for the key addresses;
• These sites will all point back to your estate agent website;
• Whenever you have a house for sale on a key road showcase it on the appropriate website.
• Use concise content focusing on the address, postcode and type of property. If possible use different copy to your main website.

The individual websites all have links from estatecreate and therefore benefit from estatecreate's ranking. In turn, the single sites point at your estate agency website and will benefit your ranking. The net effect will be that the single sites will pick up their own traffic from long tail searched on road names generating leads for you AND will also improve your own estate agency website search ranking, which will also generate more leads."

Henry Yates
http://www.estatecreate.com/

You could also take this concept one step further and get a single property website for as many properties as possible, rather than focusing on popular roads. It's a great way to promote your brand more widely and gives vendors an easy website address to share.

Good photographs are powerful things, they can inspire emotion, passion and desire. But a bad photograph can do the opposite almost instantaneously. Take a look at the photographs you are providing and take a look at what your competition are offering. The common mistake is to settle for photographs that are 'just as good', don't; be better, be the best in your area.

I have outlined a few tips which you can use to ensure your photographs show your properties in their best light.

Wherever possible shoot the house on a clear sunny day. If you need to make a repeat visit then so be it. Mid morning or mid afternoon is the best time. Avoid the sun when its too high in the sky but, at the same time, sunsets can cast deep shadows across gardens. Avoid these shadows and, if you can, shoot with the sun behind you - it will give a smooth even exposure.

When shooting inside use as much natural light as possible. This will give a soft warm image. It may be necessary to use the flash to fill in the darker areas. All cameras will have the option to force the flash on and off - try taking one with flash and one without and see which looks best.

Frame the image. It does not have to be picture perfect but this example just shows a lazy slap dash approach.

In truth this is an awful photograph. The fence and tree are obscuring the view and the house is wonky. Just a few seconds more effort could have resolved this. I would have gone a little wider and stood about 5 feet to the right, then cropped the image off to show the fence but not overpower the image with it. I would also have used the tree to frame the image on the left hand side.

Dress the scene - take a few minutes to tidy up. For external shots move cars, wheelie bins and arrange garden furniture to make the area look tidy and desirable. For internal shots work with what you have. If the house is empty, shoot from a slightly lower angle from the very corner of the room. If the room is in use arrange tables, chairs and other furniture to make it look homely and inviting.

This photograph is lazy, a little bit of effort to move the sign and the rubbish bags would have lifted the whole scene.

Take a look at this bedroom. At first glass it looks fine, but on closer inspection you will see a few flaws. Try switching lights and lamps on. Does it look more pleasing with the extra light? Even with the patio door the room looks cramped. A wider angle lens would show off the entire room. Most vitally is to square off properly. The more you look at it the more uneven it appears. The leading edge of the wardrobe should be vertical, as it is it looks like its falling off to the right.


This is a much better example. The room looks big and clean, the lamps give warmth and a sense of comfort and though the room is in use it gives the sense of a blank canvas that a new owner to put their personal touch onto.

Be sure to cover all the bases. If a property as a particular feature like a conservatory or garage, make sure its included. Most importantly of all, be honest We all know its your job to sell houses, but be truthful. Photographs like these 'powerstation photos' will not do you any favours. If the house is next to a power station, be sure to show it!"

Peter Lincoln
http://www.devotionphotography.co.uk/

1. Sit or stand with an open stance (no folded arms or other barriers) – you need to convey your openness in a non verbal way.
2. Maintain eye contact – this is one of the most important ways in which you signal that you are interested in the speaker and paying attention. Eye contact is also a cue or permission for the other person to continue speaking.
3. Summarise key points on a regular basis – this reassures the other person that you are paying attention. It also gives them the opportunity to correct or add to the information if necessary.
4. Provide continuation prompts - e.g. “Yes”, “Then what?”, “I see” or even a smile or a nod. This encourages the other person to keep speaking and maybe elaborate on a key point.
5. Eliminate distractions – if noise or nearby activity keeps tugging at your attention, move so that you can concentrate on the conversation.
6. Ask questions about points that have been made – this shows that you are listening and interested and again encourages the other person to expand on an important point.
7. Take notes – this will help you retain the information, remember key points for the future and shows you are alert. But remember to re-establish eye contact regularly.
8. Ask for clarification – again, this shows you are listening and interested.
9. Think about what makes a good listener – there will be people around you who are either great or poor listeners, model your behaviour on the good ones.
10. Make sure that you can hear – Sometimes you may need to move away from a source of noise, or ask someone to speak up if you are having difficulty paying attention.
11. Do not ‘switch off' – if you feel you are losing concentration, then ask a question or summarise a key point.

And if you ask a question, don't be tempted to start talking if they don't respond immediately. Sometimes people need time to think and gather their thoughts. Be comfortable in the odd moment of silence.

Remember too, that people are more likely to be receptive to what you have to say if they have been able to express all their thoughts on the matter – and highlighted the important issues first. People are more likely to trust someone who has taken the time to listen carefully to what they have said.

If you are in a sales situation, then the more information the other person has provided then the more likely it is that you will have identified some trigger or angle that will make your pitch more relevant to them."

Kim Tasso
http://www.kimtasso.com/

• Additional free exposure on property portals that send traffic through to your website, including the likes of Globrix, Home.co.uk and, if it launches as expected in the Spring, Google.
• Avoiding tying your company too closely to any individual portal - and retaining visitors within your website where they cannot be distracted by other agents.
• Having your property pages indexed by the major search engines (content content content) to help generate more free visitors through organic search traffic.

In addition to those three, our estate agency websites also offer a couple more benefits:

• Automatic real-time updates of information to keep marketed properties fresh, of particular importance to letting agents.
• Having contact records created automatically within the software and alerted via email when people register on your website.
• Integrated per property click-through-rate (CTR) analysis within the system, similar to that available in Rightmove Plus, to allow you to measure the effectiveness of your marketing.

So, what's wrong with it?

• They've addressed it to "Homeowner". People like to see their name.
• The biggest (and therefore most important part of the letter to me) is the branch manager's name. It should be the benefit to me of using their agency.
• He didn't make the effort to sign it personally, or even use a scanned signature - very impersonal.
• It starts "What a start to the year". The snow you mean? Yes, that has rather disrupted things. Sorry? You mean you've been successful - and record breakingly so? During all that snow? I don't believe you.. You've lost my trust.
• "We need your property to sell"? I'm sorry, your needs are of no interest to me.
• It sells the features, not the benefits. Not enough viewings, poor feedback, incorrect price..
• It uses jargon: "market appraisal". Every day homeowners don't talk that way and failing to show empathy is a big turn-off.
• There are no personal contact details. Not adding his personal email address and mobile number after his job title shows no level of commitment to the relationship.
• Finally, we withdrew our property from the market two months earlier, so the letter's whole premise is incorrect. Maintain your prospect list!

Sorry Edward. Better luck next time.

If you've got any examples of either good or bad marketing, I'd love to see them.

1. Don't aim for the top sponsored link spot - it costs more, can start a bidding war and, in our experience, the benefits are marginal. Instead, keep costs down by aiming for anywhere from 3rd to 6th.
2. Long tail search phrases (less popular phrases, normally with several words) are generally cheaper and deliver more qualified visitors.
3. When you have been split testing your adverts for a while, narrowed down what works well and have established a higher level of traffic, introduce less radical tests to make more subtle improvements. Using 3 copies of your control (best) advert and only 1 of your test advert will reduce the impact of the change while you evaluate how effective it is.
4. Don't make assumptions too quickly. Wait until you've got enough test data to be confident of what works best before making changes.
5. Don't fall into the trap of using broad match keywords. The trade-off in effort will give you less targeted traffic and therefore offer less value.
6. Try to keep to a maximum of around 20 keywords in each ad group. If you start to go over this number, try breaking the ad group down into separate groups which allow closer visitor profile targeting.
7. Measure your Adwords spend against the cost per lead on the portals.
8. Setup monthly Google Analytics reports via email to give you a regular kick to check on progress.
9. Consider setting up exactly the same campaigns with Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter.
10. Consider what amounts to a 'conversion' for you - be it performing a property search, registering for property alerts or requesting a valuation. Then track it! If you find certain keywords generate traffic, but not conversions, improve your landing page relevance or drop them altogether.
11. Make it easy for visitors to become conversions! Add obvious links, buttons and images that sell the benefits, rather than having paragraphs of text to read.
12. Go against the crowd to avoid too much competition on CPC bids.
13. Practice writing headlines - or buy a book that teaches you. An enticing headline is perhaps the most important part of your advert.
14. Follow news related to your industry and area using Google Alerts. Bid on keywords that reflect current topics of interest.
15. Use negative keywords to avoid search phrases that match your keywords despite being irrelevant, or come from a low value audience ('free'!).
16. Use your competitors company names as keywords, but avoid using their name in your advert text, as it may get pulled by Google. Imply without being specific - 'better fees than other crawley agents'.
17. Use misspelled words, particularly your own company name. This is a good way of picking up traffic which your organic search listings cannot help you with.
18. Consider expanding your bids onto the Google Content Network (websites using Adsense) - but setup duplicate ad groups to do so.
19. Use pay per click adverts to test traffic and conversion levels and see which search terms you should focus your SEO efforts (blog, etc.) on.
20. Use Google's Website Optimizer to test different versions of your landing pages to improve conversion rates. Read Rightmove's case study for inspiration.
21. Consider pausing campaigns during times when the office will be particularly busy, or even unattended for extended periods.
22. Read up on 'dynamic keyword insertion'. For advanced Adwords users, this can help you to tailor adverts more closely to user searches. Use this with care!
23. Include keywords in your display URL.
24. Once your campaigns are established and you know that the traffic you are buying is converting profitably, raise your budgets. At this point the more visitors you get, the better.

If you've got any tips you'd like to share, please post a comment.
Follow the link if you'd like to discuss setting up a managed Google Adwords campaign.

• Three Bridges Sales
• Three Bridges Lettings

Within each of these campaigns, they would then group keywords with a similar purpose together. The lettings campaign might end up with 6 groups of keywords:

• Landlords in Crawley ("property management crawley", "tenant find crawley", "letting agent crawley", "rent my crawley property", etc.)
• Landlords in Three Bridges
• Renters looking for houses in Crawley
• Renters looking for flats in Crawley
• Renters looking for houses near Three Bridges station
• Renters looking for flats near Three Bridges station

Next, create each of these as an "Ad Group" underneath the relevant "Campaign". Each ad group will have separate adverts, which will allow you to tailor the advert text closely to target each visitor we are trying to attract.

Moving onto the adverts..

There are four parts of each advert that you can use to convince your audience to visit your website:

• The headline (25 characters)
• Line one (35 characters)
• Line two (35 characters)
• The display URL (35 characters)

As each of your adverts is now tightly focused, you should be able to include several of your keywords in your advert text. This is important as Google will highlight words that match the search query in bold. E.g. the whole headline in this PropertyADD advert matched the search phrase "estate agency software".

It is worth creating at least 2 or 3 different adverts in each advert group so that Google can rotate them. In this way, you will be able to compare the click through performance of each advert over time and begin to make informed improvements that will increase your CTR.

Use your advert text to sell the benefits of what you offer: the best fees, 20 years of local knowledge, etc.

Writing good adverts with such little space available is a real skill and will take some time. It's worth it though - a 5% click through rate, compared to 1% would mean 60 more visitors out of those 1,500!
Don't forget your call to action!

• This blog has attracted visitors using 68 different keyword searches.
• 65 of those keywords have only been used once. They are all incredibly varied, but linked directly or indirectly to the content I've posted.
• Organic Google traffic accounts for 12.0% of the blog's visitors.
• Other search engines count for just 1.3%, although none at all from Bing (which can be slow to list new sites)
• Links I've posted on Twitter each day account for 12.1%.

Looking at the Google Analytics for the PropertyADD website, 42 new visitors have clicked through from here. Great!

Taking a handful of the keywords people have used and plugging them into Google, the blog is listed top or on the front page for many of them.

I'll say that again for effect. This blog is generating top listings in Google for terms that are relevant to my business, yet too varied to focus on individually.

• Estate agency goals (1st)
• Property portal networks (1st)
• Modern property particulars (1st)
• Estate agent instruction (2nd and 3rd)
• Estate agent weaknesses (7th)
• Setting up an estate agency in 2010 (2nd)
• KPIs for estate agents (5th)
• Estate agency USP (6th)
• Modern estate agent (3rd and 4th)

Just think of all those lovely new visitors who could be finding your local estate agency blog!

At PropertyADD, we were recently contracted to provide branded sales software to a new national franchise of personal estate agents, HomeXperts. Their first live franchisee was instructed to sell their first property based on the strength of their relationships at 4Networking.

Other networks include Ecademy and BNI, though each has a slightly different style and approach. Just like in real life, you shouldn't expect to like everyone you meet! However, most offer the opportunity to attend as a guest to try them out, so you've nothing to lose in having a go.

Aside from winning business, you're also likely to learn how to improve at what you do, plus make relationships with other businesses you may need to use in future (with preferential rates into the bargain!).

Titan Outdoor Advertising seem to manage Network Rail's stations. More information here.

Let me know if you've tried anything similar and how it worked out for you. In the meantime, I'll try to find out ballpark costs.

So here are my 7 signs that your property particulars aren't hitting the mark:

1. Your photos aren't big enough, or you only include the main image. The main photo should fill the width of the page and be backed up by smaller shots that highlight the key selling points.


2. The photos aren't good enough. Use a good camera with the right lens. Tidy and de-clutter and get the lighting right. Don't include pictures of any rooms or outside space that are hard to show in a positive light. Most people will accept that a property isn't perfect. Use the brochure to honestly sell the best bits.


3. You don't include a floor plan. Floor plans are now an essential!


4. Your descriptions are completely factual and go into unnecessary detail. Ignore the minutiae and focus on what makes the property a great purchase. Know who you expect to sell to and market the brochure to that audience.


5. You don't include a map, or any information about the local area. Include a short paragraph to sell the facilities on offer and distances to other nearby towns. Educate people who may not know the area as well as you do.


6. There's no keynote. Every property has a USP. Find it and highlight it!


7. It's not obvious how to contact the office to book a viewing. Make sure that contact details are obvious and add a call to action to the end of the brochure. Start building a relationship by including the negotiator's name if possible - and perhaps even a photo.

The property brochure is one of the big selling opportunities - don't waste it!

How do your brochures measure up? What are your top tips for producing property particulars that sell?

• Generating valuation appointments
• Booking the valuation appointment
• Preparing for the appointment
• The appointment itself
• Follow up and Closing

These stages vary massively in terms of how well they are undertaken and it is a useful exercise to benchmark them against other agents around the country that we work with. To keep things simple, we rank the key stages either ‘Poor', ‘Fair', ‘Good' or ‘Exceptional'.

The whole premise of our current estate agency training is that “good is no longer good enough” – most agents who survived the last two years are probably at least ‘Good' at what they do. I'd argue that to really thrive and make good profits in 2010 and beyond, agents need to be ‘Exceptional' at all that they do.

We find that establishing these performance standards instantly reveals a company's training needs. Weaknesses can then be addressed through coaching, or group training sessions where applicable.

For example, one agent we worked with was getting plenty of enquiries and appointments but had a conversion rate to actual instructions of less than 35%. This revealed an issue with the valuers' ability on the appointments themselves, particularly in terms of closing and overcoming resistance.

On the other hand, a different company had a high conversion rate (60% plus), but were simply not getting called out to enough properties. Our main job was to look at the marketing and, in particular, the staff's ability to gain valuation appointments from the opportunities that presented themselves.

In the latter case, it was alarming how the staff were sorely lacking in the skill of promoting their company's USPs and differences to local applicants with property to sell. The staff did not fully understand the benefits of their own firm's services and even less so what their competitors offered.

As a result of identifying this issue, the staff were trained to ‘benefit sell' to an ‘Exceptional' standard and to mystery shop their competitors to understand exactly what they were selling against. Almost immediately, the number of valuation appointments went up, as did the number of instructions, ensuring that stock levels for the new year are at an encouraging level.

Take a critical look at your instruction process. What weaknesses can you see?

There is a raft of further ideas that can be introduced to an agent's culture to increase the number of instructions. To discuss how I might be able to help, please feel free to email me, follow me on Twitter or pick up the phone!”

Julian O'Dell
http://www.tmtraininganddevelopment.co.uk/
Telephone 01480 405583

PropertyADD provides all sorts of statistics and key performance indicators for estate agents to help with analysis such as this.

• Houses for sale Crawley
• Flats to rent Crawley
• Crawley estate agents

Consider what people ask you day in and day out: areas of town, transport links, types of property, etc.
Using Google's Keyword Tool, you can then use these initial ideas to find other keywords people are using - and most importantly, how many people are using them. It may be that you are surprised by the results!
This is really a job for you or your web development company to do at the start of your website project, but it's never too late to get started. A website only performs as well as its search engine ranking!
To use the keyword tool, follow these steps:

1. Enter your search phrases into the 'Descriptive words or phrases' box.
2. Make sure 'Use synonyms' is ticked.
3. Enter the characters provided in the Capcha to prove you are human. (!)
4. Click the 'Get keyword ideas' button.

Now you have Google's list of suggestions, along with search statistics for your own. In order to make most sense of the list, I also recommend changing the 'Match Type' selection box at the top of the right hand column to 'Phrase' and then clicking the 'Local Search Volume' header, so that the phrases are sorted most popular first.
You will probably want to run through those steps a few times to refine your results and save them using the 'Download all keywords' spreadsheet export.
Once you have your list, there are a number of ways you can make use of it (although some of these are a bit more techie!):

1. Amend the meta tags, page titles and header tags on your website to reflect the keywords you want to target (the most popular ones).
2. Use them as ideas to form the basis of informational web pages blog posts. This can help with link building, an important SEO component we will have to come back to another time.
3. Create a pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaign (instant results, if not free) - more on this soon, as it's possibly the best use of your online marketing budget in the short term.

I'll also come back to monitoring changes in your search engine ranking and visitor numbers another time, but do this right (or outsource it to a reputable SEO company) and you'll see the difference pretty quickly.
Proper cost effective marketing.

• What sort of property they are most likely to be able to buy.
• Profiles of the local areas that are most affordable.
• The costs of moving into and subsequently owning and running a home.
• How they can make their first property part of a longer term plan to achieve the home of their dreams.

• Where you want to get to
• How you expect to get there
• What obstacles you might encounter along the way and what help you might need
• The benefit of achieving the goal

Most businesses will already have financial targets for turnover and profit. For estate agents, some other ideas for goals might be:

Set targets for numbers of valuations, instructions and completions

Be specific. Allocate targets for individual branches and members of staff. Use historical data to set realistic expectations for conversion rates and build a profile of the types and locations of properties you would like to sell so you have a plan for going out and winning the business.

Plan to evaluate and use new marketing techniques

Investigate using Twitter (follow us). Set up a blog like this one and post something interesting a couple of times each week. Set a budget and sign up to pay-per-click advertising with Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines. Consider a listing on estate agency directories, such as EstateAgents123.com. Look at improving your search engine rankings - if you're in the top 20, set your sights on the top 10 and put a plan in place to make it happen.

Keep in touch with your contact list by sending out a monthly newsletter. Send anniversary cards (it's too late for Christmas!).

Schedule staff training and development

Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your team against your plan for the year. Consider internal and external training options and tailor them to each of your staff. Training is a win-win - your staff will feel looked after and business performance will improve.

Teach them how to use social media (ask Ben Harris!). Look at what the leading agencies are doing. Join an online estate agency community and take part.

Read something motivational - like Get Off Your Arse!

Development of a particular USP

If agents in your town only list on Rightmove, market your properties more widely. There are several free property portals that you can advertise on and it needn't take any extra effort with the right property listing software. Not yet on Zoopla? Their 'super portal' coverage extends to several popular websites.

Re-evaluate your property particulars. Do buyers really want to know about telephone points and the extractor fan in the bathroom? Or would they prefer to imagine it using photos, a floor plan (people LOVE floor plans) and a high level description of the flexible layout and local area?

Define your company personality!

Consider business improvement projects

Of course, I accept that I would say this!

Set budgets and put together justifications for a new software system or an improved website. Consider an office move to support expansion or save on unnecessary costs.

Have a plan, update it and use it!

What are your goals for the coming year? Please post a comment to share your ideas.

1. Houses for sale Crawley (1,000 broad local Google searches in November 09)
2. Flats to rent Crawley (1,600)
3. Crawley estate agents (2,400)

For the first of these, the top 10 organic search results are monopolised by the property portals, with FindaProperty in number one position. In fact, the first estate agent listing is back in 29th place.

The rental side is little different. Rightmove are at the top and the first letting agent result is back in 21st spot.

However, for lettings in London, Foxtons make it into 6th, with Zoopla topping the list. So we're not talking impossible dreams here.

Fortunately, the more important vendor focused keywords are considerably simpler to rank well for. Portals do not target these keywords with the same enthusiasm, so the competition is limited to estate agent directory websites and other estate agencies in your area.

So, what is the secret for estate agents to improve their ranking for these important searches?

Content, content, content!

Along that line, my top 5 on-site SEO tips for estate agents are:

1. Ensure you have an individual web page for each property and think about how to best describe a property for both your human and search engine visitors.
2. Keep all of your content within your own domain name. Don't allow your website to link to photos and property descriptions hosted on your estate agency software provider's website, or use free off-domain hosting services such as Picasa.
3. Add local area information pages to your website and offer area specific property search pages. Use keywords in the links to these pages
4. Blog about your local market knowledge and use relevant content to target long tail search terms. I'll blog in more detail about the 'long tail' in future.
5. Use Google Analytics to track your website performance and give indications about the search terms people are finding your website with - and use those previously used terms to improve the ranking of your site by referencing them in new pages and blog articles.

Generally accepted estimates suggest that around 25-50% of all internet search queries are completely new. The number of variations on the example keywords that we listed above is simply massive. Don't feel that you have to try and match the terms exactly. Be human and generate content regularly and the search engines will do the rest.

Of course, if you need a hand, don't forget that my company build great estate agent websites!

No mention of the downward trend though! Does that surprise you as it did me? That there are actually less people searching for that in 2009 than there were in 2004. And that it's gone down almost every year in between?

Maybe the house buying public have become wiser to the listings offered by property portals in the last 5 years?

Either way, there was still 301,000 people searching for "estate agents" in the UK in November. 580 of which were for "Crawley estate agents" or "estate agents in Crawley" (exact match).

The latest stats from Rightmove, published in Bob North's Estate Agency News column suggest that the average branch receives about 100 enquiries per month. The figures for DPG and Zoopla (Property Finder Network) are not wildly different either.

So what does this mean? Optimising your estate agency website for the search engines (SEO) is still a big deal. After all, a good proportion of these searches are likely to be potential vendors looking for the right estate agent.