Technology For Agents

When I look at the visitors at my site, I notice that a majority use Internet Explorer to browse the web. While IE is a good tool, let me expose you to Firefox; a browser with a development community that blows away the competition.

Sometime in June, Mozilla aims to release their long awaited Firefox 3 which sports a vast number of new features and enhancements. From my experience with beta, Firefox 3 is way faster than IE, so I definitely suggest you give it a try.  I should also mention that Firefox is a free download, so don’t worry about having to pull out any credit card.

I will be making a new post when Firefox 3 goes live to help spread the word about the internet browser I use on a daily basis and prefer as my solution for browsing the web.

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HitTail, an excellent provider of real-time long tail analysis, has recently announced their HitTail Premium plan; offering discounts to existing members.

Current members can get a discount rate of $19.99 a month, or $199.99 annually to upgrade their subscription. The new plan includes new tools for segmenting paid versus organic website hits, and additional online tools for using Google Adwords with HitTail.

• See exactly how people are finding your site in real time
• Have keyword recommendations emailed to you or delivered in a secure RSS feed
• Use HitTail on your secure, https pages
• Generate Google and Yahoo! Sitemaps for your website
• With “Growth View” watch as your long tail grows wider (more hits) and longer (more new keywords)
• Insert HitTail keyword suggestions directly into a new Google AdWords campaigns
• Separate and analyze site traffic coming from organic versus paid search
• Boost click-through rate with those same long tail suggestions coming straight from your audience
• Lower the cost of your search advertising campaign by targeting effective long tail keywords instead of more competitive ones

I currently use HitTail to monitor traffic on my site, and it’s always nice to see a real-time version of incoming visitors (and the links they used to get to me), versus the delayed method that Google Analytics uses.

When it comes to analyzing incoming visitor traffic, do you think you need a premium service like this as an agent?

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Your site is starting to really pull in some visitors, and you’re using a great IDX solution to start pulling in those registrations. Now what? Believe it or not, you’ve just earned your right to bat. Will you knock it out of the park?

Following up with your registrations is one of the most crucial segments of converting online leads. Systematic follow up is what you really need, but will any follow up suffice? Any type of follow up is good, but lets talk about what it takes to move you from good to great.

Lets Assume All Emails

With an online user registering to save their search or keep track of their favorite properties using an IDX like Wolfnet, nine times out of ten you’ll only be lucky enough to get an email address. If this is the only form of communication you’ll have with your lead, then we need to make it work great.

Personalization

My favorite kind of email to send my clients is an email that looks like it came from me directly. At first I was afraid of this; why would I trick my client into thinking I was personally sending them an email when I actually wasn’t?

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After doing some research today, it looks like Trulia is on the rise in the search engine rankings in the Houston real estate market. Houston is the 4th largest city in the United States, and the largest in Texas; it’s a gorilla of real estate markets in my opinion.

Trulia ranking well doesn’t surprise me. Their site is well optimized to rank well in search engines, and their site is truly innovative in the tools it provides to real estate consumers.

However, what does surprise me is that real estate agents in Houston are actually helping Trulia rank better than them. Why? It could be a for a couple of reasons:

• They don’t really care about rankings, and are perfectly fine with intentionally doing this.
• They are uninformed.

I seem to feel that it’s more a matter of the agents being uninformed than them not really caring.

It Gets Worse

What I find in common with many of these agent sites is that they are all from one provider. Number1Expert is a firm that builds real estate sites for agents, and for a fee, the agents can use them to procure business in the form of real estate leads.

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One of the main reasons I use Google Mail for my email software is the focus that Google has placed in making sure my email is organized for me in an easy and intuitive way.

Though today, I was hinted by Graham Cohen, technology coordinator at Keller Williams International, to a fantastic piece of software called Xobni (Inbox spelled backwards). In a nutshell, Xobni is an addon to Microsoft Outlook that will help you organize your email and quickly see, at a glance, the following:

• Past Conversations with a Contact
• Quickly review any attachments the contact has sent to you in the past
• (really neat) Email analytics - see graphs and rankings showing how you use your email

So far it sounds pretty interesting, but I found a video on YouTube showing it off in real-time. Keep reading to watch.

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