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More and more, people turn to the Internet to look for solutions to their problems, including their real estate problems.  Whether it’s someone wanting to buy, rent or sell real estate, often they will start their search for help online.

What’s especially important to note about these people is that they are actively looking for a solution. If you put ads along the side of the road, you’re going to get quite a few people that are just curious and some who really hadn’t thought much about their situation before.

However, the people who are searching online are more motivated.  Perhaps they’ve been told “no” by somebody and they’re not willing to take “no” for an answer.  So they’re looking for a solution – a solution you can likely provide.  In addition, instead of you looking for them, they’re looking for you, which gives you a better position as the solution provider.

But how do you let these people find you?

One way to do this is to buy advertising with the popular search engines like Google and Yahoo. If you’ve ever used Google or Yahoo to search for something, and I’m sure you have, you’ve seen advertisements above and beside the regular search results. Often there will be a colored box above the results that says something like “Sponsored Links” or “Sponsored Results”.

There is usually also a column over to the right with a bunch of ads too. To see an example of this, try going to one of the search engines and type in something like “buy my house” and you’ll see what I mean. You generally see advertisements before you see the “natural” search results.

What is important to note here is that if you do a search for something like “buy my house”, you don’t just see random ads about weight loss, pet training, etc. You see targeted advertisements, directly related to what you typed in. These advertisers paid to have their ad come up when you typed in a specific combination of words.

So how do you get an ad in those spots and is it expensive?

Getting your ad in those spots is actually very easy. Google’s advertising service is called Google Adwords. Yahoo’s is called Yahoo Search Marketing. You just sign up for an account with them, which is free and easy to do. Then you set up your ad campaign. You put in the headline and other text and the link to your web site, which is what people will see when your ad comes up.

One very important step is to pick your keywords. These are words and phrases that you want to target so that when someone types in those words, your ad will appear. You’ll need to pick these carefully because they need to be very targeted to the people who might be looking for you.

For instance, don’t use something generic like “real estate” as the keywords. Why? Because most people typing in “real estate” aren’t looking for you. They’re looking for general information, or maybe a real estate agent, or maybe they’re looking for information about investing themselves, or who knows what. It’s too broad, too general. You need specific keywords.

If you’re looking for sellers, you might try phrases like “buy my house in Chicago”.  Do you see the difference there?  What else could that person be looking for?  You know exactly what they’re looking for.  Or for buyers, you might try something like “buy a house with bad credit” or “rent to own house in Seattle”.

Get creative with it.  The goal is to think like the people who are looking for a service you can provide.  Try to figure out what a person would be looking for who has a house to sell.  Think about what a person would be looking for who was rejected for a mortgage.  And of course, do the same for whatever type of lead it is you’re trying to generate.

You can put in just about as many keywords per ad as you like, but it’s best to limit it to a handful, say maybe 10-15.  You can create additional ads (using the exact same ad wording if you like) but targeting different keyword phrases.  This is important to do so you can see what’s working and what’s not.  If you put too many keywords on one campaign, they don’t all get used well and you don’t really know if they were good or not.

What’s really nice is that now some of these services have “local” searches where you can target a broader term like “buy my house” but not have people all over the country seeing your ad if you’re only doing deals in your local area.  They let you target the geographic areas where you want your ad to come up.  These services have the technology to know where in the world a user is located so that you can specify your ad will only come up when someone in, say San Francisco, types in the phrase “buy my house” instead of people all over the country seeing your ad.

This does a couple great things. First, it allows you to target only the people you’re interested in working with and not having to deal with people all over country if you don’t want to.  And second, it cuts way down on the competition, which means it cuts down on the price too.

How many people in the entire country do you think are competing for the phrase “buy my house”.  I have no idea, but I know it’s a lot.  On the other hand, how many people in your local city or area are competing for that phrase?  Way, way fewer people.  So that means you won’t have to pay as much for your ad and you have a better shot at coming up on the first page of search results instead of on page 10.

So how much do these ads cost?  Well, it really varies a lot, so I can’t give you any specific numbers.  These ads work on a pay-per-click basis, which means just what it sounds like.  You pay every time someone clicks your ad.  If someone sees your ad but doesn’t click it, you don’t pay a cent.  You only pay when they click it.  How much do you pay each time?  That’s really up to you.  You bid on those keywords that you think people will be searching for.

For instance, you may decide you’re willing to pay 50 cents per click.  You would put in that information and once your campaign is started, each time someone clicks your ad, you owe 50 cents.  If you bid too low, you’re not likely to get any clicks, or at least not many.  It just depends on how much other people are bidding.  These services will generally give you a recommendation about how much to bid.  You can go lower than their recommendation if you want and you’ll probably still get some clicks, but maybe just not as many.  If you bid too high, you might be overpaying.  But just because you bid, say $1.00, it doesn’t mean you’ll pay that much for every click.  That’s just the maximum you’ll pay. You may still get some that only cost 50 cents.

How do you keep this expense from getting out of hand?  These services usually have a budget feature built in, where you specify how much you want to spend, max, per day or month.  So if you don’t want to spend more than $60/month, you’d just set your daily budget to about $2.  I generally would set my daily budget higher than my real budget and just keep a close eye on it.  I’ve found that I get better results when I set a higher budget.  But be careful with it.

It seems like it usually doesn’t reach your maximum if it’s pretty low, especially when your campaign is just getting started. I’d rather set my budget a little higher than my real budget and get some leads started coming in. Then if it starts reaching the budget and getting too expensive, I’d just lower the budget. And at any time you can “pause” your campaigns, which just puts them on hold, meaning you your ads won’t appear anymore and you won’t incur any more charges. Then, whenever you’re ready, you can resume your ad campaigns with just a click of a button.

One other thing to be aware of is that it’s not usually real-time reporting.  Sometimes the stats are several hours behind.  What that means is you may have had more clicks (and incurred more cost) than what is currently showing.  It can be helpful to have some sort of website traffic tracking installed on your website itself that shows how much traffic you’re getting so you’ll know if you’ve received any significant traffic that’s not being shown yet.

So how many leads can you get using these methods of advertising? That’s difficult say because there are so many factors, such as:  How well did you write your ad? How many people are searching for the keywords you picked?  How much did you bid per click?  What is your budget?  If you’re using local searches, how many people in your local area are searching for those phrases?

All of these factors affect how many clicks you’ll get.  However, the important thing is you will get some clicks.  Even if you only got a couple here and there, they’re generally decent leads because they were specifically looking for what you provide.  I wouldn’t recommend you rely entirely on this method to get your leads, but you certainly don’t want to ignore it either.  If you do, you’re likely leaving money on the table because people are looking for you and can’t find you.

One thing I didn’t specifically mention, but that you probably figured out, is that you need a website to use these advertising methods.  When someone clicks your ad, they have to be taken somewhere.  So you have to have a website to send them to.  If you haven’t already done so, you can get a website from RealTurf.  You could potentially sign up now for a website, get it set up the way you want, and get a Google or Yahoo campaign setup and sending leads your way all in the same day.

Of course, Google and Yahoo usually want to check the website you’re sending people to for quality, so depending on how long they take to approve your ad, it could slow things down a little, but they usually have that done within a day or so.  Regardless, the longer you wait, the more leads you could potentially miss out on.

What we’ve just discussed here is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to pay-per-click advertising. There is no end to the information available on it and to really master it is an art.  However, you don’t have to really master it.  Just get it going, get some leads coming in, and keep an eye on it so you’re not going over your budget.  If you want to keep learning more about it you can, but don’t wait till you figure everything out to get started because there are people looking for you today and there will be more tomorrow.  Get your ad up there and you can always improve it later.

You’ll find the links below to sign up with Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing.

Google Adwords

Yahoo Search Marketing

Don’t have a web site yet? Get one here.

What did you think of this lesson?

I’d really appreciate your feedback.  Just use the comment form below to let me know.

Would you like to be able to get in touch with all of your real estate leads at once just by sending one e-mail?

And how would you like to be able to follow up with your leads automatically by e-mail over a period of days, weeks, and months with a set-it-and-forget-it system that does all the work for you?

Today I’m going to share with you an e-mail marketing tool that will allow you to do these things and more. This tool is often called an e-mail auto-responder or e-mail follow-up system.

First, let’s briefly discuss why this is important. One important thing that a good e-mail marketing system will do is let you build a list of leads. Normally you’ll be able to have multiple lists for different types of leads (for instance, one for buyers, one for sellers). You then have the ability to send a “broadcast” e-mail to an entire list of leads at once.

Broadcast Emails

For instance, let’s say you have a new property available and want to let your buyers know about it. Well, if you have your buyers on an e-mail mailing list, all you have to is login and send one e-mail and it goes out to your entire list. If you have a website such as the ones we provide at RealTurf.com, you could include the link to your website in the e-mail, or more specifically, a link to a page on your site where you have more details about the property, with pictures they can look at and a way to contact you if they’re interested.

Why this is really important is that you’re getting the most out of your marketing dollars.  Let’s use an example.  Let’s say you need to find a buyer for a property so you do some marketing, advertising the property, and a certain number of people respond.  You contact them and hopefully one of them ends up buying the property.  But what about all those other people that didn’t buy the property that expressed interest?  Well, if you don’t have a way to put them on a list to be contacted the next time you have a property available, then you’ve wasted a lot of money.  Just because they didn’t buy that property, it doesn’t mean they wouldn’t buy the next one that comes along.

On the other hand, if every lead gets put on your mailing list, then you can contact your existing leads first to see if you can find a buyer from the people you’ve already paid to market to before spending any more money on marketing.  Granted, it’s a good idea to continually do marketing and keep building your list larger, but you wouldn’t necessarily have to do an extensive advertising every time you get a new property.  You can first try the list of buyers you already have.  Having a list of buyers lined up and waiting for your properties just makes sense because it stretches your marketing dollars a lot farther, plus it puts you in a better position because you’re likely to find a buyer much quicker..

Now let’s talk about the other important feature of a good e-mail auto-responder system, and that is the ability to have automatic follow-up messages.  Following up with prospective clients is a very important side of the business that many real estate professionals neglect, which can result in a lot of lost profits.

By following up with a lead multiple times, you are doing a couple important things.  First, you’re educating them on how the process works or what to expect and can give them tips.  Second, you’re keeping yourself in the top of their mind.  When they are ready to take action and buy or sell a house, or even if one of their friends does, they will usually contact whoever comes to mind first.   If you do a good job of keeping in front of them, you will be the name that comes to mind first.

Automatic Follow-up

With a good e-mail marketing system, you can usually go in and add messages that will go out over a period of time.  For instance, when a new buyer lead comes in, you can put in one message that goes out to them instantly after they sign up.  Then you could have another message that goes out to them the next day that gives them more information.  Then you could have another one go out a couple days later, then another a few days after that, then maybe one a week later and so on.

You don’t want to overdo it and send too many messages because you can overwhelm people.  Make sure what you send them is quality information that they will actually want to read and be glad you sent.  You want them to look forward to getting the next message from you and actually want to open it and see what you sent.  Otherwise people will end up just unsubscribing themselves (removing themselves from your mailing list).  But at the same time, you want to keep in touch with them fairly regularly.

So what you could do is have a handful of messages that go out in the beginning, and then put more and more space between follow-up messages.  Then you can just periodically send out a broadcast e-mail to your entire list to let them know any news.

Now that you know a little bit about why it’s important to have a mailing list, let’s get into some of the nuts and bolts of getting started with an e-mail marketing system.

How To Use an Email Marketing System

Well, the first step is to sign up for an autoresponder service.  One of the most reliable services we’ve found is called Aweber.  They’re reasonably priced (starting at about $19/mo) and their service has been very reliable.

When you sign up, you’ll get an account where you can log in and create a new mailing list. You’ll give your mailing list a name and set up a few settings the way you want, such as what name and e-mail address you want the message to be coming from.  Then you can add some follow-up messages that will go out to people automatically over a period of time. Then you’re ready to start putting people on your mailing list.  So the next step is to start capturing your leads’ names and e-mail addresses.  You can usually do this a few different ways.

How To Add People To Your Mailing List

One way is to tell your leads that if they want more information, to send an e-mail to a certain e-mail address (for instance, something like ibuyhouses@myautoresponder.com).  This e-mail address is provided by the autoresponder service when you create your mailing list.  When your lead sends an e-mail to that address, it goes directly to the autoresponder service and they capture the person’s name and e-mail address and add them to your mailing list.

That method isn’t used as much today as at one time, but it does still work on most e-mail marketing systems and in certain situations it can be a good way to get people on your mailing list.

A second way you can add leads to your autoresponder is to manually add each lead.  Most email marketing services will have an import feature where you can manually enter the name and e-mail addresses to add. This may work well if you don’t have a web site yet or you use some other offline method to get people’s e-mail addresses. You may have gone to a trade show or seminar or other event where someone had a booth set up and had a sheet of paper where you could write down your name and e-mail address to be added to their mailing list.  Those people then had to go and manually add each person that wrote down their information to their mailing list.   It’s not really ideal, but in some situations is the best you can do.

The third, and probably the most common way of adding leads to your mailing list, is by means of a form on your web site.  Your potential client comes to your website and enters their information, such as their name and e-mail address (sometimes other information too if you want it) and when they click the Submit button, all of their information is sent to your autoresponder service and they are added to your mailing list.  It’s automatic and instant.  Once  you set it up, the rest runs on autopilot.  Then all you have to do is focus on getting people to your website.

Most email marketing systems provide a way for you to build a form that can be inserted into your website.  After you build the form, they will give you some HTML code that has to be inserted into the HTML code of your website.  So to do that, you would need to have access to the code of your website and know where to insert it.  Either that or pay your webmaster to do it.  However, on the websites we provide on RealTurf.com, we’ve made it super easy to incorporate an Aweber autoresponder system with your website.

On RealTurf.com real estate websites, all you need to know is the name of the mailing list and you just put that in a box, along with the page you want people to go to after they sign up, and you’re done!  It’s very quick and easy and doesn’t require you to know anything about HTML code or anything like that.

There is something important to be aware of regardless of which method you choose.  These days Spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail) is a huge problem.  If you have an e-mail address and have been online very long, I’m sure you know that.  We all get lots of Spam e-mails every day.  It’s illegal to send out commercial e-mails to people who didn’t request information from you.

Because of this, the autoresponder services out there have to protect themselves.  They can’t have their customers putting people on their mailing lists who don’t want to be there and blasting them with Spam.  That will hurt the email marketing services because the e-mails are coming from their server and they can get the blame for it and it could lead to their servers being blacklisted by the major internet service providers.  That would mean that none of the e-mails that their customers send out would get through to people, and obviously they can’t have that.

So they usually require each person who is added to your mailing list to confirm that they really want to be added to your mailing list. The way they do this is when a person is added to your mailing list through any of the three methods mentioned above, an e-mail is sent out to the person that basically says, ‘Do you really want to receive information from this person? If so, click this link.’  Once they click the link, then they’re added to your mailing list.

That accomplishes a couple things.  First it confirms that the e-mail address they entered is correct and that it’s a valid e-mail.  Second, it confirms that this person really does want to receive information from you.  It prevents people from putting other people on your mailing list who don’t want to be there.  Sometimes people have signed up their friends for things and their friends have no idea why they started getting information and think it’s spam.  If they don’t confirm by clicking the link in that e-mail, they are never really added to your mailing list.

While you will lose some people this way who are either too lazy to click the link, forget what they signed up for, overlook the e-mail, delete the e-mail without reading it, or change their mind later and decide they don’t want your information, it’s not really that big of a loss.  Most people will comply.  Those that don’t may not have been the best prospects anyway.  You can’t force them to be on your mailing list.

This is really a protection for you because it can keep you from getting accused of sending out Spam e-mails.

There are some services out there that still give you the option of choosing whether or not to make your leads go through this verification process.  Generally speaking, it’s best to go ahead and do it.  There are some situations where you may really not want to (for instance, if these are not just leads but people who have bought something from you or used your services), but in most cases it’s a good idea.

Those services that give you that option generally only make it optional for people who are added to your mailing list by filling out a form on your website.  If you use the method where you manually add people, they will always send out a confirmation message to make sure the people want to be on your list.  Otherwise people could just add thousands of e-mail addresses that they bought from some shady company that collects e-mail addresses for the purpose of sending Spam.  So if you manually enter your leads’ e-mail addresses, they will always have to verify that they want to be on your list.

There is one other thing I should mention about autoresponders and spam.  If you’re going to use an autoresponder service, you should go with a big, well-established company to provide the service.  Why?  Because they have good relationships with the major Internet Service Providers out there like AOL, Yahoo, Earthlink, MSN, etc.

Bigger companies can hire people to keep good relationships with these companies.  When an ISP sees a certain website sending thousands of e-mails to their server, they immediately get suspicious.  If you’re dealing with a small email marketing company, they just don’t have resources to keep up with all that and maintain good relationships with these companies.

What does that mean to you?  It’s the difference between your e-mails being delivered or not.  What good does it do you to send out thousands of e-mails if nobody’s getting them because they were blocked?

Sometimes you’ll see real estate website services offering an e-mail autoresponder/follow-up system included as a built-in feature of their website.  In most cases, it’s just a matter of time before those sites get their service blacklisted by the major ISP’s, which means nobody who uses that service will be able to get e-mails through to people.

It’s for that reason that we have chosen not to provide an integrated e-mail autoresponder as a part of RealTurf.com websites.  Yes, we have the software to do it and very well could include it.  However, we have decided that, while it would look nice as a bullet point on our sales page (in other words, another feature to list as a selling point), it’s not in our customers’ best interests to include this.  You’re better off using an e-mail marketing service such as Aweber for this purpose.  It will ensure your e-mails have the best chance of getting through to your leads and clients, which is the whole point.

We’ve made it very easy at RealTurf.com to use Aweber’s email marketing system and start capturing leads and putting them on your mailing list.  That way you can market to them over and over again and get the most out of your marketing dollar, as well as keep yourself in front of your prospects as the best solution to their real estate problems.

Don’t have a RealTurf.com web site yet?  Get one here.

Watch for the next issue of this series on tools that can help you save time and make more money!

Todd Heitner
RealTurf.com