Last week I had the good fortune to attend Real Estate BarCamp Chicago where I got to sit in on a session led by Eric Stegemann of Tribus Real Estate. I’d encourage you to attend a BarCamp if at all possible, and if you’d like to learn about getting your website to the top of Google, make some time to meet Eric as well.

The main thing I took away from Eric’s talk was a remark he made about learning how people view your website. Eric suggested buying a little stack of $5 gift cards from a coffee shop, then politely asking a few customers there if they’d be willing to surf your website for a few minutes in exchange for a gift card. The point is to see how an actual person uses your site, what they find useful about it and what they completely overlook.

Reading your website stats can tell you a lot about how people find you and what they look at while they’re on your site, but sitting beside an actual person while they view your site for the first time can give you priceless information. Questions you may want to ask:

• Did you find the information you expected to see?
• Was the site easy to navigate?
• Did you like the site design?
• Would you know how to contact me if you had a question?

After a few borrowed minutes, give a quick thank you for their time, pass them a business card and let them get back to their coffee. Then take a look at your website with fresh eyes and think about how to make use of what you’ve learned.

Thank you for sharing this, Eric!

From all of us at Real Estate Shows to all of you, Happy Memorial Day!

The video above is embedded from Wordpress.com’s latest upgrade called VideoPress. For $59.95 per year, VideoPress allows you to upload video files directly to Wordpress.com. The video files appear directly in your Wordpress.com blogs and are able to be embedded on other blog platforms, as you see here.

How can you do it yourself?

To post your Real Estate Shows to Wordpress.com, first export them to video. You find this option in the “Publish” section of your account. Then download the zipped video file to your hard drive, unzip the file and upload to your Wordpress.com blog using VideoPress. As you can see, the quality of the video compression is excellent and the video was fully processed in less than two minutes.

Makita makes drills. They wanted to get the point across that their drills are precise, hard working and comfortable to use. After some creative thought, they ended up constructing a billboard made entirely of holes drilled in the surface of the outside wall of a hardware store. Changes in tone were created by varying the depth and size of the 20,562 holes. Instead of telling us their drills are a precision tool, they showed us.

If you don’t see the video above, click here.

This made me wonder about how to best show someone your expertise in real estate. And I’m cheap, I want to do it for free – so let’s use the blog or website you already have and start from there. (If you don’t already have an online presence, consider this your call to action.)

Let’s talk about a testimonial page. It’s a simple thing, and if someone is thinking of hiring you as their agent, it will help them to hear from others how they felt after going through a transaction with you. You can tell people how awesome you are – but hearing it from other people really means something, doesn’t it?

So let’s build content that lets your past clients and listings speak for you. Hopefully after you sell a listing, you’re going back to the Manage page in your Real Estate Shows and clicking that little dropdown box that says “Move Show Into” Sold. (Bonus points, doing this also “unsends” any Flyers you may have distributed online so you’re not advertising a sold listing.) Go to your Real Estate Shows Manage page and click on the Sold tab. Click Get Widget at the top of the page, copy the code and use it on your testimonials page.

These Sold listings are telling the story of your real estate experience. If you sold listings before you found Real Estate Shows, consider creating Shows of those listings now so you don’t leave any of them out. Each one speaks of a satisfied client, a goal achieved.

Also remember you don’t have to have been the listing agent to include a home in your Sold category. Take your camera to the final walk through and make a Show. A shot of the exterior with their smiling faces is a great gift to them (make a CD of this Show and run it by to stay in touch) and it speaks volumes on a testimonials page. (And just so you know, your buyers will likely pull out that old CD when they think of selling their home, just to see how much they’ve changed it since they moved in. Seeing your name again at this point is HUGE. Make sure they have that CD!)

The next step is at the closing table. You’re beside your clients and they’re happy to be there. Pass them a sheet of paper and ask if they’d mind writing up a short testimonial for you to use on their website. Ask if it would be OK to use that picture of them smiling in front of their new home, or even to embed their personal Real Estate Show.

Or you may even want to consider making one Real Estate Show to illustrate your Sold listings. Use one exterior shot of each home, use the address as a photo title and embed the Show on your page. Be sure to add to it as you go along, upload new Solds as Additional Photos to stay current quickly.

There are a lot of ways to make the tools you’re already using work to show off your expertise, whether you’re selling real estate or drills. Using Real Estate Shows alongside feedback from your past clients can help a potential client feel comfortable initiating contact with you.

I recently wrote about an idea of using digital cameras to draw local blog traffic. It’s an idea that I believe will work very well because it’s spontaneous and fun, and once people use your cameras to take pictures they know they can go to your blog to see the results. (Film does tend to draw out the suspense.) What you’re really doing is passing a little bit of blog ownership out to each person who takes a picture. They became invested in your blog because they became a part of it. And that’s what you want. Invested readers come back, over and over, and they tell others.

So, after you’ve got your digital cameras out there roaming around, it’s time for another round of “how can I get local readers invested in my blog?” Let’s apply what we just learned: People like to see themselves in your blog. Said another way: People like your blog if they see themselves there.

I saw this idea this morning and it was an instant hit with me – the Human Calendar. Go peek and think about a page like that full of your locals. I absolutely love the idea of using photos to provide information that could have been in ordinary text, but I’m wondering if a calendar is the way to go. I think it might be better to translate this idea for use with something you’ve already found value in, something you’re already posting regularly.

If I look back at my own blog statistics, I can see that one of my reoccurring big draws are the high school football schedules. I’m in a small town and high school football is a big deal here. We have only four high schools in my whole county – what if my football schedules this year were made up of photos of local football players holding up cards spelling out who’s playing who, where and when?

Take a look at the tags you use frequently and consider how a picture might make that information come to life a little more. Even statistical information that you share on a regular basis might be jazzed up a little with some smiling local faces — and it gives people another reason to check back in if they might see themselves or someone they know.

Have you noticed the huge influx of new people to Facebook lately? If you’re connecting with more and more locals, old friends, family and even agents from across the country, you may have realized it’s not a bad idea to remind them that you’re still in real estate, actively marketing and selling homes and ready to help them with their own real estate needs.

Using your Real Estate Shows is an easy way to do just that. Real Estate Shows and Facebook get along beautifully, and you have a few choices in ways to share your Shows.

The first way is to turn on Social Bookmarking. To do that, go from your Manage page to Edit Show, then Edit Buttons. Scroll to the bottom of the page, click the box to Enable Social Bookmarking and submit. Watch your Show, and at the end click the Facebook button and follow the directions to upload to your Profile page. You’ll be able to choose from your agent photo, logo or no picture. Here’s how it looked on my page:

A bonus to this method is that ANYONE can use those Social Bookmarking buttons. If a buyer finds your Show while house hunting online and loves the house, it can be “saved” and shared via their Facebook page. Essentially, you’re allowing others to help you advertise the home.

To submit as I did above, you don’t have to convert your Show to video, as you will with the next two options. (Note: video is not available on trial accounts.) Converting your Show into a video format is easy – on the Manage page click Publish next to the Show you want, then click the Video tab to the upper left. If you have a YouTube account, you can enter in your log in information and we’ll upload your video directly to your account there. (I highly recommend sending your Shows to your own YouTube account, so that you’ll have your own branding and control of editing.) Video conversion takes anywhere from 10 minutes to several hours, depending on the number of requests we’re handling at the time. You’ll receive an email from us once it’s done.

If you decide you’d like to upload your video Real Estate Show directly to Facebook, which was my favorite option, go back to the Publish/Video page of Real Estate Shows and click the button you’ll find at the top of the page to download your video file to your computer. Unzip or extract the files and then you’re free to upload a video through the Add Video button on your Facebook profile. After my upload was complete, I edited and chose the “Full” option, which looked like this:

I really like the look of the larger picture representing the video, but the still shot was chosen for me from the middle of the Show. (I should mention that this larger version is the one that got a lot of a comments.  Since comments are the only gauge I have of traffic through a video sent this way, this was important to me.)

The third option is to simply link to YouTube after your Show has been uploaded there. To do this, just go to YouTube and grab the URL to your Show, then click on Post Link on your Facebook profile and paste. It looks like this:

Through your YouTube account, you can edit videos so that you can choose the sample photo that represents your video, but unfortunately you will only have a choice between three shots in the middle of the video, not at the beginning which would make the most sense for a listing. I’d have a lot more to tell you about using your Shows in YouTube … but that will have to wait for another post.

Any questions?

Let’s tackle a couple issues at once here. You’d probably appreciate having a little extra traffic to your blog or website. The people in your area probably like to have a little fun. Let’s bring the two together.

I saw a simple idea for a disposable camera tied to a park bench with a little note beside it telling people the camera was left there just so they could take pictures, have fun and he’d be back to pick up the camera that evening. They took their pictures, and you can see them here. If you have cards for your blog (and oh, you should!) maybe you could leave a little stack of them next to the camera and tell people in your note that pictures will be available soon on your blog. (You could even make a Real Estate Show from the pictures you get back. Just sayin’.)

If you find that you like the idea, this could even become a traveling experience – try a bench on main street, a hometown sporting event, maybe tied to a lamp post along a parade route. Think of someplace where people may gather and be happy, and see if there’s a way to throw a camera in the mix.

Another variation of this idea is to set a disposable camera free and see where it goes. The Disposable Memory Project does just that and prints the pictures from around the world. Since you’d probably rather have local attractions, consider setting a camera free (or giving it to someone to start off) in a waterproof baggie with a sign in sheet, a little stack of your blog cards and a postage paid, padded envelope to return the camera to you for developing. You can print instructions at the top of the page, such as “Please take a picture of your favorite view in Putnam County” or “When I have visitors from out of town, I take them here” and let them know to check your blog in the future to see how it turned out. Each person just takes a picture, signs the sheet and passes it along to the next person. The last person to take a picture can drop it in the mail to you.

With themes like this for each camera, you can feel free to have several cameras out there at the same time. Understand that cameras may not always find you again. I recently took three cameras to a convention and immediately received one back. A friend is bringing another to a future meet up, and the third is just missing. Not a bad record, really.

If you’re wondering, “Why would I want to do this?”, I’ll tell you.

• It should bring each one of the people that comes into contact with your cameras to your blog. They’ll want to see their picture and the ones that came afterwards.
• They’re also likely to share your link with friends, family or coworkers along with the story about how they got involved.
• It will give you search engine attracting photos you might not have thought to take on your own. If you set loose a camera with a request for a “Favorite View,” you may get back a “Sunrise over the Kanawha River”, “Ducks at Hurricane City Park” or “Flowers at Midway Greenhouse.” Give photo credit to the photographer and you have a new friend, too.
• Also, it just makes people SMILE. It’s as simple as that. You shared a little something unexpected with them and gave them a bright spot in their day – sometimes that’s enough.

And if someone is going to remember your name, isn’t it best when they smile when they think of you?

I’ve mentioned it here in our blog and it’s sitting right there on the Manage page, the “Connect Shows Together” button. And STILL, when I casually mentioned it to a friend of mine who is a long time fan of Real Estate Shows, she said, “What?”

Her next question was, “Why?”

That’s an easy one – imagine you’re a buyer. (You should be doing this all the time anyway.) You’ve just watched a Real Estate Show of a new listing, and that kitchen looked beautiful. You wish you could see more. NOW. If there were a button at the end of the Show that said, “View Related Shows”, would you click it? If you were really interested in the house, you would. And hopefully you’d see a new Show labeled “Kitchen” and experience some fabulous immediate gratification.

Oh, we know buyers LIKE immediate gratification. It’s why we create Shows in the first place! If the kitchen Show peaked their interest even more, you’ll likely earn a showing for your listing because of it. That’s good stuff.

You can even connect more than one Show together. Let’s say you’ve listed a beautiful home in a neighborhood that has special features, such a bicycle trials, community parks or a private golf course. Creating and connecting Shows for each of these will spotlight what sets this home apart. It’s a good idea to ask yourself, “What’s going to sell this house?” Then create a Show around the answer.

The Show below is by Ines Hegedus-Garcia in sun-drenched Miami, Florida. Ines takes many, many listing photos and graciously allowed me to use her Shows as an example. After you watch this Show, you’ll see buttons that will give you more information, including one for Related Shows. When you click that, you’ll have links to all the attached Shows, which in this case is one for the pool.

With your next listing, ask yourself what’s the most likely feature to sell this house and take enough extra pictures so that it can have a Show of it’s own. Giving buyers instant gratification and having sellers happy to see you going above and beyond expectations – for no additional cost – is not a bad thing.

For those of you going to Real Estate Connect in NY next week, how’d you like to play a game with me?

As real estate agents, photography is a very important part of our jobs. After all, it’s those first photos a buyer sees online that help make the decision whether or not your listing is worth visiting in person. Thankfully, photography is also fun and inexpensive — and a great way to meet people and to bond with people you already know.

So if you’re headed to New York next week (or heck, any time in the future!) see if you can complete this scavenger hunt in and around Times Square. Take 9 photos that could be captioned with the following, then use them to create a 60 second Real Estate Show. Share a link to your Show in the comments, please! Creativity is a plus, feel free to interpret the list however you please:

1. Traffic control
2. Tacky souvenir
3. Self portrait with Times Square as the background
4. Looking up
5. Reflection
6. Something I drank
7. A stranger
8. Headline
9. A kiss

Thinking creatively. “Traffic control” could be a sign, stop light, police officer, orange cone, someone who darted into the street — be as imaginative or literal as you like. (Hint: this might be a good way to share your NY trip with others.)

While you’re playing along, keep in mind that you could easily do a scavenger hunt like this through your own blog or website for your own community. Getting other people involved creates interest. If you publish photos taken by others (with their permission, of course!), aren’t they likely to want their friends and family to see it? Opening up the door like this can bring in new readers and a bonus feeling of goodwill for the ones you already have.

I like the idea of getting locals involved by contributing their photos. I’ll have more ideas for you after I get back from New York!

Let’s pretend I’m a buyer, and I’m looking at a whole list of houses that meet my needs. Oh, I’m lucky — there are LOTS to choose from! Like most buyers, I’m skipping the houses with only one photo. (If the listing agent didn’t think it was worth a few pictures, I know it’s not worth my time.) And of course I prefer MORE information rather than less. By the time I actually talk to an agent, I’ve already eliminated a good deal of the available homes based on what I’ve seen online.

I’m picky, and with all that inventory, I can afford to be.

As you’re creating a Real Estate Show of your seller’s listing, keep me in mind. I’m going to be looking at a lot of houses online, aren’t I? How can you make this one stand out?

Easy. Tell me a story.

Each time I view a listing online, I’m picturing myself in that home. I’m wondering what it would be like to cook in that kitchen. I’m imagining all this fictional spare time I’d have to pamper myself in the posh master bath. (Yes, I know buying that house won’t give me spare time, but let me dream!) If you tell me the story of what my life might be like in this home, I am much more likely to remember it, to want to see it, and to already have warm fuzzy feelings before I’ve ever set foot in the door.

I am ready to fall in love with my next home. If you title your pictures with captions such as “Living Room”, will I be swept off my feet?

Lisa Sanderson of Better Homes & Gardens Wilkins & Associates has a perfect example of how a Show can tell a story about what a buyer’s life might be like in a new home. Can’t you just picture yourself here?

I realize it’s an online relationship, but I think I’m ready to take it to the next level and meet in real life. Something just feels very RIGHT about this one.

I was asked by Kayel Buffaline from our Linkedin group yesterday how she can use Real Estate Shows to promote her community when she doesn’t have a blog. There are so many free blogging opportunities that I hadn’t challenged myself to think in terms of not having one, but this is a great question. There are certainly plenty of people who get along fine without having a blog, now how do they get their Real Estate Shows in front of people so they can make a difference?

Without a blog, you can still use your Real Estate Shows to promote your community:

• If you have a website, you might want to make up a Community page and update it regularly.
• You can send out Flyers periodically to your contacts online.
• If you use social networks like FaceBook or Twitter, you can share you Shows there. In Twitter, just share a link. In Facebook and other Social Networking, there is a button in Edit Buttons that allows you to turn on the option to share this way, and then you can just click to add. (This also allows others to share your Shows if they want to spread your message!)
• You can also take the link to your Inventory List and add that to your email signature, so that every time you email someone there’s an opportunity to share your Shows. (Just make sure you’ve clicked “Viewable in Other Shows” on your Manage and Edit page for the Shows you want to appear in your list. You can get the link to your Inventory List at the bottom of any of your Show Links pages, also accessed from the Manage and Edit page.)
• Create a YouTube Page that focuses on your community. Setting up a YouTube page is easy and free, and you can send your Real Estate Shows there with just a *Click!*

Kayel, I hope this helps. And if you ARE using a blog … you do know that all of this would only increase your exposure and it’s pretty much all FREE, right? I think I just gave you a homework assignment.