The Billboard in the Desert
Published April 9th, 2007 in Blogging, Dear Mr. and Mrs. Seller, Metro Detroit, Seller Information.
Recently a very successful Birmingham Realtor asked me, “Maureen, how come you have been quoted so much in the newspaper lately? Is it your…ummm…ahh…(she struggled to find the word) … blog?” Um, yes, Mrs. Successful Realtor, it just might be that as I have not been sending any gifts to newspaper reporters lately, nor would they likely accept them if I did. Mrs. Successful is, after decades in the business, launching her own website and I suspect that she thinks that now her phone will be ringing off the hook with reporters calling for brilliant quips on our Birmingham, MI real estate market. Frankly, I hope for her sake, as I respect Mrs. Successful Realtor enormously, that her phone does ring incessantly. I never failed to notice that Mrs. Successful has thrived without any web presence at all.
Experience, observation and statistics tell me that Mrs. Successful Realtor’s site will be a very quiet place, ignored by everyone except her prospects and clients, who will visit it to see where their home will be displayed on the web. And they will never go back again.
The day after my conversation with Mrs. Successful Realtor, I had an early morning meeting with Mrs. Successful Web Designer. She is in the process of building a beautiful site about New Construction homes in Metro Detroit. Her graphics blow me away, and she has a great design team behind her. We were talking about my site, miOaklandCounty.com (the site you are reading right now) and she said, “I checked your inbound links recently. You have something like 1,200 of them. I am jealous.” As gorgeous as her new site may be, she knows one of the key secrets to building traffic to a website: links to my site from other sites are what makes my site come up high in Google searches. This site is recognized as an authority on Michigan real estate by Google. So Google rewards me by sending more and more people here every day. Hopefully they like what they find when they get here. Another secret is having good, fresh, relevant content that keeps people coming back.
Why does any of this matter to a home seller in Metro Detroit? Actually, it matters a lot. miOaklandCounty can get your home seen by more home buyers. Unlike most real estate websites, it is not a Billboard in the Desert. It might not be as pretty as some of the Billboards in the Desert, but this billboard is at the corner of Maple and Woodward and it gets seen by thousands of people every month. As a matter of fact, the number of readers here has doubled every other month since last August. If you were advertising your Southeast Michigan home on a billboard, I bet you would rather have it on the corner of Maple and Woodward, not in the desert, right? If you live in the desert, your answer might be different. I will grant you that.
How do people end up here on miOaklandCounty.com? Many are regular readers. Nearly 500 subscribe and either receive our emails or read us in their feed readers. If you haven’t subscribed yet yourself, add your email address to the subscribe box over near the top of the far right column. Others have us saved as a ‘favorite site.’ And many find us when the do a search in Google for something like, “Birmingham MI luxury homes,” “Michigan real estate news” or “pop up tax” or tons of other real estate related topics we have covered here over the course of our 300+ posts.
Most home sellers are concerned about when their home will be advertised in the Free Press or a homes magazine. Frankly, a seller is going to have much better exposure on a highly ranked web page. That newspaper ad is tossed in the garbage and gone 24 hours after it hits the streets. And how satisfying is a newspaper ad for a homebuyer? It has one picture, a short description and it is hidden amidst hundreds of other small and equally unsatisfying ads that are displayed in a completely random (and therefore useless to a buyer) order.
We’ve often spoken about the things that can make a home sell more quickly, and effective marketing is right at the top of the list. If you chose to put your home on a Billboard in the Desert, don’t tell me that I did not warn you.
PS. Putting up a billboard at Maple and Woodward cost me dearly, but my clients are worth it!
Technorati Tags: selling a home, marketing a home, michigan real estate, metro detroit real estate, oakland county real estate, real estate web site, real estate blog
______________________________________________________________Written by Maureen Francis
SKBK Sotheby's International Realty, 248.430.4450
Visit Website
Search for homes in Oakland County
_____________________________________________________________
Maureen,
I like the article…and…thanks for the title!
Actually your links are better than you state. Here is your info as listed by http://www.wholinkstome.com:
Yahoo! has found 2,770 links to this site.
MSN Search has found 1,365 links to this site.
Blogrolling.com has found 0 blogrolls that contain this link.
You can go to that site and see the actually links if you wish.
All I can say is content, content, content. We all wish there was some fast and cheap way to success, but as in life, website or blog traffic success takes time and work. Well….or lots of money.
See you Thursday.
Mrs. Successful Web Designer
Thanks, Mrs. Successful Web Designer! I was not familiar with that site. I use a different one to check backlinks.
The blogroll info is very wrong. I am on a ton of blog rolls. We use technorati.com to check links from blogs.
Hi Maureen,
Your post got me thinking and I had to check out the stats of my blog on http://www.wholinkstome.com. I was actually a bit surprised about the results since I have started the blog not too long ago (January 19th of 2007).
# Google Page Rank for this page: Google PR 2
# Yahoo! has found 1,290 links to this site.
# MSN Search has found 41 links to this site.
# Blogrolling.com has found 3 blogrolls that contain this link.
On technorati.com as of today I have 12 blogs linking to me.
>As a matter of fact, the number of readers here has doubled every other month since last August.
Now, I was wondering if you have a way to quantify the result of your billboard advertising in direct relationship to the web traffic to your blog?
Christoph,
I don’t actually advertise on a billboard. The billboard is an analogy for a website that gets traffic vs. a website that is beautiful but nobody sees it.
Blogs are powerful tools in the eyes of search engines.
….and…
I am not sure about the accuracy of wholinkstome.com
Today it says I have:
# Yahoo! has found 3,670 links to this site.
# MSN Search has found 1,707 links to this site.
There is no way that went up that much since yesterday. It also shows a google pagerank of 2 and my site has a PR of 4.
I think that the PageRank indicator is hardwired at 2. Every site I tried was a PR2 including my own.
Take care
Tony
I have to say that the billboard looks mighty real! How did you do that?
Check out:
http://www.customsigngenerator.com/billboard.asp
There are lots of cool things you can do on that site.
Maureen, sorry for the bunk site. I found another one that I just started playing with at…
http://snapshot.compete.com/
Ah..yes….the plot thickens.
As the web grows and the variables grows, it just gets more difficult to manage and track.
Maureen,
I have just started blogging as well as reading blogs, and I have to say that yours is one of the most useful and relevant I have come across. This post was spot on.
Would you mind if I used your idea for a category call “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Homeseller” on my blog? I would give you proper credit of course!
MF - I can only strive to get my site where yours is right now - thanks for the encouragement - it’s hard work, but it pays off!