How to Earn Non-Commission Revenue from Your Broker Website
We're continuing our series on shortcuts and features you may not know about in the tech products you already use (see the first post here). Today, we're highlighting a way that brokers and MLSs can earn extra revenue with their consumer facing websites, courtesy of Nest4Less, a client retention platform from our 2017-18 Technology Guide. What is Nest4Less? Nest4Less encourages repeat visits to your real estate website by offering free directories of home-related services like movers, home security, plumbers, painters, and home improvement retailers. The directories are attractive and plug right into your website or Facebook business page within minutes.

Using Google Analytics to Evaluate Your Online Business
Do you use Google Analytics to measure traffic to your real estate company's website? How do you measure traffic to your real estate company's website? One of the biggest benefits of online marketing is that you'll always have the data you need to understand how your website is performing--if you know where to look. Google Analytics (GA) is a great place to start. Google Analytics is a FREE (yep, you read that right—FREE!) analytics tool offered by Google that allows you to measure your website's traffic, improve your site, deliver better results and convert more leads. To really understand the benefits of Google Analytics, it's best to start from the beginning. Do you have GA installed on your website? If you do, good job! If not, get it installed and discover how beneficial GA can be to really understanding your website business. Next, familiarize yourself with the basic reports Google offers. To give you real life examples of Google Analytics reporting capabilities, let's start with a few of the basic reports Delta Media Group uses to convey results to our digital marketing customers. 1.  Audience Overview This report provides the basics on user sessions, page views, session duration and bounce rate in addition to valuable information as to how visitors are engaging on your website. It answers the questions like: Is my site getting traffic? How long are visitors sticking around and how many pages are they looking at? How to Run this Report: Select Date Range and compare to same time period in the previous year. Click on Audience > Overview

Better Information is the Key to Competing with Portals
Information is the name of the game for brokerage websites who want to be competitive online. However, brokers have struggled to flesh out the information on property listing pages in a way that's comparable to the major portals. The good is news is that there are plenty of opportunities to license data beyond MLS data. Community data from Onboard Informatics and public records data from RealtyTrac are two solutions that immediately come to mind. By leveraging these or similar data providers, brokers can differentiate themselves by having more information available on their website than other brokers in their market. However, that data will still only take them to the point where their site's information is comparable to portals, not superior. One area where brokers are finding high levels of engagement with consumers is by providing localized information. This is where national portals struggle and brokers can shine. When consumers are searching the web for housing information, more often than not, they're looking for housing resources. Who can fix my dishwasher? Where can I find a new landscaper? This is exactly the type of information consumers will call their Realtor about. This is particularly true of consumers preparing to sell their home. A consumer research survey by consulting firm WAV Group revealed that consumers are increasingly expecting these referrals from their real estate professional. In fact, an agent is the first resource they turn to to ask about needed repairs before listing their home. 58% of sellers consult their agent about repairs rather than contractors (12%), home inspectors or appraisers (both 2%). The agent is expected to be the doorway to these recommendations.

Google Ana-what? Step by Step Guide to Installing Google Analytics
Buying a website is the start to building your online presence. But how are you supposed to know if your investment in a website is paying off? The answer: Google Analytics. Google Analytics is the key to understanding your audience. You don't merely want to see traffic, you want to see where the traffic has come from, how long they stayed and what actions people performed on your site. All of these data-points will give you insight into your target demo's behavior patterns. And how your site should be altered to cater to them. Below is a step-by-step guide to installing Google Analytics. 1. Sign up This is pretty straight forward. If you have Gmail already set up, then the sign in process will be what you are familiar with. If not, Google will prompt you to create an account, do it. Start here at www.google.com/analytics. 2. Add your site Enter all of the fields below. If you are managing several sites, make your account name applicable to all of your sites, i.e. "My Sites." The next field is for your actual website's name (not URL). In our Google Analytics, this field is, "NestBuilder Blog," and then the following field is entered as http://blog.nestbuilder.com.

NAR's .Realtor Domains: Should You Buy In? [Video]
With the release of NAR's .Realtor domains coming up in October, today's Pulpisode discusses our thoughts and advice for Realtors® who plan on obtaining them.

Anatomy of a WordPress Real Estate Site
Real estate websites should have a distinct purpose, otherwise it is just one of the many, cluttering up the back pages of search engine results. Before choosing anything, here are some probing questions to answer: Will your site be niche based? Either geographic, lifestyle, price range, etc. Do you plan to link it up to your Pinterest page? Will you have enough time, energy and inspiration to blog about your local neighborhoods/market? Will your site be image heavy, fed maybe by Instagram? Do you plan on collecting email addresses to use for an email marketing campaign? Is your site going to be focused on finding buyers or are you planning to post market reports for existing sellers? Set out your plan in writing. Create clear goals with actionable items and time scales for completion. If your answers created more questions you can't answer, maybe you need some brainstorming sessions, or more focused help. If you now have a clearer idea of your purpose, NOW and only now, can you plan out your site.

Google Analytics 101 for Real Estate
This post comes to us from the WebsiteBox blog: Google Analytics is a great tool for you to understand who is visiting your site and how they are using it. It can also help you figure out what changes you can make on your site to boost business. In order to turn all that great data Google Analytics provides you with into actionable insights which can help you improve your business, you must learn the basic terms and functions so that you can use the tool effectively. Unlike billboard or flyer advertising, any marketing efforts you make on the web can be completely monitored. Sure you can use a coupon code to track the success of your flyer, or ask people if they heard about you from your billboard ad, but you cannot tell how long someone looked at the ad for--or what steps they took after they saw the ad that lead to them calling you. It is also very tedious to track every inquiry you get from a print ad manually. Sometimes you are on the phone and it is hard to get to an Excel sheet to input the data. You may be so involved in the conversation you are having with your lead that you forget to ask them how they found out about you. The solution is to invest in web advertising which can all be tracked using the Google Analytics tool. In order to get started with Google Analytics, you have to install the tracking code they provide you with. If you are using WebsiteBox for your website, you can copy and paste the code using the Analytics App. Once you have installed the code in your site, it will take about 24 to 48 hours for Analytics to start monitoring the traffic from your site.

Sharing is Polite – Encourage It!
Some of us are naturally tech savvy. For the rest, we can remember the not-too-distant past, where we were all trying to figure out how to setup our websites and blog efficiently. For those of us in the latter category, it seems like just around the time we began to master how to place content on the Web, understand SEO and even pay for some traffic, along came social sites. That's when things, once again, seemed more complicated. Your Real Estate Blog Can Be Shared Using Social Media Sites The good news is that social media actually makes things easier. The even better news is that it is 100% cost-free to its users. This is significant when you consider that social media, through sharing options, facilitates the distribution of your content to a wider audience without costing you a penny. Between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Diigo, Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon and dozens of other sites, people are sharing information and making recommendations like never before. Consider sharing your newest blog post that could include local market sold property statistics, or a great post about how to negotiate as a real estate seller. Your aim is to get people from search engines and on-site promotion and linking, to read the blog. Remember the old days in which your readers could only share content via email article links? Even if one of your readers was kind enough to do so, how many of those emails remained unopened by the recipient? Today, it's just a couple of clicks and one reader who likes your content can send it out with their implied endorsement to hundreds or even thousands of their friends and followers.

Why are the local experts invisible?
The battle for eyeballs in local real estate search is getting uglier than ever. As real estate SEO strategies become more front and center, the smaller companies are fighting to even get on the first page in a Google world where the top three links make up for 60% of all clicks (Google data via AOL). RealGeeks mention real estate professionals are kicking themselves in the foot – helping the top portals in outranking them through backlinking by placing free widgets on the site (thus exposing the real cost of free). They go as far as to claim these backlinks are predatory. Via AGBeat: The linking practices have been in place for years, and Zillow and Trulia have been offering free tools for real estate professionals since their inception, which is quite a brilliant business move, and although it has led to thousands upon thousands of links from agent websites telling Google that Zillow and Trulia are high quality and relevant, it is not exactly the fault of Zillow or Trulia, rather agents who like shiny widgets that don't read or understand the implications of terms of service they agree to. Perhaps the most disheartening stat is that Real Geeks' study revealed that searches of "[city] real estate" (while logged out of Google) with the top 50 metro areas by population, only 30% of page one listings were local sites. Isn't it a bit backwards that those with true local expertise are badly bruised here in terms of Google's perceived relevance?

Match Your Online Presence to Your Offline Personality
"We're looking for a three bedroom between 2,500 and 3,000 square feet. We want to find a place in the 10028 or 10128 zip codes." When was the last time any buying conversation started like that? Unfortunately, many real estate sites aren't bridging that gap between what their database can spit out and the way an agent actually sells a home, taking in the real needs of their buyer. "We're looking for a three bedroom in a good area with good schools and two dogs who have a lot of energy. Fun places to go on the weekends are important, but we're looking for all that within a 30-minute commute of my new job." Sound more familiar? Conversations like these – and the fabric of our communities – are the reasons why properties are built and priced they are. It's also why people are way less willing to compromise on the quality of their neighborhood and schools than they are on price (according to the NAR Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers).

Real Estate Technology: Ready for “Make an Offer” for Real Estate?
RealtyBid.com, one of the top real estate auction firms in the nation and a CoreLogic company, has created an online offer generation capability for real estate brokers and agents. The idea was born out of RealtyBid's success in the REO space. Having successfully sold over 30,000 homes exclusively online, many real estate brokers asked for a way to use the RealtyBid online sales system – but in a non-auction format. Most brokers like the concept of online offers and online bidding. However, being very image conscious, they have been reluctant to embrace the technology because auctions in the marketplace typically imply a distressed property and that can give a negative connotation to buyers. In response to these concerns, RealtyBid created a hybrid program called the RealtyBid Make An Offer System. It allows a broker to use RealtyBid's technology for generating online offers within their own website, protecting and enhancing their brand in the process.

Give Prospects a Nudge With The New Real Estate Productivity Web App
This article comes to us from the Showing Suite blog: Real estate technology consulting firm 1000Watt Consulting recently released Nudge, a new web-based real estate productivity application designed to show off a real estate agent's knowledge with widgets, and act as a "call to action" for prospective clients. Where you would normally show charts and graphs with various statistics of how the housing market is doing, Nudge offers a clean, simplified way of presenting data to your prospects. "Nudge was born from the notion that agents could use something to cut through the noise and connect with consumers viscerally, almost emotionally, in their marketing," Said 1000Watt's Marc Davidson. "We wanted to create something different, clear and beautiful."

Just Your Friendly Neighborhood Robots
This week, we had the opportunity to take a look at a hip company that's doing exciting things with neighborhood search: Robot Workshop. Their product is beautifully simple, so buckle up for a fast review. Neighborhood Search for Facebook or WebsiteThe Robot Workshop neighborhood search technology can live on an agent or broker's Facebook page or website. Let's look at http://www.facebook.com/AlvaradoGroup as an example. Here's how the functionality works: 1. From the sidebar, select "Neighborhoods"

Real Estate Technology: The Internet Has Staying Power
Overall, the Internet has surpassed every other resource in terms of consumer adoption. Today, more than 1.3 billion people worldwide over the age of 16 are connecting to the Internet through wired and wireless connections. This new form of communication is used for everything and accounts for about 25% of consumer media consumption time. Reflecting on this, I can’t resist sharing a bit about the company I work for.  

3 Tips For Making Your Website More Readable
Guest contributor Elan from Ifbyphone says: Ifbyphone is a voice based marketing automation company. We help businesses manage, measure, and automate voice communications. For example, you can use Ifbyphone's software to measure which marketing efforts generate the most phone leads, manage how you distribute "hot leads" to sales reps, and automate follow-up communications. We are now on at least the 7th iteration of our website since 2005. Getting better at explaining our value proposition on our website has helped us grow to over 50 employees, earn the trust of thousands of customers, and raise millions of dollars from investors.