The MBL Surfer program is a neat little program which will allow you to gain traffic in two ways. Obviously, there are some differences in the types of traffic so we will discuss those further. With MBL Surfer, you can gain large amounts of traffic on a regular basis and you can gain targeted traffic - let’s dive in to the fun part of the program.

Regular, Untargeted Traffic to your Blog

Simply by going to the MBL Surfer “Add Blog” webpage, you can add your blog (or blogs) into the form absolutely free. This will get free traffic to your blog, which will ultimately have the appearance of being more popular. Now, keep in mind, that you MUST have MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, or Bumpzee on your blog to take advantage of this offer.  If you do not have one of these, I recommend MyBlogLog for Real Estate Professionals for two reasons:

1. It is easy to use so you should not have any problems navigating
2. Most Real Estate professionals that have one of the above services are using MyBlogLog thus making it a better possibility of being seen by potential referring agents

If you go to MBL Surfer website and add your blog(s), you will have the ability ot be added to a mailing list which will include product updates, which includes the RELEASE of this program! I am very excited about this because the program itself has some very unique possibilities and the price is EXCELLENT!

Getting Extremely Targeted Traffic to your Blog

Whenever you go to someone else’s blog and you both have a service enabled such as MyBlogLog, Blog Catalog, or Bumpzee, it will show your picture on their blog, which links back to your account and your blog(s). When you visit another blog that has this enabled, you will generally get a few people to click over to view your blog - ESPECIALLY the blogs which are a little slower and do not get as much traffic. Well, if you were to visit Jane and John Doe’s Blog who live in your market area and they see you visited their blog, guess who they are going to be checking out. What about their friends and family who frequent their blog?

As you can see, there is a lot of power in just VISITING other people’s blogs when blog networks are in place. As real estate professionals, we do not have a lot of time and while we may occasionally check out another blog “for fun”, we generally can only do one or two here and there.

This program will change that for the people who are ABLE to buy it - yes, I said able! MBL Surfer will only be available to 1000 people at any time!

Think about this:
You go to MyBlogLog, sign in, and find a community that is local to you. Grab a list of a couple hundred blogs. Import them into the MBL Surfer and let it run. Come back in an hour, shut down the program, and do something else (note the program can run in the background while doing other things and it is okay to let it run as long as you want). The next morning, you have 20 new comments on your blog and 3 property inquiries.

Think that is out of the question? A fellow Realtor® did just that! He collected 193 blogs that were in his general market area, let the program run for about 40 minutes while he was at lunch. Shut the program out and went home early because he had nothing else to do. Came back the next day and responded to comments on his blog and followed up with three potential clients. 2 weeks later - he is in escrow waiting to close one. Joe Ramsey was one of the program testers on the Alpha release of the software which was also a little “buggy” so imagine what you could do with a fully functional version.

I plan on utilizing this software almost immediately for numerous blogs and suggest you at least take a look at it when it is released next week!

How many of your clients that found you online actually searched for your name? Probably none of them, or very few anyways. Unless you are a top-dog agent in your area and everyone knows your name, the chances for someone doing a search on your name are very slim. When you post a comment on a blog, it asks you for your Name, Email, Website, and comment. Most people will put there actual name in the “Name” field, ultimately creating a link that references their name instead of something useful.

This was outlined in my Realty Blogging Basics Book, which was released late last year, but I thought it to be useful information to share with you now.

When you post a comment to a blog that asks for your website and name, why not put your name as “Your City Real Estate” or “Search Your City MLS”? This will effectively give you some “link juice” on your site for the term you put in as your name because now you will have a link that says “Your City Real Estate” pointing to your site instead of “Your Name” pointing to your site.

Make sure you get specific on your terms though - you don’t want to be trying to compete for terms like “MLS” or “Real Estate” - get specific to get the best “link juice” for your area.

Well, my wheels are always turning so I thought of a few interesting ideas for making listings stand out in the MLS to agents and get them shown more, because after all, the power IS in the numbers, especially with the way market conditions are in many areas right now.  Would you be more likely to view a property that had a $500 selling bonus or one that had a free cruise to the selling agent?

My wife and I recently started an online travel business - see our website at Dando Travel. We get paid commissions on everything booked through our site so of course i thought, how can we use this to our advantage and cross-promote our businesses? The answer came to me quite easily.  Real Estate agents are not any different than everyone else - everyone loves to travel. Whether it is a weekend getaway or week-long cruise, everyone enjoys getting away from time to time.

So, now that we have a plan to get our listings shown, how do we implement it and give agents free cruises when they sell our listings?
In the listing agreement, we do the same thing we would if we had the seller paying a cash bonus. We add $500, $1000, etc. to the listing agreement for a “selling agent incentive”. Then, at closing, this money is put into our operating account as an account payable. In order to comply with cruise regulations, the selling agent must book the trip themselves. To make sure that the bonus is used for the cruise, we pay them the bonus after they have come back from their cruise. On the same token, the money can be set aside indefinitely and can accrue. Say they want a cruise for two that costs $1500 and your bonus is $1000. They sell two of your houses with this bonus and then cash in on their cruise. Once they get back, you write a check to them for $1500 and can either hold the accrual or, based on pre-determined criteria, deposit the rest into your personal account as commission earned.

Keep in mind that if you are not the broker, they will have to be the one that handles this until the bonuses are completed and accounted for.  Check with your broker for the best way to work this to your advantage.

Recap:

1. You get the seller to agree to the “cruise” bonus
2. You advertise the cruise bonus to agents in MLS and agent handouts/flyers
3. Agent books and goes on cruise through your travel portal.
4. You reimburse agent up to agreed upon bonus amount
5. You get paid a commission on the cruise booking
6. You use the incentive to gain more listings

To gain more insight on the travel business, go to the YTB Travel Opportunity site.

When utilizing a campaign for buyers, it is important to remember what type of buyer they are. Internet leads are typically going to be not less than 3 months out and generally closer to 6 months before they are ready to buy, unless a really nice deal/property comes their way. So how do you keep their interest while in the process of waiting for them to buy without taking time away from your “now” leads?

The answer is simple - set them up on a drip email campaign. With AWeber, you can put an easy opt-in form on your website which will allow buyers to sign up to receive special reports, market information, investment opportunities, or you can even set up a “first time buyer” list with information pertinent to first time home buyers.  Wether you use AWeber or another company for your email campaigns, most allow you to have more than one list and you can have different opt-in forms for each.

The main thing to keep in mind is that when a new lead gets on your email campaign, you want to make sure they stay there until they buy - then you can keep up with them on another email campaign that sends out less frequently - this will help you maintain contact with them for as long as you want, and as long as they stay on your list

I recommend setting up weekly emails. You can set the first email to go out immediately when they sign up, and then create other emails that will automatically go out to them every week after. If you have standard emails that you normally send out to potential buyers, it will not be hard at all to copy and paste these emails into the AWeber panel and just pick how many days later to send it.

By utilizing this one easy tool, you can increase your internet lead conversions by as much as 75% on your long term leads. Maintaining contact is the number 1 reason that you are not closing those Internet leads.

The VP, Craig McClelland, brought the news to me at shortly after 10AM on Tuesday morning and by the time the calls came to the franchise owners, it seems that the CEO, Scott Dasher, had already cleaned out his office, which tells me that he waited until the absolute last minute to tell franchise owners.

SimplySOLD was a fast growing franchise real estate company and had the tools which could have really made a difference to the industry but it seems that ActiveTech version 2, the company’s proprietary “back-office” simply took too long to get off the press and money was being spent quicker than it was being made.

The news of SimplySOLD going under did not come as a surprise to me. After they let go their lead programmer and switched franchisees over to a NetAspects (third party provider) system, it was pretty apparent that the “shit had hit the fan”, but nonetheless, there are still franchise owners out there like myself that believed enough in the system to invest our hard-earned money into it through the purchase of a franchise. I believed in the system so much that I actually bought exclusive rights to the entire Gulf Coast of Mississippi just under a year ago.

So where does this leave franchise owners?
The good news is that  SimplySOLD has agreed to let franchise owners continue to use the trademark names, so at least we will not have to attempt to revamp and re-brand our offices. The downside is that there is still all that money spent in franchise fees that most likely will never be recovered.

Franchise owners, with the exception of a few tools, which will be missed but are not mission-critical, can continue to operate as normal, without royalties of course so it will not effect the end-users and agents in the local markets.

While I cannot speak for other franchise owners and their initial response or their future actions, I am currently still debating litigation against the company and its officers. If the company truly is “out of money” the chances of recovery are slim but if I do pursue further action, a judgment may be the way to go. Being that the CEO, Scott Dasher, is a real estate investor as well, I am sure that some of this money could be recovered from some of his investment property sales.

At this point I have not made a decision on my actions. I guess I am still a little upset about the way the whole process was handled as well. I had a lot of respect for Scott, and for him to pull such a cowardly move to have Craig call everyone while he dodged it - that really got under my skin. I understand that you can’t control everything in business and sometimes your dreams can go down quickly, but how you handle yourself in those instances and the choices you make ultimately show your true character. Maybe I am missing something - maybe not.