It's time for the 2nd feature of blogs from our Blog Roll: The future of real estate marketing by Joel Burslem. Joel works in marketing at an independent brokerage in Oregon and cover developments in the real estate industry.

One of the best things about Future of Real Estate Marketing is the great news coverage. Joel stays on top of new product and service launches as well as industry trends and tells it the way he sees it.

Today he has a great post about pay-per-click research and research tools like spyfu.com and keycompete.com .

You thought that your keyword lists and bids were secret and only available to you?

In the Internet marketing world nothing is secret.

We can see where you advertise, what your ads look like, estimate your spend, your average cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) and your average cost-per-click (CPC).

If your company has a partner or affiliate program we can even identify many of your best partners and recruit them on behalf of your competitor.

Nothing is secret on the web and it's easy to copy or get copied.

I have been a huge fan of Velocityscape and their data mining capabilities for competitive research. Everybody can get a free beta account at their new service spyfu.com. Register for free and type in your competitor's domain. You will get a decent sample of their keyword list and how much they are spending on the pay-per-click engines.

Head over to Future of Real Estate Marketing for the full scope and don't forget to add the blog to your blog reader.

Happy Holidays To You And Your Family! See you next week!

All the best.

-Ola

Posted by Ola Edvardsson at 09:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

The 22nd edition of the Carnival of Real Estate is now live over at the official Active Rain blog. Head over and take a look! Lots of great content to read!

What is the carnival of real estate? It's a "best of" collection of blog entries in the real estate blog world for a particular week. Every week there is a new host that reads through all submitted posts and pick his or her favorites.

Two of my personal favorite posts this week were:

1. Elizabeth Weintraub who guest blogged at The Real Estate Tomato with her top 10 list of What Sellers & Buyers Expect From a Real Estate Agent

2. Mary McKnight from RSS Pieces on How to write a blog that generates leads (pay close attention to Mary's headlines and blog titles - she is a great copywriter).

Next week's host is the Seattle Real Estate Professionals.

Best,
Ola

P.S. Big thanks to Pat Kitano over at Transparent Real Estate for mentioning us in his post "Three new blogs to watch"! If you don't already read Pat's blog just run over there and add him to your blog reader. He always has something interesting to say....

Posted by Ola Edvardsson at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There are a lot of great real estate blogs out there. I will be featuring different blogs on our blog roll as we go along. One of my favorites is Transparent Real Estate by Pat Kitano.

Pat says: "It's our mission to provide a bird's eye view on how the new transparency will change the real estate game for the benefit of society. We focus on business strategy, new business models, technology and innovative real estate marketing for the real estate community."

He does an excellent job analyzing how the online real estate industry is changing and what new companies are doing.

Today he has a great story covering the acquisition of Web design service Adaptive Real Estate Services (ARES) by classified site startup Edgeio. Why did they buy it? Because ARES have a network of local brokers providing IDX feeds into an integrated data solution. Simply put: Edgeio can now incorporate almost 70% of all MLS listings nationwide into their search result. Depending on the price it might turn out to be a smart acquisition.

If you don't already subscribe to Transparent Real Estate I urge you to. It's essential reading for anyone with an interest in the real estate industry.

All the best.

-Ola

Posted by Ola Edvardsson at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)