12 Productivity Hacks That Automate Real Estate Lead Gen And Social Marketing
These hacks will literally shave hours off of your marketing. You can automate everything from finding FSBO's to wishing people a happy birthday on Facebook
Do you like cool little marketing hacks? I know I do! The list that follows should shave at least an hour off of your social media and online lead gen activities daily. Be sure to let me know in the comments if you find any of these helpful for you.
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FREE PDF OF MY 12 PRODUCTIVITY HACKS
Looking for those FSBO’s that aren’t in your MLS? You can set up an automated query with IFTTT to scan Craigslist for you! It will send you an email every time a new property gets listed near you. To do this, you simply select a “Craigslist Search” as your yrigger, and an email as the action.
When setting up the Craigslist search, IFTTT will ask you for the URL. You’ll need to go to your local Craigslist and type in: “For Sale By Owner” in the housing section. Then paste the URL after you search into the IFTTT field. You’ll then be notified by email every time there is a new listing.
Depending on the location, you can set up that house for a drop by meeting, mailing campaign, or another marketing plan. You can even use our expired listing letters to market to these houses. The automated discovery tactic lets you focus on marketing and not spend your time digging around looking for FSBO’s.
The biggest failure of mine early on was not promoting my Youtube content. “If you build it, they will come” is a great movie line. But it doesn’t work in the online marketing world. This little automation helps you remember to share your video even when you’re in a hurry! You can preprogram the tweet with hashtags and more. I find it useful for getting a few views on my videos before promoting them elsewhere.
Sharing your videos on Facebook is a great way to benefit your Facebook Page and Youtube videos! You can engage your fans on Facebook while getting more views on your Youtube videos. The whole point of getting Youtube videos with a lot of views on them is so that they rank higher on searches. When doing video marketing, try to make evergreen videos. These videos should be reviews of neighborhoods and tours of local attractions. You can even make videos about your team. Evergreen videos are a lot easier to market online. Individual house videos have such a short lifespan that their use is very limited.
One of the most underutilized things in internet marketing is commenting. The tactic was all the rage back in the early 2000’s but has since fallen out of fashion. Now, I’m not telling you to go build 10,000 comments to your blog. That would be SPAM.
But there are probably 10 local blog and news websites in your community that have a decent readership. What if you were the first person to comment on every single one of those articles? Well, you’d get over 100 visits to your website each month from each of those websites. I know this for a fact, because I practice it on several websites in the real estate community. This tactic is especially useful if you are new to real estate or just thinking of becoming a real estate agent. The comments let you build up authority a lot faster than other methods of marketing.
Here’s how you automate the process:
You need to find the RSS feed for the website. The RSS feed is usually: easyagentpro.wpengine.com/feed
Paste that in the feed application inside of IFTTT
Make the action “Send an Email through Gmail.”
Send an email to yourself saying: “Go Comment On [Title]”
If you practice this regularly for 1 month, you will see great results. People will start to find your brand and website. If you have any type of lead capture installed, you will capture leads from these people. Contact me ([email protected]) if you’re interested in one of our sites optimized for capturing leads from this type of traffic.
When doing real estate social media, you need to post your own articles to your profiles. But this can be tedious and you’re liable to forget. There are several plugins for WordPress that will also automatically post your new blogs to social media. Unfortunately, they REALLY slow down your website. I suggest using IFTTT to do this because it has zero affect on site speed. Simply connect these three different social networks to your IFTTT account. And then connect your WordPress website. If you don’t have WordPress, you can use the feed action like in the previous item. And you can accomplish the same effect.
You’ll find that this is a great way to automate posting to social media. Now, you just have to worry about finding ways to engage with your audience. I find that it’s best to spend your time engaging with people and leave the tedious posting to automation.
Sometimes, it’s the little things that make life easier! This IFTTT recipe updates your Facebook profile image every time you change your image on Twitter. You can easily keep things unified across your networks and save time.
Are you struggling to find backlink opportunities for your real estate website? Check out what the competition is doing! You’ll then be able to reverse engineer their success. And build relationships with people backlinking to your competition.
How you can do it:
Research your competitors’ website(s) on Moz’s Open Site Explorer.
Click on the “Just Discovered” tab
Copy the URL of that page
Then paste that URL on Page2RSS.com. Now, you have an RSS Feed that we can use in IFTTT that is updated every time someone links to your competition.
What to do on IFTTT:
THIS Channel: Feed and paste the RSS URL you just made
THAT Channel: Send an email to yourself through Gmail
HARO (Help A Reporter Out) is always looking for Realtors for interview requests. However, you have to manually open 3 emails a day. Dig through the long list of requests to find out if there is a Realtor request today. That’s a lot of work! This will automate the process for you. Thus, letting you spend your time writing great responses to the HARO inquires.
Sign up for email alerts from HARO and ProfNet. Have them sent to a Gmail address.
CREATE A RECIPE ON IFTTT:
THIS Channel: Gmail – New Email from Search
Search For: any relevant industry or brand term you choose
THAT Channel: Email; Repeat for each relevant term
Now, you no longer have to search through these tedious emails! You’ll get emailed instantly something important pops up in your inbox.
Google+ is notorious for not allowing apps to integrate with it. And sadly, they don’t work with IFTTT. But, you can setup your Facebook Pages to automatically share posts to Buffer. And then have your Buffer account post only to Google Plus. This means you can share the same content you share on Facebook with zero extra work!
Forgetting birthdays? Not anymore! You’ll instantly wish Happy Birthday to people with this formula! It works like a charm.
Will this help you automate your marketing systems? If you’re looking for tips on How to Get Started in Real Estate, this article should definitely help you get off the ground. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
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