Still reading - thanks for the update.  Sherry

I hope this isn't too elementary for you and for some of the others, but I think it's important to take baby steps at the outset. It does become very powerful.

Hope to keep you with me, Sherry. More to come.

It's not elementary at all; many of us are still getting our legs under us. The proliferation of tools on the internet and their practical application to the real estate professional aspiring to online success is a useful and much needed topic.

I hope to see many more posts like these in the future.  It's clear to me that you have valuable information to share. 

Now THIS is what I'm talkin' bout! Is Mr. Hyde letting Dr. Jekyll out for good behavior?

Joe thank you for sharing; as Brian stated you do have alot to offer to the network and it is appreciated.

Joe,

I like your ideas but before everyone runs out and spends time and money on a variety of diversified marketing ideas they need to get their core marketing strategies top notch. For instance, look at your website. It looks good but it is in need of serious optimisation and instead of working on it your tagging photos. Not that Flickr is a bad idea but we must set priorities and reach those goals before we lose track of what it is we are trying to accomplish.

I am trying to accomplish what should be the goal for everyone which is acquiring new clients. New clients, at least 70-80% of them, go to a search engine and type in "local town real estate". Once we have done everything possible to accomplish that then these other ideas start to look even better.

Greg,

Thanks for the advice. I'm aware that my site needs work on optimization. As you can see from it, we're working on a ton of things. We're also working on a redesign and preparing for optimiziation.

Acquiring clients (in our case Web site visitors) on the strength of content / knowledge means putting aside a short-term focus on acquiring clients.

It makes no sense for my site to drive a ton of traffic that we can't satisfy. The content has to be there or we just hurt ourselves. It would be like running your grand opening with 5% of your inentory in place.

SEO guys want you to prioritize SEO without much underwtanding of your business strategy.

Without having a good optiimization strategy we're growing traffic well, and drawing over 26,000 unique visitors a month, bringing them back for repeat visits and serving up nearly 700,000 page views a month. In addition, we have significant traffic to our content at Flickr and YouTube and to our RSS feeds.

THis looks like some great stuff - and definately not too elementary. I will need to start from your first post and read from there. I only have a Flickr account to manage all my photos, so I can access them regardless of which computer Im on. Thats it. I guess I should "maximize" the potential. Ok. Will do.

Mariana,

You've identified one of the real benefits of Flickr that I haven't touched on since I take it for granted. Seeing your comment made me think that I may be taking too much for granted. Thanks for calling attention to this.

I'd recommend setting up a second Flickr account for social "soft-sell" purposes.

That enables you to use your existing account for listing photos. If you're sending anyone there, they expect to be sold, so it's not intrusie.

Your new account should be optimized from the start for soft-sell informational purposes only, and to draw people in who are interested in your area but may have no interest in buying or selling real estate.

Eventually they will be buying or selling. In the meantime, you may have become their Flickr friend. People form amazingly strong bonds with total strangers through Flickr. Who will those people call when it's time to move? 

Really excellent stuff, Joe. I really appreciate how you've taken the time to spell everything out for us. Thank you!

Thanks, Rich.

It gets a lot more powerful as I go further into it. Please stay tuned.

Send people to my Flickr account? I have never done that... I guess I just use it like a personal storage facility. Ok, I REALLY needs to look into this more.

Mariana,

If you work this game right, Flickr will send a ton of traffic to your Flickr photos - and then to you.

Even better, if you've done Flickr right, those mighty search engines will drive traffic to your Flickr account and through it to you.

I'm getting ahead of my topics, but since you're already there on your existing account, start ading titles, descriptions and Flickr tags that are relevant to your photos and you'll watch your views go up quickly. Every title, description and tag should be purely factual, and none of it should be about you.

More, later.

I liked this post, Joe. I have used Kodak for saving pics, emailing parts of the gallery, setting up galleries for client pics, etc. but this seems to be a better option. On my way to check this out, and review your earlier posts too. Thanks for sharing all the details and helpful information.

Jeff

Never used Flickr before. Will have to try it out and tell our agents about it. Thanks!

Why are you recycling a post that was submitted last week.  I am new to the network and thus claim ignorance, but my guess is that activerain will allow contributors to re-post a story as many times as the blogger cares likes.  Perhaps this is true of all blogs/social networks--I don't know--as I said I'm new.  If this is the case, this practice certainly waters down the flavor....(btw, if this is a common practice I'm sorry for picking on you YO!  I happen to like your style)...