Thanks to WSJ blogger Sara Max for the coverage and for the links back to the PFRE blog. Sarah points out a recent post on the SeattleBubble.com blog that has a bunch of hilarious actual photos right off the MLS.

The photo to the right is an example I use in the Realtor photo guide as an example of an “unstaged” property that we sold in 2006 on the Eastside of Seattle. The property had some renters in it and this was the actual bedroom of one of the renters. There is actually a bed under that pile of stuff! This guys mother never taught him to clean up his room!  We didn’t stage this property.

We give away this guide for anyone to use in promoting the cause of good real estate photography. Feel free to hand it out to your potential clients or let people download it from your site. The text and photos are available to download if you’d like to rewrite or modify it. The idea is to educate everyone involved in real estate that photography is an important part of marketing.

So just so you know that if I’m wacky I’m not the only one, I want to pass on a quote from John Quarles who is a Birmingham, Alabama real estate agent. John is not your average real estate agent, he is an accomplished photographer and understands it’s place in online marketing. John does his own real estate video.

John says:

“I am not sure how true this is, but there is an ad on page 19 of this months Realtor Mag by smarteragent.com that claims by 2013 mobile phones will take over personal computers as the way most people access information. I was in a CE class last week and most of all the agents had ipads, iphones or blackberrys. Slideshow pro is now coming out with new scripts that are for iPads and iPhones soon. Looks like to stay competitive, real estate photographers need to start now planing on these changes. I plan on updating all my web sites as soon as slideshowpro comes out with the new scripts. I am also going to start going to HTML5 at the end of the year with video players that have fall back options so I can have my tours play on all plate forms.”

At this point in history, it doesn’t make any difference whether you think this development is good or bad or totally outrageous. It’s happening and you ignore the trend at your peril.

Some more data is a traffic chart below from Google Analytics that shows how many of you folks (about 33% agents and 67% real estate photographers are hitting the PFRE blog with iPads. Currently there is slightly more iPhones hitting the blog but they aren’t increasing at the rate iPad traffic is.

Here is a A useful link, thanks to Karl Hoelscher, if you want to see what your site or tours looks like on the  iPad.

My primary motivation for purchasing an iPad was to see how my e-books that I distribute in PDF form look on the iPad and how PDF files are handled on the iPad in general and to decide if I need to distribute my e-books in ePub (the standard iPad e-book format) in addition to PDF format.

I have to say that so far I am generally pleased by how the iPad handles PDF files. The free iBooks app that comes with the iPad handles PDFs nicely except for the fact that hypertext links in PDFs don’t work like they do on a Mac or PC. You can easily get PDFs into the iBooks App via e-mail or by dragging the PDF into iTunes on your Mac or PC.

The native ePub format on the iPad has some nice benefits:

1. The ePub format supports Hypertext links.
2. The ePub format has a nice table of contents that you can click on a chapter name and go straight to that chapter.
3. The text flow of ePub documents is easy to read. You can change the font size and font.

I’m thinking that in the future I will move towards distributing e-books in both PDF and ePub format since the ePub format on the iPad has many nice features.

I was dismayed to see that the PFRE blog has some wacky behavior when viewed on the iPad. The little ad JPEGs along the top don’t work very well and the Woopra link doesn’t work right on the iPad. Looks like I have some work to do to get things presentable for iPad users. I think it is time to start paying attention to how sites look on the iPad. More and more of your traffic is going to be coming from these devices.

LiveBooks is a high-end web hosting company for photographers and other creative business people. I don’t think you can do much better than a LiveBooks website. One interior photographer that you may know that has a LiveBooks website is Scott Hargis. I think Scott’s website is a great example of how Flash can be used to create a great portfolio viewing experience. On a PC or Mac the site delivers a great experience, yet if you hit his site with an iPhone or iPad you don’t get a little blue rectangle; you can still see his portfolio.

The best part of having a LiveBooks site is that you have to do little or nothing to make your site accessible to devices that don’t support Flash. After LiveBooks did their upgrade with this functionality it just works. LiveBooks creates a separate site for iPhone users and a separate site for iPad users in addition to the main Flash site. Since there a million iPads a month being sold this issue is not likely to be going away soon so it will become more important for photographers as time goes by.

Here is the marketing problem that real estate photographers have:

1. Your potential clients are listing agents in a very specific geographic area
2. You don’t want to spend time an energy promoting your services to anyone but those that are likely clients.
3. You have to figure out what is the most effective way to communicate (market) these specific people who will decide to use your services.

Here are two fundamental marketing facts you should center your marketing plan around:

1. You can make a complete, detailed list with names, phone numbers, office addresses, brokerage, e-mail address for every one of your potential clients. That is, you can make a list all the listing agents that list homes in the geographic area you want to work in. You can sit down with your browser and make this list in a few hours if you know the company names of the major brokerages in your area.
2. Some listing agents are more likely clients that others. The most successful listing agents are have the best chance of becoming your client.

So depending on the size of the city you live in, before you start your marketing, you can make a list of  50 to 200 specific individuals that you want to convince to use your services. A big part of getting your message to these people is learning what is the most effective way to communicate with these particular people. Is social networking an effective way to communicate with these people? It can be for some of them, but it’s not a “silver bullet”. I think you will find that to be successful you need to use a whole variety of marketing approaches:

1. Personal meetings with listing agents
2. Flyers or jumbo post cards left in agents mail slots
3. E-mail campaigns to listing agents
4. Direct phone calls to listing agents
5. Presentations to real estate office meetings
6. FaceBook and Twitter interactions

Here are two facts that should guide your marketing to successful agents:

1. Personal contact is the most powerful marketing approach. All the non-personal approaches are just methods to work towards a personal contact. Top agents are gregarious people. They live for personal contact. This is why they are good at sales and helping people.
2. The majority of successful listing agents have been in the business a long time (15+ years). Because it takes a while to build all the necessary relationships in real estate. This means most started their careers in real estate before the web became the primary means of promoting listings. And before social media was even invented. So they may not be up on these new communication techniques.

The bottom line on using social media to promote your real estate business is that yes, it can be helpful as a communication technique. It’s just another way to work towards a personal contact with listing agents that can result in business. Some listing agents on your list will use it while some will not. But, it’s not a starting place. Real estate photography is one of the few businesses where you know exactly who needs your services and getting your message to those people is a matter of connecting with those people and communicating with them whatever the most effective means is.

What experiences do readers have with using social media to connect with real estate photography clients?

Russ gave the WSJ permission to run the photo as long as he got “credit”. Seeing the way the Wall Street Journal “gave him credit” really gets me worked up! Come on! On a web site just putting Russ’s name in text is like no credit at all. Does just a name “Russ Freeman” by itself mean anything. No, how difficult is it to link to Russ’s web site? It’s trivial, and a link from a page rank 8 web site like WSJ.com is worth hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars in traffic, referrals and potential business.

This really pisses me off! This is the same WSJ.com owned by News Corp who’s CEO Rupert Murdock doesn’t want Google indexing his sites and “stealing” his content. It works both way’s Rupert! You are “stealing” people’s content (photographs) without any payment of any kind. At least link to the photographer’s site that created the content that you are using for free.

I happen to be extra sensitive about this issue of newspaper sites being adverse to linking to external sites in the text of their articles because my neighbor Burt and I have gotten some media coverage recently because we made our HOA back down on it’s solar power restrictions. In the process, I’ve been battling my local newspaper site StatesmanJournal.com and the USAToday.com who both recently ran articles on our solar crusade but were reluctant to link to our neighborhood site where we promote our project. To get our local newspaper to link to our neighborhood site I had to argue with the digital editor of the paper and finally got her to put a link to our site, but it was NOT in the text of the article, it was external to the article and hard to find.

I was not as successful with the USAToday article that referred to our renewable energy efforts. Partially because I didn’t know in advance that they were running the article and in large part because I had my permission and linking discussion with the reporter that wrote the story and not the digital editor. I also was not pushy enough. You have to really get in their face to get their attention. No link, no permission!

So here is the bottom line: Whenever you give a newspaper site, or other site for that matter, permission to use a photo or do a story about you or your business it is important that you get hold of the managing editor or digital editor and insist that permission for using your information is contingent on a link to your site in the text of the article. As I found out with USAToday, a discussion with the reporter is NOT enough. You have to make it clear that no link in the text, no permission! They are basically in the mind set to take advantage of you and use your photos and information for free, on their terms. And for some reason, which I don’t totally understand, newspapers have and aversion to linking to anything but their own site. It’s like they don’t understand that hyperlinks are a form of payment. Newspapers are used to taking advantage of the fact that everyone wants their name or photograph in the paper. Don’t let them get by with this nonsense!

One thing I noticed early on was that real estate photographer Bill Bayless (realestatephotographer.us) was very hard to beat in the Google ranking of the term “real estate photographer”. It wasn’t a problem beating him in ranking of the term “real estate photography”. The obvious thing that stood out was Bill’s domain name that had the search term in it that I was trying to beat him at. Bill and I talked a lot about our relative ranking. I found out that he’d had the domain and real estate photography site much longer than I’d had PhotographyForRealEstate.net. The thing that always amazed me was that for a couple of years he would always rank above me even though his content was almost static. I’d be doing 4 or 5 posts a week and still be below Bill.

This experience demonstrated to me that Google values sites very high for a search term if that search term is contained in the domain name. I finally got higher ranking for “real estate photographer” than Bill gets but it took me several years of continuously fresh content that had those key words in it.

Here are two other examples of the power of having your search term in your domain name;

1. TexasRealEstatePhotography.com – My friend Carson Coots also noticed the importance of having your search term in your domain name. This lead him to get TexasRealEstatePhotography.com not long ago. His new site immediately pop up just below the PFRE blog in Google ranking for “real estate photography” even though I had over 4 years of content. Good show Carson!
2. Realestatephotography.org – This Orange County real estate photography site appeared quite recently and immediately had ranking of 3 or 4 for the search term “real estate photography” even though it has a relatively small amount of content

It’s not hard to see the pattern here! The most powerful thing you can do to get top Google ranking for a given search term is get a domain name with the search term in it. Having the search term in the domain name is clearly more important than having fresh content, but it appears to be less important than the length of time a site is in google’s index.

As a real estate photographer you can use this fact to focus your ranking for searches in your local area where you work. For example SeattleRealEstatePhotographer.com, PortlandRealEstatePhotographer.com or in general YourcityRealEstatePhotographer.com will instantly get you at the top of searches for real estate photographers in your local area. As more and more people learn how to use google to find what they want this will be more important.

1. Your regular e-mail provider (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Comcast, etc) has restrictions designed to prevent Spammers from using their services. Here’s a good example of the Gmail limitations. In general, you will risk loosing your e-mail account if you do marketing with it.
2. When you are sending agents e-mail you want to provide a “opt-out” link so those that choose not to remain on your list can click on a link and automatically be taken off your list. Doing this yourself is non-trivial. Doing this with e-mail services is very easy.
3. It’s not very easy to build good looking HTML formated e-mail normal e-mail interfaces but e-mail marketing sites have nice HTML e-mail editors.
4. I is nice to know how many recipients of your e-mail piece open the e-mail and how many click on links in the e-mail. E-mail marketing sites provide these kind of statistics.

OK, I’m sure you are convinced. What are some choices for e-mail marketing services:

1. MailChimp.com: Store up to 500 clients on your list and send up to 3000 e-mail a month for free.
2. VerticalResponse.com: Pay for only the e-mails you send.
3. ConstantContact.com:  $15/mo for up to 500 e-mails.
4. Aweber.com: Many sophisticated features. $19/mo for 500 subscribers.

I’m sure readers can suggest other e-mail marketing services that they use and like.

Here’s the whole story told by the listing agent Jerry Barbanell. “The buyer came with his agent to see the home, beach front property, you know buyers, well not really sure, but was interested. It is now Saturday morning, at the buyer is at home, as he sits down with his coffee, opens up the Real Estate section of the morning newspaper, and BAM , here is a full page photo of the home he wants to purchase, the one he saw only a day prior. WOW, he thinks to himself, this home look’s fantastic, with this photo, that “darn” listing agent is going to sell this home this weekend. To which, he pick’s up his cell phone call’s his agent, “make an offer”, right now before anyone else see’s this home. Jerry sold the home 30 minutes into the Saturday morning edition of Orange County Register. Did our twilight image sell this home, well Jerry thinks so. Great Photography, does sell homes, just ask one of our satisfied Realtor clients, Jerry.”

Here is Rusty’s description of the technical details of this shot: “The image is a twilight “blue zone” photo, as the base image, taken during a 10 minute window after sunset,  then compiled with about 10 photoshop layers of individual flashed images with a studio strobe, being fired every ten feet while my assistant walked down the street, held the flash, fired, walked out of camera another ten feet, fired.  Photoshop was blended layers by our staff wizard RAF, into the image seen.  Camera was a Canon 5D, base image set on AV, aperture f/18, ISO400, the flash cycle images, manual 200, ISO 400, aperture f/7.1, lens was a Canon 16-35m F/2.8.  This was a fast image, not much done to the base image, a few lights are blown out on the garage, but overall the image is good quality for a brochure or front page of the Real Estate Section of our local county newspaper, Orange County Register.  This is our typical MLS Twilight image.

Thanks Rusty for the story. Keep up the good work! Sounds like you’ve turned Jerry into a regular customer.

This approach of area real estate sites run by photographers was a new one for me since I’ve not seen it done in the real estate markets that I’m familiar with. In the Seattle area buyers and sellers primarily frequent the big broker sites (Windermere, John L Scott, Coldwellbanker etc.) and increasingly sites like Zillow and Redfin that are beginning to be very high traffic sites. I’ve talked about how marketing directly to home sellers is a great approach because they will insist that agents use good photography if they understand how important it is. But the trick is to reach the home sellers without alienating the agents involved. An area web site does that nicely.

The underlying idea of an area listing site is simple and makes perfect sense:

1. Provide great tours for the homes you photograph.
2. Put all those tours on a web site along with all the other listings in the area and make it searchable.
3. Design the site to sell the idea that great photography and great tours are important in selling homes.
4. Promote the site to home sellers and agents by getting a high search ranking, yard signs, door handle flyers and rider signs.
5. The result is as John Quarles says: “Sellers who visit the site make the agents call me“. “About half my jobs each month come from new agents this way”

I think it is worth noting some of the details about John’s site because he’s been running it for a long while and it has been quite successful. John says:

Up until last year I was averaging [photographing] around 1000 homes a year and had a full time photoshop employee and writer for the brochures. Since the “depression” last year, I work alone now, but still have jobs everyday.

My site is get high Google ranking for the term “birmingham alabama homes for sale” and normally comes up on the first page. Sellers who visit the sites make the agents call me. But, I have also had some of the areas top producers call me for years.

I started the site a long time ago because I was having trouble getting agents like everyone else, even though I was an agent. It helped get started because I was giving agents a little more that the other “shoot and scoot” guys in town. After a few agents had their homes sold off the site, the word spread and other agents started calling.

So, the site serves two purposes, it gives the agents more marketing for their money and gets sellers to have there agents call me.

If I were starting all over again, I would build a site and buy Google ad-words to offer a little more than the other guy and pick up some agents for sellers looking at the site.

Whoa, 1,000 shoots a year makes me tired thinking about it! It’s hard to argue with this kind of success. Undoubtedly this approach will work in any area where you can get on the first page of a google search for the search term “your-area-name homes for sale”. Home searching and selling is now completely an online activity so your success is dependent on getting high search ranking.

Dan Abraham in the Prince George, BC area is just launching his site with the goal of doing very much the same thing as John has done; get the attention of the home sellers and agents in the area and give sellers and agents a little more than the competition.

I’d like to thank John and Dan for sharing their marketing approach with us all. I’m sure many others can put these ideas to good use in their local areas.