Strategic Internet marketing has helped Deb Agliano, winner of the Mass. Association of Realtors’ 2008 Best Real Estate Agent Website, propel herself to the head of the pack in online real estate.

Deb’s Web Site - Medford Real Estate Agent
Online since 1995
Web Designer - Deb Agliano
Success Strategy - Personal Branding, Provides Relevant Content and Tools (on her sites and others), Use of Video, Sense of Humor and Personal Connection

 

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Will Rico Interview with Deb Agliano

Will Rico (WR):  Hello everyone!  This is Will Rico welcoming you to another episode of Agent Web Success, your No. 1 opportunity to learn web marketing directly from real estate agents who are having success online.  Today, I am delighted to be speaking with Deb Agliano.  Deb began selling real estate in 1991 when most homes took a year and a half to sell and her family thought she was nuts.  In 1995, Deb, known as Deb On The Web, was the first agent nationwide and ERA to sell a house through the Internet.  She was the 2008 winner of the Best Real Estate Agent Website by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.  She is a GRI Instructor as well as a contributor to the Complete Massachusetts Real Estate Sales exam book that teaches classes about real estate, marketing, and using technology and despite being crazy enough to speak with us today her family has finally called off the men with straitjackets.  Welcome Deb and thank you for joining us.

Deb Agliano (DA):  My pleasure Will.

WR:  Hmm.  So not only have you found success marketing your real estate business online but you’ve actually branded yourself as Deb On The Web, pretty unusual -

DA:  Well, my maiden name no one can still pronounce and my married name has a silent G so I realized when I got into the business I have to find somebody, …some other way to get people to remember who I was, and that’s how Deb On the Web was born.

WR:  (Laughs) Very cool!  Hmm, and the site obviously is debontheweb.com.  Ah - what are the top two or three ways debontheweb.com has helped you with your real estate business?

DA:  Some of it because I am an avid blogger.  I find that by putting things out there both real estate and just in general like, enjoy your gardening. Iit helps me to attract the type of clients that I am looking for.

WR:  Wow! Very, very cool!  So you’re talking about things that are not directly related to buying and selling real estate but things that may be of interest to your, to your clients as well?

DA:  I try to do a mix, I don’t want to seen as just having handled real estate and wanted to be something of interest for people to read as well. I make sure I talk about events that are happening locally, but I …the really one thing that I like about the Internet is it lets me show here’s who I am so that it attracts the type of people that I am going to have fun and enjoy working with.

WR:  So, what do think sets debontheweb.com apart from the typical agent website ?

DA:  Well, at least from my market place, just the fact that I am blogging sets me apart.

WR:  Okay.

DA:  You know, I’ve talked to so many agents about how, how relatively easy it is to start blogging but it is not a huge time commitment, this is certainly a commitment but it seems like many agents just don’t want to get started and I find that’s the really good way because people really feel like they no means have a chance to interview me before they even contact me.  Um, the other thing I find that is being really powerful on the website is video.

WR:  Umm -

DA:  I have designed my website about a year and a half ago and about a year ago I started video taping all of my listings and I am really finding that that’s also bringing a whole another component, of a lot more traffic to the website because of the video marketing.

WR:  Oh wow!  Very cool!  So, the blogging and the video, I definitely want to touch on both of those.  Let me ask you about the video - they are using it for the listings, you know, I also noticed you have an intro, a welcome message on your website and you even have a video in your buzz section there are a few testimonials, there is some clients talking about their experience working for you.  Umm, which of those videos do you think has been the most helpful or is it a mix of all of them?

DA:  It’s definitely a mix of all of them.  I am working on trying to get more video testimonials.  I am going in as “come on just get over it, I’ll write you something nice, I don’t want to be on camera” (laughs)

WR:  (Laughs) -

DA:  –so (Laughs) I am getting a little bit of that -

WR:  Right.

DA:  But I definitely think the welcome video to me it was my way of really trying to say, hi welcome and here is my basic philosophy.  You know, there’s my, I might make my elevator pitch - and I really, I know I kind of said this already but I really wanted to tell people when they come to my website not just what is in the video. This is what I like and this, this attracts you and it sounds like that we may be a good match,  great, and if not, by all means feel free to move onto another agent - and, so that’s from the personal side of you using the video that introduces me on debontheweb.com.  On the marketing sites for the properties, um, I’ve chosen to do, I don’t do a voice-over. I’m not in the video itself because when it’s about my listings I want it to be solely about the listings. I’ve actually talked to some of my clients and got some feedback when I decided a year ago to start doing video for my properties. I asked them what they like or didn’t like and I actually asked them to view a couple of different choices and the feedback I was getting from them is that the video that shows the agent walking outside “and here is the kitchen” (laughs) -

WR:  (Laughs)

DA:    They are kind of groaning saying we want to see the property, we don’t want to keep seeing the agent’s face and kind of the same thing too with the voice-over.  Umm, they’re like, I’ve been asked to go back and watch the video repeatedly of a property I was interested in, if it just had music and I didn’t keep hearing the agent and kind of feel like I was being sold.

WR:  Okay.

DA:  So, I was like, I was really happy to hear that because on my site when I do it, I do the videos myself, its a lot less work for me, I’d hate to go in and do a voice-over or see myself on screen as well.

WR:  Very interesting, and, so the listing videos are effective for you, you’re finding that visitors to your website are watching them and becoming your clients.  It sounds very promising the use of video but it also sounds like a lot of work and I bet a lot of agents are intimidated by the idea of working with video, editing it, uploading it to a website.  Do you have any advice for less technical agents out there who might want to use video but are scared of the process?

DA:  Absolutely.  Ah, if you take a look around there are definitely lots of videographers that are begging for the business, and the prices are, they go anywhere so I have seen it low as $75 up to, $300 or $400 depending on the, production quality and the lens and how far they have to drive, but there definitely are, people out there who are willing to do it for you.  So, absolutely it’s worth in my opinion paying for.  I checked last year my average days on market was 44 and so far since January my average days on market is 22, and I really committed a lot of that to the video.

WR:  Wow! That’s a huge, that’s a huge amount of credit to get (laughs)

DA:  (Laughs)

WR:  Very cool!  Umm - and are there, are there expenses that you also have to pay to host the video or services that you recommend for that type of thing?

DA:  There are a lot of really good websites out there for it and it has gotten so much easier even just in the year that I’ve been doing video it has gotten much easier to host.  There are some great real estate specific sites out there like WellcomeMat -

WR:  Okay.

DA:  Zipvo is another great site, ah, and both allow you to have posted photos free or a page depending on how much service, you know, that he wants.  WellcomeMat has my service too and they actually list videographers in every location - Yeah, so if you’re looking for somebody and don’t know where to start I definitely suggest them.  There is, umm, realeflix is a good one.  There really is an explosion right now of both regular video sites like of course my videos are also on YouTube, Google Video and Yahoo and all the general video websites, but also on the specific real estate sites as well.

WR:  Um, very, very cool!

DA:  Yeah.  There’s a lot of resources out there to help agents spread the word or by video.

WR:  Excellent!  So, we know our listeners caught the ones that you mentioned, they heard wellcome with two Ls, wellcome.com, zipvo -

DA:  Uh, the website, it’s actually WellcomeMat -

WR:  Oh, WellcomeMat, okay.  WellcomeMat with two LLs, so wellcomemat.com, zipvo.com, and I think there is a third one you had in there -

DA:  realeflix

WR:  Can you spell that one?

DA:  Let me double check that -

WR:  (Laughs)

DA:  This is, realeflix.com

WR:  Excellent, excellent!..Well, thank you for sharing those resources with us.  And getting back for a moment to the blogging and, it does, is  blogging to another one of those Internet tasks that sometimes sounds like a lot of work.  Give us a sense of, what frequency you blog and how much time you spend on a daily or weekly basis with adding content to your blog?

DA:  Umm, my goal is to blog a minimum of three times a week.

WR:  Uh-hmm.

DA:  In reality, I’m incredibly busy right now very pleased to say so, so it had to drop down to twice a week, so the goal is three times, minimum is twice a week.  And it depends on the post.  There is some like, I was picking some, went out to the garden last week, picked some vegetables and looked out and said, wow, look at all these vegetables!, from my little, I live in a 4000 square-foot lot -

WR:  Wow!

DA:  (Laughs)  We are talking about a container garden and I’m in Medford, which is five miles North of Boston.

WR:  Uh-hmm.

DA:  So, I’m not in any rural area but I look at what we were able to just harvest in one morning from our little container garden and was still excited I took a picture and blogged about it, it took may be five minutes (laughs).

WR:  Okay.

DA:  So some of them don’t take that long but I also try every month to sit there and do a market analysis of one of the major towns I cover and that is a little more number crunching.  I look at things like absorption rate and number of days on the market and I put the statistics, make a little graph and then do an analysis of it, so that’s a little more time consuming.  Those I would say take me about a half an hour each to do.

WR:  Excellent!  So, you’re spending, anywhere from an hour to a couple of hours may be three hours tops blogging each week?

DA:  I would say Will it’s not even three hours.

WR: Oh wow!

DA:  That’s when I wait for the response I get back from it, it is so worth it.

WR:  That’s really cool and that creates a lot of great content for your website and it’s another one of those things that sets your site apart.  I love on the site you also have the Walk Score and the Commuting Calculator maybe tell us a little bit about the Walk Score?

DA:  Sure.  Um, Walk Score is a website that has gotten very popular recently with just, with the rise of energy cost and people deciding, to be more green, which, you know, I totally support I have been driving a Prius since 2002 -

WR:  (Laughs)

DA:   and I was trying to be as green as possible, and because I do live in a suburb of Boston there are a lot of places, some areas I cover you just will need a car, but there are some areas where you can still get around with just using may be a Zipcar every once in a while and public transportation.  So, because that is that, the possibility I want to show people the areas that they’re thinking of, how walkable those locations are and could they get by maybe with just one car for the family instead of two.

WR:  Very nice and I think, and that all adds up to making your website pretty unique ’cause when you add the combination of that stuff together between the tools like the walk score and the commuting calculator you’ve got the blogging they are doing with the market analyses, the different areas that you cover like Arlington and Malden and Medford and the other towns and you have all the video with the video listings and, you, know, all that really sets the site apart and I think you’d agree one thing the website is not is it is not any other typical kind of agent template website.

DA:  Right, right.  I wanted to be, you know, fun and interactive -

WR:  Uh-hmm

DA:  My philosophy now tells us that everybody the first time when we meet that if we aren’t laughing we are not going to work together -

WR:  (Laughs)

DA:  So, I want the website to be the same way too, yes, I wanted to give good information but I also want them to have them fun while they are on it.

WR:  Very cool!  And what are those things that you’re doing to promote the website?  So you’re doing a lot of great stuff on the website and then in terms of promoting it what do you do?

DA:  Ah, well, my web address is everywhere on everything I do — whether it is about a listing or just about me, whether it’s my newsletter, whether it’s postcards and the print things I do, it’s everywhere.

Also, tied in to some of the local American towns, my blog is picked up by them as well, so I’ve got it out in those places.

I also syndicate part of it on ActiveRain, so I’ll do a blog posting and take part of that and rewrite as much as I can on ActiveRain and will link it over to my blog post, so I really am working hard to make sure that anywhere someone is looking — if is about my area — they will end up seeing me.  I answer questions on Zillow and Trulia and all those again point back to the website and the blog as well.

WR:  All right.  There’s some great ideas there so you’re using ActiveRain to post some content there and get people back to your website, you’re using Trulia and Zillow, you’re actively answering questions.  You’re being picked up, the blog is being picked up by some community websites as well - and the community websites and the area websites that reference to your blog, are you asking them to reference you or how do they find out about your site?

DA:  Well, what I did with American Towns - they actually started reading it and they have said “hey, if you blog about an area, let us know and we will look at your blog and see if we will include it,” and they looked at it and thought I have good content so when I have something that’s not specifically for Medford or when I have something for Medford, it will also go up on their website as well emailed to their entire list.

WR:  Okay.  So, you’re keeping an eye of opportunities where your content can be syndicated elsewhere and taking advantage of those opportunities -

DA:  Right.

WR:  - and it sounds like as well because you’re doing the blogging and because you’re actively adding content to your site it’s easier if you did take those opportunities because you either already have the content or, you’re in a mode of creating the content so it’s easier for you to participate.

DA:  Exactly.

WR:  Very, very nice and what’s your philosophy on SEO?  Is that a big part of your strategy?

DA:  It definitely is.

DA:  One of the things that I’m hearing and I made a concentrated effort about six months ago to try to not just obviously to write to the my potential clients but to have in the more forefront of my mind SEO when I’m doing that -

DA:  - and I’ve definitely noticed a big increase in that since I started trying to optimize my page a little bit better for SEO and started thinking a little bit more about key word and at least having that in the back of my mind, again not writing for the search engines, writing for my audience by keeping in mind a little bit of that search engine component when I do write a blog post.

WR:  Okay.

DA:  So, you’re not writing pages specifically with the intent that you want to get the page index in the search engines but as you’re writing content for your human audience you’re keeping in mind the best practices of where to include your key words in the page and the meta tags and Alt tags and that sort of thing.

DA:  Exactly.   One of the things I wasn’t doing consistently is I was not always putting alt text for photos.  I started doing that and really seeing a nice response from it.

WR:  Excellent!   And one thing that you and I talked about before is that SEO is working for you but you’re not, you’re not obsessing on it, you’re not focusing on getting, the top No.1, 2, or 3 ranking in Google for a specific key word term. You’re just letting it organically be part of your process.

DA:  Exactly.  In my philosophy, and just a business in general I’m first of all never going to be the No. 1 agent in my market because I don’t want to be.  I don’t have a team approach, it’s me and I like to offer to my clients that if you hire me, you get me and I was gonna talk to an assistant or somebody else, it’s always gonna be me so I know what’s going on in your transaction and by doing that I limit the number of clients I will ever take at one time and I just find that for me it just makes my life easier and fun because I’ve got a smaller number of clients to handle but I want to give them exemplary service, so I don’t need to be No. 1 on Google.  I just want to make sure I’m out there, you know, enough that people can easily find me.

WR:  Great.  And I think there’s a couple of real big lessons there for people listening.  One is to set your goals and No. 2 is that you don’t have to be No. 1, 2, or 3 in Google to have success and a lot of times, agents might be working very hard to get to that top 1, 2, or 3 spot not realizing it’s a lot of the other things that you do online such as producing great content having a website that’s unique and really services the customer more than just promotes the accolade of the agent that add to success.  So, in fact your website is generating so many leads for you right now that you told me you’re even giving some of those leads away, is that true?

DA:  Yes, absolutely, it’s really kind of nice because I’m finding too when I ask these people, I am right now, I have limited number of people I will take on at one time so I can give really great service its okay to have another agent contact you.  The feedback that I’m getting after another agent contacts is these particular buyers will say well if Deb recommended you and I see her everywhere then you must be good and I want to work with you.

WR:  Oh very nice! (laughs)  So you’re doing, you’re doing, it’s kind of a triple win, a win for obviously the person you’re giving the referral to, the home buyer or seller that you’re referring and then it still reflects very well on you as well hmm -

DA: Exactly.

WR:  Cool!  So at this point in time how many leads that you say you’re generating on, you know, weekly or a monthly basis?

DA:  I normally get about four to five leads per week.

WR:  Oh wow!  Very, very cool!  Well, congratulations on that and all of the work that you’ve put into achieving that. -

DA:  You’re welcome.

WR:  –ah - we’ve talked about a lot of great stuff here doing on your website, some stuff you’re doing on some other sites like ActiveRain, Zillow and Trulia to get people to your website and then you’re also doing some interesting stuff with social media, that’s a hot area right now, linkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, which of those services are you finding helpful in your business?

DA:  I use all three and I have Twitter at the moment, Facebook is definitely the one that I’m finding most useful, what I’m using a lot for like everyone else is reconnecting with people from high school and college -

WR:  Uh-hmm.

DA:  - always good in the business, but I’m also using it very directly to keep in touch with the past clients - you know, people who are choosing, shy away a little bit more from email because of just, the amount of spam that everyone is getting at the moment.  I really find that Facebook is a great way to stay in touch with the past clients and then there is …I am having a conversation with them like, I have a person who you bought a house, sold the property to me and bought another one two years ago and this weekend he was weekend he was talking about how he is fixing up his bathroom.  So we were having a conversation back and forth, you know, of course at some point somebody else commented, and they were like “who is that person?” and like, oh yeah, that’s Deb, that’s my agent Den On The Web, she is the one who helped me buy and sell.

WR:  Okay.

DA:  So, it’s a really nice way to be introduced to your clients’ sphere of influence as well.

WR:  Well, very cool you’re able to connect with your clients that way and, is there any kind of etiquette that you suggest for friending a client on Facebook?

DA:  Yeah, I’m still kind of working that out.

I had some people where I will explain to them when I’m over for an appointment that I use social networking like LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook, and I had some people say “ooh Facebook” and we’ll instantly find each other that night, even sometimes before we officially start working together.  There are sometimes with some people that I’ll for the relationship to feel a little bit progressed enough to say “Could we be friends on Facebook?” because my own personal concern is I don’t want to do it too fast so they feel like “oh no, you’re just trying to get into my circle of friends.”

WR:  Right, that makes sense.  So you’re really, …there is no hard and fast rules about, you know, the perfect time to friend someone but it’s almost like, how you progress a relationship in the real world as well, just when it feels natural (laughs)

DA:  Exactly.  I had one where I went on an appointment with a past client’s mother and we were talking about Facebook when I was on the appointment and by the time I gotten back to my office she has friended me on Facebook.

DA:  - now I’m even better.  It’s like, let it be their choice and when they choose to do it.

WR:  Great, that, that’s perfect, wow!  Well, you, Deb, you’ve really shared a wealth of information with us today from Facebook to video to blogging to your philosophy on SEO and all the great stuff you’re doing on the web and the impressive results that is yielding for you, I just can’t thank you enough for all that you’ve shared.  Is there anything else that you’d like to add before we wrap up?

DA:  Yes.  I think we covered just about everything but the only thing I just kind of want to say is, I share so much about what I do in my business because of all of the agents through my years in real estate who helped me and shared with me and I think just the more that we sit there and build this community of really good agents who are willing to say, this is how I do my business to be professional to give great customer service, just the better the whole, the industry as a whole will be.

WR:  I love that philosophy and it really teach things away from being competition to being coopetition (laughs)

DA:  (Laughs)

WR:  –you’ve heard that so it’s really refreshing and I think we all have a lot to learn from each other and you certainly are generous in what you’ve been sharing with us today and what I know you share with other agents all the time.  Hmm, very cool, so I suggest everyone listening today check out debontheweb.com and learn from what she has done.  Deb Agliano is an excellent example of Agent Web Success and a lot can be learned from her and from her website.  Before we go, Deb can you remind us of you’re special key and you know in terms of reciprocation we’d love to know the area you cover so we have you in mind for opportunities as well.

DA:  That’d be awesome.  Ah, I’m in Medford, Massachusetts, which is five short miles North of Boston and I cover the surrounding community as well.  It’s a great place, a wonderful commuter location and if anybody has clients in that area that needs help I’d be more than happy to help out.

WR:  Wonderful!  Thanks once again Deb and thank each and everyone who is listening.  It has been another great episode of Agent Web Success.

Filed under: Blogging Success on July 1st, 2009