Charlie Allred

By Charlie Allred

Here’s the scene: I’m driving home in my car after showing houses, and my phone rings. It’s an out-of-state number, not atypical since I regularly get calls from home owners wanting to move to the Phoenix area (I have blog posts on “Moving to Phoenix,” “Move to Chandler,” and “Move to Scottsdale“). So I answer my phone and it’s a sales call. Ugh. I’m almost never rude to sales representatives calling because I’ve done my fair share of cold calls, mostly when I worked in commercial real estate.

I listened to his sales pitch. He’s trying to sell me the number one spot on Bing.com for “new homes in Chandler AZ.” I ask several questions and being polite I ask if I can call him back. He says, “No, I can’t take incoming calls,” and he’s really pushing the “I can get you the top spot on Bing for $99.” I end up hanging up after a while.

Thank goodness this sales representative called me because it gave me keywords for my next blog post. I’ve been writing more articles about Chandler, Ariz. My office is in Chandler and I’m active with the Chandler Chamber of Commerce (which is the third largest Chamber in Arizona). I often struggle to find new article ideas, so this was a great help.

Here’s what I did:

1. I Googled “new homes in chandler AZ” to see who was on page one of Google’s results. They were all big companies, mostly home builders. So my initial thought was, I can’t beat out these big websites with a blog post.
2. “No Video?!?” I noticed there were no YouTube posts that popped up. Google loves to add YouTube videos to the first page of its results.  Google owns YouTube, and if there are applicable videos (they have to include the keywords), they will be front-and-center in Google’s search results.
3. I decided to make a video for the topic. First, I was a little stumped because there are tons of new homes in Chandler. How could I make a video that includes all the new homes? The list of homes for sale would be huge. Here’s the video I made: https://youtu.be/N2Iuij_z8bk

1. I looked up the keyword volume on Google Adwords. The best long-tail keywords were “new homes in Chandler AZ.” At first I thought, “new homes Chandler AZ” would have the highest search volume, but it didn’t.
2. My choice was to make a “Must-Know” video about buying a new home in Chandler, Ariz.  I even inserted a big warning intro image.
3. I made the presentation in my Google Drive. I just inserted some photos and text (see right).
4. My plan was to record myself talking while I flip through the presentation.  I thought about adding music, which is what I do in my Genius Home Videos. But this topic is very important, so I thought I should add a voice-over even though I don’t love my voice in videos. I tend to get a little overly excited.
5. Lastly, I wrote a blog with the same information. This way I could link to the blog post from the YouTube video, which drives more potential clients to my website. At my site, the potential client can get valuable information on homes in Chandler and learn more about me.

This is the first time I’ve ever used a sales call to push my online marketing. I am sometimes stumped by what to write about on my blog, mostly because I have tons of posts on my blog already. How many times can you talk about Scottsdale homes or Chandler homes?

My next goal is to make a video made for this topic using a whiteboard video. You know those videos that look like someone is writing on a whiteboard with amazing narration?

I hope you can use this information to propel your blogging and online efforts. For more details on this process, head to charlieallred.com. As always, I hope you are succeeding.

Charlie Allred is a Phoenix-based designated broker for Secure Real Estate and author of the book “Pinnable Real Estate: Pinterest for Real Estate Agents.” She leads the Killer Online Mastermind for real estate agents; you can learn more at charlieallred.com.  She is a Pinterest expert who coaches agents on how to gain more leads, followers, and clients by using Pinterest. Learn more at her blog: www.PinnableRealEstate.com.