Internet Marketing Solutions for Commercial Real Estate Brokers

In today’s commercial property market, the Internet provides some real marketing solutions for commercial brokers and agents as they promote listed properties and build their personal profile.

It is interesting to note that many agents at a personal level fail to fully utilise all the available tools on the Internet; they will commonly promote their listed properties efficiently and effectively, but they regularly overlook the requirements of personal marketing and promotion.

To build your personal profile online, it is necessary to do specific things consistently and regularly.  Placing a blog or an online article once a week to a website will not be enough activity to give you a meaningful ‘online presence’.  Doing something on a daily basis or at a minimum every 3 days will significantly improve your online presence.

The search engines look for consistency and relevance.  So the consistency aspect can be handled by regular activity undertaken in a meaningful way.  Relevance on the other hand has a lot to do with writing about your location and property speciality.  The articles and the blogs that you create should be quite specific and rich with content.

Here are some ideas to help you with establishing your online presence as a specialized commercial real estate broker.

1. Visit the major search engines to do a ‘keyword search’ based on your location and property type.  Many of the search engines offer a ‘keyword search tool’ to help you get that information.  From that searching process, you can identify the words that are commonly used and searched on the Internet when it comes to your location.  Make a shortlist of 25 words that can be merged into your profile and online activity.
2. Your consistency in the marketing process will then be to use those words regularly in an ongoing way.  In an article of 300 or 400 words, your keywords could be featured three or four times in a meaningful way.  In that way you will be optimising your article or your property to the search engine profiles.  As a special note, do not overly saturate the article or the advertisement with the identified and targeted keywords.  When that occurs, the search engines will penalise your article because of your intended keyword manipulation and will fail to rank you.
3. Establish a blog online where you can write about the property marketplace and your property speciality.  Do not promote your property listings in the blog.  Property listings should be featured on a website somewhere and handled separately.  So the idea behind a blog is for you to talk about property market trends, activities, and issues in your town or city, and your property speciality.
4. In an article of 400 to 500 words, you can say many things that are useful to the prospects and clients that you serve.  As a general rule, you should be writing a blog at least two or three times per week.  Again, I go back to the point that consistency and regularity in the process will be really important.  Let the search engines see that you are an expert in your field, and that you are prepared to share your information on a regular basis.  They will then rank your articles more favourably in their search results.
5. Also write some articles relevant to your property marketplace and speciality.  Those articles can be placed on ‘article submission sites’.  To understand how those sites work and which ones will rank better for you, do a search on the search engines for ‘article submission sites’.  Choose one of the sites and services that are ‘highly ranked’.  Understand the rules that apply to the process of writing and submitting articles with that site, and set up an account to get the process underway.  The articles that you create should be informational and relevant to your property location and property type.  The articles can link back to your website or your blog.  Do not promote your listings in the articles as you will not be allowed to do so.  The article writing process is one of authority and speciality.
6. From your regular online activity, link your articles and blogs through to Twitter and LinkedIn.  The same linking activity can be used for Facebook.  As you build your list of prospects and contacts in each of those social media channels, your blogs and your articles will be of interest to the property based community that you are connecting with.  In that way you will be seen as a specialist of relevance to the people that you serve.

So there are a number of things for you to do here in building your online presence as a top commercial real estate agent or broker.  Promote yourself at every opportunity in specific ways.  Use the social media channels effectively and efficiently.  Regularity is the key to making the process personally successful.

You can get more tips like this in our Newsletter.