Mile High Greetings from Denver!

[RonnieG]

I have actually been a forum member here for a year or so, but primarily just lurking and trying to learn about what everyone is doing to improve their web presence. But in the last couple of days, I have started posting here on a subject that is now the focus of most of my real estate business: generating most of my leads with Google AdWords Pay-Per-Click. More on that in a bit.

I got into real estate 4 years ago, after 30+ years in computers and IT. I was a systems designer, developer and project manager, primarily in banking and financial industries, as well as a couple of stints in software sales with two software product vendors and a consulting firm. As a result, when my last firm hired a new CIO and did a total IT reorg, including relocation of most of the IT staff to a different city, I decided it was time to find a less volatile career (Yeah, go ahead and laugh!). With my banking and sales background, and the attraction of a more flexible work schedule for mid-week days off to go skiing, real estate seemed a good fit. And, with many years of software development and web site development in my background, my business was internet oriented from day one. My first hand-built FrontPage based real estate web site was up and ready to support clients by the time I got my license.

My web site(s) and lead generation capabilities got better and more comprehensive over the years, to the point that I am now generating more leads than I can possibly handle myself. So I have been building a small team of local agents to send some of the leads for outlying areas to, for a nominal referral fee of course. Interestingly, and maybe inevitably, many of my leads are relocation prospects. Once I make contact and qualify them, I find that quite a few need help selling their homes in other cities, which has been a great referral business opportunity.

Unfortunately, SEO and leads from organic search results from my web site has not been a big part of my online success. This is partly my own fault for focusing on working with clients and not spending 10 hours a week on SEO. In addition, the huge number of high-tech, internet savvy agents and brokerages in our Denver metro area market, and lots of well established national and local web sites that rank well on the terms I would also be competing for, have kept my site in positions no better than 100+ in organic results, and everyone here probably knows that you don't get hits if you are not on the first couple of pages of results. The exceptions are a few small niche market terms where I am consistantly in the top 4-5 natural results, and only one general keyword phrase where I am always #1. In doing some research on ranking of some of the REW sites, especially Jake Marsh's site here in Denver, I see that I am not alone. While Jake's REW site has great page one organic results for a few "Denver" specific terms, it is never on page one for the same terms for some of the popular outlying residential communities in the Denver Metro area.

While my primary business is and will always be local real estate sales, as a result of sharing some of my internet lead generation techniques with other agents on a couple of other forums, I have also been able to help a few other agents who are not competing with me in my own market. I do this by setting up their own initial Google PPC campaigns for them, then training them on how to monitor and run those campaigns on their own. This had recently led to establishing a small side business as a paid PPC consultant. So, while I continue to freely share some basic PPC lead generation advice, here and on other real estate forums, the nitty-gritty details of how I manage to do PPC so effectively are reserved for my paying agent clients, and no more than two of those a month.

[pcdoc]

Hello Ronnie, thanks for posting and looking forward to your regular contributions.

[webmaster]

Wow Ronnie, that is one of the better introductions I have seen. Welcome to REW!

In terms of Jake Marsh, we mainly focus on the high hitters denver real estate, denver lofts, denver condos, denver mls etc but we do still have and produce content for the other areas so that users can get aquainted with them and they do actually produce quite a lot of natural traffic in themselves.

I think we could use more active members here in the PPC vertical as I think a lot of people still ignore the benefits available if your PPC is done correctly - its something I am quite familiar with, but like you, I have been so busy that I haven't been able to write the tutorials or participate to the level I need to, to help get the members up to speed on PPC

Once again, welcome to REW - its great to have you.

[ResaleBroker]

Welcome to the forum Ronnie.

[Benjamin Dona]

Hey Ronnie,

Welcome to the commuity.

[SEO Nick]

Welcome to the forum

[VRI]

Good to have you here Ronnie!