Video is an easy, fast and inexpensive way to dominate your market. The benefits of video are two-fold. On the consumer side, readers love video, it’s easier to watch a video than read a long text based blog. On the SEO side, Google loves video and will often push video up in ranking faster than text, so you have a win-win. When combined with the fact that it is easy and inexpensive, you have a home run.
Here’s a list of 10 fast and easy things you can incorporate into your real estate video blogging:
- A narrated video tour of each listing
- A driving tour of the area immediately surrounding your listing
- A narrated tour of community and town highlights such as main street, parks, etc.
- A video tour/interview at broker opens (call agents holding their homes open and asked if they’d like to be featured). You may be surprised at how many agents welcome additional coverage of their listings. This might help you find a buyer for it as well as help you move up in the level of listings you are presenting. Make sure to follow your board and broker rules on presenting listings other than your own.
- A video tour of vacant properties that have indicated it is ok to advertise them in the MLS (again, follow all rules as above)
- A video interview/tour of local businesses
- A video snapshot of local events
- A narrated driving home tour of architectural styles of your area
- Video tours of various communities and their amenities
- For the extra techy, you can do some cool editing such as time elapse sunrise/sunsets, etc.
- If you are outdoorsey, there are even bike and helmet mounts. How about a video of local bike or ski routes?
SEO Tips for your Video
- Make sure to geo-tag the video. You may be able to do this in your video software, but if not, you can always do this in the edit section of YouTube. This is key to getting the video to show up on Google and Bing maps. If you shot your video with GPS enabled camera or phone, the data should already be there.
- Make sure to add all of the appropriate tags for searchability
- Make sure to use an SEO friendly title for your video
- Make it short and interesting. Most shouldn’t go longer than a few minutes. Only for special occasions should you have loger videos. Our attention spans are very short.
- Find other video bloggers in your area and “friend” them on YouTube, Flickr, etc.
- Make sure to share your video all over: your blog, twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Posterous, etc. People often have their social media and video sharing sites of choice and may not visit them all, so you need to have a presence in each of them. Make sure you have a full profile on these sites so people know how to find you (phone, URL, etc.)
- If the wind or ambient noise is too much, consider a music overlay to replace sound, or your own voice narration
- Please use real video, don’t cheat and use a still photo slide show and call it video. It can be off-putting to your viewers. Nothing is wrong with slide shows, just call them that, not videos.
Equipment to Consider (to get started in video, you don’t need much, even a video ready phone or flip-cam will do great, but a few extra and inexpensive tools might help you take it to the next level when you are ready)
- A window mount, for filming community videos
- A dashboard mount
- A monopod (helps stop the shaking if you are walking around) and might come with an extend-able telescoping rod to get bird’s eye shots
- A tripod
- An inexpensive lighting kit for those darker spots or cloudy days
By using keywords, effective promotion and a variety of topics, your video blogging can help your business become omnipresent in your market.
I’d love to hear your video stories in the comments below. Are you using video? Experience, tips, etc.
