Posts Tagged ‘House for sale in Spain’
Marketing Your Agency Using Articles and Social Media
Spain is Different. Marketing Lifestyle Not Houses
How does an estate agency market itself and its website? What do you do to get visitors to come to your site and stay? How can a company use social media sites and search engine optimisation?
If you cannot answer these questions or feel confused by them then you may be storing up problems. The new media outlets allow you to get a lot of free PR, tons of exposure and increase your visibility. If your website is old hat and has not changed its look in years then most people looking for your products won’t come to see you regularly.
Errors happen at times of course. There are many real estate agents that have put up really good looking websites relying almost totally on Flash. Flash is not good for Google juice as their spiders cannot find any content to index. Yahoo and other search engines are the same.
One of the best ways to increase your visibility to the Google God is to have lots of backlinks, good quality ones if possible, going back to your site. Recently I have put my faith in the writing of articles with backlinks in. The articles get published on others’ sites and may bring traffic to your site but definitely bring spiders looking at the content. My favourite service has given me over 1000 good quality backlinks from six base articles in just a month.
After writing an article you can place a version of it within your own site too of course. It is easier to submit automatically to social network sites giving the article exposure and avoiding the laborious manual submission process. Many services exist to do this and the majority have a free version. Social Marker and Only Wire are examples of sites that can do this for you nd save lots of time.
The other thing is you should contribute by providing good content on the social media sites such as Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Digg and my personal favourite Stumble Upon. Do a bit every day on these sites and bit by bit over time you can drop your links in. Services such as Ping.fm lets you update your status faster.
Finally you buy with your eyes so you should make good use of video too. Avoid grainy video if at all possible because the customer will decide on a place straight away in many cases and first impressions count. Make sure to put a bit of yourself into the videos and your audience will give you business.
The real estate market is not the best in the World to be in at the moment but by promoting yourself through these media and making your company more visible you can still be successful. Have a look at the site developed in the last quarter (With some older content) to see how certain techniques have been used
Thinking of Moving To Spain?
This article may help those people who have ever thought about moving abroad but have never mentioned it to anyone yet. It is specifically about Spain but could well be applied in some of its general principles.
For a Northern European, a Brit in my case, living in Spain was always my dream. From a young age I knew that it was my long term destination. Why though? Like most people I fell in love with the idea of the country on a holiday, a cheap package one at that. My experience was on the Costa Brava. I was surprised at the ease of life, the speed at which things happened, or didn’t sometimes and the joy in the faces of the people. On visiting Barcelona for the first time I was hooked. Prior to the visit I had often thought about living here, this just made it certain.
Then the question was how to get a plan of action to make sure the dream was realised. I would say it is necessary to learn the language, visit beforehand to get the lay of the land, read about the country and get a good idea of which part of Spain you want to be in.
Once that is decided you need to know what you are going to do here. If you come without qualifications and language skills life will be hard, after all why should anyone employ you before a local of foreigner with the ability to speak the language.
There are a multitude of things you need to know about local customs and practices and life can be very different, most people are constantly caught out for the first few weeks by shop opening and closing times, by the lateness of the eating hours in restaurants by the lack of their favourite products. However, the problems of settling down soon pass.
Therefore what is living in Spain really like
1) Expect to work long hours and fit in your family life around it. Some people do.
2) Expect to take time to adjust whilst you learn the language and get yourself into the community. It is very unlikely that most people will speak English unless you live in a coastal area
3) You should expect to have fun and laugh. Lots of the aspects of life are easier but the bureaucracy is horrendous. Take everything with a pinch of salt and laugh about it because in future it becomes an anecdote
4) Come to my blog regularly and read it as you will find loads of details of what happens when you live in Spain, the good, the bad and the downright ugly, usually involving utility companies this part.
Once you have done that and have your preparation off to a tee then you can find out what it is like to live here and you will be ready. Only at that point should you start looking for houses for sale in Spain. If you come unprepared then expect to return home after a couple of years with tail firmly between legs. Failing to prepare inevitably leads to failure. By following the tips here your chances of succeeding will increase.