How to Quickly Build a Strong Internet Presence and Dominate Your Local Competition Online

Perhaps you’ve heard, that as a modern day real estate investor, you need to have a strong Internet presence and the ability to convert online traffic into leads and leads into deeds in order to survive and thrive in this new economy and real estate market in which we now live and operate. Just a few short years ago, if you had a real estate investor website and could be easily found on Google, you were far ahead of  most investors and likely got your fair share of the online leads. These days, a good website alone is no longer enough to adequately compete for leads online.

In order to compete for the coveted top 5 listings on any Google search, we must now use a variety of other Internet websites, pages and profiles such as blogs, social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and others, videos sites, photos sites, RSS feeds, squeeze pages, classified ad sites, article sites, press releases, social bookmarking and other sites too numerous to mention. You’re probably bombarded with emails on a daily basis about search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing, Internet marketing, social networking, Web 2.0, and gurus claiming to have systems to do it all for you with no effort on your part. With so many choices and so many gurus telling you what to do and how and where to spend your hard earned money, perhaps you’re confused and just don’t know where to start. If you are, you’re definitely not alone.

I was recently reminded how time consuming and complicated it can be to market a new business online. In June 2010, I started a new Atlanta Georgia real estate investors association called the Atlanta Real Estate Investors Alliance or Atlanta REIA for short. On July 5th we had our first meeting and 50 local investors showed up to celebrate their Financial Independence Day with us. In order to get these 50 people to show up on such short notice, I had to quickly start to build a brand new online presence to reach out to potential members and followers. I’ve done fairly well in a short period of time, but it has been time consuming and could be quite confusing to a newbie without proper guidance and a clear understanding of what needs to be accomplished. Luckily for me, I’ve been doing this for years and have done a good job keeping up with many of the latest Internet marketing trends.

I started by creating a Google Gmail account that I could use to consolidate all of my Google related tools and keep them all in one place to make them easy to manage and track as we grow our online presence. So far I’ve added Google Gmail, Buzz, Profile, Local, Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Talk, Calendar, Picasa, Feedburner, Bookmarks and several others with more to come.

Next, I created a Facebook profile, business page and then a Twitter account or two to start growing our followers. I also created a meetup group at Meetup.com to attract like minded people looking for a good group to join that meets in person. I also created a YouTube account (that I added to my Gmail account), a Daily Motion account as well as several other video profile pages. More recently I created AtlantaREIA.com as a standalone WordPress 3.0 blog which is an excellent site for search engine optimization, sharing information and syndicating content across the Internet. I also created a Yahoo Ymail account, a Yahoo profile, Pipes, Flickr photo/video site and many other online profiles too numerous to mention. I also created my top 10 favorite social bookmarking sites for bookmarking my ads, articles, videos and photos to give them more “Google juice” and better overall page rank.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it can be at first. Starting a new business is not always easy and does require you to do some work if you don’t want to spend thousands of dollars to hire this done. But the good news is, once you’ve setup your new business and many of the sites, profiles and pages the right way, you can start to work smarter rather than harder. What’s even better news is that once these items are setup properly, many of them can be tied together, automated and/or delegated to others to do much of the ongoing work for you. You can be involved as little or as much as you want depending on how aggressively you want to market your business online and how many leads you want to generate. Here are just a few examples of some of the things that can be automated once you’ve built a strong foundation:

• You can setup your WordPress blog so that every time you post a new message, article, photo or video, it will automatically be posted to your Twitter account for all of your friends and follows to see and retweet.
• Your WordPress blog will also create a feed that you can post to your Facebook profile automatically and post your messages, articles, photos, videos and events on your wall and news feed for all of your friends and followers to see and share with their friends.
• You can use a site like TubeMogul.com to post your videos to one site and then have Tubemogul post your videos to dozens of other sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Viddler, DailyMotion, Flickr, etc.
• You can take your RSS feeds from your blog, websites, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc. and post them to dozens of RSS feed directories where other people will syndicate and repost your content to hundreds of 3rd party sites that will link back to your websites, profiles and pages giving you much more exposure and backlinks.
• You can use your Google profile to link all your major sites, pages and profiles together in one place so that Google knows they are all related, giving you better page rank and the ability to display all your most recent updates in Google Buzz.

Again, these are just a few ways to tie all your sites, profiles and pages together to optimize your business online. If you do this properly, you will begin to increase your visibility online, your page rank, your backlinks, your traffic and lead conversion and start to totally dominate your local market in just a few short months. You will be able to post your articles, ads, messages, photos and videos and have them appear on the top of the first page of Google in an hour or less, often in minutes… yes, minutes!