• Online video creates higher initial buyer awareness, capturing the attention of tens of millions of online users;

• Online video generates more referrals – people tend to share videos they watch online. This brings you FREE word-of-mouth advertising, you are hardly getting anywhere else online;

• Online video increases Brand Loyalty and Awareness – people remember the videos they watch much more than what they read online or offline;

• Online video inspires trust and credibility – people tend to perceive better and retain knowledge of the information from the online videos;

• Online video can generate you more leads – people tend to respond and take action several times more frequently, after watching online video ad;

You can make full use of the benefits and advantages that online video offers, by employing video production and distribution service.

• You can Save Money on advertising your listings;

• You can Save tens of hours producing your videos ;

• You can Save tens of hours uploading your videos to video sharing sites;

• You can Save tens of hours distributing your links the social media sites;

• You can generate more leads and increase the response rates to your ads several times;

• You can get more referrals by Word of Mouth advertising for FREE;

• You can boost your Brand awareness and loyalty, standing out as an authority real estate agent or broker;

No longer you have to feel intimidated by technology, cost or time issues.

• Production Cost;
• Distribution of content;

Both can cost you, if not straight forward money then at least big amount of time. Converted to missed business opportunities it still translates into money left on the table.

The net effect of the two major problems discussed previously is that the search results, for instance, at Youtube.com and Google for one and the same keyword are showing huge differences. Those differences point unexploited opportunities which you can take advantage of.

Here are some examples…

Keyword: Real Estate

YouTube.com – 27,800 results

Google.com – 580,000,000 results

Keyword: Property

Youtube.com – 208,000 results

Google.com – 577,000,000 results

Keyword: Overseas Property

Youtube.com – 7,980 results

Google.com – 1,950,000 results

As you can see the competition when it comes to videos on the net is far less than the competition you get regarding keyword relevant website search results. If you could have sufficient amount of videos for your real estate listings distributed throughout the net, your visibility would increase exponentially. More people would see your marketing messages, which could effectively translate into more leads and increased brand awareness.

So, how can you possibly reconcile between the cost in terms of time and money and the huge exposure and savings you can enjoy advertising by means of online video?

Stay tuned for the next article to discover how…

read part 1 here

read part 2 here

read part 3 here

Real part 2 here

Problem # 2: Video Distribution

Once your videos are produced, even if you have taken all the time to do that yourself, the question comes of how to put your wonderful videos in front of the potential buyers.

How can you take advantage of the humongous traffic going through all the social websites?

How can you expose your listings to the tens of millions that visit the Web 2.0 websites on a monthly basis?

Specialized platforms for video real estate distribution are hardly available.  Websites like Wellcomemat.com are just emerging and gaining speed.  In order to get wide exposure and have your message seen by a relevant audience, you have to upload your videos to tens of different video sharing sites.  All of them have their unique user interfaces which you have to become familiar with one by one.

Furthermore, you have to spend time properly tagging your videos, so that they come on relevant search results within those video sites.  You have to spend time typing proper description, putting the right title, all of that one by one for each video on each video sharing website.

Let’s take another real life example…

If you have your 50 videos already produced, for the sake of this example we assume you spend no money on video production, and it takes you about 15 minutes per video to upload to a single website , it would take you:

50 videos x 15 minutes = 750 minutes per website.

Then, if you are uploading to 20 video sharing websites, the time spent will become:

750 minutes x 20 websites = 15,000 minutes

This is 250 hours of your precious time!!! Few agents anywhere in the world would be able to afford that.  You should really take your time and spend considerable efforts doing your submissions.

continues in part 4…

If you spend an average of 15 minutes per video for uploading the pictures, customization and editing of the final version of the video, you would have to spend:

50 videos x 15 minutes = 750 minutes for producing the videos.

This is 12 hours and 30 minutes of your precious time during which you would not be doing your core business activities.  Few agents can actually afford spending that much time.  It costs you also money, as you might very well miss business while doing video production yourself.

Technology issues can also come your way. Furthermore, you can very well feel uncomfortable using the respective interface of the online video creation service.

Professionally done video footage and photography costs a lot too. You can very well be charged anything from 120 to 500 Euro per video. Picture how much you would have to pay if you would want videos produced for all of your 50 listings.  You can very well end up paying tens of thousands, which is hardly worth the efforts.

continues…. in part 3

·         One, it’s the production cost;

·         Two, it’s the time necessary as well as the cost of distribution;

Let’s focus on the problems associated with online video real estate listings and see why few estate agents have been using them up to now.

Problem # 1:Production Cost

The production cost of video listings has been a major problem for the real estate agents so far.  The cheapest version of online video – picture slide shows, are either free or cost anything up to 50 Euro per video. However, they require you to waste time and upload the pictures for each slideshow yourself.  Instead of serving your customers and growing your business you have to become a tech geek producer of videos.

Free flash slideshow services rarely allow for eye catching effects.  Furthermore, even a cost of 30 or more Euro is still pretty high for a simple slideshow video. Additionally, free services rarely allow you to download the video in any file format so that you can use it in your own way.

Those videos, when free of charge, are usually hosted on the service’s own website. You are not given the flexibility to distribute your own content as you wish, distinguishing yourself for the excellence of the services you provide.

Let’s take a real life example…

Being an estate agent who has 50 properties for sale or rent, let’s assume you want to produce video for each of your listings. Let us assume a charge of just 30 Euro per video. So, you pay:

50 videos x 30 Euro = 1,500 Euro

As you can see from the example, it is hardly worth paying that much for producing the videos for your listings.

But there is also another problem.  Even if you are using one of the very few free services, you still have to spend a lot of time producing the videos.

Continues…….  in part 2