CNN's Money Magazine has just published a nice article entitled '4 ways to market your business online' which describes the benefits of leveraging the internet's newest tools for marketing your business online in order to stand out amongst the competition. After talking a bit about the importance of creating a simple website and blogging, they go on to describe how podcasting and video are becoming essential for anyone who's looking to market themselves in today's competitive online landscape.

We all know how relevant this is in terms of the real estate industry, as over 1.4 million real estate agents and property sellers are all looking to climb their way out of obscurity online in this fiercely competitive industry.

Podcasting:

Podcasting is a relatively simple technology that is being taken quite seriously by some Fortune 500 companies. And all you really need to get started is a decent microphone, a digital recorder and editing software.

Podcasts allow you to make the most of your inner impresario, plus, your show and the subscriber audience it may lure can give you an edge over competitors.

"Podcasting is still unique enough in many industries that it can allow you to stand out a bit," says John Jantsch, a Kansas City, Mo., marketing coach and author of Duct Tape Marketing: The World's Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide (Thomas Nelson).

"Podcasting makes a ton of sense for many small businesses for several reasons," says Jantsch. "A voice, rather than simple words on a paper can convey emotion and personality. It's much easier to connect to that."

Jantsch offers this tip for the podcaster trying to bring attention to his business: "Invite a key strategic partner to be a guest on the podcast and you're likely to get the attention of high-level experts, authors and even prospects."

Video on the Internet:

YouTube is not just for classic media clips, cute pet tricks and bizarre dorm antics anymore. With a YouTube link on your Web site and vice versa, you have a new marketing tool. But don't be so crass as to post blatant infomercials about your small business.

"What you want to post is something that the people on YouTube will find interesting or useful and will therefore watch," says Michael Miller, the Indianapolis-based author of YouTube 4 U (Que Publishing).

In his book, Miller cites the example of a pottery business that posted a how-to video on throwing pots on a pottery wheel. "That's what gets them in the door and then you direct them to your Web site from there."

Technorati: podcasts, podcasting, real estate podcasts, real estate podcasting, real estate video, realtor marketing, online marketing, realtor video, realtor podcasting

Three out of five now watch online video, and more than half said they engage in some sort of response activity, like visiting a Web site, going to a physical location or making a purchase, according to a new report by The Kelsey Group.

“YouTube has largely popularized the concept of watching short videos on a computer screen and has likewise familiarized consumers with the idea of watching short video ads,” said the report’s author, Michael Boland, Kelsey Group senior analyst. “A wide range of business models are coming to market in the hopes of tapping into the growing demand for video. We are in a ‘wild west’ phase of experimentation on all fronts — content generation, licensing, search and monetization.”

According to the report, video production companies can produce and distribute video ads for small businesses at price points that are significantly lower than those of traditional advertising, bringing video advertising within the grasp of many small businesses for the first time. The report also reasons that the value of video may be easier to comprehend for many small businesses, compared with some forms of online performance-based marketing.

The implications of this are pretty straight-forward in regards to using online video as a real estate professional. It's certainly time to grab the medium if you haven't already.

Technorati: real estate podcasting, real estate podcasts, agentcasts, real estate video, online video, real estate marketing, real estate video, adoption, statistics

Why? Because of Google's recently announced 'Universal Search' feature. Here's an excerpt from Google’s Press Release last week:

Beginning today, the company will incorporate information from a variety of previously separate sources – including videos, images, news, maps, books, and websites – into a single set of results.

The search giant says that it will be rolling out these new search features soon, and it looks like relevant videos are going to start populating the organic search results that Google delivers. A location in those top 10 results just got a whole lot more valuable, and in some respects more achievable as well. Who's going to take them? The agents and sellers who leverage the technologies of podcasts and video and even more so, leverage them properly.

But it’s more than just having some video - it's also about getting it seen. The key to this is going to reside within your ability to get you media marketing content across the internet, and in as many of the web's premier podcast and video sites as possible. We'd like to add that AgentCasts submits your podcasts & video listings to over 20 of the web's most popular video and podcast sites on the internet, doing all of this work for you. We also make sure that your video's meta data and tags are properly submitted and that your getting the most out of every piece of rich media content you push out on the web. How's that for fulfilling an emerging need?

We're happy to hear about this forthcoming trick up the Search Giant's sleeve, as it presents a tremendous opportunity for the early adopters of real estate podcasting and video. Real Estate agents and property sellers - It's time to get your audio and video content up on the internet. Google is asking for it!

Technorati: real estate podcasts, real estate video, real estate marketing, real estate podcasts, agentcasts, propertycasting, video property tours, video realty, google, search, web video