Parlaying SEO Skills Into A Part-Time Real Estate Cash Cow

Many affiliates know that while I was building my poker affiliate business, I also was working in real estate.  I am going to share my story here on how I was able to parlay my internet marketing and SEO skills into thousands of dollars.

I was very fortunate to sell new homes in Chicago for Pulte Homes during the good.......actually unbelievable years in real estate.  I can remember Grand Opening new communities and literally making more money in a month than most people make in a year.  During this time however I was also busy building my affiliate empire.

One day my boss came into my office with a stack of papers outlining my internet usage while I was at work....as you can imagine, this was the end of my successful tenure at Pulte.   That was fine however as I was making enough at that point to support myself with affiliate revenue.

Real estate was still a hot market though, and it was a bummer to walk away from such easy money.  So I took the nightly classes for a few months to get my real estate license, then passed the state test.  Shortly thereafter I joined Century 21 in my area as a real estate agent.  Don't worry I didn't ever wear a gold jacket!

From day 1 my goal was to never have to do all the standard realtor crap like cold calling, open houses, fliers, etc.  Unfortunately though, I did end up getting sucked into a little of that while selling friends and families homes.  Overall however, the majority of my business was driven online through collecting leads via the search engines.

So here is what I did after I became a realtor at Century 21.

I set up a site a real estate website at jeremyenke.com, here is the archived version. From there I focused my SEO efforts on ranking for "Rockford Real Estate" and "Rockford MLS" terms.  In my prime, I was in the top 5 of google for several terms.  Ranking didn't take that long either.  Primarily I did onpage SEO and exchanged links, as well as bought links in some solid real estate directories with the proper anchor text.

I also pulled one of my old tricks out of the bag.  You're going to like this!  If you can provide something downloadable, this is solid in any industry.  I created a little tool that people could download and search local real estate listings with.  Here, check it out, I still rank twice on the hompage of google for Rockford MLS ----- Check out the download.com and techrepublic links.  Having a product on download.com with the proper name will always rank VERY well and be distributed across several other high PR download sites.  Not to mention, on many of these sites you get a backlink to your site on your publisher profile page.

To do this, you just need to make an account at upload.com, pay some $, and start publishing.

Outside the box thinking at it's best!  So anyways, several times a week I would get calls like this:
<blockquote>Jeremy: Hello this is Jeremy Enke



Caller:  Hi, my name is Sue and I found you online.  My husband and I are relocating to Rockford and wanted to know if you could help us find a home.</blockquote>


From there, I would simply field the lead and pass it on to another agent.  The beauty is that in almost every real estate office you can give referrals and still collect 20% of the commission.  There are a lot of starving realtors out there that would happily take leads.

If it looked like a slam dunk deal, I had an assistant that worked for me, and together we would work the lead and she would get a rip on the overall commission.  The key however is that I ranked well for "money" terms that got the phone ringing and generated leads.

Lead generation is a very lucrative market, not just in real estate, but in several different industries.  At the time, and I imagine it is still this way, ranking for real estate terms for medium sized cities is not that hard.  If I was trying to rank for "Chicago Real Estate" it would have been a lot harder.

As it would happen though, the real estate market in my area took a dive, and I was in the midst of building the PAW Network.  I was making enough money and didn't feel like dealing with the hassles of being a C21 agent, sales meetings, expenses, and all the other stuff that went with it.

If you do live in an area where you feel there is potential to do the same thing however, feel free to hit me up for advice and suggestions.  If the market ever turns around here, I will probably emulate the same business model once again.  I can tell you for a fact, as poker affiliates, our SEO and internet marketing skills far outweigh probably 99% of every realtor out there.