The housing market is recovering. At least, 1 million people think so.

That’s the number of people who bought homes in the first three months of 2010. And that’s more people than have bought homes in the first three months of the last two years.

Let’s throw out caveats and the concerns and step back for a moment. It’s easy to point to a lot of different reasons why the home sales figures are inflated, or why home prices continue to have risk.

The two charts below show the sustained trend in recovering home sales over the past two years.

The first chart plots the number of homes sold in the first quarter over the past decade.

The 1 million home buyers in the first quarter don’t measure up to the levels of the real estate boom. But that’s not what a recovery means.

A recovery does mean changes in momentum. The second chart looks at how the market pacing has looked at the start of each of the last four years. This first quarter of this year was up 12% in sales versus the year before, breaking a decline that started in 2006.

The resale market is clouded by a lot of external factors that are driving price and inventory, but the actual number of homes sold show that there is an underlying increase in demand. From it we can infer that consumers feel good about buying homes. And that’s what the recovery will look like.

The single content brand that I’ve had the longest relationship in my life is The New York Times.

Even though I grew up in New England, a highlight of the week was when my dad went and got the Sunday papers — the Boston Globe, the Providence Journal and The New York Times.

Five decades later, the New York Times is still a key element of my daily information routine.

I’m typing this post up in the small cottage my wife and I use for our Connecticut office. There’s snow everywhere, and I can see to the end of the driveway out my window. There’s a block of blue plastic propped up against the snow. It’s today’s copy of the Times.

Someone will probably bring it in later. But I’ve already had three interactions with my favorite newspaper.

The first was around 6am when I woke up and browsed the national and business stories on my iPhone. (I use the mobile browser version of the paper; their iPhone app is overly busy and slow.)

About an hour ago, I stopped for a cup of coffee and went to NYTimes.com to check out the sports and arts headlines. I read a couple of stories and then shifted over to my RSS reader (I’m a fan of the Firefox add-in Feedly.) I caught up on some of the economics writers that I like to follow.

The New York Times doesn’t have to worry about my loyalty to the brand. It stands out for its quality and its breadth.

But the New York Times does need to worry about its economics.

The change in how I access the Times is a good example of how its business model has shifted. Its audience is no longer a cohesive entity which it can leverage for commercial benefit. The audience has fragmented into distribution channels that don’t offer the same advertising payback.

As a consumer, I’m still paying a lot to get to the Times. I spend more than $1000 a year on my internet access and more than $1000 a year on my wireless access. I’m paying for the distribution pipe.

How does the NY Times turn its brand equity with me into money? The brand doesn’t have a consumer problem and it doesn’t have a content problem. The problem is in the relative economics of distribution and advertising in the new channels that I am reliant on.

There’s not a lot of advertising on the pages I’m encountering during my interactions with the Times. And the advertising that is there is nowhere near as lucrative as the advertising in the print version of the paper.

This is a shift from being a MEDIA brand to being a CONTENT brand.

When you’re a content brand, you need to be able to extract a significant amount of your profit from the value of your content. That payment will come either directly from the consumer or from the distribution pipe (think of Premium versus Basic cable channels.)

But in this ubiquitous information world with broad redistribution of content, the distribution pipes aren’t looking to pay to subsidize content creation.

And, if the New York Times wasn’t available on my iPhone or on the web, would I change carriers? Nope. I like the content and I’ve got a long-term relationship with the brand, but I don’t think that would be enough to change my communications and internet infrastructure.

This is a problem that challenges the economics of paying people to create quality content.

Interestingly, I think it’s where the content curation discussion becomes most relevant.

A brand like the New York Times, which has tremendous reach and authority, needs to find ways to expand and deepen its relationship with its consumer across the wireless and wired web. Curating content, building applications, creating micro-communities, turning its top journalists into entrepreneurial brands, picking and choosing where to invest money in highly differentiated and traditional reporting…this is the mix of content, focus and activity that can make the digital connections into increasingly profitable areas.

Here’s how the head of the NY Times is looking at it. The key business focus is finding ways to recover the content costs. I think there’s a bigger web to spin, which will help to support the cost of original content in a different way.

A basic form of web currency that gets discussed more and more frequently is Google Juice.

Say the words “Google Juice” and people are likely to nod their head knowingly. Getting Google Juice is a dark art, easy to understand and hard to execute. People hear Google Juice and they think, Page 1.

As we’ve driven our business at NCI more and more into a Web 2.0 world, the concept of Google Juice becomes the axis point for many discussions. Too often the dialogue settles into a pattern of defining Google Juice as an outcome of highly-specific tactics designed to influence Google’s behavior.

These conversations are flawed. Google Juice is an ongoing by-product of a consistent content strategy that connects with a specific audience. As my colleague Todd Dubner points out, when you try to game Google, you end up gaming yourself. But when you try to serve a market with consistent content, even with a marketing emphasis, you’ll accrue a natural level of Google Juice that will differentiate you from the market.

Last week I spent a couple of hours with our top management team taking them through a case study in Google Juice.

The subject of the study was this blog.

As regular readers know, the purpose of the blog is to provide an outlet for structured thinking and analysis about business issues that I face in my professional life. The blog is not about the company I work for. It isn’t designed to advance any brand goals. It has no commercial bent — I don’t run ads, I don’t sell consulting. It is primarily a strategy and business information workspace.

As a result, I cover an eclectic number of topics somewhat consistently. I write about that loose focus here. I am not focusing at all on optimizing against specific topics or categories.

But I am consistent in creating content. That makes the way that my blog behaves in search engines a direct by-product of the consistency of the content that I create and its relevance to the audience that has developed around it. Dan McCarthy’s ViralHousingFix is a good study in how powerful Google Juice can be.

More than one-third of the traffic to this blog each month comes from search. Let’s see how that breaks down.

First, some basics about the blog.

It was launched on December 2008. I set it up on Blue Host and built it in WordPress. I use the Thesis theme and a number of different plugins. The five that are most relevant to the blog’s Google performance is the All-in-One SEO plug-in, the Google XML site maps plug-in, Calais’ Tagaroo semantic tag plug-in and plug-ins that integrate WordPress with Twitter and Facebook Connect.

Over the past year, I’ve published 361 posts, about 1 per day. The level of engagement on the site is low: there have been 431 comments.

The site has a digital footprint of about 7000 or so individuals. I get 3000 to 5000 unique visits a month. I have 580 fans to the ViralHousingFix Facebook page, which is used a content distribution point. I have another 650 friends on my Facebook profile; I redistribute about half of the content to my personal profile. My personal Twitter account has 1230 followers; I do 7 to 10 Tweets per day. These are mostly focused on sharing content, either from the blog or from other sources that I find interesting. I’ve got another 1000 connections across various site.

Each time I publish a blog post, I distribute it across my digital footprint. I’m not an active commenter nor am I an active solicitor of links across multiple sites. Generally, I’ve focused on initiating and maintaining my digital links to my Community of Interest, a topic I’ve written a fair amount about in the last couple of months.

This activity generates a lot of link activity: Google identified more than 2300 links coming into ViralHousingFix. A disproportionate percentage of those links come from a couple of blogs, like The Kelsey Group blog and WineZag, that update their content frequently and that list ViralHousingFix in their blog rolls.

The sum of this activity is that ViralHousingFix has a high visibility in some intuitive Google searches that help consistently drive traffic to the site. As Google has indexed the site, it has identified a handful of keywords that help it direct search results. These are show in the chart to the right.

“Media” and “social” are the two primary terms, an accurate reflection of one topic I write about frequently.

The next chart shows the 14 top search queries that drove users to ViralHousingFix in December. (Again, these figures are from Google’s Webmaster tools.)

The table shows the percentage of unique visitors from search to the site that were driven by the term. For instance, 14% of unique users from searches to the site typed in “viral housing fix.” The third column the text of the query and the last column shows where on the search page the ViralHousingFix link showed up.

For instance, 11% of visitors from search in December typed in the words “current state of the economy.” The results that were served up had a ViralHousingFix post in the 6th position on the search page.

This is the essence of Google Juice. When someone searches to learn about State Farm’s social media program, they see ViralHousingFix in the second position. Type in the words “Comscore rental” and you’ll see a post from this blog at number 4. Search for results around “multi-platform marketing” and you’ll see this blog at number 1.

The impact of this becomes more tangible when you look at specific search results. Here are examples of six searches that drove traffic to ViralHousingFix last week.

The first is a query about GDP.

The second is a query about State Farm. My post from last April is the third result on the page.

The third is a query about the current state of the economy. Google served up a post from October.

The fourth is a query about social media case studies in real estate.

The fifth is a query about print advertising leads.

The last is a query about Print or Web advertising in real estate. I find this one interesting. This question is a galvanizing topic in real estate, and one about which we have a very strong point of view at NCI. Search for this on Google and four results come up that are highly relevant to the question: a realtor who advocates cutting back print, a question and answer sequence on Google Answers, and a post from ViralHousingFix speaking to the impact print advertising has on web traffic.

The fact that this post, which is not specific to the real estate industry, shows up so high in the results speaks to the power of the Google Juice that this blog has developed. Google associates a high level of relevance and credibility to the blog around real estate, marketing, advertising, media and marketing. The confluence of these categories of relevance, combined with the incidence of words in my post that are consistent with the search terms, brings the ViralHousingFix post high up in the sequence.

The cumulative impact of this Google Juice is that ViralHousingFix has a degree of brand authority that makes its reach much larger than its actual traffic. The table below shows the Compete traffic results for ViralHousingFix.com over the past year. Contrast that audience of a few thousand with the visibility of ViralHousingFix in relatively general searches online for information about the economy, marketing, social media and advertising.

This is the tangible impact of a social media marketing program. When I speak to groups around the country, I use this example to help them understand how developing a smart content program, and creating a consistent distribution network, will give them increased engagement with their Community of Interest and increased relevance within Google. Over time, they will be rewarded with more visibility on Google.

The difference in a marketing program is that the topics are designed to be more consistent with your business goals. We talked about this during the management workshop. The single most effective way to generate increased visibility and Google Juice is to find out what people are asking about that is relevant to your business goals.

The quickest way to do that is to begin typing a search into Google. I demonstrated this for the management team.

We sell advertising services in The Real Estate Book. We maintain a brand-specific blog at blog.therealestatebook.com. We know that there are some basic topics that we want to cover: The continued value of print advertising integrated with internet advertising to real estate agents who want to have a visible footprint in their market; the importance of advertising even in a down market; and the ways that real estate agents can take advantage of social media to build their business.

If we wanted to improve our ability to intersect with people who are searching for information about real estate advertising, we would begin to share our point of view about the most popular searches. What are great real estate advertising slogans? What are new real estate advertising ideas? What are some key tips to successful real estate advertising?

There is nuance required. If we were to slavishly write about these topics, we would lose the relevance that we’ve established with our current audience, our Community of Interest. But, using Google can help focus what is on the mind of the broader audience and help a brand drive a content strategy that gives it even more Google Juice.

Looking over the search logs made me aware of one thing: I owe the people who are coming to this blog an update on State Farm’s social media strategy. It’s been too long since I’ve looked at it and the post that is served up in search is stale.

In the midst this great media shift to online and interactive, my company continues to distribute close to 10 million printed catalogs of homes for sale and apartments for rent every month.

outWe get two tangible points of confirmation for continuing with our print distribution. First, the printed copies get picked up. More than 90% of the copies we put into racks each month are getting used by consumers. Second, the printed copies drive business activity for our advertisers at a higher rate per instance of use than our online product.

As a lead-generating business, our focus is on creating the most cost-effective ways of creating leads for our customers. Print distribution is still an effective and essential channel to driving a volume of leads.

One of my regular reads, PurpleMotes, had a post today about a pile of yellow pages directories that was dropped off at their apartment community recently.

From PurpleMotes:

The traditional mass distribution of yellow pages print directories isn’t effective where I live. In my 148-unit apartment complex, stacks of new yellowbooks were recently placed outside entryways during the day on Thursday. At about 7pm that evening, 146 yellowbooks remained. The next evening, 139 remained. The following Tuesday morning, 134 books remained. Later that day, apartment staff recycled those remaining books. Hence apartment residents picked up only about 10% of the yellow pages directories placed in entryways.

What’s different about the printed catalogs that we distribute at NCI and the traditional yellow pages?

Freshness: We distribute a new book each month. While it’s not as timely as the Internet (an understatement), the printed catalog changes and gives a quick overview of the market.

Convenience: The printed catalog is designed to be convenient for someone who is out and about looking for a home or apartment. It’s small, reasonably well-organized and easy to read.

Purpose: The purpose of the printed catalog is very similar to catalogs that you get in the mail. The merchant isn’t showing you all of their inventory, just that selection that is relevant because of season, style or price. The proposition is similar for the real estate agent or property management company that is using our printed products to make an impression on consumers.

These three characteristics of our print product are vastly different from the printed yellow pages, which is designed to be a reference directory for products and services in your geographic area.

These characteristics are a big reason why consumers continue to use our local printed catalogs, despite the ubiquity of the information online and on their mobile device. Then catalog is one more tool in a discursive search the occupies multiple dimensions of time and space.

That’s why we continue to invest in our physical distribution, even as we have built out our online distribution. Because we know that it is an effective source that consumers continue to use.