Internet Marketing Mistakes

For some reason, real estate professionals who work hard to learn how to do conventional marketing seem to think there is a short cut for learning about marketing on the Internet.

There are many reasons why:

Think about the average age of real estate professionals. Last I heard it was 55 (which is younger than I am). The average real estate professional (by age) is a baby boomer who grew up without computers, FAXs, cell phones, e-mail and the internet. And learning all of this scares us a little. (#s)

Most of the real estate professionals are in large companies that are run by baby boomers who know traditional marketing well.

These two things show us why the real estate industry was slow in getting into internet marketing and why the we tend to let others tell us (or should I say “sell us”) on what is the best web site to have. I was fortunate to work for the first company in the St. Louis area to have a company web site. That was in 1994. And I have been working on learning about Internet Marketing ever since.

Why?

It is because Internet Market is constantly changing.

One thing I’ve learned is to beware of salesmen who want to sell you the one thing that will make you tons of money on the internet. I’ll give you an overview of what they want to sell you:

Template web sites for those who either don’t know how to build their own web sites or who didn’t have the money to have a custom built web sites. I’ve had two of those and never made any money from them. Now there is a wide range of template web sites priced from free to as expensive as a custom web site. (#s again)
Search engine optimization is a big money maker for the salesmen. But it may not be a money maker for you. They know that most real estate professionals don’t know a thing about search engine optimization. All they know is that their web site doesn’t place well in the search engines. There are some good search engine optimization companies and they are expensive. But there are companies out there that will tell you they can get your site top placement, but they can’t even get top placement for their own sites. And then there are companies that deliberately mislead as to what they can do for your web site.
The number one “rip-of” for real estate professionals is the lead generation companies. Not only do very few real estate professionals that use these companies report making any money. But the real problem with paying for “leads” from these companies is that those who pay them are just helping them have the money for an expensive web sites that beat legitimate real estate web sites in the search engines.
I feel like the newest product that will end up wasting real estate professional’s money is the automated drip e-mail systems that can be set up to work automatically with a web site leads. The problem is that you, as the real estate professional, may not know whether they are sending out e-mails that will attract the buyers to you or if the e-mails may turn off your prospects. There could be a problem with how the drip e-mails are sent. If the e-mails are sent by a “bulk e-mail” program, your e-mails may get blocked as spam.

As you can see there are many pitfalls to Internet Marketing. Do your homework and make comparisons before you spend your hard earned commission dollars.

The author of this article is Linda Grissette. Some of you may remember her as Linda Grayson. Linda is a Broker-Associate with River City Real Estate. She is also the company trainer. Learn more about how River City Real Estate can help you make more money...even in today's market...browse through this site.

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