Do you have a web site?

No, not a page on a company or franchise web site.
No, not a page on Realtor.com.
No, not a page on any other web site.
I mean your own personal web site.
According to the National Association of REALTORS®, 72% of all people looking for a new home start their search on the internet.  It may be even higher now.  

What are you doing to get your share of this on-line market?

Why should you have your own web site? 

The purpose of a personal web site is not to be a “fluff piece” on how wonderful you are.  The purpose of a personal web site is to develop on-line leads that go directly to you!

So what are some of the basics for a good “lead generating” web site?

1. Name:  The majority of REALTOR web sites have “vanity” names, ie, YourName.com.  Unfortunately, prospects will NOT be searching you’re YourName.com on the internet.  They are searching for information and houses.  The name you select must be memorable, easy to type, and contain words that might be used to search on one of the search engines.

2. Layout and Look:  Although template sites are less expensive than custom sites, you will need to do a lot of work customizing it to make it yours.  If you look at REALTOR web sites across the country, you will discover many web sites that look just alike.  Some even say the same thing.  After a while you will know which template company is hosting it as soon as you get to the web site.  Other people notice that, too.  Your site needs to be different and it needs to be visually interesting.  There also needs to be something unique that will hold visitors on your site and get them to come back again.

3.  Content:  Unique and helpful content is what is what will bring visitors to your site...and bring them back to your site over and over again.  You need to have information on buying and selling, information on your area, and most importantly, easy to access information on homes for sale, including virtual tours.  All this needs to be available without the prospect leaving your sites or sites.

4.  A way to get the contact information from your visitors:  There are many variations.  Some people think that forcing site visitors to register before they can get to the main page is great.  I think it will run off your visitors.  Mine is set up with a registration form before going to the IDX search.  It is not mandatory, so I can often get blank forms.  But at least I know that someone got to the search!  I have several other response forms and am in the process of adding more.  I tried several different times to get information by offering free reports instead of having the information on my site, but it didn't work!  Now I'm making special offers, such as my newsletters.  My goal is to have a unique offer, call to action and response form on each page. Considering I have 12 websites (at the time I wrote this), and over 50 pages on the main information web site, this will be a massive undertaking.  Four of my sites are small and are set up as Lead Generation Sites and already have response forms.  Three others are niche websites that have more informational pages on them.  Plus, I have my personal site, my products site, my referral network site and this site.  I will eventually adding more and more sites in an effort to give prospects more chances to find me.

5.  Other:  You need to make sure that the search engine keywords are in your text, title, etc.  That’s the really tedious part of getting a web site ready, but it’s what will make the search engines find your web site!

 

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.

If these articles makes you interested in learning more about the real estate company who would hire the Linda as their company trainer, simply fill in the information below and click on "submit".  Linda will call you back as quickly as possible, but within the times that you requested.  And don't worry, everything response from this website is kept confidential.

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