If 85% of real estate transactions are starting online why are you spending all your money printing things? I am not saying that you should not drop printing. There is a place for marketing through traditional outlets, but let’s face it most of those are dying breads that take up an every growing slice of your commissions. We were recently in a meeting with a multi-office brokerage in Southern California who averaged less then 5 calls a week from their LA Times Ad. I won’t say what it costs for a full page ad in the weekend real estate section, but let just say it is not cheap. They spent essentially a years worth of our services for 3-4 days of exposure.

Take some time to think about your marketing budget to see if the money that you are spending is making you money. I don’t know what your percentage split should be, but that is something that you need to figure out. In our business we don’t even consider a marketing outlet unless we think we can get a 10X return on our money in the first 90 days of a campaign.

If you are currently advertising in the newspaper or a magazine. Cut the size of your ad in half or run it every other week and move that money to other forms marketing. If you want to more your ad dollar online you should first invest your money in your personal website if you don’t already have one. Then you should invest in upgrading your listings through Realtor.com or get a single property website for it. If you prefer to market offline, invest in a networking group membership. I have experience with BNI and our Realtor gets a lot of leads, but remember you have to commit to attend and actively participate in networking groups for a year to be successful with them.

What are you doing to market yourself and your properties?

Not getting what you want out of your real estate website, here are five common things that we run across when working with clients. See if you suffer from any or all of our five real estate website mistakes.

1. You have the same website as every other Realtor.

Pullan, Advanced Access, and us at Seven Design Studios do a great job of providing cost effective template based websites to the vast majority of real estate professionals. But those who are wanting to take their website to the next level need to get a custom website design and write their own content for it on a regular basis. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the other websites can only rank your website based on the words contained in your website. So if you and let say 10 other agents in your office or city have the same content how do they rank you higher then the other agents in the results pages? The answer is they don’t, you fall back to the back of the results but with less then 80% of searchers going beyond the first page and less then 2% going beyond the third page, if you are not in the top 30 results your traffic is not going to be more then a few visitors a day. So get a new website and start writing your own content. It is not as hard as you think.

2. Your website design/theme does not reflect your area.

We see this all of the time. How are you going to connect with website visitor if your website does not reflect your city. Here is an example of what we mean.

This is a website of an agent down the street from us. You would think Covina, CA is a nice beach community, but by my calculations we are at least an hour from the beach and more with traffic.

Connect with your city with photos of notable building, homes, parks, etc that are in your city. If you are not the greatest photography hire someone, partner with a college student, ask a friend, be creative and then give them credit on your website. Who knows you could have just met your next home buyer or seller.

3. Your website requires user registration.

Buyers and seller these days are looking for as much information as possible. According to the California Association of Realtors, buyers are looking online for up to 3 months before contacting an agent. Give them what they want free easy access to the MLS. Once they are on your website give them another reason to contact you. The best reason I have seen is the guys from 1000 Watt Consulting and their video “I am not a lead”

4. You try to be all things to all people.

We see this more in major metropolitan areas then others, but just because the MLS gives you access to 100 different cities does not mean that you are “Really” able to represent all of those cities. Our most successful clients concentrate on no more then 3 cities, most of then its one.

5. You not putting enough effort into your website.

The days of build it and they will come have long gone. The search engines and visitors love fresh content and your professional insight. In Covina, I literally have thousands of agents within 10 miles off our office. So use your website to tell me why I should use you for my next transaction. The amount of time you spend is not important, the fact that you have a dedicated time to work on content and marketing for your website is. If you don’t have a time schedule weekly to work on your website then schedule one today.

I recently found this graphic that perfectly illustrates why real estate agents and brokers should be actively marketing themselves online.

If this is right and it come from a very reliable source, then the top three results for each term control ruffly 80% of the traffic for that term. Let take it a step further, according to NAR over 85% of all transactions start online, then those three agents or broker would control 68% of transaction for that search term. So for every 1000 times someone searches for the term ex. “Your City homes” these have the potential to bring the following traffic to your website.

Site 1 (56.36%) would bring you 563 visitors
Site 2 (13.45%) would bring you 134 visitors
Site 3 (9.82%) would bring you 98 visitors

My question to you, is what are you doing to most your self up in the search engine results pages?

We often ask clients if you would trust a lawyer or banker if they looked like this?

The answer is most likely NO. The answer is no because he does not look the part of a professorial. As a Realtor we entrust you with one of our, if not, our most valuable possessions, Our Homes. When dealing with high dollar financial transaction there is a certain level of professionalism that you must project. Would you show up for a listing appointment dressed like the guy above? No you put on a professional business attire, and make sure you put your best foot forward. If NAR’s statistics are right then for a good portion of your new clients first interaction with you is your website. Does your website resemble one of the following websites?

If you answered yes to the abpve question you should think about your image that you website is portraying to potential new clients. If you would like one of our website professionals to review your website. Please fill out the contact form to the right or contact us at 626.488.0330.