Real Estate Techie

Whether you are a Realtor or a Real Estate Investor (REI), if you are serious, then you need your own website.  But just having a website is a waste if you don’t know how to drive traffic to your site.  You can have the most beautifulest website in the whole wide world, but if  you don’t have visitors, then your website got dressed up for nothing.  So, if you want leads, you’ve got to have visitors, because visitors convert to potential leads.

Now that I’ve established “you need visitors”, let’s talk about how to get those visitors.  There are basically two things that Google and other search engines are looking for to help drive traffic to your site.

1. Links
2. Content

We’ll save links for another day, but let’s talk about content.  Content is the reason people would want to visit your website.  Again, if it looks pretty, but there’s nothing worth visiting your site for, then you have all fluff and no stuff.  One of the best ways to add content to your site is to blog.  You can blog about almost anything:  your listings, the real estate industry in general, neighborhoods, things relative to your city, and about any other thing you can come up with.  You can even try your hand at making people laugh about real estate.  One of the best suggestions I have heard is to think about what topics prospects and clients have had questions about.  Because if they have had questions about “Owner Financing”, then I can assure you, that other people have had the same question as well.

There are many different free sites where you can host your blog.  There’s blogger.com, blog.com, and wordpress.com for general purpose (real estate included).  There are real estate specific sites like Active Rain, and Real Town, and then there are hosted web sites which you must pay a monthly fee.

I have found one of the best formats for getting good SEO for web traffic is a self-hosted WordPress site.  ”Self-hosted” means your are paying for the hosting site, and then you can put any type of web page on the site whether it’s WordPress or a custom designed html site.  WordPress is most known as a blog format, but it can be set up as a stand alone website with a blog attached.

WordPress has so much flexibility, and is so easy to use. It can be used by both tech savvy real estate professionals as well as someone who isn’t so savvy.   And  there are many free themes and plug-ins that you can use to customize your site.

We’ve established a few things so far:

1. You need content for search engines to send visitors to your site
2. You should use WordPress as your format for ease of use and customization.
3. You need a “self-hosting” account.

My recommendation to you for hosting is HostGator.  I like HostGator for several reasons.  One, it’s cheap.  They have plans starting at less than $4 per month.  (That’s much cheaper than most of the companies that specialize in real estate sites.  Most of them average around $50 per month.)  Personally, I use the plan that is about $10 per month, because I have lots of different sites for different marketing niches, and this plan allows you to host unlimited domains.

Second, their control panel or “c-panel” is really simple to use.  It takes maybe 5 minutes to add your domain, set up an email address, and install WordPress.

And third, HostGator’s customer service is OUTSTANDING!  You very rarely have to hold long before you are speaking to a customer service rep who is here in the United States.   And their reps are very courteous and go out of their way to help make sure you are satisfied.

So, there’s no need to ask yourself “to blog or not to blog?”   It’s time to blog!  Just do it.  I have easily made over six figures the last few years as a direct result of my WordPress sites.  Set up your account.  You’ll be glad you did.  And I’ll be glad to direct you if you have any questions.