Online Marketing

Generating Traffic For Your Real Estate Website

If you read my Web 2.0 article, you would understand the importance of having a website. But having a website in itself is not important and like having a phone number. No one will call, unless they know about it.

In this article, I am going to cover some concepts to publicize your website to build traffic. Some of these concepts are basic, and some are advanced topics which costs money. You do not have to do all of them, you can pick the ones that meet your budget and patience.

Gaining publicity through marketing

One of the basic concepts, and most common one is to add your website to all your marketing material. Post cards, sales letters, ads, business cards and so forth. This method does not cost anything extra, you are simply adding an extra line in your marketing material.

The disadvantage of this method is that the only ones who will visit your site are very few of those who you market to. Most of the prospects will not acknowledge your marketing and will skip it. So the exposure will be a limited.

If you are following my Business Card design ideas, then I would make sure the website I list is specific to that prospect type. For example, if my business card is to network with professionals, I want to list a website designed to promote me to professionals not home sellers and vice versa.

Gaining publicity through organic search

This is by far the second most economical method, but it takes time to develop and needs dedication and patience. Organic search is a term used to describe search engine search results. For example, if you do a search on the term "Fadi Zeidan" you will notice multiple entries that reference my work, or those with similar name.

The issue with organic search however, is that search engines usually perform what is called crawling where they follow links throughout the web and create an index of all the sites and the pages so that when someone perform a search, they return the best match for the user.

Google for example has what is called PageRank (PR) which rates websites from 0 to 10, 10 being the highest. The higher the PageRank, the better ranking your page will have compared to lower ranked sites with same content.

You can see your website’s PageRank when you install Google’s toolbar, available for free from Google. Do note however, that Google does not provide a live PageRank. The Toolbar PageRank value is a historic static rank value that does not represent today’s values. Google does this to minimize the workload required to calculate them on the fly. So what you see today is probably few months old.

PageRank is a good way to see what Google think of the relevance of your website and the more links you get from higher PageRank sites, the better your ranking will be since Google assumes these sites value your website and your website has relevant content.

So how do you increase your PageRank?

First, let me clarify something. Having a higher PageRank in itself is not as important as having good content, and lots of it. Search engines will return the exact page on a website that contains the words in the search phrase the user entered. Having a PageRank of 5 for example, will not improve your visibility if you do not have content matching the user’s search phrase or words.

So to increase your site’s visibility through organic search, you need to work on the content of your website. As you already know, I am an advocate of using blogs. In fact, in my How To Setup Dirt Cheap Real Estate Website I recommend using free blogging software, not just for the cost, but for the opportunity it gives you to easily publish content.

Many Real Estate Agents and Real Estate Investors feel that this is too much work, or it requires too much talent. You need to think of it as an investment in your marketing, and one of your successful marketing strategies, not an extra burden. Yes, the results from it are not immediate, and may take a year before you notice any benefits, if  any at all.

It all depends on how much time you dedicate to it. Writing a 500 words or more article relevant to different subjects that your target prospects tend to look for online, will improve the chances of your success. If you dedicate three hours a week to your blog/website, you will be able to publish two to four articles a week. That is 104 to 208 articles in your first year.

 you don’t need that many articles, if you dedicate three to six months to your website to build content, you will be fine. After that, you can publish once a week or once every two weeks to keep fresh content rolling. By then, search engines would have found your website and would have started indexing your content. The next time a search is performed, your website will appear in the search results, assuming the content is relevant to the search term of course.

Now, if you still feel this is too much for you and you cannot do it, then you can hire or buy articles to publish. There are ghost writers on the web who will be more than happy to write articles for you. Do expect to pay $50 per 500 words and up, and you may need to go through few of them till you find one you really like. I know of a Realtor who does this and spends $200 a month on writers to get articles out every week.

The other important part to get more traffic and higher ranking is to get other websites to link to your site. There are many ways to get link backs, most of the links will not have direct benefit or prospect generation ability, the main benefit of them is the increase in search engine’s ranking of your site and better ranking in organic search results.

Let us look at some of them:

1. Blog software such as WordPress (more info found in the link above) has built in PING feature which broadcasts your new article to other websites generating link backs to yours. If you search on any of my article titles, you will see it on many websites even though my articles are new.

2. Participate in online communities and forums related to what you do and including your website in your forum’s signature. A signature is a static text that appears at the bottom of every post you do online. The more activities you have, the more link backs will be generated. Make sure to read each forum’s rules on posting links however.

3. Read other blogs, and comment on them. Some blogs allow you to provide your website, so as you comment, a link is generated back to your website.

4. If you use blog software as I recommend, you can add your blog to Blog directories, and some of them will retrieve a feed from your site and show your articles on their sites with a link back to your site

5. Some hosting companies such as 1 and 1 gives you the ability to register your site with multiple search engines and directories for free, increasing your exposure

6. Paid article submissions. Some companies will submit your articles to 100 to 1000 article repository websites for a fee

More expensive way to generate leads

There are other ways to generate leads, such as Pay Per Click advertising where you pay search engines and other websites for every click back to your site. The cost per click would vary from few cents to few dollars per click. I will not get into this topic at this point due to the complexity of it and the fact that it needs thorough explanation, but with proper planning, it could pay off.

Happy Marketing!

© 2008 Fadi Zeidan’s Articles.