My Real Estate Website Doesn't Produce Leads

This seems to be the number-one concern among real estate agents these days ... a website that doesn't produce any viable real estate leads. Or one that doesn't produce any leads at all.

Sometimes the answer is obvious. Other times, it calls for some speculation. For example, some websites have such obvious problems that you can spot them at a glance. Maybe there are no lead generation systems in place at all, or perhaps the website doesn't function properly.

In other cases, however, the website may appear to be well-designed from a lead generation standpoint, but it still does not produce any real estate leads. This is a tougher scenario to evaluate.

In the latter case, the lack of real estate leads could just be because of the market. After all, if there's not a lot of real estate activity in your area, you can't expect a steady stream of leads to pour through your real estate website. In many cities -- from Nashville to Tucson and elsewhere -- this is what we are seeing right now. And in this case, you simply have to look at your traffic stats. Are you even getting any traffic on a daily basis? If not, you have no hope of producing real estate leads from the website.

If your stats reveal a steady stream of website traffic day in and day out, but you are not getting any leads from the website, then there is something lacking from a lead generation standpoint. In such cases, these are the things I usually troubleshoot first:

Does the website offer any reason why people should contact the agent, or fill out the form, or whatever the conversion goal is? If not, this needs to be addressed first and foremost.

Are the conversion points easy to find, or is the real estate website in such a messy state that visitors can't find their way around? This is a usability issue, and one of the ways you can spot it is through high percentages of people who hit the home page only to leave right away (without clicking further into the website).

These are the things I would start with when troubleshooting a real estate website with good traffic levels but poor lead generation. Often, it's just a matter of cleaning things up and presenting something of value that people would want.

I also see a lot of those "Free Reports" offered on real estate websites, presumably for lead generation purposes. Many of the so-called reports I encounter are poorly positioned in several ways. First of all, they will consist of information the web visitor can easily find elsewhere online. For example, "Top 10 Tips for Buying a Home" is so worn out and overused that it's sad really. Without much effort, I could probably Google that phrase and find it plastered all across the Web.

So who is going to offer their email address in exchange for a generic article they can find on thousands of other websites? Consumers are web-savvy these days, and they know how to ignore useless info and find the good stuff.

So let's say you took the "free report" concept and injected it with steroids and other performance-enhancing substances ... metaphorically speaking of course. Let's say you created an actual e-booklet, in PDF format. And let's say that it was all about the local real estate scene in your area. Suddenly, the booklet becomes something that people cannot find anywhere else, thus the perceived value of the item increases.

Now let's take this further and hire a graphic designer to create a "virtual cover" for the booklet -- one that you can use to promote it on your website. People believe in what they see, so sometimes a little visual entice is all it takes to get people to starting filling out those web forms.

But we're not done yet. Let's create a press release and distribute it online to announce this insightful new guide to the real estate scene in [your town] ... jam-packed with recent sales statistics, development news, residential reports and more. A must-read for anyone planning to buy a home in [your town].

I've shared enough. You get the idea. But suffice to say these are only steps 1 through 7 of about 15 steps I would take ... if I were serious about generating leads through my real estate website. I offer these kinds of ideas and strategies all the time, but very few people implement them. And do you want to know why?

Because nobody ever said lead generation was easy!

Those who put in the extra effort will reap the extra rewards. And those who keep peddling their "Top Ten Tips for Buying a Home" will probably find another line of work at some point.

Nashville Real Estate - New City Page Available

We have just posted a new City Page for Nashville, Tennessee real estate, and promotions are already underway to drive this page up through the search engine rankings.


Image: View of Nashville from the Cumberland River

For real estate agents in Nashville, this is a great way to ensure your online visibility for the months and years to come, as we are very active about promoting these City Pages. I expect this page to reach the first page of all major search engines within the next few months.

Here's an excerpt from this Nashville real estate City Page:

In 2006, Kiplinger.com created a list of "50 Smart Places to Live." Essentially, it was a list of cities that were a good real estate investment. Nashville, Tennessee was ranked #1 by the editors. So right away, we have validation that Nashville real estate is a smart investment to make. So what makes Nashville a great place to buy a home? Why do publications such as Kiplinger consistently rate the city high on "best places to live" types of lists? Well, lots of reasons actually. So in this City Page, we will take a closer look at just what makes Nashville tick — and what makes it such a smart real estate investment.

Full article

Real Estate Marketing Online - Introducing City Pages

Coming soon to a city near you, City Pages are a unique approach to real estate marketing online.

I've recently begun to revamp a website of mine that, up until now, had just been "hanging out" online with no real purpose. In its new form, the site has plenty of purpose. It will be an online encyclopedia of U.S. cities, from a real estate and lifestyle angle.


You can see the groundwork here

And, because all of the City Pages can be sponsored by real estate agents, it's also a new way to approach real estate marketing online (for additional exposure, web traffic, etc.).

Here's the gist of the program, and how you can use it for real estate marketing online. Each City Page will be designed for good rankings in the major search engines such as Google. But even more importantly, the pages will be very informative and useful for people researching the city from a real estate angle.

By following a "one agent per city" type of rule, the website will offer premium placement for the real estate agent who chooses to sponsor a particular City Page. Thus, it's a nice addition to any online real estate marketing program.

Also, because we are spending more than 40% of site revenue on additional site promotion, it's a marketing investment with increasing returns year after year. (The City Pages will enjoy increased visibility and traffic levels over time.)

This will all make a lot more sense if you see it for yourself:

• Here's an example of a sponsored City Page for Georgetown, Texas.
• Here's an example of an available (not sponsored) City Page for Birmingham, Alabama.

Here's some additional information on the benefits of the program.

Being a newly revitalized program, there's obviously a lot of work to be done. Now that the site's redesign is complete, my focus will be on (A) creating new City Pages, and (B) pouring resources into the site in order to increase its search engine ranking and traffic levels.

Note: We are adding new cities / pages at a rate of two per day. If you are interested in sponsoring a City Page, please let me know and I will put your city at the top of the production list. This will give you "first dibs" to lock down your City Page for a year ... or longer!

Real Estate Lead Generation Online - Tip #63 of 100

Real Estate Internet Marketing - 100 Tips in 100 Days

Tip 63 of 100 - Increase Your Onsite Conversions

A real estate website that doesn't make conversions is a real estate website that serves very little business function. So let's talk about (A) what a conversion is and (B) how you can increase conversions across your real estate website or blog.

By way of definition, an "onsite conversion" takes place when somebody goes from being a website visitor to something else as well.

For example, if a person visits your website and signs up for your email newsletter, an onsite conversion has taken place. The person has "converted" from a casual website visitor to a newsletter subscriber.

There are many kinds of conversions, and they differ from one website to another, and from one organization to the next:

• A non-profit website might seek donations or volunteer registrations. Those conversions are valuable to them.


• A service-related business like real estate might seek website conversions of a different nature. Maybe they want people to sign up for a newsletter list or call to learn more about a property listing. Those are valuable conversions for these business models.


• A product-based website like Amazon.com seeks one type of conversion above all else. They want people to purchase products, plain and simple. So that's the most important type of conversion for them.
  

Increasing Conversions Across Your Website

So we have talked about the importance of onsite conversions, and how they are the end-product of your online real estate marketing efforts. Now let's look at some of the ways you improve your onsite conversions to help grow your real estate business.

1. Define Your Conversions in Advance

This might seem like a no-brainer, but you'd be surprised by how many deer-in-the-headlight expressions I get when I ask real estate agents, "What are your top three conversion goals on this website?"

Some will scratch their heads and say, "To get clients, I guess." That's not a specific goal for website conversion. It's the end-goal of all real estate marketing efforts, sure. But it's not a clearly defined conversion goal.

Other real estate business owners have it figured out better. For example, they might say something like, "I want my visitors to do one of three things ... download our featured report from the home page, click on the chat button to get in touch with a representative, or contact us by phone or email."

In the example above, the hypothetical real estate professional has clearly defined the conversion points on her website. And from the sound of it, other members of the company are knowledgeable about (and engaged in) those conversion points. Customer support, for example, is ready to connect with site visitors through the website's chat tool, anytime somebody clicks on the button. That's much more specific and achievable than the first conversion goal of "getting clients."

2. Be Visible Online

People cannot contact you (or purchase your products, etc.) if they don't know you exist. So you must strive to make your business visible, online and off. Internet visibility is a big part of this. After all, the more visible you are online, the more likely people will be to find you.

That's why I've written an entire book on the subject, to serve as your guide to online visibility.

But there are other ways to increase your visibility as well. You can publish articles in your local newspaper, syndicate articles and press releases online, be active in your community, conduct free seminars, and many other aspects of PR. Visibility and awareness are the first steps to generating real estate leads online.

3. Increase Usability Across Your Website

Picture this. You're on one side of your real estate website, and a potential client is on the other side of the website. This person is looking for an agent to represent them in buying a new home.

The problem is, you don't know the potential client is there. How could you? They haven't contacted you yet. So in order for a connection to take place, the person must first enter your real estate website, navigate their way through it, like what they find on the site, and then contact you in some fashion.

But what if they find the navigation menu confusing? Or maybe they can't find the property listings on your site? Or what if they have any number of problems related to a lack of usability? That's right ... they'll leave as quickly as they came. After all, there are plenty of other websites within your industry that they can visit.

Website usability is crucial to making onsite conversions. The two concepts are inseparable, because if a person can't use your website, you have no chance to connect with them or to make a sale. You don't have the luxury of personally guiding them through your website -- they are completely on their own.

4. Minimize Distractions Across Your Website

This is another element of website usability, but it deserves special focus. On a real estate agent website, the goal is usually to lead visitors down a certain path. You can't control where people will go or what they will click on, but you can at least offer your preferred path and make it easy to follow.

But when you overload your web pages with too many items, you end up dividing the reader's attention, creating unneeded distraction, and increasing the likelihood visitors will leave your website altogether.

Visit your home page and ask yourself, what is the most desirable action you want people to take? What is the second most desirable action? From a visual standpoint, does the placement and prominence of these two paths support their importance? Or do they battle for attention with a dozen other distractions?

5. State (and Restate) the Value of Each Conversion Point

In real estate web marketing, there is a direct correlation between value and response. If you want people to take a certain action on your website, you have to convey the value of that action. In other words, tell people what they get out of it. It's a simple rule to remember. If you want action, you have to explain the reason and value behind the action.

Instead of saying, "Click here to join our newsletter," say something like this:

"Join our newsletter for access to hard-to-find property listings, plus a wealth of money-saving tips and advice!"

6. Increase Traffic to Website Conversion Points

Want the opportunity to convert more of your website visitors into clients? Then just increase the amount of website visitors you get. Once you have some lead generation and sales-generation techniques in place, you want to get as much qualified traffic to those conversion points as possible.

The first step is to increase your overall website traffic. The second step is to increase your traffic to specific pages of your website (your purchase page, your download page, your contact page ... in short, your conversion pages). You can do this by making your conversion points / pages more prominent and easy to find. See the following items for tips on doing this!

7. Increase the Prominence of Conversion Points

Once you've defined your conversion points (see item #1 above), you should try to make them visible from every page of your real estate website. Put them into the main menu, right up near the top. Create eye-catching graphics to showcase them. Put them "above the fold" across all of your web pages.

For example, let's say one of your conversion points is an email newsletter you want visitors to find and subscribe to. You could put a sign-up box in the upper-right corner of your website, a location that has been shown to increase sign-up rates. You could also create a newsletter link at the top of your main menu area, right under the links for "Home." You could put call-out boxes within articles on your site, right there in the middle of the page ("center mast").

By doing these things, you would increase the prominence of your newsletter sign-up forms (conversion points) and most likely increase subscription rates as a result.

8. Minimize Website Attrition

Marketing attrition refers to the number of people who do not take the actions you want them to take along the path to conversion. At each step in the marketing process, you stand to lose some people. You could also refer to this as "drop-off." The higher the attrition rates, the less successful the marketing program.

9. Increase the Interactivity of Your Website

The more ways people have to interact with your website, the better your chances of converting them into customers. You can increase interactivity in a number of ways. And these days, there are all kinds of software products to make it extremely easy for you!

Here are a few examples of interactivity you could build into your website:

• Real estate blogs work great because readers can leave comments on the various blog posts. That's a form of interaction, and it's also the start of a dialogue that could lead to a sale.


• You could create some kind of Q&A forum on your website and grow your own Internet community. Forum software programs like VBulletin and phpBB make it achievable.


• You can also buy and install programs to help you create an interactive FAQ section of your website (also known as a "Knowledge Base"). Interspire's "Active KB" and Omnistar's "KBase" are two such programs.


• If you have customer support personnel, you could install a chat program on your website to encourage the all-important first contact from site visitors.
  

10. Overcome Skepticism / Encourage Trust

We are all naturally skeptical online. The reasons for this are obvious. The Internet can be an anonymous and scary place, used for deceitful purposes by everyone from con artists to pedophiles. Yikes!

Of course, these shady characters represent the minority (or so I'd like to believe). But it still poses a challenge you must consider in your online marketing program.

I encounter a lot of "faceless" websites that use a lot of pronouns like "we" and "us" ... websites that make it nearly impossible to find a person's name. You've seen websites like this, yes? What's your first reaction when encountering a mystery website? Distrust? Uncertainty? Fear? Yeah ... me too.

Take a look at your own website right now. What have you done to make the visitor comfortable in who you are? How have you demonstrated integrity? How have you encouraged trust and confidence?

Open House Ideas - 21 Ways to Pack the House

Open houses are probably one of the oldest forms of real estate marketing. After all, what better way to choose a potential home than by spending some time "hangin' out" in it?

It's not the purpose of this article to say whether or not the open house is an effective marketing tool for real estate agents. Personally, I feel that it is. The purpose of this article is to offer some open house ideas that may help you "pack the house" with potential buyers.

Obviously, not all of the ideas on this list will be feasible for you. When coming up with ideas for your open house event, you have to weigh the cost of the event against the size of your potential commission. For example, when marketing luxury homes with a larger commission at stake, you can probably afford to spend more on your open house event.

These ideas are just to get your wheels turning...

Ideas for Filling Your Open House With Potential Buyers (And Probably Some Freebie Hunters)

1. Promote the open house to your email marketing list, if you have one.
2. Announce the event with neighborhood flyers and signs.
3. Hire a band for the event (if the potential commission could justify the cost).
4. Hire a clown to entertain the children while the parents are getting to know the home.
5. Hire a Santa Claus if it's the holiday season.
6. If it's going to be a cool event, let your local news know about it.
7. Leave a trail of colorful balloons leading to the open house location.
8. Hire a "sign waiver" and have them stand on a high-traffic entry to the neighborhood.
9. Have an incentive item of some kind, such as real estate data reports of some kind.
10. Place a yard sign with the future date on it. Light it up at night.
11. Use a section of your website's home page for upcoming open houses.
12. Hire out a billboard (again, the potential commission will dictate budget here).
13. Send direct mail postcards to announce the open house with full-color photos.
14. Find a popular blogger in your area and pay them to blog about the event.
15. Create a virtual open house for all of those web-savvy house hunters.
16. Have the home professionally staged and offer design tips to attendees.
17. Set up roadblocks to funnel traffic past the open house ... just kidding.
18. Sent invitations to apartment complexes (where the rent "qualifies" the audience).
19. Hold a private, invitation-only open house with a select group (requires leads).
20. Use all of the community websites you can find, such as Craigslist, local forums, etc.
21. Fill in the blank here. Use your imagination. Where there's a will there's a way!

Do you have open house ideas to add to this list? Email them to me and I will include them in this blog post (with credits).

Yahoo Real Estate Leads Available to More Brokers

Yahoo is making its real estate leads available to more franchises and brokerages. If you're not familiar with Yahoo Real Estate, it's a multipurpose portal with all kinds of real estate tools -- home valuation, property listings, and many other resources.

And because it's operated by Yahoo (one of the smartest Internet companies, in my opinion), it is incredibly easy to use and highly visible to a vast audience.

So ... as you might imagine, the site gets a ton of real estate leads as a result of all that traffic and visibility. And everyone knows that quality leads are one of the hardest things to come by in the real estate business. Well, Yahoo has plenty of them. And if you work for one of the increasing number of real estate companies who partner with Yahoo Real Estate, consider yourself lucky.

Read the full story here

Real Estate Buyer Leads - You Get What You Pay For

I was doing some Internet research recently to see what type of lead generation phrases are being searched through Google, Yahoo, etc. And I was surprised to see the word "free" come up quite a bit.

In other words, it seems that a lot of real estate agents are using the Internet to try and find a source for free real estate leads.

Here's a quick word about real estate buyer leads (regardless of the source), based on my own experiences working with agents over the years. You get what you pay for!

Essentially, there are two types of buyer lead sources that real estate agents can pursue. You can either generate the leads yourself, or you can buy into a lead referral program. If you want to increase the number of buyer leads you get from your own website, check out this article on the subject.

Real Estate Web Leads - The Book

After repeated requests, I've finally created a book on website lead generation for rel estate agents. This book is a compilation of the techniques I've used over the years.

If you want to by real estate leads from some other source, keep the "you get what you pay for" principle in mind. With regard to free buyer leads, consider this. It takes a lot of time, energy and money to initiate and sustain a lead-gathering program. So why would somebody want to give those valuable leads away for free. I can't think of a reason ... unless the leads are junk, or there is some other catch to the "free" offer.

Two Types of Buyer Leads

Here's the difference between real estate buyer leads that are worth paying for, and those that are marketed as being "free"...

• Valuable leads worth buying are basically the names and contact info of people who are actively seeking home buying information in your area. In other words, these people are your ideal audience -- they are in need of real estate information (and probably services as well).
• Low-value leads are usually nothing more than the names and contact information of regular folks ... with no consideration as to whether or not they are in the market for a home. These are the "discount leads" and free leads you see offered on a lot of shady websites.

The difference, of course, is that the high-value leads are much easier to turn into clients, because you know that they are (A) in your local area and (B) actively shopping for a home in the area as well. Low-value leads are basically people you know nothing about, aside from their name and contact info. Why would you even contact people like that?

Real Estate Marketing Newsletters 101

Article summary: A guide to using electronic newsletters as a marketing tool for real estate agents and brokers.

A lot of people argue about which real estate newsletter company is best, or what kind of templates are easiest to work with, etc. To which I add the following commentary:

None of that really matters.

Or at least, those things don't matter as much as the newsletter content and strategy. Newsletters can be a useful addition to your agent marketing program, but there are some things you need to know about them.

From everything I've seen, real estate marketing newsletters are one of the most misunderstood -- and misused -- forms of agent marketing.

I know this, because I'm on the contact list of about two-dozen real estate newsletters. Call it research. Many of the email newsletters I receive from agents lack one thing above all else. They lack strategy. Here's how the typical agent newsletter unfolds:

The sender rounds up a few generic articles, such as "Top Tips for Buying a Home," sends the newsletter to the list, and says something like "Call me if you need my services."

This kind of real estate newsletter lacks originality, specificity, strategy and value -- four things a marketing newsletter should have if it the agent expects to get anything out of the program.

Here's how to turn up the dial on these four elements...

4 Elements of an Effective Real Estate Newsletter

1.Originality -- Think about the people you're sending your newsletter to. Chances are, they get a lot of unwanted emails. Don't we all? So if you use some kind of real estate newsletter service that sends the same cookie-cutter articles to people in different real estate markets, don't be surprised if your newsletter winds up in the "unwanted" category. Write your own content, and write it in a way that will interest and aid the home buyers and sellers in your market.

2. Specificity -- Anyone can go online and find hundreds of home buying or selling tips. So how would it benefit your newsletter recipients to have this kind of information in an email? Instead of sending generic tips for generic people, get specific with your newsletter. Offer local property listings, local real estate news, local resources ... tailor your information to your audience.

3. Strategy -- Your real estate marketing newsletter should have a purpose. You might say that the purpose of your newsletter is to help you grow your real estate business. That's too general to be a realistic strategy for a real estate newsletter. You need to define an objective that your newsletter can actually achieve. For example: "I want my marketing newsletter to generate at least ten inquiries each month. I will achieve this by [fill in the blanks]."

4. Value -- When it comes to any form of marketing, value and response are proportional. If you offer some form of incentive to your newsletter list (in hopes of generating a response), the value of that incentive will dictate the size of the response. This is a longstanding premise of direct marketing in general, and it applies to real estate marketing newsletters as well.

Is the Recession Monster Rearing Its Head?

Today I saw two CNN anchors talking about recession. They were really getting into the nitty-gritty of semantics and word origin. Evidently, it's very important to CNN anchors to know when they can and cannot refer to the economy as being in a recession.

Economists will say that when we experience two consecutive quarters of negative growth, then we are in a recession. Incidentally, "negative growth" is also a favorite oxymoron of mine ... right up there with "original copy." But I digress.

Semantics be damned, is what I say. Despite what you call it, we are in a housing slump. And it will probably only get worse before it gets better.

You even see media folks using words like "crisis" and "meltdown" to describe the current mortgage market -- which has everything to do with your real estate business, by the way.

Here's my take on how this all came to a head, for anyone who cares:

• Through most of the 1990's, many lending institutions began to offer home loans to people who had no business taking on home loans. They had low credit scores and financial "houses" with shaky foundations.
• To maximize profits, the lenders cranked up the interest rates for these bad credit mortgage shoppers, like they still do today.
• Many lenders, such as Ameriquest, began to focus on this kind of subprime lending (as it became known) almost exclusively. *
• Some economists began to warn that these "easy lending" practices would have grave repercussions down the road, so...
• Some politicians began to raise an eyebrow at these subprime lending practices, but...
• Lending industry lobbyists contributed to political campaigns so the politicians would have an easier time turning a blind eye. (Schwarzenegger got a nice chunk from Ameriquest, and so did George W.).
• Because many of the subprime loans were adjustable rate mortgages with low initial rates, they inevitably reset to much higher interest rates.
  
• Thousands upon thousands of subprime borrowers could not afford their increased payments, so...
• We had more home foreclosures in a single year than any other year since they've been tracking these things.
  
• A lot of the same politicians who previously turned a blind eye realized that the media was covering them more closely now. So they began to step up and say, "Ooooh, these evil mortgage lenders make me so angry. We must regulate them."
• Long story short, it's a lot harder to get a mortgage these days ... and many of the subprime lenders are facing extinction.
  
• The mortgage meltdown extended to the business world as a whole, which is why business credit is tightening as well as consumer credit.
• And now, CNN anchors are arguing over the definition of the word "recession."
• Oh, and it certainly doesn't help that we are spending 25 gazillion dollars a year in Iraq.
  

* Update: Ameriquest recently posted a message on their website that says they are no longer accepting loan applications. Go figure.

So there you have it ... my take on how we got to where we are, from a mortgage lending standpoint. Of course, one person's loss is another's gain. For example, real estate investors who focus on buying foreclosure homes benefit greatly because there are so many of these properties available now.

Related article:
Real Estate Marketing In a Slow Market

Real Estate Marketing In a Slow Market

The following question gets the award for most commonly asked question from my real estate SEO clients over the last month:

The market has sure slowed down lately. Do you any real estate marketing ideas that are specific to a slower market?

Unfortunately, there is not much to say to a question like this. Most agents realize that real estate is a very cyclical business, and we are scraping bottom right about now.

So the best advice I can give about real estate marketing in a slow market is to be smart about where you spend your marketing dollars, scale back on unnecessary expenditures, and focus on marketing techniques that will benefit you during the next upswing ... because it will come eventually.

Here's how this relates to search engine optimization, which is my particular specialty. Anytime is a good time to work on your website's search engine rankings. It's a slow and steady process, so you should work on it a little each month. I've even given step-by-step SEO instructions in my book Top Ten Agent, so there's plenty you could be doing.

When real estate markets turn upward, the volume of real estate-related Internet searches also begins to rise. I've seen it happen for years. So if you boost your website's search engine rankings starting now, you'll be in good shape to capture your share of that increased search traffic down the road.

Thus, search engine optimization is a good investment in any kind of market, and I'm not just saying that because I offer real estate SEO services. Truth be told, I have about all the clients I can handle right now.

Other forms of real estate marketing do not share that trait, and are not a wise investment in slower markets. For example, it's usually a good idea to scale back on print advertising (newspaper, magazines, etc.) during anything that resembles a housing slump. After all, what's the point of spending money on print ads when nobody is going to respond to them? Magazine ads don't have the same future benefit that SEO does.

So while there aren't any magic techniques for real estate marketing in a slow market, there are certainly things you can do to prepare for when the market swings up again. The key is to spend your money on marketing tactics that have a future benefit.

Related article:
The Recession Monster Rears Its Head