17 Ways to Generate More Real Estate Leads Online

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

Viable leads are the lifeblood of any real estate business. They are the seeds from which new business relationships grow. They are, in essence, the key to client acquisition.

But many agents are at loss when it comes to generating real estate leads on a regular basis. Sure, they realize the importance of it. And they know they have to be proactive in order to generate new leads and grow their businesses over time. But when it comes to the actual implementation of strategies and techniques, these agents get stuck.

In this article, I've compiled a list of 17 techniques you can use to produce more real estate leads online. All of the strategies involve the use of your website, your blog, search engine optimization and other web-based elements.

And if you're really serious about this topic, you'll be glad to know that all of these items are covered in detail in my lead generation book for agents. It's the best-selling ebook in the history of this website, and you'll find out why when download your copy!

But I digress. Let's move on to the mission at hand. Here's a helpful list of techniques for producing viable real estate leads through your website or blog:

How to Produce Real Estate Website Leads

1. Clean up your website. I am constantly amazed by how unbelievably cluttered a lot of real estate websites are. What hope do you have of generating leads if people can't find anything on your site? Start this process by determining your "action paths" (next item).
2. If you want people to take a certain action on your website, you need to (A) define what that path is and (B) make the path very easy to follow. Map it out on paper. Think about the goals people have when they visit your site. Help them find their way, and they'll be more likely to stick around.
3. Assign value to every action you ask people to take. Increase the value of what you're offering. Tell people what's in it for them. The stronger the value of your offer, the more real estate leads you stand to gain. If you have nothing of value to offer people, then you're not ready to market your services -- go back to the drawing board.
4. Understand the difference between web traffic and leads. I once spoke to an agent who claimed to have over 1,000 unique visitors to his website every week. Care to guess how many inquiries he was producing from that traffic? Zero! He thought traffic was the ultimate goal, when in truth it's merely a stepping stone. Don't make this same mistake.
   
5. Use multiple strategies to produce leads through your website and/or blog. As we progress through this list, I'll offer plenty of ideas you can implement across your site. But the best strategy for real estate lead generation is a combined strategy, one that employs various techniques.
6. Experiment with FAQ programs. These are software tools that you can install onto your blog or website. It adds interactivity to your site, which increases the likelihood that people will contact you in some way. (This is explained in more detail in the lead generation manual, by the way.)
   
7. Experiment with chat programs. You have no doubt encountered a customer service chat program while surfing the web in the past. Many companies use them these days. If you have an office manager or customer service rep who's in front of a computer during business hours, you could pick up some extra real estate leads with a chat program. (This is also explained in the e-book.)
   
8. If you don't have a real estate blog already, it's time to start one. You can have a blog up and running in a couple of days, and it's a great way to encourage participation from readers. Many of the people who leave comments on your blog will be local buyers or sellers, which means they could become your next client.
9. Blog often to increase traffic to your website. This is the primary benefit of blogging programs -- they make it incredibly easy to publish new content on a regular basis. The more information you publish, the more search engine visibility you'll enjoy. This in turn will increase your web traffic and (if you use the other techniques on this list) the number of real estate leads you produce. Here are some content ideas to get you started.
10. Create landing pages to capture more real estate leads through your website. A landing page is a "stripped down" web page that presents something of value and asks for a certain action on the visitor's part. It removes all other distractions and thereby increases the likelihood of a conversion.
    
11. Increase traffic to your key pages, the ones where you have lead generation techniques in place. Make sure they're a prominent part of your main menu. Practice cross-linking across your site to send more people to your key pages. Try using callout graphics / links to direct people where you want them to go.
12. Generate more leads by improving the overall quality of your website. If you have a well-designed and neatly organized website, people will be more inclined to trust you. Trust is the first step to encouraging a response from your visitors.
    
13. Put your phone number in a prominent location on every page. Hint -- mot people will look for it in the upper-right section of your header. This is where phone numbers usually occur on business websites. This simple technique has been proven, time and time again, to increase the number of leads and inquiries.
14. Why not launch a second website, blog or web forum? If you're still struggling with the first site, keep your focus on that. But if you already have a successful web presence that produces traffic and leads, why not duplicate that success? It won't cost you much, aside from your time and energy. And it could potentially double your lead-generation and client-acquisition rates.
15. Use your website in conjunction with offline events, such as home buying seminars and other educational events. You might even experiment with online "webinars" using a software product like GoToMeeting. Of course, you'll need decent levels of site traffic to get people to sign up, which is the key to success with all of these techniques.
    
16. Partner with local mortgage brokers, home appraisers and others in related fields. When used properly, cross-marketing can be an effective tool for business growth. And you can take this technique onto your website as well, by creating a separate "pitch" page for each professional in your network. Of course, they would do the same for you.
    
17. Come up with the next "big idea" in real estate lead generation. This list represents things I've done in the past, for my own websites and those of my clients. Often, however, the best ideas are the new ones -- the techniques nobody has ever tried before. So put on your thinking cap and come up with your own unique strategy for attracting clients online.
    

Top 10 Lead Generation Techniques - Explained

If you found this list helpful, and you'd like to learn more about the various ways to generate real estate leads online, you should download a copy of this e-book. You can get a copy today and start putting it to use tomorrow.



In this book, I've outlined the strategies that have worked best for me on the Home Buying Institute website, and also on the website of past clients. In other words, it's like a "greatest hits" collection of lead generation techniques.