How to Make Extra Money From Your Real Estate Website

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

Summary: In this article, I'll explain how you could generate extra revenue from your real estate website by using commission programs.

I think we can all agree that times are tough for real estate agents right now. Despite record-low interest rates, home sales are still down. So a lot of real estate folks are looking for ways to make extra money during these tough times. And that's exactly what I'm going to talk about in this blog post.

Specifically, I'll use this blog post to explain how you can make more money from your real estate website, by (A) helping the people who are already visiting your site and (B) partnering with trusted companies online.

Let's say I'm a real estate agent, and I get about 200 visitors to my website each week. Most of the people who visit my site are doing some form of real estate research, but only a small percentage of them will actually contact me for help. It's just an undeniable fact of Internet marketing. Most people who visit my real estate website will just pass on through, without contacting me in any way, shape or form.

But what if there was a way for me to earn extra revenue from my website traffic, for those people who are doing general research into the local real estate scene? In truth, there are plenty of things I could be doing to earn extra money from my website. In this blog post, I'm going to focus on the strategy I think works best for most real estate agents.

Commission Programs for Real Estate Agents

Let's say you a person visits your website when researching the housing market in your area. They are not ready to work with a real estate agent yet, but they might be ready to get mortgage quotes from lenders. If you were a member of a commission program with a trusted lending website, you could send those visitors to that website so they could request mortgage quotes. And if they did request a quote, you'd get a commission for it.

So in this scenario, you are accomplishing the following goals:

• You're making more money from your website, particularly from visitors who were not planning on contacting you.
• You are increasing the usefulness of your website, by providing links to related (but non-competitive) real estate and mortgage services.
• You are guiding people toward trusted companies and websites, because you screened them in advance.
• Most importantly, you are not interfering with your lead generation program. People looking for a real estate agent will not be distracted by a link to mortgage information, home insurance quotes, etc. They'll simply contact you.

Of course, for this kind of commission program to work, you would need a steady stream of website traffic. If you only get a handful of visitors to your site each week, I don't know that I would bother with this. But if you get hundreds of visitors each week, and most of them are not contacting you for your services, then you could create a new revenue stream for yourself -- while helping those anonymous visitors in the process.

What would you need to put such a program in place? Here's a list of the most important ingredients:

1. As mentioned, you need a website that gets a good amount of traffic.
2. You need to join a commission program, such as the comprehensive services offered by Commission Junction.
3. You need to identify advertisers to partner with.
4. You need to obtain the creative items for your website, such as links and banner graphics.

When choosing companies to partner with, you should make sure that their products or services do not directly compete with your own. You should also do a little homework to ensure they are reputable companies with solid products. You don't want to send your site visitors to sketchy websites!

Does this kind of strategy work? Well, it depends on the amount of website traffic you have, how well you implement the promotional items, and several other factors. I know some people who do this kind of thing for a living (and a good living at that). I know others who use commission programs as a way to supplement their primary income, especially in times such as these.

Is this kind of strategy right for you? This is a question only you can answer. I'm just putting this out there as something worth considering, particularly if you meet the real estate website "model" I described above.

Spam, Link Exchanges, and Other Real Estate SEO Failures

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

Today, I received what must have been the 50th spam email from some company claiming to be a real estate SEO firm. Evidently, they rely heavily on link exchanges for their SEO clients, because all of the spam emails I've received from them have been the garden-variety link swap messages -- the kind of email that begins with the always awful phrase "Dear Webmaster."

Let me make offer some advice, based on nearly eight years of search engine optimization experience. If you pay money to a company that relies on this kind of tactic as the core of their real estate SEO program, you are missing the whole point of search engine optimization. You're putting your money in the wrong place at the same time.

Let me start with the "premise" of this blog post, and then I'll explain it in more detail:

If you rely on link exchanges to build your link popularity, your website will never live up to its full ranking potential.

High-ranking, quality websites (the kind you want to get links from) do not participate in link exchange programs, because such programs are the tools of the desperate. So when you spend all of your time and money on link exchanges, you are building up a link profile that puts you in a certain "neighborhood." Swapping links is a technique used by webmasters with inferior websites (and the lazy SEO companies that act on their behalf). Instead of building a quality website that naturally attracts links, the lazy webmaster tries to "game the system" by getting links through exchanges.

It's like saying: "Look, my website is not good enough to attract unsolicited links. And neither is yours. So let's commiserate by linking to each other."

One of my mortgage websites is fairly high ranking. It competes with LendingTree and the like for most mortgage-related key phrases. But I didn't achieve this by being lazy, or by wasting my time with link exchange programs. I achieved it by spending many hours, over many years, to develop a truly useful and unique website. As a result, other webmasters link to it without me asking them to.

This is the only way to get links from reputable, high-ranking websites. Why? Because such websites ignore link-exchange requests, for the same reasons I ignore them. When you rely too heavily on a link-exchange program for too long, you'll end up being "stuck," in terms of your search engine rankings. You will never be able to compete with the webmasters who know the "secret" to link building. And the secret is what I've just explained. Long-term SEO success comes from building a quality website with great content -- the kind of website that attracts links naturally.

Or, you can go the lazy route and hire a real estate SEO company to put you in a link-exchange program. They'll make huge promises, but they won't be able to deliver because you cannot earn top rankings for highly competitive phrases through link swapping. They'll say things like, "Well, we use a three-way triangle link swap, so the search engines can't tell they are reciprocal links." But this technique still misses the point. It ignores the fundamentals of SEO success that I've explained above, and it will forever keep you in league with other desperate webmasters. Good luck breaking out of that pool to reach the top of the search engines!

Professional Internet publishers (the people you want to get links from) ignore link-exchange emails. Why? Because they get tons of these requests, and just like me they are tired of them. I've gone so far as creating email filters to block all emails with the word "exchange" in the subject line, though some of them still get through. A link-exchange email request will only get the attention of mediocre websites, so it will result in a mediocre link profile.

When Google's ranking algorithm evaluates your website, it will check to see what kind of links your site has coming in. Does it get links from educational websites, journalistic websites, and high-ranking authority sites? If so, you'll be rewarded with good rankings.

Or does the site only have links from less-popular websites with little or no traffic of their own (the kind of webmasters who also rely on link-exchange programs)? If this is the case, Google's algorithm will put a lot of other websites above yours. Goodbye top rankings!

There's no reason to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to a real estate SEO company that is going to trap you into mediocre rankings. The best person to manage your SEO campaign is you -- and I've given you the tools for success already.

Here's another reason you should be concerned with the quality of your website. Search engines are beginning to consider usage data when ranking websites. And they should, because this kind of data suggests how useful a website truly is -- so it should definitely be a ranking factor. I blogged about this back in 2007, and it has become even more important since then.

Here's what it boils down to. If the majority of people who land on your website (from a search engine) leave the site right away, then it will hurt your rankings. On the contrary, if most of your visitors stay on your website for a while, it will help your rankings. Search engines use web browser "cookies" to track people who use their sites. If somebody clicks on a link through a Google search engine result, Google can track their browser activity until they end their Internet session or clear out their cookie cache. They do this, partly, to gauge the true popularity and usefulness of the website. And they adjust the site's ranking accordingly. This is as it should be.

How do you get people to stay on your site? You create quality content. You make your website easy to navigate. You offer useful tools that help people accomplish a certain goal. You make your website unique and better than the websites of your competitors. You let people interact with the site in some way (chat, FAQ programs, blog comments, etc.).

I'll get off my soapbox now. I hope I've made my point, for what it's worth.