You Can Have My Real Estate Agent Leads

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

You can have all of the real estate agent leads you want. Seriously. I'll even show you how to go about it. You see, lead generation is not a complex science or skill. It just takes a lot of hard work and persistence.

This article is a compilation of the lessons I've learned over the years. As a marketing consultant, I've helped many real estate agents generate leads with their websites and blogs. And through this process of trial and error, I've learned which techniques work best for producing real estate agent leads online ... and which ones are a waste of time. Here's a list of those proven techniques.

Real Estate Lead Strategies

Start by writing a lot of website content. Using a blog is the easiest way to do this, because it reduces the entire publishing process down to a few steps. We will talk more about this as we go. But for now, just realize that you need to create lots of content if you want to get lots of traffic. And traffic is the first step to generating real estate agent leads through your blog or website.

Don't just write any website content. Write articles and reports based on your local real estate scene. Use tools like this one and that one to create a list of relevant keywords ... the kind of phrases your target audience would search through Google, Yahoo and Bing. Relevant content will help you generate quality traffic, and this is paramount to getting real estate agent leads online. You can learn more about keyword strategies here.

While you're expanding your content base, you should start implementing some lead-generation strategies. You can use chat programs for this purpose, or contact forms, or a wide variety of other ideas. But you've got to encourage people to "raise their hands" in some way. You need to promote interaction. I've written an e-book that compiles my favorite techniques for generating agent leads, so you might want to download a copy and give it a read. You'll be glad you did!

Don't just use one lead-generation technique on your website. Use two or three. Experiment with different strategies. See what works best for you, given your particular audience, your website, etc. If one technique works like gangbusters, and the other two are a bust, then get rid of the dead weight and focus your energy on the one that works. Then introduce a new technique to see how it works. This process never ends, by the way. I've been doing it for many years, and I learn something new every week.

Take the advice of other people (including me) with a grain of salt. When it comes to producing real estate agent leads, nothing is written is stone. What works for John might be a bust for Jane, and vice versa. Maybe John did a poor job implementing the strategy, while Jane pulled it off perfectly. Same strategy -- two different stories. Harvest ideas from other agents, but take their "case studies" with a grain of salt. They are personal experiences that may or may not apply to you.

Do you have a search engine optimization (SEO) program? If not, you're falling behind. I have to be blunt here, because there's no time to waste. All of your successful competitors are working hard on their search engine visibility. I guarantee it. Why? Because you can't generate real estate agent leads without traffic, and search engines are the best way to produce a steady stream of traffic.

Learn to capitalize on the web traffic you have right now, before trying to boost your traffic. I once had a client who was convinced he needed more website traffic, because he was not getting very many leads through the site. I reviewed his website analytics and found that he was getting about 1,000 visitors per week. That's plenty of traffic for an agent website! He just wasn't doing anything to get those people to raise their hands. Work with what you've got. Put your lead-generation strategies in place today. And then work on boosting your website visibility and traffic. First things first.

Let me restate that last point differently. (It's important enough to warrant repetition.) Web traffic alone does nothing for you. If 500 people visit your website each day, but leave the site without interacting with you, then you've gained nothing. You must convert traffic into real estate leads, and then you must follow up with those leads to turn them into clients. It's a series of steps. Website visibility comes first, and it's the hardest part of the process. This will increase your site traffic. And then, if you do something to encourage interaction, you'll turn traffic into real estate agent leads ... or not. It's all up to you.

Realtor Website Design with Search Engines in Mind

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

Realtor website design and search engine optimization (SEO) go hand in hand. So if you're planning a new website soon, you should learn how to optimize it as well. You don't have to become an SEO expert or anything, but you should know enough to build the site properly.

Why is this important? Because if you ignore the fundamentals of SEO when creating your site, you could hamstring your future success. In this article, I'll talk about Realtor website design with search engines in mind. If you embrace these fundamentals early on, when designing the site, you'll attract more visitors later on down the road.

Let's start by defining what SEO is, and what it has to do with your marketing success.

Definition: Search engine optimization is the act of optimizing your website for better rankings in Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines. By ranking well for certain key phrases, you will also increase your web traffic. So the ultimate goal of SEO is to gain additional exposure online, in order to attract clients and grow your real estate business. I think we can agree that these are all good things.

The question is, how do you achieve this kind of success? Well, it all starts with Realtor website design and how you build your site. This is the first step to SEO success -- the fundamental building block. So let's talk about some of the things you should put in place to achieve maximum search engine visibility.

Realtor Web Design with SEO in Mind

So what does it mean to practice Realtor website design with SEO in mind? It means you develop the site with an eye toward your future search engine visibility. It means that you put certain things in place to achieve good rankings and visibility. Most importantly, it means you understand the importance of search engine optimization, in terms of bringing visitors to your site.

That answers the "why" of SEO-friendly web design. But what about the "how" side of things? How do you ensure the future visibility of your Realtor website with SEO techniques? What areas should you focus on to get the best results? That's what we will talk about next.

1. Create plenty of topic-specific web pages.

We all know what a web page is, and we know that content is the information that fills the page. But what is a "topic-specific" page? This means that every page on your site has a specific focus -- one that is built around a particular topic. More specifically, you should build each page around a key phrase that's relevant to your business.

When you take a topical, keyword-driven approach to Realtor website design, you will increase the specificity and relevance of every page on your site. This contributes to better search engine rankings for your key phrases.

How many pages should you have? Well, this depends on your business model, your area of operation, and your audience. You could have pages for different cities, different neighborhoods, the different real estate services you provide, etc. But generally speaking, the more pages the better.

The key to all this, from an SEO standpoint, is to keep your pages tightly focused around one or two topics / phrases. This will boost the search engine relevance of each individual page. On the contrary, if you take an "everything-but-the-kitchen-sink" approach to content development, you will decrease the specificity and relevance of your individual pages.

There is no limit to the number of topics you could integrate within your Realtor website design, and that's actually our next subject.

2. Design your website for future growth.

We just talked about the value of having plenty of content on your website. When you add more topics and pages to the site, you give people more ways to find you through search engines. Your website will appear for more searches, because you've incorporated so many key phrases. This will increase your web traffic, which is the first step to gaining new clients via the Web.

You need to account for this perpetual growth in the early stages of the Realtor website design process. Why? Because if you build a site that is hard to expand, or is rigid in some way, you will limit your growth. So when you're sketching out your organizational chart for the site, make sure it's flexible and expandable. This is a key requirement for Realtor web design and SEO success. You may think you only need five web pages right now. But as your business grows over time, you may end up with dozens of even hundreds of pages.

Adding new content to your website on a regular basis is one of the easiest and most effective ways to increase your traffic levels, month after month. Here are 21 content ideas to help you get started.

3. Build your site logically, with an organized structure.

Before you actually start building your website (or having one built for you), you should it mapped out on paper. Call it a site map if you like, or an organizational chart. Whatever you call it, you need to make sure your website is designed around a logical structure.

This helps you in two ways. It increases usability by helping people navigate their way through the site. And it improves your visibility by helping search engines find all of that content you've created. Both of these things will help you gain new clients via the Web.

If you have a large site with dozens or even hundreds of pages, you should also create an XML sitemap to help search engines find all of the pages. You can create a sitemap easily (and for free) by using an online tool such as this one.

It's also helpful to have at least one text-based menu on your site, since these are the easiest links for search engine "spiders" to crawl. If your main navigation menu is built using Flash, Javascript or some other fancy programming, put an alternate menu at the bottom of the site. Include plain-old text links (like this) to all of the key sections of your site.

4. Add a blog to your website for easy expansion.

This is the perfect solution to what we just talked about. A blog is an easy way to grow your website over time, because it's so easy to use. By using a blogging program, you can add new pages to your site just as fast as you can type.

I'm writing a blog post right now, and as soon as I click the "publish" button I will have a new page of content. This gives me a greater range of topics on the site (item #1 above) and helps me grow my website over time (item #2 above). Both of these things will lead to an increase in search engine traffic, which is the whole point of an SEO program.

In terms of search engine visibility, there are other benefits to all of this content development. If your Realtor website provides a lot of useful information, news and other resources, other webmasters will be more inclined to link to the site. This increases the link popularity of your website, which in turn will increase your search engine rankings for all of those key phrases. See how it all ties together? This is what I mean by Realtor website design and SEO going hand in hand.

5. Optimize images and photos for search engines.

Search engines are starting to show more images within their results pages. Searchers can do an image-only search to find pictures related to a specific phrase, but these pictures will also show up in the regular search queries from time to time. So if you optimize your images, you are giving people yet another way to find your website.

You can optimize the images on your website in two ways. You can save them with keyword-rich file names (such as "credit-score-chart.jpg"), and you can use relevant keywords within the alt tag for each image.

I hope you've enjoyed this guide to Realtor website design and SEO, and I wish you well in your online adventures.