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.

How to Promote Your Website on a Budget

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

Many website owners are stuck between a rock and a hard place right now, in terms of promoting their sites. They know they have to promote their websites constantly in order to drive qualified traffic. But times are tough right now, and many people are cutting their marketing budgets in response to economic changes.


It's a classic catch 22. How do you promote your website on the cheap? What kind of low-cost promotional techniques can you use to generate valuable traffic without blowing your budget?

It's time for some hard truth about Internet marketing. If you don't create the kind of business website that promotes itself, you will always have to spend your precious time and money to promote the site. So the goal here is to develop the kind of website that other bloggers and webmasters talk about without being paid to do so. If you can achieve this goal (and you can if you put your mind to it), you will find that your website essentially promotes itself. And think of the time, energy and money you'll save when that happens.

Building Value Into Your Website

Buzz. Word of mouth. Citations and referrals. These are the things that every webmaster should strive for, and this goes double for those of us who rely on our sites for business purposes. If you can create the kind of website that generates constant word-of-mouth exposure, links and citations, the site will promote itself.

You see this kind of thing happen all the time online. In fact, as I write this blog post, I'm listening to an online music website that I heard about through word-of-mouth marketing. It's called Pandora, and one of my friends was telling me to check it out for the longest time. "It's so great," she would say. "So much better than the other websites offering free music." So I checked it out, and you know what? It is great. I'm now a member, and I use the website every day. I also tell people about it constantly! And that's why Pandora does so little marketing (if any). Their website promotes itself through buzz, word of mouth, and referrals.

Granted, most business sites won't have the kind of traffic and user base of a website like Pandora. But it's the concept I want you to grasp, not this particular manifestation of it. If you work hard to build value, usefulness into your site ... if you make it better and more unique than competing websites within your niche ... if you exploit an under-served niche or come up with some truly unique ... then you won't have to spend anything to promote your website online. The promotion will run on auto-pilot.

So how do you build this kind of site? Well, it's not easy -- I can tell you that much. If it were simple, everyone would have this kind of web presence. I feel I'm starting to achieve this goal on one of my other websites (the Home Buying Institute), because I can see that people are beginning to talk about and recommend the site to others, without any input from me. Here's a list of things I've put in place on that website in order to get people talking about it ... and to make the website promote itself. Note: For the sake of simplicity, I'll refer to the Home Buying Institute as "HBI" from here on out.

• Content, content and more content. It's hard to get excited about a business website with five pages of information. But if you can develop extremely useful articles, tutorials, glossaries, learning center, blogs, market news and the like, you'll get some people talking. This is the hardest part about creating a quality website, because you can't "copy and paste" your way through. You have to develop highly useful and original content. This is the centerpiece of a website that promotes itself.
  
• Organization and usability. With all of that great content, you have to make sure the site is nice and neat. Everything should have its own place on your website, and it should be easy to find through more than one path (navigation, search, site map, etc.). Clutter and disorganization will kill your online success before it even gets going. After all, why promote a website that people are just going to leave upon arrival?
  
• Interactivity and feedback. People like to interact with websites these days. It's part of the social web, also referred to as Web 2.0. When you offer people more ways to interact, participate and respond, you'll enjoy greater success (more leads, more clients, and more business). On the HBI website, we recently launched the Consumer Credit Blog that allows readers to enter their questions for a response within 48 hours. This has not only generated a ton of interaction from site visitors, but it also gets links and citations from other bloggers and webmasters.
  
• Being different and better. Find out what your competitors are doing with their websites, and then do something different and/or better with your own site. If you simply replicate what others are doing, you have little chance of standing out. That's now way to promote your website to Internet users! People are tired of the same old thing. So offer something unique -- great content and more of it, useful tools and resources, an interactive blog or community of some kind.
  

The Internet is an overcrowded place with an abundance of competition. Even if you serve a small niche, or you focus on a small geographical area, you can be sure there are other websites already occupying that web space. The key to promoting a website is to create the kind of site that promotes itself. This will save you time, energy and money.

Using Google Maps on Your Real Estate Website - The Mashup

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

Did you know you can publish Google Maps onto your real estate website and use it to display property listings, office location, open houses and more? It's true, and it's a lot easier than most agents realize.

This kind of technique is commonly referred to as a "mashup" -- a web program that combines multiple data sources within one application. In the case of a real estate mashup, you are combining your own data (such as property addresses) with Google Maps to create an interactive tool on your own website.

To show you how to go about it, I've just posted a new tutorial that walks you through the process. It shows you in step-by-step fashion how to get started using Google Maps on your real estate website, and it reinforces this with diagrams and a sample mashup I created just for the tutorial.

If you've been itching to use programs like Google Maps on your real estate website or blog, but you're not sure how to get started, this tutorial is for you.

Benefits of Using Google Maps

This web-publishing strategy might not be for everyone. For instance, if you have not data to display on the map, then there's really no point in pursuing it. But for many agents, this kind of real estate mashup offers endless possibilities. You could display property listings, open houses, your office location, local events, new subdivisions ... you name it.

Here are some more benefits of integrating Google Maps with your real estate website:

• It's a way to make your website more interactive.
• It adds value to your site by mapping out homes for sale or other data relevant to your website visitors.
• The Google Maps program is free to use, as long as you abide by their terms of service.
• You can save your maps within your Google account, to edit and update them later.
• If you're creative with this tool, it can even help you generate leads through your real estate website or blog.

Read the full tutorial here:
Creating a Real Estate Mashup with Google Maps

Web Content Writing Made Easy

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

Did you know that writing web content is one of the easiest things you can do to improve your search engine visibility and traffic levels over time? It's true. Sure, link building has a lot to do with search engine rankings. But you cannot even begin to rank well for a certain phrase until you have web content built around that phrase.

So in this blog tutorial, I'm going to talk about web content writing, and how you can take the mystery out of the process.

Web Writing Tips

Think of all the things you'll be able to do with some basic web writing skills and the confidence to use those skills: You can publish press releases online to drive traffic to key sections of your website. You can create new web content to make your site more valuable to readers. You can start a blog and publish new information on a daily basis (a great way to attract new clients). You can create informational articles and publish them all over the Internet with links back to your site -- more traffic and rankings!

With some basic web content writing skills, there is no limit to what you can do online. After all, content is the fundamental building block of your Internet marketing program. Search engine rankings, website traffic, lead generation, client acquisition ... none of it can happen without quality content. So let's dive right in to our lesson on web writing like a pro.

1. Put Content Over Form

Let me start by putting your mind at ease, with regard to a common fear people have about writing. When you publish information onto a business website, the content is more important than the form. In other words, you don't have to write like William Faulkner when you create web content. In fact, it's best if you don't. Sure, you have to write clearly and cleanly, without typos and major grammatical errors. But when it comes to website writing, what you say is more important than how you say it.

The best thing you can do when publishing information is to (A) select topics your audience really wants to know about, and then (B) explain those topics in clear, straightforward language. Be thorough and helpful with your writing, and you have won half the battle already.

2. Turn Off the Little Man Inside Your Head

Negativity and self-doubt are the enemies of web content writing. We all experience these things at one time or another, and when left unchecked they can block the road to success. So when you write content for your website (particularly the first draft), turn off the internal editor inside your head. Remember, you can always come back and edit the web content after you write it, and before anyone will see it. The first draft is all about getting your ideas down before they float away.

When you do this, you'll be amazed at how much easier the web content writing process is. Ideas will come to you more easily, and you'll be able to get them down without being impeded by your internal critic. Before you begin a writing project, say to yourself: "Nobody will see this until I'm ready for them to see it. I can write like mad and then come back to revise things later on."

3. Forget About the Search Engines (For Now)

Writing the first draft of web content with the search engines in mind is a recipe for bad content. Remember who your real audience is -- people! So create your content in a way that makes it useful to people first. Inform them, educate them, and help them achieve some kind of goal on your website.

When you have created the kind of web content that achieves these goals, then you can go back and make sure it's optimized for search engine visibility. You can even use my book as a guide for this secondary process. And while we're talking about SEO, let me give you a helpful tip for writing the kind of web content that performs well in the search engines.

4. Narrow Your Topics to Increase Relevance

Have you ever read a web page that tackled too many topics in one place? Instead of segmenting the topics into "digestible" parts, the author decided to lump everything onto one page. This is rarely a good strategy when writing content for the web. It's best to limit your internal web pages (those beyond the home page) to one or two topics per page. This helps you in two ways:

• First of all, it makes your content much easier to read. Instead of sifting through five things they don't care about to find the one thing they do, readers can simply navigate to their topic / page of choice. So it helps with website usability.
• Secondly, segmenting your content helps with search engine visibility. If a web page covers 12 different topics, you are essentially diluting the relevance of that page (in terms of search engine rankings). But when you have tightly focused pages that address a specific topic, you increase the relevance of the web content ... and the likelihood that it will be presented to a search engine user who is searching that topic. So it helps with visibility too.

5. Outline Before You Write

When I say you should "outline" your content when writing for the web, I'm not talking about that Roman numeral system you learned back in your high school English class. I'm talking about creating a simple outline before you write to help you stay on track when writing your web pages. I have been using this process for years, and it has helped me publish several pages of website and blog content every day! I often teach it to my consulting clients as well, and it always helps them increase their web writing efficiency.

Outlining your website content need not take a lot of time, either. If you spend more than ten minutes on the process, you're probably over-thinking it. All you need to do is jot down some notes on the topic you are addressing, the key points you will make along the way, and how you will wrap things up.

Take this tutorial on web content writing as an example. To outline this article, I started by jotting down some notes on what I wanted to accomplish: "I will write a brief tutorial to help people overcome their fear of website writing. Specifically, I will offer five tips that have helped me a lot over the years, when creating content for the web." Then I simply listed my five tips, with a brief note about each one, and presto ... I had an outline for my tutorial.

Then I followed the other advice presented above. I turned off the little editor in my head. I forgot about search engines for the time being, and I did my best to create a helpful article on the specific topic of writing for the web. And if you found this tutorial useful, then I've achieved my goal.

Hopefully, you can now see that website content is not something to dread. You don't have to be a professional writer, and you don't have to spend hours looking at a blank screen or notebook. When you break the process down like I've shown you above, you'll be writing for the web with more ease and efficiency than ever before. Good luck!

What the Best Real Estate Websites Have in Common

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

What do today's top-performing real estate websites have in common? Shiny and sparkly? Great headshot photos? Nice use of font colors?

Hardly.

In fact, the superficial aspects of a real estate website hardly matter anymore. Ten years ago, you could put up a pretty website with basic information and wait for the phone to start to ringing. Today, that kind of thing is a fairytale.

These days, consumers expect a lot more from agent websites. They prefer useful content and data to shiny graphics and headshot photos. They want to get to the "heart of the matter" and view listings. The owners of the best real estate websites know this, and they build their websites around this knowledge.

In a new article just posted to the website, I've listed what I feel are the most important ingredients of a modern real estate site -- enhanced listing data, regular updates, consumer education resources, lead generation strategies, and organization / usability.

You can read the full article below:
Best Real Estate Websites - 5 Key Components

Free Real Estate Content for Websites

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

A real estate website without quality content is like the body of a car with no engine under the hood. It looks useful from the outside, but once you get inside you find it severely lacking.

That's why we have created a new section of the website that offers free real estate articles to agents and brokers. I wrote all of the articles myself, so I can attest to the fact that they're helpful and (I like to thing) well written.



You are free to use these articles as content for your real estate website as long as you follow the simple guidelines listed on the page. Basically, you can use any of the real estate content for your website as long as you (A) please publish the articles as-is without editing them, and (B) please include the author's note with hyperlink citation at the bottom of each article.

I like to think that's a pretty fair exchange, considering the amount of real estate website content I am offering.

So if you'd like to expand your website with helpful real estate content geared toward buyers and sellers, check out the articles page.

Content Strategies for Real Estate Websites

Here are some of the ways you could integrate the free real estate articles we offer with the existing content on your website:

• Create a "Library" section of your website and post the articles there.
• Publish the real estate articles onto your blog over a period of time.
• Develop a Q&A / FAQ page of real estate topics and link off to the articles.
• Use your imagination -- use the website content as you see fit.

Again, all I ask is that you adhere to the publisher's guidelines and the anti-plagiarism policy explained at the bottom of the articles page.

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

-Brandon

Website Maintenance Service for Real Estate Agents

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

We now have a Client Services Manager with the company, and this frees me up to offer a broader range of web services for real estate agents. The latest addition to our services lineup is web maintenance.

Most of you are aware that we also provide expert SEO services to help you boost your search engine rankings. But what if you just need some minor changes done to your exiting website? What if you just need to remove some outdated content or add an image to your photo gallery?

We have developed our website maintenance service around these very situations.

The Need for Web Maintenance

These days, it's common for real estate agents to have a website built by one company and then later migrate away from that company. Maybe you no longer needed their services, or maybe they were charging you an arm and a leg for every web maintenance task.

Whatever the reason, there are a lot of real estate websites out there without webmasters to maintain them. The result, of course, is outdated web content and other concerns. That's where our website maintenance service comes into the picture.

Let's say you had a website built five years ago by some company that's not even around any more. Web development firms come and go quite frequently, after all. And now you just want some small changes made to the website, but you don't want to pay some high-end firm a ton of money to perform basic maintenance. This is where we can help.

Our web maintenance services are affordable and efficient. We charge a flat rate of $55 per hour, for most types of work.

Some of what we can do for you:

• Updating content on web pages or adding new pages
• Adjusting navigation to reflect new content
• Creating photo galleries / adding photos to existing galleries
• Graphical work to create buttons, improve website appearance, etc.

So if you have a real estate website that has been "languishing" without a webmaster for some time, and you need some basic web maintenance to freshen things up, please contact Melissa with Client Services.

Free Real Estate Articles

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

If you've been looking for free real estate articles to help expand your website, you should find this information helpful.



As some of you know, I publish a fairly large home-buying website (in addition to this one). That website has hundreds of real estate articles on it, and I wrote many of them myself.

This morning I created a Free Real Estate Articles section of the Home Buying Institute. Here, you can shop for articles on home buying, selling, mortgage refinance and more.

All of the free real estate articles listed on this new page are ones that I have written. I will be adding new articles as they are written, and I'll send a blog blast out to let you know about the new material.

Here are some of the titles currently available:

• The Adjustable Rate Mortgage - A Buyer's Guide to ARMs (a 1,300-word tutorial - recommended!)
• 101 Tips for a Smoother Home Buying Process
• How to Buy a Home With a Low Down-Payment
• How to Avoid Common Mortgage Problems
• How to Prepare for Closing Costs

There are a few articles geared for sellers as well:

• Why to Stage Your Home Prior to Letting Buyers See It
• Selling Your Home - 7 Tips for Proper Preparation

I hope you find these free real estate articles helpful. If you have any questions about publishing these real estate articles, just leave a comment below and I'll answer it for the benefit of everyone.

Enjoy!

-Brandon

Real Estate Website Templates - My Personal Pick

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

Somewhere during the course of Internet evolution, website templates got a bad name for themselves.

I think it's because early templates were basically garbage ... and some of them still are. All of these companies referred to their products as professional website templates but, in truth, many of them were amateurish in appearance and functionality.

Most Real Estate Websites Templates are Horrid

As a real estate agent, you've probably encountered many companies selling their real estate website templates (and the hosting services that usually go along with them). But there are significant problems with many of these template-based products:

1. They often use frames that greatly reduce your potential for good search engine rankings.
2. They are usually cookie-cutter templates that cannot be fully customized.
3. They limit your ability to make certain types of edits to your own website, which should never be the case!

I started playing around with website templates about six years ago. I wasn't very impressed back then. Most of them were built with clumsy HTML coding and lots of table structures that made them a nightmare to work with.

Then I "went off" templates for a few years, building my websites from scratch. It takes a heck of a lot more time to build a site that way, but I thought it was the best way to go.

Boy Meets Templates - A Relationship Renews

About a year ago, I started researching professional website templates again. I looked at all the big template sellers, such as TemplateMonster.com, but I was never really excited about any of their offerings.

Eventually, I stumbled across a website called 4Templates.com. Since then, I've built a half-dozen websites by customizing their professional templates -- for myself as well as for clients. I've become a template "junkie" again ... and with good reason.

I'll get to the reasons I like these templates in a moment. For now, here are a couple of the more recent websites I've built by customizing the professional website templates offered by 4Templates.com:

• Far West Capital - I created this company's website by starting with a template and doing some basic customization with colors, graphics, etc. I also added a blog to the site, but that's another article entirely.


• Top Ten Agent - This is the website I use to sell my step-by-step guide to real estate search engine optimization (which you should purchase, by the way!). Once again, I started with a template from 4Templates.com and did some basic design customization with colors, graphics, etc.

With content aside, each of the websites above took me about a week to customize (and that's mainly because I'm anal-retentive about details).

If my clients at Far West Capital had some high-end design firm build their website from the ground up, it probably would have taken 1 - 2 months. But by starting with a professional website template and customizing it with unique content and graphics, I was able to produce a good-looking, highly functional and professional website for my client in a quarter of that time (and for far less money).

3 Things I Like About These Websites Templates

My background is in creating highly successful websites from a visibility, traffic and sales standpoint -- not in creating "pretty" websites that fail in the other areas. So when I experiment with a so-called professional website template I want to know ... is this thing going to harm or hurt my chances of good search engine rankings and traffic?

This is the primary reason I like the website templates offered by 4Templates.com. When you select and download one of their templates, you will probably get two versions of it. One folder will be labeled "HTML" and the other folder will be labeled "XHTML."

Now this might not mean much to you, but any web designer will tell you that XHTML code with cascading style sheets (CSS) is the more modern way to design websites. This approach makes them easier to maintain and gives your website greater flexibility, usability, and coding longevity. 4Templates.com is one of the only website template companies I've encountered who offers their templates in this more modern coding method.

That's the main reason I like their templates, because to me it's the most important aspect of any website template. In fact, I would go so far as saying that any company that claims to offer professional website templates had better offer clean-coded XHTML versions as well. Otherwise, they should call their product "outdated" website templates.

Cost and reliability are the other two reasons I prefer this company. You can get some really nice design layouts (modern, clean, versatile, etc.) for under $35. As for reliability, I've used their online ordering process at least a half-dozen times over the last year, and I have never had a single problem. You get an email within five minutes or ordering online, and it gives you links to your website template files and other "goodies" such as fonts and graphics.

I hope you look at website templates in a new light after reading this article, and I hope you find these products as useful as I have. Related article on free blog templates for various platforms.

Good luck, and good marketing.

-Brandon

Content Management Systems and SEO

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

Many agents with real estate websites employ content management systems (CMS) to simplify the maintenance and content updates on their websites. But there might be a downside to this, depending on the type of CMS you use on your website.

Some content management systems make it really hard for search engines to crawl the website, mainly by generating complex URLs and website structures. When this happens, a large amount of your website content could go unnoticed by search engines. This would obviously have a negative effect on your search engine visibility in general, and by extension your website traffic levels and overall success.

Is there a way to enjoy the best of both worlds? Can you use a content management to simplify your website maintenance, without sacrificing search engine visibility? The answer is ... sometimes.

CMS programs have come a long way. Modern content management programs offer a lot more features and capability. But they're also being developed to perform their roles in a more search-engine-friendly manner. The term for this is "SEO friendly CMS" and it has become a hot topic in real estate web development circles.

Today, in fact, there are quite a few website CMS programs that can help you manage the content on your real estate website while also maintaining the SEO friendly nature of the website.

Here are a couple of articles and a forum thread to help you learn more about the subject:

• An SEO Choice for Content Management System
• Choosing an SEO Friendly CMS
• The Agent's Guide to Real Estate Software
  

Advice For Agents - Version 2.0

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

Hope everyone is having a nice weekend. Just a quick post to let you know that we are currently revitalizing / reformatting the website AdviceForAgents.com to turn it into a more useful for real estate agents.

This website will be a library of articles on all aspects of running a real estate business, from the training and startup to career advancement, and beyond. Best of all, it is advice submitted from the field -- anyone qualified to write about the real estate business can submit articles to the site.



Click to go there now

You can submit articles to the following categories (w/ more categories coming soon):

• Real Estate Agent Training
• Running a Real Estate Business
• Real Estate Technology
• Real Estate Agent Marketing

I hope you find the new-and-improved version of this website useful, and I welcome any relevant articles you care to submit.

~Brandon

Real Estate Web Hosting - Don't Overpay!

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

Today, I was using KeywordDiscovery.com to see what kinds of "real estate website" phrases get searched the most through the major search engines like Google. I was surprised to find that "real estate web hosting" (and the longer version, "real estate web site hosting") are two of the most commonly searched phrases in this area.

This could mean two things -- either (A) these web hosting companies are checking their rankings so often that it has inflated the volume of that search phrase, or (B) real estate agents are genuinely searching for real estate web hosting.

You Don't Need a "Real Estate Web Hosting" Company
Here's what I want you to take away from this blog post. Web hosting is a straightforward service that should not require much thought on your part. You can get web hosting for less than $10 per month. As a long-time customer, I only pay about $6 per month for hosting of my real estate websites.

Some companies bill themselves as "real estate web hosting experts," which really doesn't make any sense. Web hosting is web hosting ... it doesn't matter if you have a real estate website, a mortgage website, or a website about basket-weaving. All a hosting company does is host your files on a server so they may be called up whenever somebody's web browser requests the files (by typing your web address or clicking a link to your site).

So if you are paying more than $10 per month because a company claims to specialize in real estate web site hosting, you are probably paying too much.

Real Estate Web Development
Now of course, there are companies that legitimately specialize in real estate website development. Perhaps they're intimately familiar with implementing IDX, MLS and similar real-estate-specific data tools. But again, they should not charge you a lot for hosting, and if they do you're being had.

Some web development companies will tell you that they need to host your real estate website on their servers because your website requires special features. This too is bogus. A legitimate web development firm will let you host your real estate website anywhere you want ... they won't trap you into their overpriced hosting plan, or claim to be "real estate web hosting" specialists.

Web hosting should be simple, straightforward and affordable. If you find yourself paying an arm and a leg for "real estate web site hosting" ... you may want to start asking questions.

Learn more about websites and web hosting.

~Brandon

GoDaddy is Going Downhill

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

For years, I have been using and recommending GoDaddy.com as a web host provider. But lately, I feel I should steer my readers AWAY from GoDaddy ... not toward them.

I have several websites hosted by GoDaddy, and lately some of them are extremely s-l-o-w to load in a web browser. The last time I called, they told me it was a server problem that would be fixed within 48 hours. Excuse me? 48 hours?? Sorry, but that's about 47 hours too long.

I make my living online, so I take web hosting very seriously. In my mind, a hosting company only has to do two things ... (1) host websites reliably and (2) provider great support. While I can't fault GoDaddy on their customer service, I can certainly fault them on their reliability.

Here's my personal opinion. I see this as just another company who has fallen so deeply in love with themselves (you've seen their commercials, yes?) that they forgot about the one thing that got them where they are -- they forgot about reliable hosting.

I will get off my soapbox now, but I leave you with these parting words. When considering a web hosting company, consider someone other than GoDaddy.com.

Legal disclaimer: I make no claims or assertions about GoDaddy other than my own personal experiences. The fact that I see them sliding downhill is my own opinion.

This concludes Brandon's angry rant. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog topics.

~Brandon

Why Some Real Estate Websites Are Becoming Invisible Online

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

This press release is going out over the wire tomorrow. I thought I would give you first look here on the blog:

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A new book on real estate Internet marketing paints a stark picture for real estate agents, but also offers a road map to future success.

March 30, 2007 -- In the near future, the traditional type of real estate agent website will become all but invisible online. That's the attention-grabbing premise of a new report entitled, "Real Estate Web Presence: How Agents Can Survive Online in Changing Times."

But according to the report's author, real estate marketing specialist Brandon Cornett, it's more than just a catchy title:

"Based on the changes I've seen in the real estate industry, and with Internet marketing in general, I believe the traditional real estate website is no longer enough to ensure the agent's online success. There are billions of documents on the Web, and at least 10 times as many real estate websites as just a few years ago. On top of that, we are seeing a rapid increase in the number of real estate data websites like Zillow.com, Trulia.com and others."

While this may seem like a bleak picture to real estate agents, Cornett says that's not necessarily the case. His 43-page special report opens with the stark realities of real estate marketing online, but it also offers what Cornett says is the perfect solution to the modern state of the Web ... the real estate web presence.

"What real estate agents need to realize," Cornett said, "is that a five-page website is not going to work the way it might have 10 years ago. There's just too much content on the Web these days. So agents need to think of the Web differently ... they need to build a real estate web presence, not just a real estate website."

And that's just what Cornett teaches through his report and training manual. He offers a six-part strategy for the modern real estate web presence, a strategy that combines websites, blogs and various other publishing strategies used in concert with one another.

"I've been watching the Internet closely over the years, particularly as it applies to real estate agents and their websites. I truly believe the path to future success requires agents to think and act like publishers -- or at least to have somebody do it on their behalf. That's why I've created this real estate Internet marketing guide, to help them adopt this type of mentality."

About the Book and Author:
Brandon Cornett is the founder of ArmingYourFarming.com, a company that has been providing marketing advice and services to real estate agents since 2004. He is the author of three popular blogs and has been involved with Internet marketing for nearly a decade. His guide to creating a "Real Estate Web Presence" is available for immediate download from http://www.armingyourfarming.com