You already know you need a website. Right? Well, you should know. But what do you put on your site? Is it lacking content? Why would visitors come to your site, let alone RETURN to it? That’s the key, the most important piece – repeat visitors. What that means is that your content needs to be current, dynamic, and relevant. These factors are also very relevant to Google SEO (search engine optimization).

Blogs are a great way to accomplish all three of those requirements. You can even have your blog as part of your total real estate website. Blogs are time-consuming, though.

Looking for some quicker content? Try real estate widgets. Widgets are mini-apps that run on your website. There are plenty of places that provide widgets but perhaps the largest virtual warehouse is WidgetBox.com. Check out all of their real estate widgets – from mortgage calculators to walking scores you can probably find what you are looking for at WidgetBox. Have a specialty website? You can probably find a widget just for you – Foreclosure Listings Widget is an example.  Zillow.com provides a great selection of widgets as well. Facebook also provides a fan widget if you have a fan page set up.

Back to blogs – have one? You can even create a blidget (blog widget) that will showcase your most recent blog posts on any website.

So what does using a widget involve? It’s not difficult at all. All it takes is a little copying and pasting of some html code. Need help? Give me a call or send me an email. I’m happy to help.

What sets you apart from other agents? Why would someone choose you to sell their home? You know you have the experience. You know you have the knowledge. Sometimes, though, it comes down to things like who suggests a higher listing price. Another supporting angle couldn’t hurt your position as the most knowledgeable, caring, and professional agent, could it?

I’ve been mentioning this for years to my clients and as of yet have had anyone take me up on it. Yesterday, I came across a local agent who IS already doing this and I got geeked out. This agent is cutting edge in the technology arena. I’m so glad he had adopted this plan and put it to good use.

Being the Expert
Here’s the plan:
Pick your farming neighborhood or area. Take tons of photos around the neighborhood and maybe some video with audio commentary. SELL the neighborhood. What makes it special? What makes it unique? What is it like to live there? These things are especially helpful for people who aren’t familiar with the area.

Convert your photos to a virtual tour (there are lots of ways to do this for very little or no cost to you – in fact, I believe you can convert PowerPoint presentations to video).
Upload to YouTube (for SEO benefits).
Embed in your website.
Create a custom Google map with pins in each neighborhood you have videos for and link them to your site.
Embed map in your site.

Very cutting edge.

Okay, I’m going to be a bit blunt here. Yes, your job as a real estate agent is to negotiate legal contracts and work on behalf of your clients. But much of that is marketing as well. One MAJOR piece of marketing nowadays is visual marketing – photos, virtual tours, marketing pieces, etc. I am sure it is easiest to take photos when you are already at the home for the listing appointment but I BEG YOU to set up a separate photo shoot appointment. Ask your sellers to stage their home in the same manner they would for a showing. What does that mean? YOU NEED TO TELL THEM. I’ve seen some absolutely atrocious photos at which any buyer would laugh. Don’t mistake what I’m saying; they are laughing at you as well. They probably think you are not a good agent for the sellers. You won’t even tell them to:

• Get the dishes out of the sink
• Make the bed
• Get out of the photo! You’ve heard about taking personal items out of the home – gosh, don’t forget to take the seller out of the photo! Same reason – buyers can’t visualize themselves in someone else’s home.
• Store all of your knick-knacks in a storage unit
• Turn off the TV
• Clear the kitchen table of breakfast dishes
• Close the toilet
• Close the garage door

If you don’t have the nerves to tell them these items to their faces, put a Staging Guide in your Seller’s Presentation packet. For goodness sake, do something. They are depending on you to help sell their home. If you can’t take a good photo and you know it, HIRE SOMEONE. It’s well worth the cost.

Now, I won’t point at anyone specificially, so take a look at these Bad MLS Photos websites. Believe me, sites like these are all over the internet. People notice bad photos.

Stay tuned for photo tips every Wednesday.

MLS Trash Can

Worst MLS Photo

Bad Photos

Check out these photos from Google

I can’t say it enough:

OWN YOUR DOMAIN
OWN YOUR WEBSITE

Why have someone else register your domain and have them own it? What happens if you want to take over the control? Is it easy to do? You better make sure it is.

Why pay a company thousands of dollars to design a website for you only to find out down the road that the content is not yours? The US Copyright office has determined that web designers are considered ‘authors’ and even if you collaborate with your designer on content that it is the designer’s property! So if you want to switch providers down the road, you might lose your site. They can and will sue you for your content.

Make sure you get it in writing that after payment, ownership if your website is to be transferred to you. Do not sign a contract stating anything else. You paid the money; you keep the website. It’s your company brand.

Google’s page rank system is virtually dead. Google is producing more sophisticated methods or ranking websites and are becoming better and better at weeding out dead sites. Sites that don’t offer fresh content, sites that don’t bring and retain visitors are going to suffer page rank. Google used to crawl sites by looking at the keywords in your website, finding other sites that linked to yours and ranking those sites as well in order to help determine the quality of your website. Now Google wants to see how others see your website.

Google is now going to be focusing on a deeper algorithm. It is no longer going to just track your hits each month but is going to take into account how long each visitor stays at your site. Say someone did a search and your site came up in the results. They click on your site and then quickly realize it’s not what they were looking for of they just don’t like your site and leave rather quickly. A person can bounce by:

• clicking on a link to another site
• typing in a new website
• closing the browser window
• remaining idle for too long, causing the analytics session to timeout
• hitting the ‘back’ button

Basically, Google wants to see that people like your site and want to stay there and look around.

How do you get people to stay on your site???

• Videos
  Record a video, upload it to YouTube, embed on your website. You want to try to keep your visitors around for a few minutes and have them check out other spots on your site while they are there.
• Downloadable forms
• Make clickable urls open in a new window, not in the same window
• Sidebar widgets to entice visitors to look around your site (maybe Featured Listings if you’re a Point2 member or real estate agent)
• Blogs

Be prepared to revamp your website and to really take a leap onto the social networking bandwagon if you haven’t already. It’s a great way to share your website with the world, gain traffic, and make friends. If you don’t have the time to blog, consider hiring a Virtual Assistant to help write your articles. Or, you could write them and your Virtual Assistant could post them all over the internet, driving traffic back to your site. Either way, now is the time to really consider getting involved before you lose your search engine placement to those who are.