Service! That’s what a good web
site provides, the same as does a good Realtor®). In fact, your
web site IS you—your representation of yourself to visitors whom
you welcome to your site the same as you would to your office.
Consumers Want
Help, Information & Content
Consumers visit you to get help, to
gain information. They want to buy or sell a home without making a
mistake. You’re there to make them feel "taken care
of." Thus, your job on the web is as always—assisting
consumers in making realty decisions. But to get started, you need
a high-content web site.
Your Marketing
Position & Identity
Creation of your web site begins in
your head and with a yellow pad. You must be honest with yourself
and write down your greatest strengths. Why? Because most
Realtors® portray themselves online as generalists, thus you may
be better off in positioning yourself as a specialist,
employing the theory that it is better to get, say, 50% of a
smaller "niche" pie instead of a wafer-thin slice of the
same pie that everyone else fights for.
When you "position"
yourself well to visitors, they form a distinction between what you
provide and that of other Realtors. You demonstrate your specialty
on your home page through a main headline, subheads, relevant
graphics, and links to position-related information.
How do you determine your
strengths, your positioning specialty? Chances are you’re
already promoting yourself that way. Are you a dynamo with rural
land? Beach property? Lakefront homes? (http://www.lakeproperties.com),
1031 Exchanges? Condos? Are you the "Horse Property
Specialist?" (http://www.larandpat.com), "The
Mountain/Resort/Lake/Stream Property Realtors®" (http://www.schallerandschaller.com),
"The Online Realtor® for Remote Buyers" "The
Internet Realtor® " (http://www.debbieferrari.com),
"The (County Name) Specialist"
(http://www.2buy2sell.com)?
Ask yourself,
"What would a consumer want to know?"
Once you’ve thought through your
specialty (or even several) write it down on your yellow pad.
Next, think about what sub-points are important in your specialty.
Ask yourself: "If people want my specialty, what will they
most want to know?"
Make your selections in an outline
form, with main points followed by sub-points. Write down
everything you can think of for each point. What you are also
creating here are many of the main and sub-links that you will
later put onto your home page and internal ones. Once you have
exhausted your thinking, go on the web and study Realtor® web
sites until you can make distinctions between them.
Study Successful
Web Sites
Judi Franich, San Francisco - East
Bay Realtor® (http://www.2buy2sell.com/) says, "A good place
to find sites already rated for their quality is at the
International Real Estate Digest (http://www.ired.com). Select any
state and then pick a city or region. There you’ll see lists of
agents and their locales, followed by a symbol indicating how the
hard-nosed IRED editors rated the agent sites. Compare highly
rated sites with lower rated ones. Look for ones with specialties
similar to yours. Even if you prefer not to indicate a web site
specialty for yourself, study what made some sites rate high and
some low. Take copious notes. Write down the addresses (http://
etc.) of sites you particularly like or dislike."
Do what Judi says, and you will
have likely done more serious planning about your site than do 95%
of all agents. Also, notice that you did not have to know one
thing about computers, software or the Internet. But this is also
the point where you may turn to an expert who does—someone who
designs web sites, ideally ones for Realtors®. And, fortunately,
you can often see links to them at the bottom of Realtor® pages
that you admire.
Template Site or
Custom Design?
Site designers abound, but you want
one skilled in doing Realtor® sites. Prices vary and you
generally get what you pay for. If you want a web site merely so
you can tell prospects that you have one, you don’t need much of
a site. For you, a very basic "template" site may be
fine. These "canned" sites feature off-the-shelf formats
with most realty and local links built-in, however, some
modification is offered. Sadly, most agents who get template sites
make few changes, and thus one looks almost identical to the other
(from the same vendor) in a given metro area.
Visually, most template sites
differ only in the agent photo shown, main headlines and subheads,
and in bio information. A consumer, who has visited several and
noticed that the other information is basically the same, will
likely not visit another one.
Barbara Cox, Orange County, (bgcox@home.com),
co-author with me of the Prentice Hall book, "Internet
Marketing for Real Estate Professionals," and a pioneer in
teaching Realtors® web marketing, says, "Any site is
thousands of times better than no site. Agents who choose to start
with a template site and then build on it later are to be
commended for getting started. That’s often the biggest
obstacle, getting started."
Building More
Into a Template Site
Nonetheless, template sites,
perhaps the number one choice of California Realtors® during the
last year, are everywhere. For a Realtor® who never plans
focusing much attention on Internet marketing, they seem a valid,
inexpensive choice. Template sites cost as little as $400 up to
many thousands. If you get one, your goal is to radically modify
its layout, button choices, background colors and text so that it
looks far different than those of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of
agents in your area who chose almost identical ones.
Some larger template sites enable
so much modification that you can hardly tell them from custom
sites. That’s great, since your best marketing strategy is to
look and be different and better than
competitors so that consumers find you more memorable.
Custom Design
and Individuality
Debbie Ferrari, (http://www.debbieferrari.com),
First Team – San Clemente Real Estate in South Orange County,
says, "If you plan to market seriously on the web, perhaps
with the goal of becoming one of the most dominant Realtors® in
your area, you may want a custom-designed web site so that you can
modify it at will with no limitations. For custom sites, you do
the same planning as for template sites. But now your options
abound."
With a custom-designed web site,
you can choose virtually any of your sub-points to become
actual links or develop into pages in your site. On internal
pages, you can even expand your outline’s sub-sub-points
into original content that you write with your word
processor. Or, scour the web for outside links to add so
visitors can find the same data. You can also choose a combination
of content—things that you write, plus outside links to
more information. Most agents take this latter approach and
finalize pages through a web designer.
Web Site Content
Don Schaller, Schaller Family
Realtors® (http://www.schallerandschaller.com), Truckee, CA,
says, "Each comprehensive Realtor® web site ideally services
visitors with certain basic content items (links and
original, agent-written data). These items often include
community-related information such as text about or links to
school info, government, civic, social, shopping, local
attractions, lodging, dining, utilities, home-related vendors,
storage firms, weather, maps, and more.
"Basic realty-related content
can include mortgage info/various loan calculators, seller and
buyer tips/procedures, local loan rates, newsletter, online real
estate news services (realtytimes.com, inman.com), bio info,
awards, e-mail links and special request forms (going to you), MLS
search link and much more. A terrific all-inclusive realty-related
site is Fannie Mae’s at: http://www.homepath.com/sitemap.html."
Where do you find links for your
site? You go on the web and find them. Or, you hire a web-skilled
assistant to handle such needs. You don't have to do all
this unfamiliar stuff yourself.
Community
Information Content
Jerry Cox, RE/MAX, San Clemente,
(http://www.jerrycox.com) says, "Community information is the
most important content your site can have. People choose a
community first and then choose a home. If your site
has superior community information, visitors will be more likely
to bookmark it and return, perhaps to select you as their
Realtor®."
Franich says, "I see my site
almost as a local mall for visitors. One of the advantages of the
Internet is that it allows an individual Realtor®) to compete
with the large real estate firms, and in many cases I will have better
exposure than they do they because I can firmly establish my
expertise in my particular region by showing more of
it."
Checklists for a
Top Site
Franich’s checklist for a top
site:
- Easy e-mail access (to you)
- Show expertise through site
content, not just bio info
- On-site access to MLS searching
- Comprehensive and current
content
- Photos besides "mug
shots" that show you’re human
- Offer something unique to your
area that gets someone to bookmark your site
- Give something for free, hold
contests
- Create excitement; ask visitors
to sign up for drawings, reports, etc.
- Know about your visitors’
habits in your site by using "web site analyzers."
(See more at http://www.webtrends.com).
Becky and Jim Swann, founders of
IRED, offer their essentials for a top Realtor® site:
- Must load quickly, within
15 seconds
- Front Page (Must be
inviting/informative, a. Include company name, b. Company
logo, c. Statement of services covered, d. Market area
covered, e. Full contact information
- Control over sound must
be given with no sound default
- Front-page design must be good
in layout, graphics, color combinations
- Non-conflicting background
- Only one animation per page and
that should attract attention to something important
- Text-only pages are boring; use
some graphics—small and fast loading
- Resume info should be present
only as backup; not main point. The site should sell service
first and then bio data should back it up
- Include something unique and
valuable
- The site’s purpose is to
encourage visitors to either leave contact information or to
initiate a contact. Doing this well is an art!"
Search Engine
Success: META TAGS
Finally, a great site needs maximum
search engine "findability." To get it, insist that your
designer create truly excellent META tags. (Don’t ask!
– basically, they are invisible codes on a web page that many
search engines read to help rank the relevance of a web site to
certain key words a person is searching for. (See basic tutorial
at: http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/meta.html)
Debbie Ferrari says, "Fine
tuning META tags for maximum effectiveness is an art. Yet, without
truly excellent ones, a web site is doomed to oblivion. Even the
world’s best web site is useless if no one can find it."
(To see META tags [or lack, thereof] on any web page, click on
"view" on your browser, then select "source.")
The
Revolutionary Internet - What To Do Next?
Barbara Cox sums up where we are
today: "Most realty professionals understand that the
Internet’s impact on their industry is revolutionary, but they
don’t necessarily know what to do about it. In areas where many
agents are web-savvy, late-to-the-web agents fear they’ll never
be able to catch up and don’t know where to start. Where agents
who use the web actively and effectively are far between, the
late-to-the-web agents are seeing opportunities—but they still
don’t always know what to do about it.
"Agents who are ready to
undertake Internet marketing have no choice but to dedicate some
time and resources to learning and applying web-related tools and
strategies. And if they intend to stay in the real estate business
for the next several years, they need to start now.
"Agents will not be replaced
by technology; they’ll be replaced by the agents who use
technology to their advantage."
(c) William Koelzer, 1999
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