How To Promote Your Website

howtopromotewebsite

 

What good is a website if you have no traffic

A question we’re often asked is “How can I promote my website?” We can help you to Learn How to Promote Your Real Estate Website.

We know how important a website is because our service places over 14,000 real estate have and want ads on a broker’s website in a way where they are contacted by their leads directly!

Benefits: If a broker receives 10 calls that lead to referrals (five minutes each) and they all go through at an average of $3,000 each, that’s $30,000 for 50 minutes work if you figure five minutes per referral. One broker has now done fifteen!

So driving traffic to your web site becomes a very profitable venture.

Below we’re listed some ways for you to promote your real estate website. Feel free to leave us a comment telling us some of your tips, we always appreciate it. You can also watch our video which discusses some of these methods.

Obtain a Keyword-Rich Domain Name

Pick one that ties your area to real estate (DenverRealEstate.com) to improve your visibility with search engines; for large cities, focusing on a suburb will increase your chance to come out on top (LittletonRealEstate.com). You can have more than one domain name pointing to your web site. You can even have yourname.com

If you need more help with domain names click here for a video tutorial
This is a .wmv file and will download to your computer, you can play it with most video players.

Add Exclusives To Your Website

Add exclusive real estate to your website.

Promotional Material

Start handing out more of your business cards with your real estate website address. Inform people you have residential listings with color photos and slide show displays, 20,000 commercial real estate listings with 50-100 new listings per day coming in on your web site! If they want information on any of them, they just have to call you.

Promote the Facts

Put this on all your promotional material including letterhead and envelopes.
Tell them what is on your web site: Thousands of residential and commercial real estate ads.
Make sure everyone knows you have 14,000 Have and Want ads on your home page. Over $1 Trillion of Buyers, over $8 Billion Properties For Sale and For Lease. In any advertising that you do, let people know you have this information. They will visit your home page.

Let them know there are hundreds of new listings coming in regularly, which will encourage them to visit your web site on a regular basis. By letting people know you have buyers, people may be more inclined to list with you since they see how well connected you are in the market place. How did you gain all of these connections? Through your membership with ICIWorld of course!

Don’t be Afraid of Keywords

Place key words in your meta tags on your home page. The major search engines of the world send out “spiders” to crawl every website on the Internet. They immediately go to the “meta tags” on your web site, take those words, and place them in their search engine index. The next time someone searches those words in that search engine, your page will come up.

We can help. 

Consider a Budget for Sponsored Links

If your page comes up as one of 5,000,000 pages during a search, people won’t be able to find your real estate website. However, you can sponsor a link so that you’re on top. Sponsored links in search engines average .15 cents per click to $.50 per click and more. Every time a person clicks on your link you are debited .15 cents.

What should you budget for promoting your real estate website?

We suggest you start with a budget of $50 per month to $200 per month for three months. Each month when your budget is reached your sponsored link will stop and then restart next month. In the case of real estate, if you are specific about what you sponsor, you can get very high qualified leads only. Would you pay .15 cents for a lead where you end up selling a shopping center? This is possible to do with the right wording go to Google Ad Words to learn more.  Also visit this search tool, it explains searches and estimated costs, it even gives you suggested search terms.

Use Search Engine Promotions

Home pages and web sites are like billboards. If a billboard is in your garage, no one can see it. If it is on a highway then many people can see it. Promote your web site in search engines and any and everywhere you can.

Utilize your Emails

Promote your web site in the signature files of your email. Every email that you send can contain a signature file that is attached to every email that you send out. Advertise 14,000 commercial haves and wants on your web site with a link to your web site.

Reach Out within Your Community

Economic Development Agencies are departments that most cities have to promote business in their communities. You can ask to have your web site listed on their site.Develop a list of fax numbers and email address’ of all businesses in your community. Send them a list of Haves and Wants once a quarter, every 3 months, of listings in your area. People love reading real estate ads. Then provide the link to your web site. We suggest you use Winfax Pro to do group faxes. By doing this you are building a real estate practice, not just chasing the almighty deal.

Join Groups such as The Builders Association

Distribute information to them at meetings, etc. and build databases of people interested in real estate. Join other groups, Chambers of Commerce, any groups of people. There are always people interested in investing and dealing in real estate.

Some Quick Ways to Promote your Website

  • Network your web site to the people you already do business with your lawyers, accountants, doctors and dentists.
  • Place a magnetic sign on your car or license plate holder.
  • Take out radio ads, billboards on all the major highways in the USA. You get the picture. Promote it.
  • Literally invite any and everyone to visit your web site to view haves and wants in real estate. When they are interested in something, they should contact you.
  • Develop a press kit. Notify them of sales in your area. Include “provided by” information with links to your web site.

Know your Website Inside and Out

Analyze your web site. The basis of ALL search engine rankings is keywords. Users enter keyphrases in Search Engines to get information they need, It is VERY important that you optimize for such key phrases. There’s a tool that provides you keyword suggestions and reports on their monthly search estimates, check it out by clicking here.

As anyone with a Web site knows, you need to appear in search results to get visitors to the site. The higher up in the search results, the better. That’s because most surfers don’t make it past the first page of search results. The process of getting a good ranking in search results is called search engine optimization (SEO). Many people, even experienced techies, misunderstand SEO, or consider it hocus-pocus. Over the years, many people have sought to manipulate search sites’ results so their pages appear high in the rankings. This often involved trickery. Search sites try to weed out sites that use these tactics.

Steps to a better Search Engine Rank.

  1. You need to consider the search terms you will target. Start by picking five relevant terms. As mentioned this tool  will help you pick out alternative terms. Be realistic. With really popular terms, it may be impossibly difficult to get a good ranking. So pick moderately popular terms.
  2. Pick five pages from your site. Each should be related to one of the terms. Focus on writing clear, concise content that uses the term throughout the page. The idea is to achieve good keyword density. But don’t overdo it. Otherwise, search sites will think you’re “keyword stuffing.” This is when you cram words into a page. Search sites flag this as trickery.
  3. Find reputable sites that are related to yours. Speak with the owners and ask if they will link to your site. They may ask to exchange links. The more inbound links to your site, the easier it is for search sites to find you. Each link coming into your site is akin to a vote for its credibility. But you want these votes to come from legitimate sites. Link farms, or sites that serve no other purpose than to list links, are bad news.

Key Word Mistakes

People often choose keywords that in their mind are describe the activity of their website.  You have to discover which words and phrases the average user is inputting to find your product or service.  For instance, if you have a relationship site, you might discover that “relationship guide” does not work for you, even though it has the “relationship” keyword, while “dating advice” works like a charm.

Choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. Even if you are very resourceful, you can’t think on your own of all the great keywords, but a good keyword suggestion tool, like the one suggested in this article, will help you find keywords that are good for your site. You might also want to check out the ‘Top ten mistakes’ made in SEO.

These are the best ways to build traffic to your site. Keep in mind that it may take several months to see results. In the interim, you may wish to consider online advertising, if your budget allows it.

ICIWorld.com is a Society of Real Estate Brokers and Salespeople. In business since 1994 we provide a Real Estate Information Listing Service for Investment, Commercial, Industrial and Residential Real Estate Professionals.  Visit nreils.com to explore new real estate opportunties.