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Building a Successful Real Estate Website

by Brandon Cornett

Think of your website as "Web Marketing Central." It's the all-important centerpiece to your online marketing strategy. If people find you through one of the other elements of web presence listed above, they can then move on to your website for the "prized content" -- property listings, virtual tours, market news, etc.

Build as much value into your website as possible. Load it up with helpful content, articles, property listings, property photos, real estate news, mortgage calculators, etc. In web marketing circles, this is known as making your website "sticky." The more valuable the content you offer, the more likely people will be to stick around.

Just keep in mind that the more content you add, the neater things must be. Organize your web content so people can find things easily. Keep things clean and uncluttered. Within ten seconds, people should be able to identify the correct path to the information they seek.

On a real estate marketing website, the goal is usually to lead visitors down a certain path. You can't control where people will go or what they will click on, but you can at least offer your preferred path and make it easy to follow.

But when you overload your web pages with too many items, you end up dividing the reader's attention, creating unneeded distraction, and increasing the likelihood visitors will leave your site altogether.

I see this a lot on the home pages of personal marketing websites. Often, agents participate in real estate link exchange programs that require them to put logos with outbound links onto their home pages. The only problem is, when you take this strategy to the extreme, you dilute your own brand and invite unnecessary distraction.

You're also giving people plenty of things to click on that will take them away from your website. Is that the best strategy for a home page?

You should also incorporate some kind of response-generating mechanism. We will talk about web-based lead generation in a later section of this guide, but it's worth mentioning briefly here. Lead generation is an area where a lot of real estate agents go astray. Some agents have no form of lead generation whatsoever, while others use a diluted form of the "free report" approach to lead generation. Such reports can produce web leads, but many agents go about it all wrong.

We will get more into lead generation later. For now, just remember to keep it in mind when thinking about your website.