The Internet is called the information highway and in order to travel it effectively, you will need to gather some information yourself. The best place to start is at the website that you already have in place. Look at your website from the standpoint of your prospective clients.

Another important piece of information is finding out what your competitors are doing. Go onto the web and type in various keywords and phrases that prospective clients may use to find real estate in your area and see whose site pops up. We will delve further into competitor snooping techniques later on in this book.

Gathering information is only one piece of the puzzle. Your site needs to give information to the viewers and it needs to be the information that they are looking for, not just useless fluff.

There are many ways to make your site more informative and do so in such a way that will cast you as an expert in your field. Two such ways are by posting articles and blogs.

These informative tools contribute to your site and finding sources to post about will be important to your online success. You will need to surf the Internet for e-publications that discuss real estate trends.

This will give you a constant source of fresh topics for both your articles and your blogs. This topic will be discussed more in depth later, so have your topics ready!

No one has to tell you that getting qualified leads is essential to any real estate practice. Since you already know that, I won’t go into all the reason that you need leads. What I will do is make suggestions on how to use your site to get qualified leads.

First a dose of reality. Not everyone who visits your site finds it informative and initiates contact will be converted to a client. Probably not even half, a quarter or an eighth.

That’s the way it is in real estate whether your lead comes from the web or a human referral. However, despite the fact that your percentage of client conversion may seem to be low, consider it from the standpoint of commission earnings.

If you only get two conversions from 1000 leads a month, a mere .002%, that still equals a very nice commission. Naturally the more leads you get, the more chances you have to convert them to clients.

There are those that will argue quality vs. quantity as far as leads go. Each may have a legitimate argument but the fact remains that being a successful sales agent also means playing the odds.

This means that you want to get a large quantity of leads and then filter out the quality ones to concentrate on converting. Converting them to clients will be up to you and your skills, but getting a large quantity to convert will come from your website.

Another consideration is prospective clients who may just have begun to consider buying a home but are not quite ready. People like this, whether they be walk-ins or have made an appointment are usually considered the bane of a real estate agent’s existence.

They have you drive them around all day, looking at houses all over town then say, “Thanks, we’re just looking”. Now the real estate agent has wasted the day and despite their best efforts at converting them, these same people may decide to use another real estate agent when they are finally ready to buy.

A friend of mine is planning to move to Kentucky in two years and she’s already visiting websites of real estate agents in that area, looking at houses and trying to learn about the different neighborhoods.

She likes one site so much that she constantly visits it and because of the information listed on it, she’s considering buying land there now that she can build on later instead of waiting two years to move and then purchase a home.

This is one of the beauties of lead generation from the Internet. People can browse houses online and then come back to you when they are ready without you ever having to leave the office. The trick is to make them come back to you.

Three ways to do this is by the use of email links, freebies, newsletters and information request forms. Lead generation will be discussed further in Chapter 3 – Build a User
Focused Site.

One of the main purposes of optimizing your website is to improve its position in the search engine rankings and thus on the search results page. While I encourage you to employ these techniques to achieve this, it’s important not to over emphasize your website’s position.

It won’t help you to have your site returned at the top of the search engine pages if your site is not attractive to viewer’s, doesn’t provide the information they need or is difficult to navigate.

This is why before you start worrying about getting your site to the top of the search result page; you need to make sure its worthy of that position.

Once upon a time, long before the advent of the Internet, a person just like you had a great idea for a service to sell. It didn’t matter that others had the same idea and had already begun to capitalize on it. This person just knew that he could do a much better job at it and success was in the bag.

The fledgling entrepreneur spent the requisite time to learn about the real estate industry and get the required licenses to begin.

A location for an office was chosen, a lease was signed and a shingle proclaiming the business for the world to see was proudly hung outside the office. All that was needed now was an advertising campaign designed to lure in prospective clients.

The entrepreneur drew on his savings and invested a lot of money in fancy brochures and mailing lists, to say nothing of the stationery imprinted with the company name.

Stamps were purchased, envelopes were stuffed, sealed and taken to the post office. Unfortunately, many of the addresses were wrong or the recipients pegged them as junk mail and didn’t bother to open them. This meant that the return was minimal.

The entrepreneur also tried cold calling, playing the odds that at least a small percentage of those that were phoned could be converted to clients. This brought some rewards, but was hard work and rejection was the usual result. Eventually, with perseverance and a lot of investment in time and money, the gamble paid off and finally success was achieved.

Today’s entrepreneur’s have it much easier than those of the pre-Internet generation. The Internet puts literally millions of prospective clients at your feet and all you really need to know is how to work the system.

In the olden days when a person was looking for a product or service, they turned to the yellow pages. Now, most go online where they can easily search and compare prospective companies.

When you initiate a search on the Internet, typically multiple pages will turn up, listing millions of web sites designed around your particular keywords. The majority of those searching will rarely go past the first page of results.

This is why it’s important to make sure that your website is on that first page and hopefully at the top of the list so that you can gain their attention and secure their business. That’s where search engine optimization comes in.

By utilizing Search Engine Optimization, you will be able garner clients from those Internet users that are searching for the service that you are offering, in this case real estate. With so many people using the Internet to find what they need, this could equate to big profits for both you and your company.

A review will be given at the end of each chapter to go over what was learned. This will give you the opportunity to recognize if there is something that you need to go over again. If so, then you should read that section again before moving on to the next chapter.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is exactly what the term sounds like. It’s a series of techniques designed to help move your web site off the 50th search result page to the top of the first page where it belongs. You’ve heard the term, “first come, first served”.

If your web site is at the top of the search result page, you can change that to, “first result, first opportunity to gain a new client”.

The way SEO achieves this is by increasing the flow of traffic to your web site. Just about every business has a web site these days. The reason that they developed them was not only with the hopes of getting more business, but because it was felt that in today’s high tech society, you simply had to have one.

While it’s true that you have to keep up with modern trends, many felt that as long as their web site was in place, then certainly they would be listed in the search engines and people would be able to easily access it. Alas, this is not the case at all.

If your site was posted on the web without the proper coding and content, then the search engines may not even know that it exists. Even if your web site might be listed in the search engines, it probably does not come up on the first result page of a search, which is essential to the site’s success.

It’s not enough to have a website; it has to be a searchable one. This is because unless your web site was designed in such a way that the search engines give it a high ranking, it’s likely that it does not come to the attention of those who are searching for just what you are offering.

This is particularly true for real estate professionals. Much of real estate is based on referrals, but technology has introduced even more ways to get new clients, not just locally but on a national level as well.

People in other states who are planning to relocate to yours will need a qualified real estate agent to help them find a new place to live. These people go on the Internet to look at properties and query the real estate professionals in the area that they are interested in. When they begin their search for real estate in your area, if your web site comes up on the first page, you have an excellent chance of converting them into clients.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that competition in the real estate industry is fierce and while the Internet enables a real estate agent to get more business, it has also caused the competition to multiply.

This is why utilizing Search Engine Optimization is imperative to getting a substantial amount of business from the Internet.

It might seem virtually impossible to achieve this, since there is so much competition out there, but by employing techniques used for SEO, you will find yourself at the top much sooner than you think.

I don’t mean to make it sound as if this will be an easy task. Your success depends on how much effort you put into this.

The good news is that unlike previous generations who rolled the dice with mailing lists and cold calling, your odds for gaining new clients this way will be much greater.