This week’s guest author, Steve Peron, has educated hundreds of Realtors on the formulas for online marketing success. We are excited to have him on the Vine, and are fortunate to have him take the time to share his expertise. Here’s his abbreviated tutorial on getting the most out of having a real estate website.

So, you have just purchased a website… or maybe you’ve had one for years, but it has done nothing for you. What’s next? Education is the key to success. Here’s a breakdown of the most basic formula for your journey to success. Please bookmark this page so you can use this as a guide in the future.

The Equation = Traffic x Conversion x Follow Up = Sales

Traffic (Rule 1):

Traffic is the blood line of your site. Without traffic the other parts of the equations will not work. (0 Traffic x 100 Conversion x 100 Follow Up = 0) You might have the most beautiful and informative website, but if no one sees it, it’s useless.

So where does one get traffic? Redirecting a freeway works well, but unfortunately it is not that easy. You get traffic by advertising. The advertising can be broken down in into 2 categories: offline advertising and online advertising.

Offline Advertising:
Offline advertising is traditional advertising: fliers, open houses, farming, classifieds etc. Your website is the most important tool in your marketing toolbox. Make the website the center piece of all your traditional advertising. Do not ’hide’ your web address in fine print at the bottom of your marketing pieces. It makes your site appears as if it were an after thought. We all know that your future leads are going online to educate themselves, so make them want to go to your site for that education.

Give your audience reasons to visit your site:
1. To see every home on the market, visit www.MyWebsite.com
2. I know the value of your home, do you? Come find out at www.MyWebsite.com

You get the idea…

Online Advertising:
Online advertising refers to how people are going to find you on the internet. That sounds simple enough. Not really, searching for “Sacramento real estate” in Google you get 59 million pages indexed. That is a lot! So, how are people going to find you in this vast ocean? You have a couple of options.

Optimize your site. Search engine optimization is a very big topic and the whole point of it is to get your site listed in the top 10 of the organic search result. In an effort to keep the article on this side of elementary, we’re not going to open this can of worms, but rather, point you in the direction of your website provider to help optimize your site.

For a curious education. Or to do it yourself: “Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day” by Jennifer Grappone, Gradiva Couzin

You could also invest in a pay per click (PPC) campaign with search engines. To simplify, you buy ads on search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN etc) so your site link will appear when someone types the terms that you competitively bid for – such as: “luxury homes Fair Oaks, home for sale in Oakland, etc…..” This will be costly, but effective. I recommend Google Adwords, and Overture.com.

Beyond paying for search engines, you can also pay for area specific lead generation from companies such as HomeGain, RealtyTrac, HouseValues etc. Again, costly, but can be effective.

Some free solutions for posting your listings on your own: Googlebase, Craiglist, Trulia, Oodle. This will be effort on your part but well worth it when it works, and it is free! Even if you do not have a listing, offer to post a peer’s listing and have it link back through your site. Some companies, for your convenience, will broadcast the listings on your website to these free solutions automatically

That’s a good start for building traffic. Look for subsequent articles picking up where we’ve left off.

Conversion:
Now that we have traffic flooding in from all directions, w need to convert them to leads. By convert I mean a visitor performing a desired action. This could be signing up for an email newsletter, filling out a form on your site, emailing you, or someone giving you a phone call.

To achieve this, make sure that you have email required forms on your website, so people do no just get your most valuable information without their own commitment. If you have advertised your most valuable website assets appropriately (“to search through all homes on the market visit www.MyWebsite.com”), then the exchange of an email for access to them should be acceptable to your audience. If you want higher conversion rates, offer something in return for their email entry: 25% off at carpet cleaners, or enter to win some raffle or something… be creative. At best you should expect less that 10% conversion for all your traffic. That means if 100 (unique) people visit your site, then getting 8 of them to actually fill out a form on the site is great! Beyond that percentage, expect that less than 10% of those leads to actually become a physical lead (someone you have engaged in ongoing conversation, qualified, met in person etc.).

Regarding the layout of the site: Make sure your site is very easy to navigate. Your email address and phone numbers should clearly visible on all pages. You do not want too many buttons on your site because people will get lost and frustrated. Your main navigation should be limited to 7 choices (property search, listing notification, your home’s value, local information, mortgage info, main menu, and contact me – all make good examples). If your site is cluttered with options, then your advertising message is going to be lost because you will confuse your audience. The audience needs to stay on the path that leads them to providing you with their name and email address. Anything that distracts them from this is going to water down your website’s effectiveness.

Again, we are just tapping into the elements that make for successful lead conversion. Check back for subsequent articles developing this topic.

Follow Up:
You’ve got leads. Now what? CONTACT THEM; do not let these leads sit over night with out a call or personalized email. You should know that a lead that is not contacted in 24 hrs is a dead lead. In 24 hours that same person will have certainly visited other real estate websites and is working with someone else.

Harvest these leads. It will take some time for these leads to turn into sales because people are just beginning their research. In most cases, these visitors do not want to buy or list a home from you in the next 30 days or even 6 months. You should prepare for these leads to take at least 6-8 months to incubate into something more substantial. To stay in contact with your ever growing lead base for that long, you will need to implement an email marketing strategy as well as begin a blog. Here is a great article that explains email marketing for you, and another about the benefits of real estate blogging.

So what have we learned? Take baby steps. You have just entered the new world of marketing. Take the time to educate yourself. The internet is here to stay, don’t be left behind. This simple guide will get you pointed in the correct direction. Just remember you need traffic, conversion, and follow up. That’s it! Well it’s not that simple, but you can always come back to that equation as a fundamental rule.