What’s Your Website For, Anyway?

The Internet has been around now for years, and much of the real estate community has embraced the Web and most of us have a website. Some still resist, and many are new and trying to decide how to proceed with an online presence. It's easy to see how the decision can be a tough one, as we're also being instructed by marketers to have a social presence with Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and others.

Let's assume that you're continuing to read this because you believe that a website is important to your business. It is your business, as you're an independent contractor. You need your own website, not a display page on your broker's site. So, here you are, trying to figure out how to proceed. If you're about to spend time, effort, and money in building a website, you should have a very clear idea of what it is you expect from it.

If you're really into listings, and you believe that the primary purpose of your website is to display your listings and use your site to impress listing prospects, that's OK. However, if that's all you expect from a real estate website, you're really going to get very little for your efforts. Let's be realistic.

Even with great SEO and a reasonable stream of visitors, and even if you have a dozen listings, how many of those visitors will be in the market for precisely those homes? The fact is that buyers will be at your website to search listings, but they want a much wider selection than just your listings. You must have a great IDX search solution to keep them around.

Sure, one of the functions of a great real estate website is to showcase your listings. Doing that well should help you in marketing to future prospective listing clients. You'll also want to show them other major sites that have their listings displayed through syndication. However, if this is all you're doing, it's a monumental waste of opportunity. Here are the major reasons for a real estate website:

• Present your business and you as a local real estate expert.
• Generate qualified leads.
• Generate qualified leads.
• Generate qualified leads.

You can even forget the first item in that list if you realize that it is really one component in "generating qualified leads." Your income is from commissions received for real estate services, and those commissions come from buyers and sellers, and buyers and sellers come from leads. Sure, many of them come from personal referrals, some from print marketing, and some from other marketing. If you want a higher percentage of all leads to come from your website, here's what it needs to do.

• Present you as the local real estate expert.
• Provide useful information of value to buyers and sellers.
• Offer more detailed information through email to get their contact information.
• Provide you with Customer Relationship Management tools to nurture your leads.
• Help you to build referral business.

If you are not committed to building your website presence with the primary objective of lead generation, then don't spend a lot of time and money on it. You'll need to spend that time and maybe some money in doing more print and other marketing. However, if you want to jump right into a turnkey solution that has every feature and tool you need for quality lead generation and CRM, then WebsiteBox is worth some serious consideration.

See more options for website solutions in our Product Directory.

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.