Real Estate Agent Marketing Tools

Welcome to Real Estate Celebrity where you will find information to help you market your real estate services using the latest online marketing tools. We have evaluated the leading technologies and condensed this list to just include the more useful tools that are known to be user-friendly.

Real Estate Events - Share Your Expertise - Generate Leads

So you are a real estate professional? Try getting more leads by doing small events and conferences in your local area (or online) to establish yourself as the "Go To" Real Estate Agent in your area. You can use Eventbrite to organize your own events or find local events that might be a great venue to meet prospective buyers and sellers.

I have seen many top selling agents creating online webinars as a means to build trust and also provide a flexible and pressure free environment for prospective clients to get to know the Real Estate Agent before having to make a decision which direction to go. With social networking tools you can easily promote your event locally and worldwide without having to spend from your advertising budget. This is also a great way to fine-tune your sales pitch and determine what resonates with your prospective buyers and sellers as the real estate market continues to change.

Learn More About Eventbrite Real Estate Events

Do You Have A Real Estate Website?

This is a very important topic and I will cover a variety of considerations you must be aware of when marketing a real estate website. Having a website and making your website show up in the top results of the search engines are two different beasts. A common misconception for real estate professionals is that once they have a website posted online that the leads will start rolling in. This couldn't be more far from the truth!

Real Estate Website Construction vs. Real Estate Agent SEO Rankings

Your website does not get judged by the search engines based on the visual graphics. In fact, the search engines don't care about the aesthetics of your website. "Content is King" in the real estate marketing world and so you need to put out fresh text copy on your website that does not appear on any other websites in the internet realm.

Why? The search engines scan websites and quickly penalize or disregard websites that have redundant content. So, yes... that high-priced website or recurring monthly bill you just committed to from most real estate website companies just pushed your website to the bottom of the rankings. One major selling point for commercially available real estate website design companies is that you "don't have to do anything" because all the content is part of the system. Yes, it's true you won't have to do much and the site will be up in 24 hours or so but just don't expect to find your website anywhere in the search engine rankings due to the redundant text copy. These "cookie cutter" sites are only useful if you actively distribute business cards, post cards or other forms of print marketing that will drive visitors to your website.

You can get better Search Engine Optimization (SEO) using something like Wordpress (wordpress.org) to build your website due to the widely available and user-friendly modules that do all of this SEO work for you. With Wordpress, you just have to write the text content on your real estate pages or blog posts and the optimization will happen "on the fly". A Wordpress SEO plugin we recommend for newbies is "All-In-One SEO" which makes your life easy. IDX Broker also has the IDX Broker Wordpress Plugin that helps connect and integrate your IDX Broker account features directly in your Wordpress theme.

We recommend using Hostgator to setup a quick Wordpress site that is easy to install along with a Real Estate Theme easily found online. The benefit of using Hostgator is that there is a "Simple 1-Click" install feature for Wordpress that will have your website up in a matter of minutes and a very comprehensive set of tutorials to assist you every step of the way.

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Learn More About How To Use Wordpress For Real Estate Websites

Do Real Estate Agents NEED A Real Estate Website?

Just as you had to make the jump from real estate print marketing in the local Sunday newspaper there are more leaps that you will continue to make ahead as the technology changes very quickly. The main function of having a real estate website is to allow for MLS Property Searches for your visitors. You may have a free MLS feed from your local Board of Real Estate Agents or you may wish to contract with a 3rd party vendor like IDX Broker. For beginners, we would highly recommend using the combination of Wordpress and IDX Broker since it is the most efficient way to manage your own website without having to be a programming guru. There is a small learning curve on the setup steps but once you pass that phase the rest is pretty repetitive and easy to maintain.

What Is A .mobi Website And Do Real Estate Agents Need One?

There are more people connected to mobile devices than there are connected to computers on any given day. Mobile devices like iPhones, Android, Blackberry and others are constantly being upgraded with faster data/internet connectivity. You definitely want to tap into this trend and be prepared to shift your online marketing to a domain name with the .mobi extension. The good thing is you have a unique opportunity to purchase domain names that are more specific to your local area that would otherwise be taken (as are most .com domains by now). Don't worry though, setting up a .mobi domain name and a mobile version of your website/services can cost as low as $7-8/month but is worth every penny. A real benefit is that you can set your .mobi mobile real estate site to automatically forward all visitors that may be trying to reach your site from a regular computer and it will forward them directly to your .com real estate website.

What does this mean for the future? For your print marketing materials, why not just use your .mobi domain name that will allow your real estate prospects the 1st opportunity to learn about your services/listings from their mobile device. However, if they enter your .mobi website domain name at home on their regular computer it will just forward them directly to any .com website you currently have. Makes sense, right? Currently, real estate professionals are marketing their print materials with their .com domain names and if you ever tried to view most websites from an iPhone or Android it just looks like a tiny snapshot of the website. Change your marketing game plan to get ahead of the curve!

1-Month Free Trial goMobi™ Mobile Website For Real Estate Agents, S...

Learn More About Setting Up A .mobi Real Estate Website for the iPh...

What Is A Real Estate "Squeeze Page"? How Can It Help?

One aspect of real estate website marketing that can be very confusing is why your website just never ranks or shows up in the search results. So, I'm going to explain this to you in a simple example.

When you go to the bookstore to buy a book on "foreclosures" and you have 2 books to choose from:

Book #1 - Has 20 chapters of content but only 1 chapter about "foreclosures"

OR

Book #2 - Has 20 chapters of content and 20 chapters are specifically about "foreclosures"

Which book would you buy? The answer is simple... you would buy the book with 20 chapters that are specific to your topic.

Well, the search engines work the same way when ranking your real estate website for whatever you wish to be #1 for in the search results for your city, niche or area of expertise. With this in mind, you can see that probably 90% of real estate websites are inherently flawed from the initial setup and design because the website is usually very general in each of the cities, area of expertise and other text content you put in the website.

The reason most real estate websites are built to fail is for one reason - they are expensive to build! Most real estate professionals just have one website that tries to be everything to everyone with the end result being that the content is too general to show up for any specific searches.

How can you adapt your online marketing strategy to work for you? I recommend that real estate professionals have 1 main website (traditional general marketing site) and then create 5-7 "Squeeze Page" mini-sites that will be 100% specific to the community, city or real estate niche you are trying to generate leads for. However, keep in mind that just by having a single "Squeeze Page" that you will still want to link your blog to these mini-sites so that the search engines can continue seeing fresh content from time to time. The search engines get smarter everyday and the main point is to keep fresh content churning out over time.

Why are they called "Squeeze Pages"? The purpose of connecting a network of "Squeeze" or "Lead Generation" pages to your marketing strategy is that they don't leave a lot of room for random surfing and reading from your prospective leads. Every click, search and property photo leads pushes the visitors forward to either submitting their contact info or giving you a phone call. They also are very specific in nature which helps your prospective lead get a feeling that you are a specialist for a community, city or real estate niche like commercial, foreclosures or short sales.