Leverage Internet Marketing to Boost Your Real Estate Business

It used to be that investors could get by quite well without marketing on the internet. Those days are long gone. For many real estate investors, internet marketing is fast becoming the way to get new customers. This is because if you know how to take advantage of what is available, you can get a lot more for your money marketing your services online than you get advertising almost anywhere else. So where is a good place to start? By getting yourself a good website setup.

Two things I want to address right off the bat: First, don’t think you have to have a setup that’s super fancy. Remember, you’re not getting a website so you can showcase technology or wow people with graphics. You’re getting it to reach out to new customers who are looking for services you can offer. Second, don’t go in the exact opposite direction and think all you need is one of those free accounts that allows you to upload a couple of pages and a picture or two. You won’t get good traffic and your site will be cluttered with ads.

Here are the steps you should follow:

Get a keyword-specific domain name that also references the local area. This is fairly easy to do. You can go to GoDaddy.com or GKG.net and search there for available domains. Limiting your name to something local helps by making it obvious to your potential customers where it is you do business. If you are buying and selling houses only in Cleveland, Ohio it will do you little good if people start contacting you from Phoenix, Arizona. So, for example, if deal in Lease Options, you could try the domain like Cleveland-Rent-To-Own.com or Cleveland-Lease-Option.com.

Once you’ve registered your domain, you need to get hosting for your website. A hosting company provides a place for your website files to reside on the internet. There are TONS of hosting companies out there. All you have to do is a quick Google search and you’ll come up with a good list. Many offer very cheap rates, sometimes around $25 a month.

This next step is crucial. Everything on the internet is done with keywords. Keywords are what you put into Google when you do a search. What you want is to use the keywords that your potential customers would use so that they find your site when they search on those words. To find keywords like this, you can use the Google External Keyword Tool. It’s free, and is available right on their homepage.

These tips will help you get started on establishing a good website for your business. You will still have some work ahead of you, but there are many free resources on the internet as well to help you in this regard. With a little time and work, you can get a your site up and running and put yourself miles ahead of your competitors who don’t take good advantage of internet marketing.

This article is based a chapter of book Be a Real Estate Heavyweight, entitled Internet Marketing for Real Estate written by Sam Bell III. For more information on the book, be sure to check out www.RealEstateHeavyweight.com.