Creating a website for your real estate investing business is becoming more important with each passing year. Along with that is the need for multiple websites to handle different aspects of your investing. This series of posts about Real Estate Investing Websites is going to be a place for me to share all I know about creating the below types of websites.
What are the different kinds of real estate investing websites and there purpose?
Company Site: This site is your main website that describes your business and everything that you offer. I like to call this page the “Home Base” because every other website in your portfolio should point back to this one in some way shape or form.
Key Features
- About Page – Place where you give the company’s history and success
- A Sellers Page – A place where sellers can go to understand what you can offer them and give you there info
- A Buyers Page - A place where buyers can go to understand what you can offer them and give you there contact info
- Testimonials – great selling feature for any business. Display comments from happy customers
- Properties – A listing of all your available properties
- Community information – This is optional, but a great place to give buyers information about the area’s you work in.
- Contact Us – Page dedicated to giving out your contact information and a form for users to fill out to quickly send you an email
example: http://www.prosperityhomesolutions.com/
Squeeze Page(s): Squeeze pages are simple one page websites that are designed to get people to request information from you by filling out a quick form (usually name, email address and phone number). Real Estate investors will typically have two types of squeeze pages, one for buyers and one for sellers.
When I do online marketing on sites like craigslist and Kijiji or using Google Adwords, I direct clickers to my squeeze pages. The reason is because it’s much simpler then my company page and I can send the desired message I want.
Usually after a person has filled out the form on the squeeze page and requested information from me, I’ll then redirect them to the company page if they are buyers. Sellers I’ll redirect to a thank you page and possibly a free report about selling their house in todays market. In either case I now have there name, email address and phone number and can follow up with them.
example: http://www.webuyhousesdirectory.com/
Marketing Blogs: There are really two types of blogs you can use in your investing business, one of which is a marketing blog. The sole purpose of these blogs is to show up on the first page of Google (or other search engines) for when buyers or sellers are searching for real estate information in your local farm area. So when sellers and buyers are searching around the internet for buying/selling houses in Anytown USA your Marketing Blog will appear near the top.
This type of blog will typically have information about the local area such as…
- Local News
- Events
- Attractions
- Restaurant information
- House buying tips
- Housing Values and other statistics
Basically anything you may think a potential buyer or seller is looking for when researching an area. Throughout this blog you will have links to your company page and squeeze pages.
example: http://cincinnatirealestatereport.com/
Personal Blogs: These blogs are perhaps one of your greatest networking tools. You’ll post about your daily (or weekly) happenings with your business, tips and life lessons. The idea is to attract other real estate investors in your area and across the country and build relationships with them. Those relationships are going to be one of the biggest keys to your success. Practically ever relationship I have in REI is because of my blog here. A personal blog is a place to share your story with everyone.
Facebook: we all probably have used Facebook as a way to keep up with friends and family, but it’s an incredible tool to use to keep in tough and establish new relationships with other investors as well. What you’ll want to do is create another profile just for your REI stuff. The reason is because you don’t want to subject your friends and family to all your real estate talks and you don’t want all your investor friends to be reading about your personal conversations. Plus it makes it easier to keep track of things.
Twitter: I like to use twitter to share links, stories and news about real estate investing with people who want to follow me. I don’t like using twitter to create relationships because it’s just to unorganized. Maybe I just don’t understand twitter as well as I should, but I like to use it as a way to follow what other investors are reading.
Other sites ideas
- product pages
- dedicated page for home listings
- message boards
- forums
Does anyone else have good ideas for sites that an investor could use?
Related posts:
Facebook
RSS
Twitter
LinkedIn
Great breakdown of the different websites to use. I’ve always wanted to add a blog for my house buying website to help with SEO, but never quite knew what to post about. I also was worried that some sellers would end up spending too much time reading somewhat irrelevant stuff instead of submitting their information.
Great post.
Thanks Danny,
You hit on the main reason I like to create multiple websites. I like to employ the statement “a confused mind says no” Give them to much information at first and they seller will always say no.
nice guide!
This is a great article on Real Estate firms who have only just discovered the latest and the best way so far to reach their market – the Internet. The community info page is optional, but very useful! Potential and convinced buyers usually look for this page first.