Finding A Web Design Mentor
January 14, 2010
The fastest way to improve your web design is to admit professional help is needed. By choosing a web design company like IMCD that has a portfolio of web sites that generate sales leads and rank high in Google search results, you get someone you can trust to guide you through the web design and Internet marketing process.
Getting mentored by a web design professional means saving yourself the time and struggle of nights and weekends filling in a template site that looks like many other sites. Instead, rapidly step into a site that has professional graphics and layout, an attractive Flash slide show from your pictures, and a strategy for your real estate website success.
The key to mentor relationships is that the mentor doesn’t take over your decisions, but guides you through the web design creation process and around the “time-soak, website disappearing blues “pitfalls that frustrate real estate agents and business professionals untrained in online marketing technology.
In the end, you have a web design that leads to referrals, markets your services and provides your contact information 24/7, provides an easy to use platform for listing your feature properties.
Mentoring can extend beyond the website creation to guiding you with your external linking strategy and pay-per-click marketing plan. Look at what areas of Internet marketing you need guidance to improve your online offering – is it understanding what a blog is and how it can help, or using the social media avenues to drive traffic to your website? Yourreal estate website mentor’s strengths are your time-saver in making the best use of your real estate online marketing opportunity.
Clarity in the process of creating a website reduces the possibility of mismatched expectations on the outcome. IMCD uses checklists with specific steps and online sample pages so real estate agents and business professionals can assemble the necessary images and biographical and marketing content needed for their site. There is nothing like the ability to see the light at the end of the website building process.
When you are ready for that professional web design guidance that can turn your online marketing need into a high ranking website, contact IMCD. We have a track record of assisting business professionals and Realtors in getting cost-effective, lead generating websites.
Four Major Pitfalls of Real Estate Template Websites
January 13, 2010
Real estate template websites can be a great investment and fast-track way to establish an Internet presence, especially for real estate agents launching their personal agent website. IMCD is a real estate web design company that brings the best of two worlds – attention-arresting custom designs and cost-effective template websites – together in semi-custom real estate template websites.
When building an online marketing presence, better to start with a proven system of getting your name out in a professional manner as well as with a website that has the search engine optimization (SEO) built into its structure and layout. Over the years, IMC has had many agents turn to us to build their online marketing after having earlier attempts misfire, usually due to their first attempts getting caught in these pitfalls:
- No proofreading. Bad grammar and misspelled words convey a less than professional image. With IMCD real estate template websites, professionals handle copywriting and final edits for you.
- Tomorrow never comes. The template fill pages with “under construction” or “your information goes here” text seldom get revisited. Due to time or manpower constraints, many websites are one-shot deals, so the pages left undone will probably still be without content and remain a keyword opportunity missed 18 months down the road.
- Static brochure instead of lively news site. Real estate websites treated the same as a sales brochure become dated too quickly. Just as markets change, information you provide your clients must stay up-to-date. Mixing the graphical design expertise of IMC with the ease-of-use of a blog integrated into your real estate website allows maximum control over updating your website. If your real estate blog is linked to your template websites and hosted for free by a blog company, you lose many of the SEO benefits of having your real estate blog integrated and hosted with your website.
- Homegrown graphics. Real estate websites built with professional graphic design expertise boost your professional image. When potential clients see amateur images selling your services, they figure their home will suffer the same photographic indignities – not the way to sell the sizzle!
If you need a real estate template website with tremendous return on investment potential, contact the web design pros at IMCD. We will get your real estate website template built with your information and our SEO, graphic design and marketing layout expertise.
Create Content For Your Real Estate Website
January 12, 2010
Creating content for your real estate website is an important step in creating your online marketing presence.
Even if you are not a professional writer, the following guidelines can help you create content for your web design that will improve the performance of your home page in retaining visitors and optimize the content in your real estate website for search engine indexing.
- Create a “call to action”. For a real estate agent, contacting you to use your services is the action step.
- Emphasize the buyer’s or seller’s benefits. Instead of listing the features of enlisting your Realtor services, list the benefits they will receive. Third party testimonials are a great boost to selling the benefits of your real estate services.
- Reinforce your corporate and personal brand. If you have a memorable and catchy phrase to promote yourself, use it early in your content and end with it.
- Use your first sentence – it may be the only one your visitor reads. Your first sentence should also have your keyword phrase also. Your first sentence is marketing you to both the web traffic as well as the search engines’ indexing programs.
- Break it up. Unlike writing as taught in school, paragraph breaks are used to keep the text from repelling readers by the sheer density of words. Rule of thumb: two to four sentences per paragraph.
- Write for your market. For real estate agents, writing in a colloquial way, as if your are in a conversation with your web visitor is great – let your website be a carry-over of the way you build relationships when you are face to face.
- Bring up a common problem buyers or sellers have and one or two ways you have helped people solve them. Remember, it does not matter if all the real estate agents you know solve the problems in the same way – in marketing it’s the first person to tell people what they do that becomes the consumers’ hero. If people know how easy it was to solve, it wouldn’t have been their problem to begin with!
The best place to begin is the content for your home page. This sets the tone for your entire real estate website. The secondary pages to tailor to your market are your bio page (more benefits and testimonials) and the pages directed to the home buyers, sellers and investors in your market. Investing in extra content pages always pays off by creating market-specific keywords and content that casts a wider net of keywords for search engine queries.
What Is Your Real Estate Website’s Marketing Pitch?
January 10, 2010
Does your real estate website‘s marketing pitch need a tune-up? In a competitive economy such as real estate sales, your marketing pitch is the item that helps you stand out. In the online market place, you need two marketing pitches – one to the customer and one to the search engines.
To market to the home buyers and sellers, your real estate website‘s marketing pitch should explore all the ingenious ways that you solve their problems.
Marketing Principle #1 is “Love your customer”.
Your web visitors read your web page content to see if you are putting their real estate needs first. If you give your customer what they want, then real estate referrals and warm sales lead generation benefits flow from the advantageous relationship.
To “market” to the search engines, the discipline is to keep your marketing pitch divided up so a different web page addresses one of your markets. Do not rely on your home page to pitch to sellers – who want the best price, buyers – who want the lowest price for the nicest home, and investors – who are looking at the real estate sale from a whole different perspective.
Keep your marketing pitch on the home page to those benefits everyone in the real estate market wants: top notch communications, comprehensive knowledge of the residential and/or commercial market – whatever your market niche is, and guidance all the way through the closing process.
Part of your search engine strategy is following Marketing Principle #2:
Know your competition. Check your competitions’ websites to see if there is keywords or markets you have overlooked or could market to better. Late entry to market can be a benefit to a real estate agent’s website, since the market positioning and keyword usage can take into account all the successful strategies at play in the online real estate marketplace.
Place your real estate website order with IMCD Web Design and take that beneficial step towards establishing your powerful online real estate marketing presence. Our web designers work with you to create the best keyword strategy and content presentation to get your website ranking on the search engines and generating home buyer and seller leads.