Mortgage websites utilizing the immediacy of Internet marketing are converting more website visitors to leads that websites that follow traditional loan application methods. Is your mortgage website going down the less effective, though more traveled route of converting leads? Internet Marketing Consultants (IMC) has created successful mortgage broker websites that ease the website visitors’ path to getting you the necessary information to start the loan process.

1. Build credibility with solid loan information. IMC offers a complete package of articles, guides and checklists that helps educate home buyers or people in the market to refinance their homes. At the same time, this information helps build your credibility as a mortgage and real estate expert.

2. Offer a fast method for loan preapproval. Even though the 1003 Application is the main application form to capture loan qualification information, on the internet, it is a major barrier to converting a visitor to a lead. IMC’s mortgage websites offer visitors several methods of sending their prequalifying information. The first offered is a “short form” application that gives you enough information to narrow down the possible loan packages available for that lead’s financial situation. The regular 1003 Application is available, of course, but that isn’t necessary to get the process started. Once you have made contact with your lead, you can help them fill out what to many people is a daunting application.

3. Search engine optimize to your specific market. All IMC mortgage website designs are search engine optimized for your particular mortgage market, whether that is defined by geography or the nature of your clientèle - commercial, residential or investor borrowers. Optimizing for the general terms “home loans” puts your site in competition with the entire world. With Internet marketing, specific keywords is the key to driving lower quantity, but much higher quality leads to your mortgage loans website.

4. Use a blog or neighborhood news tools to keep your site fresh and up to date. Blogs and neighborhood news tools are a great avenue for keeping your contact base apprised of today’s financial news that can benefit their efforts towards getting a home loan or refinancing their current home mortgages. In today’s intense mortgage market, opportunities tend to go to the loan officers with the best communication tools and skills.

5. Check your graphics. Your graphics are tools to reinforce the benefits that your services can bring to your website visitor. The main benefit they are looking for is the American dream - home ownership. Research has found that the pictures of a smiling happy family are not as effective as images of nice homes in which people can envision themselves. Apparently the happy faces images only convey someone else living the dream, not your visitor. Images of homes and lifestyles trump images of someone else’s success.

It is never too late to start or upgrade your internet marketing presence with a mortgage website. IMC has several web designs that have, for several years, successfully helped mortgage brokers convert their website visitors to warm leads and sales.

The luxury residential real estate prices continue to rise, contrary to the general market contraction. According to the recent report on luxury and high-end homes from Christie’s Great Estates, luxury homes selling around the country at record setting prices.

In the Colorado real estate market, luxury real estate in mountain communities such as Bachelor Gulch, Beaver Creek, and Vail have seen homes for sale keep pace with national luxury home price trend and sell for record amounts. In Telluride Mountain Village, 2007 prices were over 10% higher than the 2006 prices. Boulder County has also seen real estate values increase on the high-end properties.

The Florida real estate market’s Gulf Coast and Atlantic Coast have seen increases in both demand and prices for high-end homes. Hawaii, which overall saw a 10% decline in home sales in 2007, enjoyed a 14% increase in sales of high-end properties in the same period. On the East Coast, Europeans, Mid-easterners and a growing number of South Americans form the majority of the foreign buyers. In the West Coast and Hawaii markets, Australia and the Asian Pacific countries dominate. With expected changes easing the ability to obtain visas, China and South Korea are poised to become a larger part of the market. Both markets enjoy a resurgence of Canadian buyers now that the Canadian dollar is on par with the American dollar.

In the competitive world of Internet real estate marketing, blogs, neighborhood news tools and email “new property” notifications are standard. In order to stand out, websites are putting more emphasis on editorial content. To take advantage of the international interest in American luxury properties, real estate websites have adapted by adding more information on their niche market through very informative area luxury lifestyle guides and currency converters.

The market appeal to the luxury home buyer is not based so much on school locations, value and price, as on the lifestyle the home affords. Price is part of the picture, of course, but with 28% of foreign buyers purchasing their luxury property for cash (20% more than US buyers), price is not a hurdle. Real estate websites that add content on an area’s high-end life style amenities help create the market through their attractive and educational presentation.

Successful real estate agents in the luxury market know the power of Internet marketing as a foundation to their traditional marketing methods of colorful flyers and networking with associates. Starting with their own real estate website, designed to appeal to high-end buyers, they also utilize high visibility websites such as the Wall Street Journal’s website and the NAR’s website to steer traffic to their website. With many luxury home buyers leading “movable feast” lifestyles, the Internet is one stable real estate information source for the luxury market, where ever it may be.

“Permission Marketing” author Seth Godin gave several great tips for your real estate blog in a recent interview with Wordtracker.com’s Academy, a leading keyword analysis company. Tips from a successful writer who understands marketing and creating loyal customers as well as writing are always helpful.

• Story telling is most effective when told right. “The story has to begin with something compelling enough that you want to learn more about the story. The mistake marketers make is that they tell all the story at once, take it or leave it. People need to realize they have to ensure an unfolding dialogue.” Your stories can be like the jokes in a Crosby-Hope Road Show, a theme that keeps popping up and changing to add liveliness to the scene. Your client’ testimonials can be a great source of anecdotes that add to your unfolding story.
• Create your own feedback loops to spur improvement or cover popular themes. When Seth was asked if he felt under pressure to always be coming up with new ideas, he responded “I do it because I want to do it. Every time I am interacting with the outside world I‚m thinking about why that interaction happened, whether it was a good one or a bad one.” If your entry is a “good one”, the result may be your client receives information helping them with the selling or buying process or impels them to respond to your call to action. Listen to your clients when they give feedback on your real estate website.
• Sit down and write, don’t let the perfect kill the good. “I am not a perfectionist. I think that I am very focused on doing the best I can quickly and fixing it to make it better. A perfectionist doesn‚t do things quickly, it takes them too long to shift.” A short entry with good information that carries your personal enthusiasm is much better than sporadic short pieces that have been crafted with the word crafting ability of Edgar Allen Poe. Plus, by the time you get that blog entry perfect, the real estate market may have shifted!
• Content is king. Asked about search engine optimization (SEO), Seth pointed out there are no short cuts. “The best SEO is great content. Don’t do that and you don’t get much.” The reason real a estate blog helps with your search engine ranking is that it is a great opportunity for adding useful keyword-rich information to your website.

Wordtracker offers a free keyword search trial at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/. You can type in the keywords you are planning to use in your real estate blog entry and see what variation is the most used one on the search engines. Then you can modify your blog entry to use that keyword variation.

Real estate agents in markets with international buyers benefit from an Internet marketing presence. A real estate website is your interactive marketing arm that is immune to time zones and available any where in the world that has the Internet. With the dollar falling in value against foreign currencies coupled with the residential real estate market in a slowdown with prices falling in at least 77 of the major metropolitan areas, American real estate has become the international bargain.

Hawaii continues to attract international buyers, especially from around the Ring of Fire. According to the NAR, 47% of foreign buyers bought their US property for vacation purposes. This may account for the fact that condominiums and apartments are twice as popular with international buyers as American buyers.

If buying follows the 2006 trends, real estate agents can expect over 50% of the foreign real estate investments to be in the Florida (26%), California (16%) and Texas (10%) markets. Positioning your real estate website for your market’s international clientèle is an important part of your marketing strategy. With 13% of the buyers coming from Mexico, with an additional 3% from the rest of Latin America, bilingual websites in these markets are positioned to capture the Latin American buyers. Certain real estate websites have also added web pages translated into European and Asian-Pacific languages to attract and educate the international buyers. Europe, at 33%, was the largest foreign buyer in the US market.

The National Association of Realtors in its October 2007 The Global Neighborhood Report noted “The Internet has also provided a vital conduit to potential buyers around the globe, making property details and related market information one click away for anyone with interest and an Internet connection. And if softer housing prices have tempered some U.S. homebuyers‚ enthusiasm to move forward with a transaction, quite the opposite could be said for many foreign buyers, who are witnessing even better deals when weak-dollar prices are converted into their currency equivalents. For example, the British Pound Sterling, worth $1.44 in 2001 rose to nearly $2.00 in mid-2007, allowing a U.K investor to buy considerably ‘more house,’ simply through favorable exchange rates.”

Real estate websites positioned for the European and Caribbean markets have begun including a translation glossary of American to British words. For instance in the UK, a “closing” is a “completion” and a “condominium” is a “flat”. It is a simple addition to a website and follows the sales principle of not having your customer leave your website to get service you can easily provide.

Knowing the attraction your real estate market has for the international buyers and investors, helps you create the web pages and add the web tools that foreign buyers are looking for. Working with a real estate web designer will aid you in making sure your content and page set-up are optimized for the search engines so your potential international clients can find you in their Internet searches.

Internet marketing or eCommerce is a — powerful tool that real estate brokerages can leverage to increase lead generation from their real estate websites. A best of all possible worlds may be all the sales agents attached to a real estate brokerage showing property and closing deals. Not spending any time finding and qualifying leads. Admittedly an unrealistic scenario, but by scientifically positioning your real estate website’s message, you can get closer to that perfect world.

Positioning #1:
Talk to each client. Traditional advertising takes the shotgun approach a blasting a general message to a general segment of the population. Internet marketing, by its nature, is one-to-one marketing. In your message use the keywords that an individual looking for a specific piece of real estate will use. Maybe only 10 people in your market use those keywords in a month, but when they contact you, they are a qualified lead looking for exactly what you have to offer.

Positioning #2:
Measure and adapt. Use your keywords in a testing of the market manner. Measure the traffic certain keywords or pages draw to your site. Tweak pages or keywords with low draw and create more pages with the keywords successfully driving real estate leads to your website.

Positioning #3:
Don’t profile. This goes against the prevalent advertising strategy of targeting demographics. Internet marketing is most successful when it targets a buyer’s or seller’s behavior or activity. For example, instead of targeting middle income, male, householders, target people looking to buy their dream home in the mountains near a skiing resort or on the waterfront near boating access ramps. No one does searches for real estate using the keywords “homes for sale for male householder”, but they do search for “Breckenridge mountain real estate near ski resort”.

Positioning #4:
Utilize the Internet’s capacity for interactivity. Your real estate website client used the mouse and keyboard to arrive at your site. The brain is in the typing, clicking mode. Make your call to action initially a call to simply type or click to request information of give contact information. Do not push them to call initially. Keep them on your real estate website. The more information a website visitor reads on your site, the more likely they will convert into a warm sales lead.

Several successful real estate companies redefined their marketing position by measuring the warm leads directed to sales. Traditional marketing that was ineffective in attracting leads fell in the category of “not doing your job”. By following these simple Internet marketing positioning steps, your brokerage office can harvest the leads generated from the site and feed them to sale agents. Real estate sales agents working on warm leads close more sales than the ones who are trying to find the leads that saw a magazine ad and are thinking of buying in the near future.

Real estate agents and brokerages need to pull out all the stops to effectively keep their real estate websites positioned on Google and Yahoo, the two leading search engines, and to adapt to market trends in today’s slow real estate market. There is a two pronged real estate situation causing some real estate agents to get corralled into unproductive labor to secure listings.

Google and Yahoo have apparently tweaked their search algorithms to give priority in front page ranking to mega real estate websites such as Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com. The slow down and price drop in the housing market has caused 12% more of the sellers in the market to try the “for sale by owner” route, instead of listing with a real estate agent.

With listing information more available and a slow housing market, some real estate agents have taken to painting houses, doing clean up and maintenance to build relationships and win listings. While extra help, such as giving a client a lift back to work after a showing, is usual, recent efforts to secure clients has raised liability and loss of sales time concerns.

Is there a better way to roll with the internet marketing punches? Yes. Trulia has a free linking section and an Agent Feature Listing program that provides even more opportunity to funnel traffic to your personal real estate website. Realtor.com also has a feature allowing real estate agents that are MLS participants (and who’s Multiple Listing Service must be a REALTOR.com® data content provider) the ability to upgrade their listings with more photos, contact information and web links. Zillow allows real estate agents to add their picture and contact information, such as your website, to your listings for free. Top real estate companies such as RE/MAX and Prudential are actively utilizing Trulia’s additional market reach.

The Trulia Voices section allows real estate agents to further their market presence by answering questions from active buyers and sellers. In your answer, you have an opportunity to guide the reader back to your website for further information. Most effective, of course, is finding the questions from people in your market area. Trulia Voices can also serve as part of your market feedback loop. After reviewing questions posted to the site, you can create an informative blog entry on your real estate website and direct your reader to that entry in your answer.

According to Trulia, 68% of their visitors checking their website listings are not working with a real estate agent yet. By increasing your visibility on Trulia and Zillow, you can ride your part of the 10 million visitors a month wave and harness Zillow’s and Trulia’s commanding search engine presence to capture those untethered warm sales leads.

By integrating Trulia and Zillow into your internet marketing strategy, you gain exposure to a larger market that can show your listings, but better still, drive traffic to your real estate website so you can capture the leads. The greater visibility translates to the potential for a faster sale. Real estate agents now have even more to offer the “sale by owner” sellers who would willingly trade their perceived savings for the quicker sale.

Your real estate blog entry is your fastest, most cost-effective way to get your real estate message out to as many of your clients as quickly as possible. If your blog has RSS feed subscribers, they receive notice of your blog entry very quickly. With this tremendous communication tool at your fingertips, remember these blog basics for making the most of your real estate blog entries.

Put your expertise into your writings. As an experienced real estate professional, you are in the best position to educate the home buying and selling public. By using your blog as an educational device, you position yourself both as an expert and as a thought leader. Real estate expert status is quickly translated into boosting your trustworthiness with people who are virtually introduced to you through your real estate website.

Your real estate blog creates a history of all your teaching lessons. With the ability to sort and archive your entries by topic, build your “knowledge Base” library to educate your current and future clients. Many companies, such as Microsoft, have found their websites’ searchable “knowledge base” to be the best way to provide their customers answers around the clock. Your real estate website’s visitors will benefit from your blog’s knowledge base.

For cost effectiveness, a blog utilizes space already included with your current website and your real estate web design consultant has templates available. Your main investment is your time. Fifteen minutes a day or a few days a week helps you consistently keep your brand active on the Internet. Your thoughts and insight uploaded on your site will instantaneously be available to the people searching to buy their next home in your market.

Best of all, you are your own boss! You can set the amount of time and when you want to unleash your real estate writing muse. You can address topics that arise that day in the real estate market news or typical home buying or selling concerns of clients. The conversational format makes it natural to bounce around between different real estate or mortgage topics.

If you have not added a blog to your real estate website, now is no better time to increase the benefit your clients’ receive from using your website. Once your website company sets you up, it is no harder than sending an email. Only you are sending it to the world.