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.

When providing material for your real estate website, beware of two copywriting traps that diminish the effectiveness of your website content.

Trap #1: Writing for other real estate agents.
Every profession develops shorthand words, initials or acronyms for part of their daily process or products. Keep in mind that your new home buyers, which may be 40% of the traffic your real estate website receives, are novices. They do not necessarily understand real estate acronyms that are second nature to real estate agents. Writing over someone’s head leaves them feeling like they need to use another agent who is used to talking on an introductory level. Especially do not write as if your material is going in a classified ad where everything has been broken down into a type of classified ad shorthand.

On the other hand, if you are real estate website targeting practiced commercial and investment buyers, you can use a certain level of market specific language to prequalify your potential clients.

Trap #2: Writing page content as if it is a blog entry.
Blog entries can be written in a more conversational style. When writing content for a webpage, make sure you are using a descriptive adjectives and keyword nouns instead of pronouns. Actually, keeping this in the back of your mind will help you write better blog entries.

When reviewing client testimonials, tweak their quotes to add punch (keeping it in their style of talking/writing, of course) and get them to approve of the changes. A positive testimonial such as “He was a great guy to work with and we are very happy with our new house,” can be tweaked for the search engines with minor edits. A better testimonial would read “Seymour Lystings was a great real estate agent to work with and we are very happy with our lovely new Denver home in the Cherry Creek neighborhood.” This adds your name and three keywords: “real estate agent”, “Denver home” and “Cherry Creek neighborhood”. Hopefully your testimonials are a little longer also!

With these copywriting traps out of the way, the real estate information on your website should appeal to first time buyers as well as seasoned home buyers. Don’t worry about getting your explanations too simple, your seasoned buyers will skim over that text to find what they need.

To maximize the return on your real estate website investment, make sure you integrate your website’s lead generating capacity with your current customer relationship system. As businesses have found since the beginning of the computer revolution, “a new business technology changes nothing, unless it is used to remove an obstacle or limitation to achieving your business goals.”

The main reason for a real estate website is to funnel more warm sales leads to real estate agents. A major lead gathering constraint is time. Agents, no matter how much coffee they drink, have time limitations on their day. Your website technology solves the time constraint by expanding the time available to find new leads and cultivate relationships with past customers. Your website works 24 hours a day providing potential clients real estate information and your business contact information. As an interactive media, your website also requests contact information and automatically sends responder emails once contact information is received.

To integrate the lead gathering benefit of your real estate website, examine your current sales process for capturing, possibly delegating, and tracking your leads. What needs to be changed to incorporate the real estate sales leads forwarded from your website into this process?

Since people perform best at those tasks on which they are measured, a good failsafe method of integrating your real estate website leads is to make a (diplomatic) person responsible for them. Then you know that the capturing and tracking of sales leads through the sales process happens in a measurable way. By tracking your website leads, you gain the best insight on your website’s return on investment and your (or your company’s) ability to convert leads to solid sales.

The typical business mistake is adding new technology, be it more robust software, a faster computer, or the ability to text message, without rethinking the process it is meant to aid. This mistake usually leads to the innovation being underutilized or worse, with lack of integration, another impediment to the business process.

Given the real estate client testimonials Internet Marketing Consultants has received over the years, the best time to integrate your website’s increase in sales leads is before you launch or relaunch your website.

Real estate website marketing is very different than traditional advertising in the print, TV and radio venues. When shifting your real estate marketing resources from traditional marketing methods to internet marketing, understanding the different marketing activities are necessary.

Traditional advertising is to a great degree directed toward a rather static audience. Advertising is purchased after matching the demographics (age, buying habits, race, sex, etc.) to a target market. Real estate companies facilitating sales of high-end homes put ads in magazines, such as Forbes, that target their demographic: successful business people looking for homes that make a statement with size and price. Traditional advertising seeks the market.

Internet marketing is directed to a constantly shifting audience. It takes the opposite approach of placing their message on the internet and the market finds them through web links or search engine results. The market seeks the advertisement.

Traditional marketing tends to attract a broader audience to make the most of the advertising dollars. Internet marketing (and a real estate website is no different) is most successful when targeting niche markets, not broad markets.

Another key marketing difference is that when someone purchases a newspaper or magazine, they get the ads whether they requested it or not. On the internet, visitors arrive at your real estate website because they bookmarked it, got a referral to it or picked it from a search engine result. There is a free will choice involved. If someone clicks on more than one or two pages of your website, you now have a target market.

With the warm lead interacting with your site, the third key marketing difference kicks in. The real estate buyer or seller on a website can send their contact information to a real estate agent or send an email requesting information or a call. This dynamic interaction can not be duplicated by newspapers, magazines, TV or radio. At best, traditional marketing interaction demands extra steps from the audience, even if that is just picking up a phone. When someone is browsing the internet, they are already using their keyboard. Contacting the real estate agent is just continuing what they were doing already.

When structuring the marketing content on your real estate website, put out the information that your target market is searching for and your market will come to you.

Real estate buyers and sellers are using the Internet in growing numbers. Besides the growing numbers, buyers and sellers are checking more pages of the real estate websites with each visit. On the average, each time a real estate website is visited, 14 pages are clicked on. Websites filled with quality real estate information score with more page hits, while “navigationally impaired” sites usually never reach as high as 14 page hits.

Reviews of last year’s trends in visitor traffic to real estate websites found that the Internet visitations mirrored the overall market trends. March was the month with the highest amount of traffic. March captured over 12 % of the annual visits with the following months gradually decreasing to July’s 8% traffic. August to February stay in the 7% range, with November dropping into the 6% range. With both traditional marketing and heavily internet based real estate selling cycles at an average of 8 weeks long, the March spike may correspond to the families trying to move between over summer vacation.

Scaling back and looking at the weekly and daily website visitation trends found by VisiStat.com, it appears that most people plan their week of real estate shopping at 9 PM on a Monday. This indicates that real estate agents definitely want to have their online MLS listings up-to-date by the end of the weekend.

Of website visitors, almost 24% arrive fresh from a search engine. Over 45% of the visitors write down the real estate website or bookmark it and pay return visits. 60% of website visitors go directly to the URL, either from bookmarking the site or from finding the address from print or radio ads or business cards. Combine this 60% figure along with the fact that Internet real estate shoppers do six weeks of research prior to contacting an agent. This may well indicate that the referral market is also using the Internet to research real estate agents, their listings or companies before making an initial live contact.

Inbound visitors coming from pay per click, directories or other websites, such as a Chamber of Commerce site only accounted for a little over 16% of the visitors. Inbound links are good, but with 7% more traffic being directed by organic search engine results, a real estate website designed with keyword rich content, search engine optimization and attractive graphics are still the best ROI approach to internet marketing.

Your real estate Internet website should be saving real estate agents time and money! Is your real estate website is getting the hits it should? You need a successful website to enjoy the benefits internet marketing is bringing to the real estate market.

Look at the benefits of using internet marketing for your real estate business:

• Buyers using the Internet to preview properties find their homes in a little over two week. Traditional shoppers: 6+ weeks.
• Internet buyers rely on their real estate agents for the final steps of the process. In a reverse of the above numbers, buyers using agents’ real estate websites research the market for 6 weeks before contacting an agent. Traditional shoppers only research the market for two weeks before contacting an agent.
• Internet shoppers usually view 6 to 7 homes with their real estate agents. Traditional shoppers view over three times as many, on the average of 21 to 22 homes.
• Almost 75% of the Internet researching home buyers first view of the house they bought was a picture on a real estate website.

Two fast conclusions to draw are:

1. Your internet website’s ability to educate the real estate market is a crucial part of funneling traffic to your door. Make sure your website is providing information in the six week span prior to your meeting.
2. Your real estate website’s search engine optimization is of paramount importance to becoming and staying visible on the Internet.

A third conclusion a real estate agent could draw, is that it pays to keep your online listings up to date. Fight the temptation to leave the updating task to later. Today’s market puts a premium on “real-time” data. With news sources and financial companies offering RSS feeds of news of interest as soon as it happens, today’s consumer considers yesterday’s home sale an archive research item. The most up-to-date real estate websites are viewed as the most informative.

Real estate agents only help themselves by getting feedback from their clients as to how helpful they found the website. Or if they even found the website. Keep your real estate business on the radar of your buying and selling leads who turn to the Internet first for information.

The real estate market has always been one of the most competitive markets. This fact will not change as long as people continue to move and the rewards or real estate brokerage remain attractive. What is changing is the way real estate agents are capturing market share. Traditional marketing avenues are still beneficial, but well designed and optimized real estate websites are becoming the highest return on marketing investment.

Other marketing avenues are one way streets - you deliver your message on the radio to someone who listens, in a magazine to someone who reads, or on TV to someone who…is flipping the channel. Internet marketing opens up the whole world of interactive marketing. Competitive real estate agents know how to work this interactivity to their advantage (or connect up with a web designer who does).

• Internet buyers more quickly focus their home search by viewing your listings. This means real estate agents spend less time visiting properties with their clients before arriving at a sale.
• The internet provides the least expensive and fastest way to for interested people to contact you. Contact forms and email links make contacting you easy, even if a potential client is visiting your site at 1 AM.
• The Internet is growing in usage and the average age of home buyers is decreasing. That means the trend of real estate buyers are internet savvy and go to the internet first to find information. This is, after all, the generation that coined the term “googling”.
• You can provide tools to help your clients make decisions. Mortgage calculators help buyers figure how much of a house will fill their budget. Mortgage and financial calculators are great Internet marketing tools, but according to the National Association of Realtors, only 58% of the real estate websites provide them.
• Create an atmosphere of trust even before you meet your clients. Agent profile pages are a golden opportunity to show how people benefit from working with you. Sadly, almost 30% of the NAR surveyed websites failed to take advantage of this tool.
• Room for Improvement. In 2006, per the NAR, the average real estate website accounted for only 10% of the firms leads. This figure may indicate how many real estate websites are under utilized and in need of web design and search engine optimization help.
• Of the 85% of home buyers using Realtors in 2006, 75% reported that they found the real esate websites helpful.
• Looking at the last two facts, you can see that even if your website is not yet your best lead generation tool, real estate internet sites have become a primary educational tool for many real estate agents. Whether it is downloadable buyer and seller guides and checklists in PDF format or informational web pages - as an educational tool, your real estate website becomes a big time saver for you.

Keep your traditional marketing methods going that are working successfully for you, of course, but don’t miss high return on investment you receive from owning your own professionally designed real estate website.