You hear the phrase diversify from investors and wall street analysts alike, telling you to put your money in several investing areas to spread out your portfolio.  This way if one sector has gone bad, you have the other investments to help keep you going.  The same rule applies to your internet marketing strategy, diversify your efforts and never put all of your eggs in one basket.  By using only one marketing stream for your website, you are limiting the potential and possible business you could be gaining from using other marketing techniques.

Good Situation Gone Bad

Almost every business owner or potential entrepreneur has been guilty of sitting on a business idea and never doing anything with it.  In today’s economy people are taking more chances then they were in the past.  They feel they have nothing else to lose, so why not take the leap and see if the business idea works out.  As with life, not everything will work out as you had hoped and sometimes your plans make a sharp turn in another direction.  That is when you adapt and continue forward with your business idea and eventual goal you had set for yourself.  Sitting on a business idea and not doing anything is worse then failing, at least you attempted to do something and are not telling yourself “I should have tried that idea I had”.  Do not live your life in doubt and realize fear is not going anywhere, fear is a part of many decisions people make with business as for some it is charting into unknown waters.

After a friendly discussion with @socialvation and @lisadmyers (who agreed with me) on twitter today, I made a few points in 140 characters or less in regards to why your business still needs a website in today’s social world. Jon made a point as to why have a website when you can simply market your articles in the social world.  My simple response was:

@socialvation @lisadmyers website = self branding, full control, ability to gain back links…why advertise a store front yet not own one?

You have visitors walk into a clothing store, look around for anywhere from 5-60 seconds then turn around and walk out.  Imagine if a majority of walk in traffic were to do that and the store owner does nothing to persuade these people.  Exactly, he would probably would not be in business for very long.  Instead the store owner sets up discount racks on each side of the aisles as soon as the visitor walks in, hangs signs from the ceiling of buy one get the 2nd for half price etc. and on each rack he puts the sizes of the cloths on a large sign to read from almost anywhere in the store.  That store owner has just increased his chances of not only keeping that visitor in the store longer, but possibly converting it into a sale.

Great Design And Poor Coding

A common problem many businesses face today is the fact their website either was designed heavily with no internet marketing in mind or the website looks so awful because it was designed only to try and appeal to a search engine.  These are both major problems as fixing either to meet in the middle may end up costing you more money in the long run.  If you are looking to start an internet marketing campaign (we will use SEO search engine optimization in this example) and you have a great looking design, yet it was coded poorly, you will end up spending more money fixing the on page problem before getting to the off page marketing techniques.  Trying to rank your site for specific search terms before fixing the on page problems is like trying to run the 100 meter dash with a weight around your ankle.  You may make it to the finish line, but you will spend more time, effort and money getting there.

As a real estate professional you know that potential buyers judge a home based on how it looks from the outside.  The same thing applies with your website’s look and functionality.  You only get one chance to make a that great first impression with your viewers and in most cases it is decided within the first 15 seconds of them arriving to your website.  The look of your website speaks for both you and your real estate company, so do not take it lightly.  Ask yourself

1. Do I still convert as much traffic into leads as I did in the past?
2. How long are people staying on my site before leaving?
3. What are they looking at on my website?

For some of you reading the title to this post you may be scratching your head wondering what this is all about.  Many people believe SEO (search engine optimization) is all about what they do on their website and do not realize it also deals with what they do off of their website that can make a difference as well.  Gone are the days of “optimizing” your meta keyword tags with small variations of the same search phrase you want to rank for, stuffing your content, hiding text to make the search engines think that page is relevant and submitting your pages to the search engines.  All of the things I just listed above are so far from the island of truth you couldn’t fly there.

Back in December 2009 Google made it public that site speed would be a factor in how your website ranks within their search engine.  Well a few weeks ago Google rolled out some testing and started using site speed in their algorithm, which contains 200+ different factors when ranking a website.  Will site speed over take actual relevance a website gives to viewers, no it will not.  It will be something though that can be an easy fix for most webmasters.

What Is Site Speed Anyhow?

When you ask many real estate professionals what do you think is the most important thing to rank for, most will have the same answer of CITY Real Estate.  Where city would be the current location where they are selling real estate.  In theory you would think that would generate the most leads for you real estate business, but from a percentage standpoint targeting long tail keywords for your real estate business can actually generate more traffic to you website and increase your conversion rates.

Yesterday I talked about using only one website for your real estate business and today I will discuss the benefits of using multiple websites to increase your lead generation.  In theory it is a numbers game, the more sites you have out there, the better chances you have of generating more leads.  These websites can be full listing websites, informational based sites or a  simple landing pages (lead capture pages).  The type of site you use is up to you, factors to consider is the cost to create and develop a specific site along with the cost to market them.  If you are able to do most of the work yourself, then you have an advantage over most real estate professionals and only your time is needed.  However, most real estate professionals are not web developers and this post is mainly for them.