A website is of great value to you and your customers. You can easily put your testimonials, houses for sale, contact information, products for sale and many other things right there. On all of your advertising products you can put your website address. It can pay you huge cash dividends, it certainly has for me. I have bought well over 10 houses from my site including the very one I live in! I ran an ad in the newspaper that read “We Buy Houses Fast, Cash Close in 3 Days” and added my phone as well as my web address. Well, as good marketing would have it, the seller was sitting at his desk reading the newspaper at work and Googled my website, called me and I bought the house days later!

You see a great website will help you find motivated sellers, listings, and sales easily as most every home and office has computers.

But there are a ton of websites out there.  How do you know which one is right for you? You want a website that will be easy to maintain, update and change at your whim. What you do not want is a website that you have to become a website technical engineer. You make your money in real estate not being a computer technician, so find one that offers unlimited changes so you can simply email the changes to the technician.

Example: you want to add a testimonial with the person’s photo on it. You type out the testimonial in email format, attached the persons photo to the email, the send it to the webmaster and your done! You are back to real estate, what YOU do best! Photos are always great, lending a more personable feel.

Example: you want to add a new domain like 123exampledotcom or 123lasvegasmogaldotcom, you buy the domain and email it to the webmaster who points that domain to your website, and it’s done for you. Back to real estate, what you do best! You see your time will not be taken up with learning to manage a website.

A word about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is critical activity that a webmaster should be continually studying, researching and working with to stay up on the latest advances. Like what are the spiders and bots that crawl through your website to study your websites target audience so it can decide if it’s a site to shoot to the top of Google’s page when your customer types in a key word or phrase like “sell my Las Vegas home fast.” Ask them what is their program for SEO.

In searching for a webmaster, it’s critical to find one that has been in business for several years. You will know that you will not have to research again for a webmaster to host your site. I spent some 2 very long years, in 2000, looking at, researching, educating myself and speaking with webmasters on websites. If you know very little about websites, and most do, you can spend countless hours and days looking for the site that’s a fit for you and is a solid company. Usually webmasters begin there business then drift off into the next or latest Internet fad.

The best sites have what’s called Back Office Pro, it’s a software program where you can upload photos and descriptions of your real estate very easily and make changes as needed quickly. Example: if you just put a house on your site for sale at a low low price and it sold, you want to be able to go in and choose the option labeled “Sold” on it to stop the phone calls immediately. Because running a small business your time is gold, and you do want to ensure those calls stop when you want them too.

In a webmaster, you will want to look for testimonials on there site, do they even bother with that, do the testimonials seem legitimate? When you Google their name, does it pop up in the organic side of Google, which will tell you about their longevity.

The website should offer bilingual text so you can target an additional customer base which is a step above the rest in today’s changing market place for you to keep your competitive edge.

The owner of the company should be very familiar with real estate. If he and or his staff has a history of being in or around real estate, this is perfect. He will know what your target audience is and will have designed sites to cater to listings, sales, wholesale, and subject to deals. They will write the pages and the auto-responders directed towards your customer. Auto-responder software will send occasional emails out to your customer once they input their contact data. An excellent webmaster knows that you cannot spam your customers. This means sending several emails constantly through auto-responders, or your site gets marked as a spam sight. That would lower your Google ranking.

You may find that you want to do certain things with your website and the wise webmaster will educate you to not do this or that with your site. Heed their advice, they do websites, you do real estate, and respect their knowledge in their specialty.

They need to be easy to reach by email or phone. This is important so they can help you if you have questions. Do they charge for those phone calls or emails? Are there so called up-sells to your site once you are on board? So let’s talk price, should you get a website that is expensive or cheap? The answer lies in your business longevity and aspirations. I found that you get what you pay for more often than not in most things. I would rather spend a bit more today and have a site that will stand the test of time. A site made by a company who is innovative, stable, and has been around for several years. You want your site designed by someone who has a background and backbone in real estate. Shy away from getting just any old site today then having to deal with changing to another site later and developing all new relationships with your webmaster, their policies and procedures - well you get the picture. Do it right, and do it right the first time when it comes to your website; then the part of your business that demonstrates creditability and increases revenue is solid. Now you can go back to finding those great real estate deals.

Listed on Bill’s website under the button “Products” is who he highly recommends, tell them you were referred by Bill Guerra and receive ten percent off! You’ll be glad you did.

Happy Trails,
Bill Guerra

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