Real Estate Investing and Marketing

What Business Are You In Again?

Something which never fails to surprise me is the enormous number of real estate professionals who don’t seem entirely sure of what business they’re in. From the way that a lot of real estate investors do business online, it looks like many of these investors seem to think that they’re affiliate marketers.

You may be wondering why I say this. All you need to do is to have a look around at how a lot of real estate investors are running their online marketing efforts; it’s not only newcomers to the business either. Even seasoned professionals are seemingly being swayed by the idea that the methodologies employed by affiliates and other internet marketers are the right way to sell real estate.

Landing pages, hub pages, Squidoo lenses and other methods used by people trying to promote their products online have been adopted by real estate investors. To some extent, you can’t really blame people who haven’t spent a lot of time in the industry for thinking that there’s some merit to these techniques. Even many investors who’ve been in the industry for years but are new to the web have taken the same approach; it’s partially their inexperience with the World Wide Web as a business environment. However, you can’t help but think that these investors should really know better. Read more…

A recent e-book claiming that websites are a less effective means of promoting a real estate business than are landing pages (also known as squeeze pages). As anyone who knows their SEO methodologies can tell you, it ain’t necessarily so. There are a number of reasons why an actual website is a more effective tool to gather leads and generate business if real estate is your field. While a landing page can be properly optimized for the search engines, the long and short of it is that doing so means one thing – more work for the webmaster.

The book seems to be designed to convince real estate investors of the merits of landing pages largely to persuade them to purchase the author’s system. Since real estate investors tend to be far more savvy about real estate than they are about search engine optimization, it’s certain that he’ll see some level of success with this book and the (nebulously defined) system it promotes; at least until investors realize that they’re actually losing out on business by having adopted this ill-conceived approach to online real estate promotion.

While it’s hard to fault someone for going for easy money where they see it, investors should be advised that what they really need isn’t an entirely new approach to building an online presence – it’s simply making the most of the online presence they already have. Read more…