Getting Business to Come to You...

The following article was originally published in Broker Agent News on Dec 16, 2005. While non-commercial use of this copyrighted material is encouraged, unauthorized, commercial use is strictly prohibited.

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I want you to imagine that you just got up out of bed and went to your computer to check your email. It's still early and dark outside, but you're getting ready for a full day. You look at your inbox and find twenty-three new leads there - people who visited your website overnight while you slept. I know: you think this is a dream. But it's not a dream. It's reality for many agents! And it could happen for you.

In the previous articles (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) we discussed what many agents believe to be the most powerful and unique listing presentation to come along in years. I know that I've used it to list as many as 114 homes in a single year - all at 8% or more. Also, because the system is so simple and makes perfect sense, I've been able to list about 85% of the properties over the phone, saving me countless hours and saving my clients the hassle of the at-home supper time listing presentation.

Still, even the best listing presentation in the world is only as good as the number of opportunities you receive (and even the worst listing presentation is effective if you present it to enough sellers!). Using this unique presentation (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), I've lost only two listings where I was able to present. But I could be really bad and still be the top listing agent in our market. Why? Because I receive tons of seller leads. I can't remember the last day when I didn't receive at least one. That's my secret weapon! I get many chances, and because I get those chances, I also get many listings.

THE SECRET OF MY SUCCESS

Okay. Now that you know my secret involves getting lots of chances, let me be more specific. I use three pieces of technology, together, to generate my business, both buyers and sellers. And it's the way that I use the components that helps me land and keep the business.

1. The first piece of the technology puzzle is my website.

Now, I realize that I'm about to go against conventional wisdom in what I'm going to teach you, but in the three and a half years that I've been doing Internet real estate, and the year and a half that I've been helping our agent partners across the US and Canada with Internet real estate, I've experimented with virtually every type of website available. I've used template websites, and I've built my own. Here's what I've learned.

When I started in this business, all the "experts" told me that content is king. They let me know that every successful website has to include mountains of content. So of course, I set out to have every kind of content imaginable. I had school reports, local community information, and links to various community sites, such as the chamber of commerce, the visitors' bureau, local hotels and restaurants, the school board, and more. I had information about our city, our state, and my company. I had general relocation information. I had weather, news, sports, and human-interest content. I had every conceivable kind of financial information - from a couple of dozen financial calculators, to articles about mortgages and credit, to lender comparisons, to rates, to pre-qualification forms, to credit repair, and then some. In fact, I had literally hundreds of pages of real-estate-related content. I offered free reports. I offered listings by email and free CMAs.

After much testing and many changes, though, I learned (belatedly!) that content isn't king. I also learned that most of the "experts" don't have a clue about online real estate marketing, which is why most real estate websites look alike and generate very little business for their owners. Today I have what is probably the simplest website you've ever seen, and I receive an amazing number of customer comments about how nice it is to find a real estate website that's easy to use. You know, it's always wise to give consumers what they want, and I'm here to tell you that simplicity is what they're searching for. Nowadays, in terms of content, there are only three things on my website.

First and foremost, there's a link to my local MLS, using IDX (Internet data exchange). This is not the private, or "for-REALTORS®," side of the MLS, but the public-access side. If you don't have it on your website, you absolutely must get it because 92% of all Internet real estate customers want to search for homes on the Internet. And if you don't have IDX available in your market, you need to insist that your local Board of REALTORS® make it available. In the meantime, there are several reputable companies that will build a custom IDX link for you at a reasonable cost. But if that solution is out of your budget, you should at least link to REALTOR.com® or one of the other sites that have large groups of listings.

Next, you should offer to send your visitors free listings by email. This very powerful tool gives you multiple excuses for contacting a buyer without making him feel "pressured," (See article on prospecting Internet leads.) Almost any MLS application will allow you to input a customer's preferences into its system so that it can email him any new listings that meet his criteria. In most markets, this service is free to member agents. But if you don't have the automated system, it's still a good idea to offer the service, even if you have to pull up listings for your clients manually.

Finally, you should offer a free CMA (comparative market analysis). One of the first concerns that a seller will have is how much his or her home is worth, and many visitors will request a free CMA if one is offered. However, it's important that you not refer to it as a CMA because that's REALTOR® jargon, and most non-REALTORS® don't know what it means. You should use clear, self-explanatory terminology like "free market valuation" or "free home value" or "free house valuation" or anything else in plain, non-industry English that your visitor can understand.

Those three items and my contact information are absolutely all that's on my website now. Yet I have one of the most frequently visited websites and clearly the largest web presence in our local community, using only what I've just described. Remember the "KISS" rule? Keep it simple, Stupid! Well, this rule certainly applies to real estate websites: less is definitely more when it comes to attracting Internet customers.

2. The second piece of critical technology is the database, or CRM (customer relationship manager) application.

There have been books written about the importance of having a database, not only as a customer management tool, but also as an asset to sell when and if you decide to retire from real estate. I don't think it's possible to overstate the importance of having and using a database.

Moreover, as you grow to become a higher-volume agent or top producer, you'll find it virtually impossible to maintain a significant level of transaction volume without using a database. Having tried most of the major databases out there (dBase, Filemaker Pro, Access, Outlook, Outlook Express, Act, Gold Mine, Salesforce.com, Top Producer, Top Producer 7i, Online Agent, Agent Office, Market Leader) and having managed a team of agents, all of whom work the same pool of leads and share the same information, I can attest that there's one fact more important than all the others: the best database is the one you use! I first read this statement when taking my e-PRO® certification training and still consider it the very best information on the subject. Besides, if it's not simple, agents won't use it.

After trying unsuccessfully (many times!) to persuade our team of agents to use different database applications, I finally decided that we needed to develop our own. What we noticed in using the major real estate databases was that, even though advanced functionality is "cool," it's largely wasted on 99% of all agents. We also noticed that we tended to hire the 99% instead of the 1%! So what we desperately needed was a database application with a five-minute learning curve...not a five-day, five-week, or five-month learning curve.

Besides that, we needed an application that could be shared by multiple users, and we needed that application to be usable from numerous computers at any given time (a feature for which most companies charge additional license fees). When our agents needed to use the database, it had to be available, regardless of the hour, the location, or the computer, so it definitely had to be web-based.

Being web-based meant that multiple agents using different computers could access the data at one time without installing new software. Additionally, if somebody in our office were to buy a new computer, there would be no time-wasting hassle while the application was being installed on the new computer.

One of the most important aspects of a good database is website integration, which means that, when a customer visits your website and registers or fills out a form, his or her information is automatically inserted into your database (and nobody in your office has to type it in!). Most of the better databases include this function.

Also critical to a top-notch database are follow-up tools such as template emails that can be modified on the fly, call-back scripts, activity scheduling, customer contact history, and financial tracking-all built into the database application. These features reduce hours of menial work to mere minutes, leaving an agent free to do what he or she does best: listing and selling real estate.

An essential feature of the database application that our company developed is our Agent Success Panel. With only a few keystrokes, it allows us to reverse-engineer a business plan for a new agent. We can input how much money he wants to net for the next year, his brokerage split, and the average transaction and average commission rate in our market; and, in seconds, the database will make all the necessary calculations to build a customized business plan: how many customers or leads the agent will need, how many transactions, what to budget for customer acquisition, how many calls to make each day, how many appointments to schedule - the Agent Success Panel literally builds the new agent a business plan! Even better, it then tracks his progress along that plan, allowing him to remain motivated. This tool has saved us two or three hours with each new team-member orientation, and the plan can be changed by the agent at any time...and the system will adjust to compensate for the new variables! Soon our database application will be available to any agent who wants it, free of charge, so watch for upcoming announcements.

3) The final and, without a doubt, most important piece of the technology puzzle is the LCM™ Gateway.

Very few people have heard of the Internet term LCM or "lead capture module." Although this technology is primarily used by lead aggregators, it is available for single-agent and single-company use as well. If this is your introduction to LCM technology, you'll actually find it to be amazingly simple. Here's how it works.

Real estate websites, as a rule, capture fewer than 1% of all unique visitors - or about half the site conversions of the average B2C (business-to-consumer) website, which gets about 2%. Hold on a second, though. I just threw a lot of technical jargon at you, didn't I? Let me back up.

In the field of website development, there are many measurements (metrics) that are important to the webmaster and the site owner, including total visitors, total unique visitors, abandonment, etc. The most important metric of them all, though, is the conversion rate (CR), also known as capture rate. This is the percentage of unique visitors (first-time visitors, generally) who actually fill out the guest registration or online registration form. According to the experts who measure these statistics, real estate websites rate among the worst of all B2C websites in terms of site conversion, or CR.

The typical real estate site has a CR of less than 1%, which means that, of 100 unique visitors to a website, not even one actually registers or identifies himself. This is because real estate websites aren't designed to capture traffic; they're designed instead to deliver real-estate-related information to home buyers and sellers, and they're pretty good at it. However, because they're not designed to bring in customers, they generally don't!

Our LCM gateway technology was designed to do only one thing: capture Internet traffic - and it does incredibly well at lead capture. Instead of 1%, or even the 5-6% that the very best real estate sites can do, our LCM gateway routinely captures between 30% and 40% of all unique visitors! But how does it succeed so well? The answer to that question is in nearly three years of continual testing and improvement. Every little gain took weeks or even months of concentrated fine-tuning! What follows here are the basics (although much of the detail is beyond the scope of most webmasters, let alone REALTORS®, so don't despair if you can't immediately comprehend everything).

Most important: on your website, have a registration form in the path of the strongest value proposition. In fact, simply adding a form in front of the IDX link will bring your conversion rate up to 4-5%. Many agents are afraid to do so, however, because they think they'll lose people at this point...and they're right! "People" will leave. The freeloaders will leave - and I say good riddance! We're trying to earn a living here! Where is it written that a REALTOR® has to operate a charity? If a customer is unwilling to identify himself, I'm unwilling to share my IDX link with him. Let him go mooch off some other agent.

Other factors that effect the CR are colors, landing page content, advertising content, font size, font color, the order of the fields on the contact form, the number of fields on the form, the speed at which the pages load, the size and presence of images, the actual HTML, Java Script, and ASP or PHP code (if any), and many other details. Suffice it to say that, if it were easy to get a high CR, everyone would have one.

Let's face it: if you're a webmaster or know a lot about site development, you could probably build a high capture rate into your website yourself, assuming that you were willing to spend thousands of hours in development over a period of two or three years. However, if the technology had been available when I started, I can assure you that I would've gladly bought it instead of developing it.

As it turns out, so many people called me asking for help on website lead capture that ultimately I decided just to license the technology to agent partners. Wherever you get your LCM technology, it's very important that you have effective website capture in place before spending lots of money on advertising. Otherwise, you will be spending a lot of money for each and every lead you produce.

GETTING BUSINESS TO COME TO YOU

Now that we've discussed the secret of my success and the specific technology solutions responsible for the volume of business that my company does, let's talk about how to get the business to come to you. What can you do to get visitors to your website? Are there some strategies that are better than others? What about SEO (search engine optimization)? What about PPC (pay-per-click) advertising?

Well, assuming that you've developed a good trap and that you've got a relatively good site conversion rate (CR), the next thing you need is a strategy to send the most customers to the site for the least amount of money. How they get to the site is much less important than the fact that they get there, but there are some things you should do to maximize your traffic and minimize the cost of that traffic.

First, put your web address on everything you do. Your yard signs, your business cards, your postcards and direct mail, any print advertising, such as home magazines or newspapers, any fliers or brochures that you're using in your marketing: all of these should have your URL, or web address. All of these should promote your website.

If you do any media advertising, you should mention your website several times in your message. Radio works well in markets where you can afford it, as does TV and, in some markets, the Real Estate Channel. Make your website part of your brand!

If you use a call-capture hotline system or Auto Attendant on your phone system, be sure to mention your website in any voice mailbox or greeting. On-hold music can include references to your website and the benefits of shopping online for houses.

Finally, there's the whole area of paid traffic (or advertising). Paid-for traffic really comes in two varieties: direct and indirect.

Direct traffic is pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements or sponsored links in various search engines. The best three sources for PPC advertisements are a) Google, which includes - among other destinations - Earthlink, Ask Jeeves, and AOL; b) Overture (recently purchased by Yahoo), which includes Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, InfoSpace, and CNN; and c) FindWhat, which includes CNET's Search.com, Excite, Webcrawler, MetaCrawler, Dogpile, and Microsoft Internet Explorer Autosearch. The key to using direct traffic is that it's performance-based, meaning that you pay only for results. You're charged only for traffic that comes to your site. If your site is able to capture at an effective rate (in other words, if your CR is high enough), direct is likely the best avenue for buying traffic.

Indirect traffic includes the whole field of search-engine optimization, or SEO, which involves hiring a firm to "chase" the search engine bots. To boost your site's natural ranking in the search engines, most SEO companies would use artificial means, including key-word spamming, reciprocal linking, mirror-page generation, and many other "gimmick" methods of tricking the search engine bots into thinking that your site is more relevant than it truly is. Of course, there are advantages and disadvantages to this type of traffic generation. One advantage is that, after you get your site optimized, you generate lots of traffic, and there's no additional cost for each visitor. A drawback is that the search engine algorithms change constantly in their attempts to stay at the head of the SEO industry. Their livelihood depends on their being able to provide relevant searches for their users, so they must filter out the "trick" methods of ranking. Google is very aggressive in this area, and, as a result, it continues to gain market share in the Internet search space.

The point of all this frenetic activity is that, for an SEO campaign to be effective in generating traffic, it has to be constantly run and continually monitored, and there's a price for all that work, whether you do it or you hire it done. The bottom line is that, if you're going to see any real amount of web traffic to your website, you're going to spend money directly in pay-per-click advertising, or you're going to spend it indirectly in search-engine optimization.

Currently, we use PPC advertising through Google and Overture (as well as some minor SEO strategies that our own tech department handles), but we've spent thousands of dollars on SEO and used many different PPC sources in the past. Our method is to buy as much traffic as we can get from the cheapest sources. When we've generated all the business that we can handle, and then some, we scale back the ad buy.

Obviously, there are many worthwhile sources of advertising, but what you do, really, will come down to calculating your cost per lead (CPL). By using home-magazine ads in conjunction with a call-capture hotline and Internet marketing, we've generated more than two thousand new inbound leads per month. However (and most importantly), we've always used lead capture technology so that we could evaluate the cost per lead for each ad source. We treat advertising like an employee: it must be accountable for results, or we'll replace it. Very simple! And, by handling things this way, we're able to generate thousands of low-cost leads every month while keeping our marketing costs under budget. That's the secret of getting business to come to you.

PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER

Getting business to come to you really boils down to a few simple but very important points: first, you must have a clear-cut marketing plan that's designed specifically to generate the maximum number of leads for the least amount of money. Then you must implement the critical technologies needed to capture and manage those resulting opportunities. Finally, you must carefully choose and manage your sources of advertising so that you get the maximum "bang" for your hard-earned buck. If you do it well, you should be able to produce a seemingly endless supply of low-cost leads to grow your business and to maximize your number of closed transactions from those leads.

Remember, real estate is a business, and there has never been a better time to be in the real estate business than today. More transactions are closing now than at any time in our history! Are you getting your share of that business? I hope so. But if you're struggling, you don't have to. Take charge of your real estate destiny! There are many of us who will gladly help you. You can be experiencing astounding success now. Don't let anyone hold you back-not your broker, your fellow agents, your friends, or your family. Do it today. Nowhere is the opportunity greater and the investment smaller than in this phenomenal industry. What a great way to earn a living!

About the Author: Matt Jones, now President and CEO of FavoriteAgent.com, began as a brand new real estate agent in June of 2002. In his first year in real estate, he developed a technology that he uses to generate hundreds of inbound leads every month! Needless to say, this had a profound effect on his business. His original single agent practice has now become the second largest company in his market-all in only three short years. Special Offer.