That’s great, you have the tools necessary to start generating some leads. But the next step is to start driving some web traffic, and also, to get those web visitors to stay on your site longer as they consume, read and engage with your content.

The more time they spend consuming your content, the more time they’ll have to consider your service offering — hiring you as their real estate agent. 

Here are some little known ways to get site visitors to stay longer…

1. First and foremost, eliminate all the clutter. 

Be a minimalist. Here’s what I mean…

If you have too many tabs on your header navigation, too many widgets on your sidebar, and you have call to actions spewed all over the place, you’re just adding clutter to your site. And frankly, that’s making it more difficult for consumers to find what they’re looking for.

Simpler is better. So think about the main, primary pages that you want to drive traffic to… Only link to those in your navigation. Get rid of the unnecessary stuff on that sidebar. And limit yourself to one call to action per page. In fact, think of each page as a landing page, what do you want visitors to do while they’re there? Everything else, doesn’t matter.

2. Build content rich community landing pages.

A great, content rich community landing page should consist of the following:

• A snapshot of the neighborhood. Give me a short history of the neighborhood and an over-view of the makeup of the neighborhood. Things to do, places to visit, what are the best schools in the area, etc.
• Show me the latest listings. What’s for sale in the neighborhood? Using tools like our WordPress IDX plugin, this should be easy. You can display the latest listings simply by using the shortcode.
• Show me the market statistics. What’s the total inventory of homes for sale in that particular area? What’s the average days on market? What’s the average price? Tools like Altos Research makes it easy to display local market statistics.

Here’s a great example of a community landing page from real estate agent Heather Elias: http://www.locomusings.com/areas/sterling.

At a glance, you have a quick description of the community with additional photos listed below. The tabbed structure lets you access additional relevant data easily. And if you want to search other neighborhood ares, no problem, just use the drop-down form on the upper right side of the page.

Lastly, there’s a contact form embedded on every community page so that if a consumer has a question, they can quickly and easily ask it. Perfect!

The whole purpose behind building content rich community landing pages that offer everything a consumer could possibly want to learn about he community, is to keep them on your site longer as they read and consumer your content. The more time they spend on your site, the more time they have to consider your service offering — hiring you as their real estate agent. 

3. Organize your content categories properly.

WordPress makes it easy to add new content regularly. And of course the more content you create, the better. But what happens as your site matures and you’ve added dozens if not hundreds of posts? Well, it becomes a little more difficult to navigate of course…

You want site visitors to be able to access relevant content easily. Luckily, WordPress makes it really simple for you to organize all of that content through the use of categories.

Here are some basic (non-official) rules to keep in mind:

• One category per post. In other words, every time you write a blog post, you should add it to one category and one category only. Otherwise, it’s just too repetitive to have the same content in every category.
• Try to keep your categories to a minimum (say 7-10). Here’s what you do, make a list of everything you could potentially talk about on your site. Here’s what your categories might look like: Financing Tips, Market Reports, For Buyers, For Sellers, Communities, et cetera. Try to develop 7-10 general categories where your content might fall under. This will help you better organize your content over the long-term.
• Make sure you update your categories regularly. As a rule of thumb, once you’ve gone through and created your categories, you want to make sure you have somewhere between 2-4 posts per category. This way, when a site visitor clicks on a category, they have some content to dig through. This also means that you should update your categories with new content regularly so that you’re content doesn’t look stale.

The better you keep your content organized. The easier it’s going to be for site visitors to discover and engage with your content over the long-term.

Recommended reading: How To Use Categories Effectively On Your Real Estate Blog.

4. Use captivating images to complement your blog posts.

As a rule of thumb, include an image for every blog post that you write. Do this for a couple of reasons:

• It helps break up the text. It’s a little less daunting to read a long-winded blog post when you have some good imagery to go with it. 
• It helps suck the reader in. Think of it this way, say you have a sheet of paper. You have a headline written on one side of the paper, and the post written on the other. Your first goal, is to interest people enough with the headline to get them to turn over that sheet of paper. But then, once they turn over that sheet of paper, your goal is to capture their attention long enough to keep reading. A strong image does a wonderful job of capturing one’s attention.

The great thing is we’re talking real estate here. Really, you should be able to take a lot of your photos. Don’t have a camera? Don’t worry, most smart phones come equip with a camera that could render a high enough resolution photo for a blog post.

So the next time you’re writing a market report about a community, things to do around town, or even a restaurant review, snap a photo and include it in that post!

5. Create themes for your content.

Creating themes for your content helps establish a little bit of consistency. Not just for you, but for your readers. This way, they know what to expect.

For example, Ines Hegedus-Garcia has her Miamism Friday’s series. Ever Friday, she takes a photo that helps paint a picture of the lifestyle that is Miami and she tells the story behind it. It’s really a fun series and here’s the great thing about it…she gets her community of readers involved by inviting them to contribute the photo content!

How might you do something similar to get your readers involved? But also, what other types of posts can you write about to add some consistency to your content? Maybe each week, you hi-light a new neighborhood, or you write a market report on that neighborhood? Maybe, once a week, you write about activities and events coming up for the weekend?

The goal is to establish some consistency so readers know what to expect next. And so that they continue to come back.

Getting Site Visitors To Stay Longer

A lot of it has to do with how you structure and organize your content. The easier your website is to navigate, the better. You want it to be simple for site visitors to navigate and discover new content. But you also want to have enough content there for them to consumer. Because if they don’t find what they’re looking for on your website, they’re going to find it somewhere else.

Hopefully, this post gives you some ideas of the things you need to look over. How can you better structure your website to make visitors stay longer? 

You want site visitors to be able to easily navigate your website, find what they’re looking for (IDX listings), and contact you should they have any questions about buying or selling a home.

Otherwise, if your site is difficult to navigate, you make it hard for consumers to access current listings, and you make it difficult to get a hold of you to answer a simple question, well, you’re losing business to your competition.

To avoid that, here’s 5 essential elements of a lead converting real estate website that you should take into consideration…

1. You need a great, professional looking design. 

Consumers are making a decision as to whether they like you or not…whether they trust you or not, within a few seconds of landing on your website.

Does this site look trustworthy? Is the information reliable and up to date? Can I easily contact this agent if I have a quick question?

Those are all questions racing through the consumers mind. They’ll either land on your website and stick around long enough to consider what you have to offer, or they’ll leave and find what their looking for elsewhere.

The decision they make all boils down to whether you have a professional looking web design to begin with. If you have the technical skill-sets to do it yourself, more power to you. If you don’t, sometimes it’s best to hire someone to do it for you.

A real estate agent building their own website is like a homeowner doing a FSBO. The job can get done, but the end result isn’t nearly the same.

A professional web designer brings the same knowledge and experience to a website project that a real estate agent brings to a home sale.

Quality website planning, designing and coding is a service that will pay for itself through more Internet leads. – Chad Johnson, President & COO of Agent Evolution

2. You need a solid IDX system to capture leads. 

One of the primary reasons consumers are coming to your real estate website is to search for homes, so you need to make it easy for them to do so.

In this example, I love that you can easily access the site’s content, but also, search for homes using the prominently displayed “quick search” at the top of the page. That takes you to the IDX map search page where consumers are prompted to register in order to receive new listings by email.

Here are Diverse Solutions, there’s two ways you can quickly and easily integrate IDX listings onto your website:

dsIDXpress (our WordPress plugin) – this is a WordPress plugin that will take every single listing as it hits the MLS, and create an indexable page on your domain for that listing. You can download a test version of this plugin for free here.

dsSearchAgent (our full-fledged mapping IDX w/mobile) – this is our full-fledged map-based property search full with built-in lead capture tools, a Google Maps interface, and the advanced settings of a custom IDX website full with a mobile version of the product. You can test-drive a free version of this product here.

3. You should display client testimonials at every opportunity.

While not mandatory, it’s a good idea to display client testimonials on your website at every opportunity. Think about it, consumers are going online to gather information about their buying/selling process. As they begin and continue to search, the content on your website is helping shape the opinion that they have of you — do you know what you’re talking about, are you reliable, etc.

Testimonials are the ultimate influencing factor. Because it doesn’t matter what you say about how good you are as a real estate agent. What matters more is what other people say about you as a real estate agent. By showcasing client testimonials, you’re showing people that you know what you’re talking about and you’re helping influence their decision to want to work with you.

Here’s a great testimonials page from Thompson’s Realty: http://www.reviewouragents.com/existing-reviews.

4. You should have a solid About page.

Let’s say a random site visitor lands on one of your community posts/pages after doing a Google search for best schools in the area, or best places to live in the area. They land on your site, so they stick around and keep reading through some of your content. Here’s what happens next…

Before they decide to contact you, they want to read and learn more about you. So what do they do? They navigate to your About page of course. They want to get to know you before moving forward.

Here’s a great example of a solid About page: http://coloradospringsrealestateconnection.com/about.

They do a great job of hi-lighting their real estate stats and achievements for the previous year. Then, they explain how and why they embrace technology for the benefit of the home buyer and seller. And finally, they dig in to give you a bit of background as to who’s behind the team.

Take a look at it, it really is a thorough About page.

Then ask yourself, how can you improve your own?

5. Prominently displayed contact information.

Simply put, your contact information should be prominently displayed at all times — whether a site visitor is reading a blog post, they’re on your home page, or they’re on a listing details page.

You need to make it easy for a consumer to contact you about a property listing at all times.

Here’s a great example from real estate agent Bill McCue:

First, he has a prominently displayed contact form on the sidebar of his site to allow consumers to quickly and easily contact him should they have a question on a property listing. Then, he has an image just below that to allow the consumer to put a face to his name but also, additional contact details should they wish to call him about the property instead.

Take a look at your own website. Click around through some of your posts and pages. Then ask yourself, how easy are you making it for consumers to get in touch?

Of course, there are several elements that you need to take into consideration when designing a professional looking, lead generating real estate website. These are just a few critical elements to take into consideration. If you take the time to include them, you’ll likely experience better conversion.

Here’s why…

Great Design + Fast Turnaround:

You can get a great looking site designed within a fairly fast turn-around time, but you can also expect to pay a pretty good premium for it. No one’s going to drop all of their existing projects, to design a high level website for you at a discount. Period.

Fast Turn-around + Cheap: 

You can get a simple site designed fairly quickly and at a nice discount, but don’t expect it to be fully customized. And remember, you get what you pay for.

Great Design + Cheap:

Yes, it’s possible to find a good designer who can knock out a nice looking site design for you, and at an affordable price. But don’t expect for it to get done quickly. They probably have other higher paying design clients who’s project takes priority over yours.

You can’t have all three…

Ultimately, you can’t have all three. I don’t know of any designer that will deliver their best work, at a fast turn-around time, and at a discount.

It just doesn’t happen.

(If I’m wrong, lucky you).

You have to compromise on at least one.

Pretty fair assessment, don’t you think?

Clear Your Cache

Internet browsers will often create a “cache” of websites so that it can load them more quickly on subsequent visits. However, this creates an issue when changes are made to a website since these changes can appear not to have taken effect. If you suspect that this has happened to you, you can clear your cache using the following steps.

• Internet Explorer 6 – Go to the “Tools” menu at the top of the window and then click “Internet Options.” This will bring up a new window, and in the middle of the window will be an option called “Delete Files.” When you click this button, it will bring up another new window, at which point you should click on the “Ok” button. Once it is done processing, close all Internet browser windows. Reopen one, and then bring up your website. While looking at the website, hold down the control button on your keyboard and click on the refresh button on your browser.
• Internet Explorer 7 – Go to the “Tools” menu at the top of the window, click “Clear Browsing History,” and then click “Delete Temporary Internet Files.” Once it is done processing, close all Internet browser windows. Reopen one, and then bring up your website. While looking at the website, hold down the control button on your keyboard and click on the refresh button on your browser.
• Mozilla Firefox – Go to the “Tools” menu at the top of the window and then click “Clear Private Data.” Make sure only the “Cache” checkbox is checked, and then click ok. Once it is done processing, close all Internet browser windows. Reopen one, and then bring up your website. While looking at the website, hold down the control button on your keyboard and click on the refresh button on your browser.

Publishing

Another thing that often causes confusion when editing the website is publishing. Many times people will preview a change, see it there, and then just go straight to the “View My Site” option without clicking the “Publish” button. Doing this will lead to the assumption that the change has not taken effect. When my customers call or email me with this problem, the first thing that I often try is republishing the area in which the change was made; this usually solves the problem. If you are experiencing difficulty in having changes take effect, please try republishing the areas that are connected to the change that you have made directly instead of the main “Publish” area.

One specific example of where this often happens is in the Featured Properties section. You may wonder why you can delete a property from the page but still see the property appear in the featured properties slideshow. If you’d like to fix this problem, you can edit another one of your featured properties without making any real changes, go to the save step, and then publish the property. Afterwards, go into “Template Options” section of your AgentCast admin, go to the “Done” step, and click publish. This will reset the slideshow, and your deleted property will be properly removed.

Featured Properties Slideshows

Above, I have given one tip into the world of the featured properties slideshow, but I do have some more.

First, the featured properties slideshow takes the first image of each of the featured properties added to the “Featured Property” section of AgentCast. If you’d like to change which picture is first, you easily reorder the properties using the “Reorder Properties” option in that section.

Next, take a look at two of our templates that have a built in featured properties slideshow.

In the first one, the featured properties slideshow cannot be anything other than just that, a featured properties slideshow. In the second, because there isn’t any wording associated with any of the photographs, and because they are not links to real properties, it can be “cheated” in a way to be a slideshow of any images desired. If you would like to do this for your own site, you can add a number of featured properties, add a single image to each, and make sure the “Display in Featured Properties Slideshow” checkbox is checked and the “Display in Featured Properties Listing” is unchecked for each. Also, on the actual properties, it is necessary to reverse the above options to make sure the “fake properties” are not displayed with the real ones, and vice-versa. These options can also be used for choosing not to display properties that are not as beautiful as desired for the featured properties slideshow.

Slideshow Builder

Adding a slideshow to your content pages is a great way to spruce up a page and make it more appealing to a reader. To add a slideshow to a page, the first thing that needs to be done is to upload the desired images into file manager; you can view step-by-step instructions on how to do this in the support center in your AgentCast admin. The next step is to create the slideshow in the slideshow builder; you can also view step-by-step instructions for this in the support center in your AgentCast admin. Finally, it is necessary to add the slideshow to the page of content. In order to do this, edit the page in the “Content Manager” section, place the cursor where the slideshow should go, and click on the “Snippets” dropdown to choose the desired slideshow. Once the page is saved and published, it will display the slideshow and the page will have pizzazz.

File Manager Folders

Using folders in the “File Manager” section is essential to keeping an organized file library. Many times I encounter file libraries that have all of the images in only one folder, often with duplicates, making it very difficult to find the desired image. Create a file folder for any new property and any new area that you are going to be using images for. This will really help when trying to locate the proper image for a featured property or content page.

Editing Photo Sizes

Often times I have had to change the sizes of photos for clients complaining that their photos are not showing up correctly. The featured properties slideshows do not automatically resize photos, and most photos straight from a camera are very large. I would recommend modifying the size of your images before you upload them into file manager. If this is not something that you know how to do, or you do not believe that you have the proper programs on your computer, you can upload the full size photos and then modify them in file manager.

To do this, you can click on the file name while in file manager. Doing so will bring up information about the image near the bottom of the window. To the right of the image’s information, there will be an icon of a piece of paper with a pencil on it. This icon is an edit button that will take you to a new window where you can edit the image. The window will have many editing options, including the ability to change the size of the image. The editor is only going to give you the option to change the width in order to keep the image proportions correct instead of stretching or squashing the image.

Each of our templates has a different slideshow size. If you have any questions about the sizes, please contact your Account Executive and they will be happy to help you with this.

Pasting Text Into Content Manager

Pasting text into content manager is a risky ordeal. Programs like Microsoft Word do not have the same programming as our content manager and will often cause problems when text is pasted directly from one program to the other. However, I would always recommend writing your content in a program directly onto your computer instead of over the Internet in our content manager since, if anything happens to your connection, you could loose your content. If you use a word processing program like Word on your computer, I would recommend pasting your content into Notepad first and then copying and pasting that text into the content manager. The reason I suggest this is because Notepad will remove any formatting that your content was given so that it will not negatively affect your content manager. Doing this will ultimately avoid unnecessary complications when editing the page later on.

Shift + Enter

When formatting your content in content manager, just hitting Enter will cause what looks like a double space. This is because it creates a paragraph tag in the HTML of the page. In order to just get a single line break, you will need to hold down the shift key on your keyboard and hit the enter key at the same time.

Background Color

In the “Site Options” section, there is a step called “Colors.” There are two color boxes here, one for “Links” and one for “Background.” The background color override is a neat option that allows another color to be added to the website. You can see some examples below.

Normally, the background of the content would be the same color as the main background. The trick for the first example is that the home page content needs to be put into a table with a background color set to the other content’s background colors. To do this, right click on the table in content manager and choose “Table Options.” Then, on the advanced tab, change the background color; I recommend copying and pasting the hex number from the first color box in the Template Options since it will give you the exact color you are looking for. Since the second example has a background that is always going to be gray and pinstriped the change is a bit trickier. Please contact your Account Executive for more information on how to do that.

Support Center

For my last trick, I bring you the Support Center. It is located in your AgentCast admin area and holds many secrets to the AgentCast product. Please use this valuable addition to our AgentCast office as it will help you in making changes to your website. If there are any questions that you have that the Support Center doesn’t answer, you can always contact your Account Executive and they will be happy to assist.

I hope that my knowledge of our AgentCast office has assisted in your quest of knowledge to create the best real estate website in the business. Thanks for the audience!

One of the first mistakes people make with their website is not updating it. They initially spend a lot of time in the beginning process of building the site, but over time, it becomes outdated. Maintaining a website is just as important as having a website. A variety of things can be done so this doesn’t happen to your own website.

Update your pictures

Users that have visited your website are not going to want to see the same thing six months down the road. Visitors will notice this, assume your information is also not up to date, and leave. In addition to updating your content, keeping your site visually stimulating will also increase the amount of time visitors spend on your site.

Review your website

I highly recommend this. I would suggest clicking through your website at least every two weeks and make sure everything is working as it should. Look for things such as links to pages that have been taken down or broken pictures, especially with links and images that reference third-party sites. Too many of these occurrences will lead people to believe you don’t visit your website that much and it will send them going somewhere else to find the information they are looking for.

Research the Competition

One way to keep your website up to date is to visit sites that relate to yours. Find out what things your competitors may be doing that could possibly work for you. For example a site may contain a feature on it that would keep visitors returning. Including these features to your site is a must to keep it competitive.

The Internet is growing everyday. More and more people are setting up websites. The sites that stay updated and current are the ones that succeed.