September 10th, 2008
Successful Agent Websites
Mike Rahmn and I attended an office meeting regarding office and agent websites last Monday. There were many good questions asked which is the basis for this post; Field Best Practice: Successful Agent Websites.
There seems to be a lot of not misinformation, but misconceptions of what a website is supposed to do. What the consumer is ultimately looking for with an agent website is validation that you are a professional. If you don’t have a website, the gen X consumer immediately discounts you as a professional, content or not. How people get to that website a direct function of cost; both hard dollar costs and opportunity costs. The two schools of web design are static content that provides informational needs that remain unchanged and dynamic content that is ever evolving. If you are reading this post, you are seeing a website that’s sole existence is based on dynamic content, the more Justin and I write, the more likely Agent Field Guide is going to be found on search engines like Google. Websites like Agent Field Guide are commonly referred to as a “Blog.” A good example of a static website would be the King County Website (http://www.kingcounty.gov/) where the traffic is derived by large amounts of “static” content that serves a specific purpose but remains relatively unchanged for the life of each page.
The most common misconception is that spending lots of money on a website will make you the king of web real estate. The only way to immediately compete with those websites that show up whenever you type real estate into Google is by spending lots of money. Now it’s up to the consumer to find something meaningful on your stale website. The more effective way to compete, both monetarily and philosophically, is to create a webpage with great content, that is dynamic and highly useful. You may not drive traffic to your website like you are ReMax, but you will likely find people that are genuinely interested in what you have to say. What you ultimately end up doing is “Blogging” about your activities, market and other things that relate to your business and clients.
Taking all that into account, the most important fact to remember is that you can spend $10 or $10,000 on a website. What you ultimately get out of that cost is totally up to you, but the important thing is that you have a website. The one caveat to the Blog based website is that you have to be diligent on using it, otherwise you will end up with your standard “stale” website.
Share Your Thoughts