Build it and they will come?

In previous articles, I mentioned the importance of making your website your hardest working employee. It is important to get good recurring return on your real estate website. So in this article, I will list and describe 9 ways to get more people to your website, thus more leads and eventual sales.

1) Pay per click advertising Have you noticed those sponsored links on websites or in your Gmail account if you have one. It is usually related to the website you are browsing or the topic of the email you are reading. You can have your company featured in those sponsored listings too. The most popular Pay-per-click program is Google Adwords. These programs are fully customizable for cost and for geographic area, keywords, etc. For instance, you can stipulate how much you want to spend per day or per month or per click. You can also specify which geographic area to display your ads. And you can drill down further to specify they keywords relevant to your Ad and for which you want your Ad to be displayed.

2) Website Optimization You can use keywords in your website content that are most popular for your market. In this case, some of those keywords are: “Jamaica Real Estate”, “Real Estate Jamaica”, “Jamaican Properties” and more. But don’t take my word for it. You can do a quick research for this using a free tool called, Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool. This tool tells you what people are searching for and what keywords or keyword combinations they use most.

3) Submit articles to Article Directories An underutilized tool by the Jamaican Real Estate Industry players. I heard someone in an online Teleseminar say recently that ‘underutilized’ translated means ‘opportunity’ You can take a look at my submissions to EzineArticles.com, the most popular article directory here, Jamaica Real Estate Guide Articles This gives you an opportunity to link back to your website, which helps your site to get found quicker by the search engines, this more web traffic.

4) Submit press releases Send out press releases when you have added a new Real Estate Sales Consultant to your staff, new person on the Board of Directors, changed locations, redesigned your website, received an award, made a significant donation to charity and more. One of the most popular online press release services is PRWeb. But there are also Jamaican and Caribbean specific online press release services. Two of them are Jamaica Press Release and Caribbean Press Releases

5) Exchange website links One of the best ways to increase your website’s popularity is to exchange links with similar websites in your industry. Exchanging website links means to place a web link for another company on your website in exchange for a placement of your company’s web link on their website. Hope I did not lose you. For instance, www.JaRealEstateGuide.com has a Broker Directory page with links to Jamaica Real Estate brokers. Some of those brokers have kindly and smartly reciprocated with a link to the Jamaica Real Estate Guide. Some of those brokers are La Maison Property Services, Declan Real Estate and Howard Johnson Realty. This does two things for companies that actively engage in link exchange: 1) It adds value to the web visitor who sees your links page with helpful resource links to other companies in the industry; 2) It increases the ‘credibility’ of both websites, as Google and other search engines, rank websites high based on the number of links pointing to it. For instructions on linking to our website, click here

6) Offer a Newsletter When you offer a newsletter to your website visitors, it encourages them to come back to your website and refer others as well if your content is good.