 |
Real Estate Marketing, Real Estate Web Design |
 |
|
|
| There are many reasons why a particular Website simply refuses to generate leads and most of those causes stem from a lack of understanding of the relationship between Web design and Web promotion. Is Your Website Not Working? Visit me online at www.sellrealestate.net/FreeWebPlan.asp for a Free Custom Web and Web Promotion Plan. If you already have a Website and want to know the best way to promote it, I?ll help you with that too. Definition of Terms A Website is a collection of Web pages located on a server and made available via the Internet. A Website might include information about the company, products for sale, general information and much more. Promotion includes a variety of strategies designed to inform or persuade or influence people. Types of promotion include search engine placement, direct mail, billboards, business cards and much more. Web Design and Web Promotion Are Not the Same Thing While many people believe that having a Website will somehow produce leads and business, they soon learn that this is not the case. Think of a Website as a brochure for a minute. You would never think that printing up a bunch of brochures would bring you business unless you were to take that extra step of getting those brochures into the hands of potential clients. The same is true of Websites. Taking it a Step Further Not only do you need some form of promotion if you expect your Website to be effective, it is also true that you need to know what kind of promotion you intend to use to promote the Website. The reason for this is that for maximum effectiveness, the design and the promotion should match. Imagine that you have a large double-sided brochure and you want to do billboard advertising. Do these two things match? Of course they do not. The same is true with Websites. For example, if you plan to use radio as a method of promotion, then you want to make sure your Website is set up to coordinate with your radio message. The same is true if you plan to use Search Engine Optimization or other forms of Search Engine Marketing. They must coordinate for maximum effectiveness. This is why template Websites often fail to produce good results even when promoted by paid advertising online. How to Merge Web Design and Web Promotion Let us say that your ultimate goals is to build a real estate Web design that will ultimately get top search engine placement in the free or organic section online. This is what SEO or search engine optimization is all about. The site has to be created to please both your customers and the search engines and there are specific ways to do that. On the other hand, maybe you plan to promote your Website using pay-per-click options. Now you no longer need to worry about pleasing search engines. Your Web design needs to focus on a niche that will allow you to pull in quality leads in order to reduce clicks from tire-kickers and Lookie-Lou visitors. Plan Ahead The best advice I can give to avoid falling into the trap of setting up a worthless Website and hoping for results is to plan ahead. As I write this I can almost see one of those old signs that visually demonstrated the poor results from failure to plan ahead. So, what do I mean by this? Do three things: determine your niche market, know how you intend to promote your Website, and build your Website around your customers and the method of promotion. |