Other Website Solutions For Real Estate Agents
As a real estate agent, there are many options on having your own websites. The most basic solution would be using the websites provided by your broker. These websites tend to have bad SEO on their pages, because everyone in the same real estate brand is using the same template, under the same domain name, and oftenly with duplicate styles and content, which search engines don't like. Another solution is to hire a website designer. This will cost a fortune. A typical lead-generating website will cost you well over $5,000 with good website structure, moderate content, and through out on page SEO optimazation.
This Is My Solution
Creat your own wordpress website, which gives you full control over your online business. It can be done with a small investment under $200, and it can be very rewarding. Most real estate top producers generate leads this way. You can do it too.
Step By Step Guide On How To Create A Real Estate Website
1. Buy A Domain Name And Hosting Service.
My personal recommendation would be using Blue Host (email me at: binbin@kw.com for a discount code). It has the fastest servers on the market for cloud hosting. Once you have purchased the domain name and hosting service, you will receive an Email containing your login information for C-Panel, the place where you can manage your website files, domain name, and databases.
2. Easiest Way To Install Wordpress
Please make sure you are on the home page of your C-Panel once you login to your hosting account.
Click On Install Wordpress To Start Your Installing Process
Click on Install
Choose the domain name you have purchased and click on "Check Domain"
Check All Three Boxes. Under Site Name or Title, please enter a SEO friendly title for your website. Admin Username and Password will be the admin access information to your website. This can be different from your hosting account, please make sure you remember them. After entering all information, please click "Install Now" to continue.
It may ask you to purchase a theme, just ignore it for now, and here is the progress bar for your wordpress installation.
This is a indication that your wordpress has been installed.
If you type your domain name in the browser, you may see your website in a built in wordpress theme. It means your wordpress site has been created, and you are ready to go to the next step.
3. Login To Your Wordpress Site And Get A Theme
To manage your website, type in your browser: "http://www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin/". Please replace "yourdomainname.com" with your own domain name.
Login your website with the username and password you created earlier.
After you login, you want to install a new wordpress theme instead of the default one. There are plenty of free themes.
To install a real estate relative theme, go to Appearance >> Themes >> Add New
There are plenty of themes to choose from. For This particular demostration. I used Modern Estate By slocumstudio. To get this theme, simply search "Real Estate" in the theme search field.
Click "Install" to install the theme.
Click on Activate after intalling.
You have now completed on building the structure of your real estate website. Based on the theme I chose , the website structure should look like this for my site:
This doesn't look very nice right? That's because You have not added any content for your website. There are still alot of work needed to be done before it can show up professionally. Here are general instructions on how you can add content to your website:
1. Click on Pages, you can add pages to your website.
2. Click on Posts, you can add posts to your webstie.
By default your most recent posts will show on your home page. Some people would prefer to have a static designed page to show on home page. To do that, you want to go to Settings >> Reading >> Front Page displays >> change to a static page and select the page your want to use as the home page.
Conclusion
This step by step guide only shows you how to set up your website structure and running. To have a great lead generating website, you must create unique and high quality content that will provide value to prospective visitors. I highly suggest you to play around with wordpress admin panel before putting content on it. There are plenty of other tutorials online for the admin panel and features in it. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me. I will respond to your request when I have free time.
About Me
I have been a self employed real estate agent in Sugar Land TX for two years now. Before that, I worked as an independent website designer, I didn't go to schools to learn. I learned about websites myself and have created hundreds of professional websites before. My current Realtor website is: http://www.sugarlandtxrealty.com/. If you like my content and think it provides good value to you, please feel free to share them.
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