I get this question on a daily basis from Brokers and Realtors all around the country.  There are tons of ways to market your website.  Firstly, if you know anything about me or have read anything I write, you then know that I spend my entire marketing budget online.  I'm not a big believer in marketing in magazines, newspapers, billboards or basically any other marketing where I can't measure exactly what my rate of return is for my marketing.  Internet marketing has opened the door to manage your marketing like never before.  You will know how much money you spend, how many people click on your site, and how many people become leads and how many of those leads become sales.  Of course you can break this down even further, but I'm not going to get into that here. 

Banner Ads and Paying Per Impression

I see so many people that are buying Internet marketing and paying per impression.  Paying per Impression is calculated by how many times your site is shown on the Internet.  For instance, if you look to your right you probably see an ad.  I'm not saying they are paying by impression, but this would count as one impression.  All you have to do is go onto most Newspaper sites to see tons of realtors buying rotating ads that show up when people do search for Real Estate in their area.  These companies usually charge a certain dollar amount per 1000 impressions which could sound like a great deal.  For instance, if they charge $25 per thousand impressions that sounds great.  1000 people are going to see my ad for only $25.  Let's go back to the ads to the right.  How often have you clicked on those ads?  Have you even clicked those ads.  In this example, every time that ad shows up, counts toward those thousand impressions.  Let's say you have a 1% click through rate which is probably high.  If 1% of those viewed click on your site you are getting 10 people out of 1000 to click on your site.  Now consider that almost every Real Estate site uses their home page as their landing page, how many people are going to contact you out of that 10? One if you are lucky.  That's a hefty cost per contact considering that most Realtors will only convert 1 out of 50 or so leads to a sale at best.  Wow! 

So let's look at something that is more predictable and a lot less costly.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay per Click (PPC) Marketing is the extremely predictable and much less expensive than Banner Ads.  First let's explain what this is for those who don't know.  PPC is how Google, Yahoo and most other Search Engines sell their sponsored searches.  These sponsorships are seen when someone types in a specific search term (keyword).  For instance.  we use Melbourne Real Estate as a keyword along with 499 other keywords.  (This time of year you won't find me which I'll explain why shortly).  I know that if I buy spot on Google, when someone types in Melbourne Real Estate, I will be seen.  I only pay when that person clicks to my site.  Hence the name pay per click.  Depending upon how good you are at playing the PPC game, you can buy your clicks for as low as 10 cents.  However, for a keyword like Melbourne Real Estate, even if you are good at it, you will still spend about $1 or more per click.  If you use the example from above, you will now receive 20-25 people coming to your site for that same $25. That's about 2.5 times the traffic for the same cost.  The best part is you will know exactly how many people will come to your site when using PPC.  You control your marketing dollar.  You control your destiny.  The hardest part of a good PPC program is the amount of time you need to spend managing your keywords. 

To me there is a better way....

I have found that using a third party traffic supplier usually will produce better leads as well as  free up my time to do other things besides manage my keywords.  Currently I use Homegain's BuyerLink program.  This program generally costs me up to 50% less expensive than doing the keyword marketing myself but best of all I don't have to spend a moment of my time managing my keywords.  I basically save two hours per day.  You can check them out at http://www.homegain.com/buyerlink/index_html?ht=landing_bl&entryid=10708 to see if they have any cities available where you live.  I have never been a fan of the Internet companies out there that tell us Realtors that they have great tools.  It took a lot for me to be convinced by them to try their program.  Once I did try Homegain I noticed an immediate change in my conversion rates.  I went from about 10% to 16% and now sometimes around 20% the  same day I changed.  Crazy!  My costs also went down to about 79 cents per click.  This isn't supposed to be an advertisement for Homegain, but I wouldn't suggest if if it didn't work so well.  In 2007, as I'm sure I have told many of you, we had 193 Internet sales which I can lead all back to traffic I bought through Homegain.  Keep in mind, through this program we are currently showing over 100 different buyers every month.  However, this is only resulting in about a 20% close rate because of our market being so bad here in Florida.  Once our market comes back a little, our 100 people per month or more will turn into 50-75 sales per month.  I can't wait! 

To me, even if you receive a good response from a Banner Ad, it's just not predictable.  I know like to be able to know how many sales I'm going to get each month.  I know that if I product 1000 leads in my office I'm going to have around 30 sales. 

Ok, with all this said, before you venture out into any type of online marketing, you need more than a website.  You have to have an IDX system attached to your website and you need to understand landing pages as well as you must have a system to capture leads and convert them to sales.  We currently are spending about $5 per lead and my better Agents are turning one sale from 22-25 leads.  Basically it cost me about $100-$125 per sale.  Not to shabby!  If you want to see how a landing page with lead capture should look, go to one of my landing pages at:http://www.melbournehomesearch.com/index.cfm/Melbourne_FL_Real_Estate

Here you will see how not only do I capture their name, email and phone number, I also will know which town they are search for a home as well as price range.  This allows me to supply them with great info and a powerful marketing campaign to convert them to a customer and then to one of our happy customers! 

If you are not sure how to do this stuff, feel free to contact me.  As long as you don't work in Brevard County Florida, I will gladly give you some tips and check out your current website to let you know what you should change before spending a penny on Internet Marketing.