Monday, March 23, 2009
Website Fun
I've been working on our company website for about a week now. Things are going better than I anticipated. It won't look like a million bucks, but I think it will be functional enough, and reflect some of the more innovative ideas I've had about what I want our website to be. One of the cooler aspects of it, is that since successful real estate agents and companies successfully network themselves within their sphere of influence, I felt that we needed to take full advantage of the different social networking websites out there if we're going to make a dent in the existing market. The problem with conventional advertising, such as newspapers or real estate magazines, is that its very expensive (you could easily spend thousands of dollars a year advertising in printed publications) and its very slow. By the time your ad gets printed and into the hands of the consumer, the information is outdated... prices can change, properties can sell, and if they print the ad with a mistake, you're just out of luck for another month! Another issue is that you have very little control over what gets printed. The last time I had an ad printed, I gave them all the pictures and text to my rep, and I assumed that everything was going to look professionally and neatly done. What actually got printed? All the colors were off, the pictures were blurry, there were typos that I didn't put in my description, and when I asked them to put in some sort of decorative horizontal line, they put in this really ugly green and white "barber shop striped" pole looking thing that made it look rediculous. On top of all of that money and time spent, I didn't get ANY phone calls from the ad whatsoever. Before that I advertised an open house in Huntsville in the local newspaper there, and ended up spending the day alone in the house.
So, what's a Realtor to do? You've got to advertise, but if its really expensive and in the end it doesn't work, then what's the point? Fortunately for me, I'm young, and have basically grown up in the internet age. All of those in my "sphere of influence" are wired in with laptops, Blackberries, and Facebook. Rather than joining the garden club or mailing postcards, I can post an update on my profile or Twitter page, and the rest of my world sees it. In order to take advantage of all this technology (which also just happens to be free), I've incorporated THIS into our company's website:
This little section on our site which took me an hour or two to put there will turn our website into a real estate social networking hub. Look around at other real estate companies' websites... you won't see anything like this. Sure, you'll see agents on Facebook or MySpace, but this is just one more thing that we feel makes us one step closer toward the Blue Ocean I spoke of in my previous post. Let me know what you think.
Joshua B. Pettus
President and Broker
Home Grown Real Estate
http://www.homegrownrealestate.net
http://homegrownrealestate.blogspot.com
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