The Birth Of Real Estate Greenwood SC Dot Com
One of the best things I learned in my long, long life is that I can do anything I decide I want to do. It may take a lot of hard work, it may take a lot of learning, it may even take a lot of time and I may need some help doing it but I can do it. The trouble with most of us is that if we don't have the skills in our tool belt we have the mindset that if I don't know how to do it then I'm too old or too out of the loop to learn how. Wrong
Case in point I was 52 when I decided to give up a lifelong career as a Cosmetologist to pursue another career path Real Estate. I'm a bit of a slow learner I can be very dense at times even though my IQ says I'm intelligent. At the time I entered real estate websites for agents had not found much popularity with agents in my town but I be being a seeker saw uncharted territory for me to explore. Now I want you to know i didn't know ANYTHING about computers, I didn't even know what a url was but I knew the web was the way to go in my new business so I bought my first computer and labored and studied and stayed up pulled all nighters 
trying to force my brain to absorb all the information I could cram in my itty bitty brain. I am a hands own type of person and an individualist so not templates for me. I didn't have much money but I had a whole lot of time and little by little I learned. My big break through was when I found Yahoo Small Business Site Builder and being an artist I have a creative bent so designing a website hit the right note with me and Site Builder was good for a Dummy like me. I didn't think it could hurt to at least try it, so I did. I didn't use a template I started with blank pages and would go to other real estate websites and see what kind of looks and information they had on theirs and finally a light bulb came on and I was on a roll. After conquering the what was it going to be when it grew up, I began to add content and the more content I added the more content I thought of adding. The content was KING and www.RealEstateGreenwoodSC.com was indexed by Google despite my lack of knowledge of meta tags and meta descriptions etc. SEO was my next frontier to conquer so off I go again learning all the techie stuff and the more I learned the more I tweaked my website and the closer I moved to the top of the search results. I have held first page position now for about five years.
I don't use Site Builder anymore because I found a way to have a website free! Why should I pay for it if I don't need to. I saved all my pages and files on my computer and brought them over to Office Live Small Business, re registered my domain name with them and used their site builder and here's where I'll stay. They have great add on's, great tracking tools and it's all free! You don't need to know html if you can copy and paste code. I can do that! my IDX feed is an I-Frame, I got the code and voila it was there.
99% of my business comes from my website! I rarely take floor time, mail out post cards, work expired or FSBO's the business is delivered to my inbox. 
If you are stuck in a rut with a template website that is a carbon copy of thousands of other agents I encourage you to go check it out. Yes it is a learning curve and if you have more business than you know what to do with you won't need this but if you don't and you want to get to the top do what I did learn build and optimize. Don't worry if you don't know what all this means, with a bit of time and knowledge you will.
If I can be of help just email me or comment and I'll do my best to help. By the way I love Active Rain and the outside blog feature is another challenge to make it the best it can be. www.allgreenwoodscrealestate.com my second child was born in Jan 2010.
p.s. My website has not always looked like it does now. The earlier versions were a bit pitiful :( but not many people saw the earlier versions and whats so great is that you can redecorate it any time you want to!!
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