If you have a website and it isn't in Wordpress currently, then you might want to think about importing your site into Wordpress. It's the best move I've ever made.
What's so great about Wordpress?
Pretty much everything. But I'll give you the three most important bullet points:
1. It's free. If you are paying for a back-end site management system (like AlaMode, for example), you can get Wordpress for zero dollars and have the same type of back-end management you have now.
You can log-in to your Wordpress site and add or delete pages, upload photos, add listings, write blog posts... Whatever you want. The sky is the limit.
Did I mention it's free?
2. There are a million plug-ins that are useful to Realtors and mortgage brokers, and about 99% of them are free as well.
Plug-ins can be downloaded from your Wordpress dashboard. Every day, new plug-ins are added. So, lets say, for example, you wanted to add MLS listings to your site.
You would log-in to your Wordpress real estate or mortgage site, just like you do for ActiveRain.
You would click on the "Add New Plug-Ins" button, from your homepage "dashboard".
Then, you would search for "MLS" or "IDX."
After you find the feature that you want to add to your site, you just click "install" and now you have MLS access on your site. (You do have to pay for MLS access though. The plug-in is free, but you still need to pay for the IDX.)
I downloaded a mortgage calcultor plug-in and added it to my site. A friend of mine specializes in Arizona Reverse Mortages and she added a reverse mortgage calculator to her site.
Here is a Real Estate Wordpress site using one of the many MLS plug-ins. (I don't think it's a very pretty design, so don't judge Wordpress on this particular site.)
Administrating your website using Wordpress is no more difficult than administering your Active Rain site / blog.
3. Wordpress is search engine friendly. Google loves Wordpress.
There is a saying that's been around which states that, "BLOG = better listings on Google."
Wordpress allows you to keep your content fresh.
If your site has been up for years and some of your links are broken, Wordpress will crawl your blog once a day and find your broken links, so that you can fix them.
Wordpress will tell you how people found your page.
When you log into Wordpress, you will see a dashboard that will tell you exactly how many people have visited your page and exactly what search phrases they used to get there.
Just this morning, I had a visit from somebody who typed the phrase "Home Loans In AZ".
So, because Wordpress told me how they got there, I went over to Google and typed that phrase- "Home Loans in AZ".
Guess what? I'm number one for "Home Loans in AZ". I had no idea. I never bothered to check for that phrase.
The only reason I knew that is because I can see every single hit and exactly where they came from and what they typed to get there. For example, yesterday I had two visitors that came directly from ActiveRain. So that's nice to know, right?
I could write a book on why Wordpress is so great. But I'll stop now. If there is some interest, I will definitely post more in the future.
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