“Those who want milk should not seat themselves on a stool in the middle of a field and hope the cow comes to them.” (Elbert Hubbard) as seen on the Blog Jack’s Winning Words. This week Jack is using quotes from the book “isms” by Dan Gilbert the founder of Quicken Loans.
This quote struck me an applicable in real estate for those who put up some sort of minimal Web site (usually paying somebody a couple hundred bucks for the design work) for their real estate business and then sit there waiting for people to find it. Ain’t gonna happen folks!
The Web is one place where “build it and they will come” just doesn’t apply. Sure, a few people may stumble onto your Web site; but, if you want to gain real advantage from a Web site, you have to work at it – like everything else.
I do a little bit of consulting locally with merchants and others who have Web sites up, but who aren’t getting the return they had hoped for from the site. I don’t focus just on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as so many consultants do, but rather take a look at how the Web site fits into an overall marketing program, or whether such a program even exists. Most of the time I find that no SEO work has been done for the site at all and that there is no marketing “context” within which the site fits.
It’s not unusual for me to find that these $400 quickie sites have no meta tags - no keywords at all, no title, nothing that the search engines can use to index them. Depending upon how the actual content is worded the site may end up generating nothing that someone using a search engine might put in as a search criteria.
The second things that I found most often is that these sites are out there by themselves with no other supporting marketing efforts – no print based materials refer to their URL, no blog entries point back to their URL and there are no other sites that show their URL as links. The owner might as well have taken the $400 and tossed it into the street. If he/she had written their contact information on the bills before tossing them, they might have a better chance of someone who picked up a bill calling them for a real estate deal.
More on this topic in future posts. For now, get your bucket ready, I think I see a cow coming.
Comments(21)