Selling more homes to more people is simply a numbers game. You need to market yourself as a dominate figure in your local market, letting everyone know that it will be you that will successfully complete the transaction on their home. The more exposure you get, the more people know about you. The more people who know about you, the more leads you’ll generate. The more leads you generate, the more homes you’ll sell. The more homes you sell, the more commissions you’ll see. Again, this whole process is a numbers game. But as easy as this may seem, to become a dominate figure in your local real estate market you need to start with a big marketing budget. We all don’t have this readily available to us, and that is the number one reason why offline marketing is starting to become phased out. No, we are not concluding that offline marketing is not necessary, but we are saying that there is a better way to get your name out to the public – online marketing!

Many of today’s real estate transactions first started with your clients searching the internet for that perfect home. So if that is where they are starting, that is where you need to start as well. It takes much less time, effort and money on the agents part to dominate their local real estate market online than if you were to do it offline. Results can be seen almost instantaneously, with tracking mechanisms put in place so you know which online marketing efforts are performing, and which ones you need to spend more time on.
Included below is a list of features that your website should have so you can dominate your local market online.
Note: List includes many Web 2.0 features that help you rank better in the search engines.

• IDENTIFY KEYWORDS / KEYPHRASES THAT YOUR CLIENTS LOOK FOR!!!
• Professional Clean Design with Easy Navigation
• Search Engine Friendly WebPages
• Real Estate Listings with optional MLS inclusion
• Unlimited Photo & Video Gallery
• Content Management System
• Contact Agent WebPage (with SPAM Safe Email)
• Proper WebPage Titles for Optimal Search Engine Inclusion
• Proper WebPage / WebSite Coding with W3C compliance and Search Engine Friendly Tags
• Social Bookmarketing ability
• Social Networking ability
• RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed
• XML / HTML sitemap

This list is just some of the basic features that a standard Realtor website should have. While most of you are looking at this list with complete confusion, your website design company should have a complete understand of what each feature is and how it can be implemented and used to benefit you. Unfortunately, most Realtor websites do not even include half of these features which puts them far behind their competition. This is especially prevalent with websites that are designed from the standard realty company template of which whom they work for. It would be like competing in the Nascar races with your go-kart.

Bottom line: The only way to dominate you local real estate market is to implement many of the new Web 2.0 features. This can easily be done with a professional real estate website design company that is familiar with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Internet Marketing.  We don’t advise that you, as an agent, spend your advertising dollars on the “glitz and glamor” of the website, but invest that money towards proper web marketing strategies. Make your website look good, but don’t focus on it.

If you would like to know any more information about dominating you local real estate marketing, please contact us.