Real estate websites should be so much more than MLS information and a contact form. An effective real estate website should not only sell the services of the office or agent, it should sell their personality and their expertise in their market area.
To illustrate this, let’s imagine a person is looking to buy a property in your market area but does not have a particular affinity to any office. This person visits two different websites in their search process. Each of these websites is built on the same web platform, using the same basic functionality and layout. If the structure and functionality are all identical, the element that will distinguish one site from another is the portrayal of the agent’s personality, experience and knowledge of the real estate market. By giving people more information, you give them more opportunities to connect with you on a personal level.
I have never met a Realtor who got into the business because he or she lacked personality or an attachment to his or her service area. Connection and personality are what make a person a good Realtor to begin with. In today’s Internet-dominated real estate market, the motivated Realtor faces a new challenge: how to effectively convey personality and market area vision online.
Here at Union Street Media, we get to watch projects go from idea to reality on a regular basis. These are some of the newest sites that we’ve launched online as well as some of the older sites we’ve recently redesigned.
Pure Vermont Building Company needed a website that would showcase the beautiful craftsmanship that goes into each one of their home-building projects. Their overall goal was to bring in more business, but they were also on a quick timeline and were looking for a site that would be easily update-able for their employees and would match their offline marketing materials.
A longtime Union Street Media client, Winhall Real Estate in Stratton, VT recently wanted to bring in more and better leads to their site, as well as update their website’s look and feel. To improve their lead generation, they started writing on their new blog and engaged in USM’s Internet Marketing program, RRR. We also widened their site and gave it a fresh design.
The attorneys at Wick and Maddocks, a Burlington and Essex, Vermont law firm specializing in real estate, came to Union Street Media looking for a website that would be easy for them to use and give their clients and potential clients a clear idea of their array of services and years of expertise.
If you have employed the services of a an Internet Marketing firm, chances are they have advised you to start a Facebook business page, Twitter account and a LinkedIn profile. You might have a blog, too, videos, and a life to lead! That’s a lot to keep up with while juggling your day-to-day business operations if you don’t have the benefit of someone helping you manage all these accounts.
Here’s a few tips on how you can consolidate some of these platforms and seamlessly integrate them into your day-to-day operations.
Use what’s happening around you to write blog posts. They can write themselves: a phone call with a client, an internal memo, a conference you attended, your email outbox, etc. Blog consistently and have these posts automatically feed to your Big 3 social media accounts.
I recommend Twitterfeed for getting content out to Facebook and Twitter.
Go for Bronze!
Yahoo, Bing, AOL, MSN, ASK?
None of the above. It’s YouTube.
As mentioned in my previous post, this past week was CollegeXTRA.com, Inc.’s 10th birthday. CollegeXTRA.com, Inc. is the corporate name of Union Street Media. As a celebration of this milestone, I’d like to share with you a few of the things I’ve learned over the past ten years.
Running a business of twenty people requires a lot of cash and none of it comes easily. Each month our sales team is responsible for generating well over a hundred thousand dollars. To earn that money, our web development team needs to produce the work, which requires our product development team to create a scalable architecture for the sites. Our internet marketing team needs get the sites up in the search engines so that our clients get the traffic to generate a return on their invest. Our support team needs to keep the sites live, handle incoming phone calls and help clients with updates. Our office manager extrodinaire needs to invoice for all of this work and then made sure we actually get paid for it. This is fun, challenging and inspiring, but not easy.
However, there are free lunches. I know because I used to buy them for people and now, on occasion, people buy them for me. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs requires that we eat. Every day. Often three times. I have used lunch as a way to get an hour with really smart people. Our awesome attorney, Peter Kunin, helped set us on the right course over many-a-$10-sandwich, which is less then his normal billable rate. I have had the opportunity to learn from successful entrepreneurs about the lessons from their businesses over a lunch, and applied those lessons to USM. After a trip to the Google Campus in 2008, I discovered that 110% of Google employees eat free lunch at Google every day (I really appreciated the free lunch even if the shareholders might not). So now we have office lunch too at Union Street Media every Tuesday. We get together as a group, share stories, ideas and hang out. It’s awesome.
Jim Shattuck, the Director of Career Services at my senior year at Middlebury College, had a simple manta: “Network, network, network.” Although I didn’t know it at the time, I actually honed this skill at Middlebury. Freshman year I found out pretty quickly that if I knew the person behind the bar at a campus party, I got my luke warm Natty Light faster. Today, I’m the most public facing employee at Union Street Media. I spend about 10% of my time attending business events in the community and volunteering on boards of other organizations. However, you can’t just take from your network. You have to give back to it. One of the things I like to do the most is connect people in the community with each other, whether it’s for business purposes or friendship. When people move to Burlington, I invite them to the office and share my knowledge of the area. They leave with a sticky pad full of names, emails and phone numbers from contacts at a company where they might find a job to the best guys fix-it-guy (Chris Labelle, 802-343-0269) and mechanic in town (Daren Smith, 802-660-3111).
Since the last site launch post, Union Street Media has been busy with a variety of exciting projects:
New Hampshire real estate agency Prudential Spencer Hughes is a long time client of Union Street Media. They went for a redesign to update the look of their website. They’re also continuing with our Report Recommend Revise Internet Marketing services to ensure the site’s high level of performance.
Search Engine Optimization
