More Traffic to Your Website – Revisited

Last post we reviewed what Direct Navigation was and how it could be implemented and integrated into our marketing to increase the traffic to your website.

This post I would like to revisit the Direct Navigation concept and look at a few more zingers or slight variations on the previous examples. As you can see they are only limited by your imagination. You should review your strengths, what you are offering on your web site, and your marketplace...then promote with the appropriate "zingers" that would entice folks to visit your website.

· Visit My NEW Website
· Search All Area Homes for Sale Anytime
· To Visit Every Listing, Visit YourDomainName.com
· Request a FREE Relocation Package (if you provide one)
· View My Online Real Estate Newsletter (if you provide one)
· Request your FREE School Report [or] Free Neighborhood Report
· View Properties utilizing Google’s Earth Mapping Technology

I have had agents tell me that upon mailing out postcards promoting their websites (spheres and farms), when reviewing their stats, they saw substantial increase in traffic.

Whether using postcards, magazines (ie Homes and Land) or whatever, you will have an impact on the traffic to your site. And like anything we do in real estate, it is numbers and timing. The more we send, the greater the return.

Don’t be afraid to promote your website. Do have good quality content when your visitors stop by.

Direct Navigation For More Traffic To Your Website!

Did you know that “Direct Navigation” accounts for as much traffic to your website as does search engines…perhaps even more?

What exactly is “Direct Navigation”? It means that visitors typed your domain name, or URL directly into the address bar of their browser. This also includes links from emails and bookmarks.

This means that all the “off-line” marketing we do can make a difference to our traffic. The benefit here of course, is that many of these are “low-tech” and inexpensive.

What might some of these marketing solutions be? Business cards, direct mail, magazine ads, newspapers, signage, etc.

So, how…what would you do??? If I were an agent, I would get busy with my “off-line” marketing. I would focus on driving folks to my website as my primary focus.

For example, in Homes and Land…or newspaper advertising, you could continue to show 2 or 3 listings or whatever, but would devote the thrust of your message as to why they should visit your website with 2 or 3 zingers…maybe even only one if it is a biggie.

And another idea...send out those postcards. You could display an image of your website on the card, and then list a zinger or two as to why the recipient should visit your website. Agents that have done this say they could see the increased traffic to their websites via their stats.

And, with even more new tools to be released in the weeks to come, what a time to get on board this bandwagon!

The cool thing is that you could probably reduce the size of your advertisement one notch down because once a visitor visits your site, they have even more content to become excited with…and interact with! They just need that “sexy” reason to go to their computer and type in your URL (your domain name).

Here is a list of zingers that you can place in your advertising.

• NEW! Search homes by neighborhood!
• See Photos of your favorite listings!
• View all MLS listings from all real estate companies.
• See what homes sold for in your neighborhood.
• Estimate what your home is worth.
• Save your favorite listings for future viewing.
• Save your search for future viewing
• Find information on schools, and neighborhoods.
• Receive the latest email notification of new listings matching your search criteria.
• Send listings of interest to family and friends by email.
• View Buyer and Sellers tips.
• Calculate how much home you can afford.
• Calculate your mortgage payments.
• Get creative...you can come up with even more reasons
  

You need to integrate your marketing strategies…offline marketing and online marketing…then watch your traffic grow!

GraphicalData Is Upgrading Agent Sites to the Next Generation

GraphicalData is currently upgrading all sites to the new Build 4 platform.

This is exciting news as this new build will enable more exciting tools to be released in the upcoming weeks. Soon the Blog system will be here...new homesearch mapping system and more.

As with all upgrades, you may have experienced some strange things materializing here and there over the past couple of weeks. Most of that should be behind us now. Just some tweaking going on.

For those with standard banner designs, they have been updated as well, and you have been automatically converted over. I believe a handful of agents may have not had an equivelant replacement banner if that specific banner had been retired. If that is the case, you should have received an email from GraphicalData to that effect. Just go to your design section in your admin center and select a new style and color...or if not sure, feel free to give us a call and we can walk through it.

In any event, stay tune for the exiciting new products that will be released as the dust settles. There has never been a better time to have a site with GraphicalData than now...

Online Marketing: Real Estate Professionals Focus Marketing Dollars Online

As an individual agent or brokerage, what can you do to be on the Internet and achieve success?

Visit this article to find some interesting online advertising facts...and a couple of good ideas.

Commandments for Website Design

• 10 tips to make your site load like a rocket
  
• Web Standards And Designing For The Future
  
• CSS Tips and Tricks
  
• 5 sling-shot ways to build traffic to your blog
  
• Make your MySQL upto 10x Faster
  
• 13 Great Firefox Extensions for Web Professionals
  
• SEO : Top Ten Costly Mistakes
  
• 5 Things Digg must do to Prevent SPAM
  
• How to Hide Secret Documents inside JPEG's
  
• 15 Rules for You to Obey
  
• 5 Untapped Ways to Get Links
  
• I've Been Dugg
  
• 9 ways to get incoming links to your blog
  
• Something Nice for Today..
  
• How to Get Your Link on a Top Blog
  
• How to Master the Art of Blogging
  
• How to Manage Your Blogging Schedule
  
• 5 Steps to Building A Better Blog
  
• Generate Unlimited E-Mail Addresses
  
• Making it to Technorati Top 100
  
• Increasing Search Engine Traffic
  
• 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic
  
• Top 10 Reasons Why You Need to Blog
  
• 5 tips to be a solid Blogger
  
• How to Build Up your Online Reputation
  
• How to Write Quality Blogs
  
• How to Make Your Blog a Big Hit
  

Everything on a website should have a purpose for being there.

This online article provides some simple guidelines that might help you in writing text and adding content you your website.

Check out these tips...this is an easy read and well worth the few moments it takes to read.

Resize Your Images Before Uploading to Your Website

OK...you have taken a great photo and you want to upload it to your website. The challenge...with each new generation of cameras, image mega-pixel counts continue to increase. Unoptimized images are appearing on websites across the nation (around the world) with sizes approaching 1, 2, and even higher megabytes, bogging down servers and frustrating users. What does this mean? Website page bailout rates are on the rise as visitors are less likely to wait around for slow loading pages.


The solution: down-size your image...this reflects not only the physical size of your photo, but also the kilobyte (kb) size of the image which influences the download time. You need some form of photo editor.

Perhaps the easiest solution for the average user is to downsize the photo with a nifty little program that is available for free from Microsoft. It is called, interestly enough, Image Resizer and is found in their PowerToy section.

Sure, you would do even better if you were an experienced PhotoShop user, but for average website owners who do not have the time or inclination to learn a high end program, this could be the perfect fit.

You can find Image Resizer and download it from this location: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

Once you have downloaded the small file, just install it into your Program files or wherever, Windows will know where it is located.

The cool thing is that this PowerToy enables you to resize one or many image files with a single right-click. So, find the image on your computer...right click...select "Resize Pictures" and either use one of the default sizes provided (probably the smallest), or customize to the exact size you want with the simple "Advanced Feature" setting.

You can either overwrite your existing photo or save as a new smaller image (recommended). And, as previously mentioned, you can save time by resizing multiple images simultaneously.

This is a simple program...but effective. Run through a couple photos and you will have it all figured out.

The Result: Now your website will load much more quickly, and your visitors will be more "happy".

Neighborhood Map Search - Revisited

The Neighborhood Map Search is really a hot item in my opinion. In fact I think it is one of the hottest tools going. Review my first article here.

There is however one critical item I forgot to mention in my earlier post. That being...once you have created the page with this tool in place, you need to "set the neighborhood map" to the appropriate area. Currently neighborhoods exist in Portland, Seattle, and the Tacoma areas (they will eventually be expanded to other areas).

How do you do this? Edit the module by finding a neighborhood that you know exists in your area. Select it and save the page. I have found that I now need to leave this module and then return to it. Now, all the neighborhoods for your area will show in the selection menu on the page. From here, if you have a specific neighborhood which you would like to be the default neighborhood that shows, repeat the process. Merely select your default desired neighborhood to show and save.

Normally you will not select the "displayed neighborhood only" option as you will want your visitors to be able to explore all neighborhoods for listings available in each.

Do You See Weird Characters When You Copy-and-Paste Text Into Your Website?

When we copy-and-paste from one application (such as Word) into another application (such as your website), you are usually also pasting (though not obvious) all the original source formatting. This usually does not translate well, and can cause weird characters…or just as frustrating…not allow you to change your formatting to something else (changing font size for example).

Perhaps one of the easiest ways around this is to use a program called “Pure Text” that you can download free from the internet. It has its own set of instructions that you can print out as well. It is very small in file size and compatible with all Windows programs.

Basically it removes what is called “rich text formatting” from text and just leaves the pure text behind, along with carriage returns, tabs, spaces and the like which you may want to keep.

You can down load this small, helpful program at http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/ and discover how it can help make your life easier.