Welcome to Week Eight of the Website 101: Working with Websites Self Learning Tutorial.
In this final week of the website’s weekly tutorial, join us as we explore the different ways to market and promote your Web site.
Marketing Your Website
Once you’ve created your website it’s important to market it and let people know that it’s out there. There are a variety of ways of doing this, including adding your website URL on all marketing materials you send out, your real estate signs, as well as marketing and promoting your site on the internet.
Another way to increase traffic to your website is through the use of targeted ads. These are the ads that you see displayed after doing a search that is targeted at the type of search your are doing. For example if you do a search on “real estate,” all the ads displayed will be real estate related. There are a variety of companies that offer this type of service at varying rates. Listed below are three of the major banner ad distributors.
- realtor.com® Local Expert: https://marketing.realtor.com/local-expert
- Microsoft Advertising: https://advertising.microsoft.com/home
- Google: https://ads.google.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ads/
Increase Traffic To Your Website
Okay, so now that you have this great, optimized website, what else can you do to help get you found, promote your listings, and generate more business? There are several popular websites that can help you in promoting your services, marketing your listings AND drive more traffic to your website.
One of the best ways to promote your property listings is craigslist.org. Craigslist is an excellent way to market your property for free. Anyone can use it. Craigslist real estate pages will get ranked by Google with real estate search terms and millions of people read the site on a daily basis. Not only will you get leads directly from Craigslist but you can also generate traffic to your website through Craigslist.
YouTube is an excellent way of advertising a property as well. If you have a digital camcorder and know how to upload your movies to the internet then you will find this to be an effective way to not only promote your property but also helpful in directing traffic to your website.
Other websites that you may want to look into are social websites such as Instragram or Facebook.
If you have a local newspaper online, you may benefit from any advertising that you do there. Your Chamber of Commerce site can also be helpful as well.
Remember: You need to have optimized your website BEFORE you start your external marketing. This includes Search Engine Optimization and Writing Content.
What’s Next? Maintain Your Website – Maintain Your Web Presence!
Now that you have completed all of the steps in this Self-Directed Learning course, you should now be well on your way to having a fully functioning website that provides value to your visitors – each of which is a potential customer.
Remember that in order to survive on the internet and continue to attract visitors, your website cannot remain static. Develop a schedule that will allow you to maintain your website regularly – writing new content, updating your listings, tracking website statistics and traffic sources, and refining keywords and other SEO best-practices. Even after implementing all of the SEO processes it will take some time before your hard work pays off in terms of Search Engine Ranking – so always pay attention to what is working and what isn’t.
Although this course has provided links to many of the resources available for learning how to best establish your website, there is always more to learn. Below are links to some of the sections on Top Producer Campus that will help you continue to develop your site.