If You Live By Referrals Only, Your Business Is Dying By Them Part 4

December 7, 2009

Here’s another common objection to having your own real estate website:

“I’ve never sold a thing to anyone who’s emailed me about a listing.  These people aren’t serious.”

A great misconception.  Did you ever stop and think that it could be the way you’re handling these email prospects that’s making them shun you?  Very few people are bored enough to go searching on the web for homes for sale if they aren’t thinking of buying or selling their home within the next 6 months.  There’s a certain way you need to handle email prospects and it differs considerably from prospects who contact you by phone.  My course The Awesome Power Of Email gives a step by step method for effectively dealing with email prospects and getting appointments with them.

I believe there is only one reason for having a personally branded real estate website: growing your prospect email database.

”Your database is your business.  Building up the number of names in it and a relationship with those names is really at the very core of what building a real estate business is all about”
-    Gary Keller, Co-Founder, Keller Williams Real Estate Inc.

When you build or acquire a large prospect database with email addresses, you truly have a diamond mine.  You have an ability to influence prospects that is unparalleled in any other type of advertising medium, yet the financial costs of using email are absolutely miniscule.

Now how does having a website build your prospect database?  When people find your website, it’s your chance to demonstrate to them why you’re the best at what you do and why they should work with you.  You’ve probably found it much easier to close people who find you vs. people you’ve found yourself.

So the next question is: what content should my website have?  Your website should be a composite of and reflection of the different types of people in your target market.  Your website should be all about THEM.  NOT you.  Quite frankly, prospects don’t really care who you are.  They just want someone or something to help them find the home they want.

Let’s say your target market is Brampton, Ontario.  Brampton is ethnically diverse, but there are a noticeably high number of East Indian people there.  So if you wanted to focus on that market, you should design your website as if you were one of these people.  Many of them are immigrants to Canada and are probably much more comfortable reading and speaking information in their mother language.  So your website should be available in all the different languages these people might speak.  You don’t necessarily have to hire a translator to get this done if you don’t speak any of these languages.  There is very sophisticated software available nowadays for translating writing in specific languages with great precision.

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