These days it goes without saying, but real estate investors really need their own website. Even if you don’t get a single lead through the site, it’s a great way to build credibility for you with leads from other sources.
But do we really want to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars on a website? Heck no!
Trying to find a good web designer is challenging, and the good ones are not all that cheap. Sure there are also designers over in India or China, but what kind of quality do they offer? And they will still have a price tag of several hundred dollars to put together something good.
Another alternative is to build the site yourself. At first glance this sounds daunting. After all, we are real estate investors, not programmers. We would much rather spend our time on profitable deals than learning to build websites.
There is an alternative to buying or building an expensive website yourself – it’s called Wix.
Click. Build. Deal
Wix is a website that helps you build your own business website for free (or a very small price). You don’t have to know code or Wordpress or any of the other programs out there to build a website on Wix.
If you know how to point and click on a computer, you can build a website using Wix.
To get started on Wix, all you do is click the ‘Start Now’ button. You can create an account using your Facebook or Gmail login, or you can just set up your own email address and password.
Once you are in, you select a template:
Generally, investors will pick the ‘Real Estate and Property’ templates, but you can pick whichever ones you want.
When you select a category and hit ‘Go,’ Wix will take you to a selection of templates you can choose from. Most of them are free but there are a few paid templates.
While we are on the subject of paying for stuff on your website, take a look at the pricing plans for Wix (as of this writing):
You can have a free version of Wix, but your domain will be http://www.wix.com/yourdomainnamehere or whatever you want to call it in the second half of your domain name.
Using Wix as your domain name does not look very professional. That’s where the pricing plans come in. For about $4 a month, you can go get your own domain on a hosting service like Host Gator, and import it to Wix.
But we’re trying to keep things simple, remember…
For $9 (Combo plan) or $12 (Unlimited plan) per month, you can have your own domain name on Wix. It really is one-stop shopping.
Scroll down the page with pricing plans and you will see what you get for the paid plans. Most people use either the ‘Unlimited’ or ‘Combo’ plans. The differences between the Unlimited and Combo plans (besides $3/month) are:
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Unlimited Bandwidth vs. 2GB of bandwidth
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10GB instead of 3GB of storage
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The Unlimited has the Site Booster and Form Builder App
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$350 in ‘ad vouchers’ to advertise on places like Bing, Google Adwords and Facebook
The Site Booster app will use that secret internet fuel to raise your site in the rankings on all the major search engines. The Form Builder app allows you to add fancy opt-in forms for your website. You can choose from dozens of templates for contact or subscription forms.
Once you’ve selected your hosting plan, it’s time to build your website. Just select a template you like and click on the ‘Edit’ button to the top right of your screen. A video will pop up explaining all the ways to customize your site. The cool video will show you how simple it is to create a great site:
Real Estate Empire Website Essentials
Now you know how to build a website, it’s important to know what should go into your website.
Besides the website looking professional, it should also have a few important elements. Good website designers will tell you that they like to plan out their site on paper or a spreadsheet before they start programming. It may make sense to draw out all the pages and how they are linked on paper before you dive into Wix.
The website should be welcoming and disarming – remember that motivated sellers are skittish. Here are some things to think about:
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Put some friendly pictures on the site – we’ve seen pictures of families, sold homes, even ponies!
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Have an ‘About’ page explaining your company and how you are Mother Teresa endorsed.
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Have all your contact information included very conspicuously. People will contact you in many different ways. Make sure it is easy for them to do it every way you can think of.
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Have a contact form. Maybe offer a ‘free report’ on how to help motivated sellers in their situation. Examples might be:
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How to minimize damage in foreclosure
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How to rent your house out for top dollar
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The probate rules for your state
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One report covering all of these
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If it’s a buyer’s list site, possibly offer a subscription to all the deals you will send out in email
You can bring people to the website either through online ‘Search Engine Optimization’ or offline through networking and marketing…
But the bottom line is that a website will really help sell your real estate business. It is becoming more and more essential for today’s real estate investors.
Strongly consider a website – Look into a getting a website to really help boost your real estate business.
Learn about internet marketing – It’s not necessary to become an internet guru. Just think of the internet as one more medium to advertise on to increase your business. Renters, buyers and sellers are on the internet more and more these days. You should be too!
Give Wix a try – Wix is easy and free. Because you don’t have to pay anything until you have the website designed and running, you lose nothing by trying it out. There are a lot of tutorials and ways to ask questions on Wix’s support page .
Don’t forget about offline marketing – Don’t neglect your networking, direct mail, bandit signs, etc. to unearth great deals. And use the internet as part of your overall marketing strategy.
JP Moses
is a real estate investor in Memphis, TN, with experience ranging from land lording to note buying, rehabbing, and wholesaling. However, wholesaling is the area that he enjoys most and where he bring the most experience and expertise to his students.