You Have 5 Seconds to Impress Me or I am Outta Here! (Is Your Site Converting Visitors?)

Statistics show that visitors on a website will give it a “once over” for about 5 seconds to determine

  1. If they can easily navigate your site
  2. If the information they are looking for is on the page / relevant content

FIVE SECONDS! That’s it - – - that’s not a lot of time for a making a lot of mental notes. If they are gone without clicking on other links they are a “bounce” and you have a problem.

Think about your real estate Website as a home you are helping the property owners getting ready to have photographed.

  • Does the home look cluttered?
  • Do you need to take your arm and run it down the shelf to remove all the knick-knacks?
  • Are the kitchen counters over accented with cookie jars and roosters?
  • Is there more furniture in a room than needed?

If your site is too cluttered, it will be confusing to the visitor and they will leave.

Below are a few tips to optimize your landing page to increase visitor conversion:

  1. User smaller and fewer graphics
  2. Use bulleted text list when possible
  3. Keep the content short – keep away from lengthy paragraphs
  4. Try not to have the visitor scroll below “one screen height” (meaning, if you have to scroll, your page has too much content)
  5. Reduce the number of choices and links

Another way to think of the first page of your site is to compare it to a magazine cover – simple images with a little teaser text and it makes you want to open the magazine and read more.

eClassifieds – 10 Tips to Post Ads Effectively on Craigslist, Kijiji, Backpage

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OK, it’s really not 10 tips…it’s 9!

eClassifieds can be a huge resource for generating buyer and seller leads through posting your listings to advertising an upcoming seminar that you are hosting. Below are a few tips to get you started or improve your current campaign:

  1. Create a spreadsheet of your postings with date posted, address, title and number of leads each ad producesm [TRACK TRACK TRACK TRACK TRACK TRACK]
  2. Use .html code from your Point2Agent listing, Postlet account, vFlyer, etc. so that the ad stands out from others
  3. If you don’t use code, create a photo collage with text and save the collage to PhotoBucket or Flicr and use the code they generate for you
  4. Don’t give all the information in your ad – leave something to get them to contact you by email,  phone or to visit your website for more information
  5. Use the MAXIMUM amount of photos that are allowed with the posting method you are using
  6. Rotate different headlines for each property to test “keywords” in the title are generating the most leads TRACK TRACK TRACK
  7. Use ______underscore _____to _____separate ______text ____to _____make _____it ____POP ___more (can’t do this with Backpage)
  8. Avoid any of these @#$%^&*  to grab someone’s attention
  9. Post ads throughout the week but make sure you have ads posted on Thursday and Friday (my stats show those days generate the most leads)
  10. TRACK TRACK TRACK TRACK TRACK

Remember, visitors on these sites are shotgunning lots of emails about properties they see online and 80% go with the real estate agent who contacts them first! DON’T DELAY WHEN THAT EMAIL ARRIVES!

Good luck and let me know if you need help!

WordPress Blog Plug-ins & Themes for Real Estate Agents

Listed below are plug-ins and themes for real estate agents to use with their WordPress.org blog. (Some have to be used in conjunction with others.)

WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITES?

Word Press Plug-ins for Real Estate Blogs

  • Feed Wrangler: A feed utility for creating custom feeds. Useful if you need a clean feed that doesn’t go through FeedBurner for example. (Visit plugin site)
  • Featured Listings: This plugin was designed to assist real estate professionals with the marketing of their listings with their blog. By adding featured listings directly into your WordPress posts you increase the relevance of the content associated with your listings and provide a way for search engines to index content relative to your listings. The WP Featured Listing plugin requires Open Realty to function (Visit plugin site)
  • Great Real Estate: The Real Estate plugin for WordPress (Visit plugin site)
  • Listing Press: ListingPress creates a WordPress-esque query system for a registered real estate agent in the United States to automatically embed listings in to their WordPress blog. The plugin is free and open source (released GPL) but unfortunately the listing data is not. For more information on this, please visit ListingPress.com.
  • NextGen: A NextGENeration Photo gallery for the Web 2.0. (Visit plugin site)
  • Local Market Explorer: This plugin allows for WordPress to load in data from the following APIs listed below. For example, to load the Local Market Explorer for Seattle, WA, you’d simply need to point your browser to . If you have spaces in your city name, you can use hyphens for the spaces in the URL, like so: .At any time, you can link to any city in any state that you’d like. While not all of the APIs have data for every single city in the United States, you’ll find that most cities are sufficiently covered by nearly all of the APIs. The data from the different APIs is then presented on a single page that is dynamically created on the server depending on the specially-crafted URL that is being accessed. The format of the URL to load the plugin is as follows: city/state>.
  • Realty: Chad Broussard had originally developed this plugin for use in client websites where real estate listings were to be marketed via the WordPress blog. After spending a great deal of money on programmers to develop this plugin, it became obvious that releasing it as a free plugin for the WordPress community would be more beneficial than harboring it for commercial efforts. So in association with Jared Ritchey Design, we developed this free plugin to provide website owners with truly easy to manage easy to integrate listings management features into their WordPress blogs.
  • Zillow API: The UltimateIDX Presents, WP Zillow API for WordPress Real Estate Blogging at its best. Developed originally for our client use only, we have released this tool as a contribution to the WordPress community in support of the Worlds best Real Estate website platform, WordPress. This plugin provides blog website owners with a truly easy to manage easy to integrate charting solution for Zillow Demographics that can be put into your blogs posts and pages.

Word Press Real Estate Theme Resources

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