Real Estate Web Site Design by IDXCentral.com - theInsider » Improving Your Website

Using Video on Your Website

Mark — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:24:29 +0000

Inman News published an article on their site today with a list of great ideas on how to incorporate video on your site. Some of these ideas could be helpful in saving you time as well as allowing you to stand out from your competition. Video profiles of a particular neighborhood could be especially helpful to buyers from out of the area. The more excited you can get a buyer about an area or a property, the more likely they will be to make an offer. For more information check out Inman’s article Video killed the business card.

You may want to spend the extra money and have a professionally produced video that you can use to promote yourself. This is just one more way visitors to your site can ‘connect’ with you before actually meeting with you, helping you stand out from others. See the video below for an example.

There may be some videos on YouTube that you can embed on your site to help showcase an area. There are a few sites I know of that link to this video about Tahoe.

It may take a little time to learn how to do a ‘great job’ at posting your own videos, but this is a trend that is only going to get more popular and can more than likely benefit your overall business. There are several companies that can help you produce your video or even shoot and host it for your. One such popular full service company is Turn Here. If anyone has had a positive experience with a web video company and would like to share them with others, let us know and we will add them here.

Remind your Visitors to Subscribe

Mark — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:01:54 +0000

With so many websites out there fighting for buyers and sellers attention, you want to make sure you make every effort to keep visitors coming back to your site. Don’t rely on your visitors to remember your website address or bookmark your site. Offer them a friendly reminder at the bottom of every post, that if they like what they are reading on your site, they should consider subscribing to your RSS feed. This way, anytime you add new information to your site, they will get notified of it immediately. The more you add information to your site, the more they will hopefully come back and remember you when it is time to buy or sell. Keep in mind, post information of value that visitors can benefit from or that will help them better connect with you. If you post a bunch of nonsense articles, they will probably lose interest and unsubscribe. One plugin that automatically adds a reminder at the bottom of every post is ‘Subscribe Remind’. You can find a link to this on our Top Plugins page.

For visitors who are not up to speed with RSS feeds, offer them an alternative to receive updates via email. There are a few different services that will allow visitors to sign up to receive your new posts by email. Two very popular and free services are Feedburner and Zookoda. Feedburner, which is owned by Google, manages your RSS feed and sends your visitors emails daily (if you have posted something new to your site). They also offer a wealth of stats on items such as who has subscribed to your feed, what articles they have clicked, etc.

Zookoda uses your blogs rss feed and gives you a little more flexibility by allowing you to choose which posts to send out, as well as when to send your ‘email newsletter’. The best option would be to have a Feedburner account to manage your feed and use Zookoda to have more control over the look and delivery of your email newsletter.

For more information on these services and what they can offer you, visit their respective ‘About’ pages:
About Feedburner
About Zookoda

Make it Easy for Visitors to Share Your Website

Mark — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 23:36:13 +0000

One of the best things you can hope for is that visitors to your site will find your content so helpful and informative they will want to share it with others. To make sharing as easy as possible, we recommend the ‘ShareThis’ plugin. The ‘ShareThis’ plugin allows visitors to easily share your content via different methods such as email, posting it to their blog, their favorite social bookmarking site and more. You can find a link for this on our Top Plugins page.

For an example, just look for the ‘ShareThis’ button at the end of this article.

Add Listing Links to Neighborhood Profile Pages

Mark — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 02:43:05 +0000

One great way to improve your visitors experience is to provide links that will show listings available in the neighborhood you talk about. If there are more than 50-100 listings in a particular area, you may want to consider creating a few links to listings in predefined price ranges. Not only will this help your visitors find homes in the area quickly and easily, you can add keywords in the link text to help your search engine marketing. For example, if you wrote a neighborhood profile for the Lake Tahoe neighborhood called Montgomery Estates, you could create links such as:

Montgomery Estates Homes for sale up to $750,000
Montgomery Estates Homes for Sale $750,000+

View this example page on our demo site: Montgomery Estates Neighborhood Profile (example)

Better still, create a custom quick search form that will allow your visitors to search the neighborhood they are reading about by price and / or any other criteria you wish to add. This will require you to add some html code to your post. Or, you may hire us to set up something custom for you.

View this example page on our demo site: Heavenly Valley Neighborhood Profile (example)