Websites For Real Estate Investors?

This post will be a short(er) one today.

You have a dilemma… a challenge of sorts… because if your like most real estate investors or entrepreneurs you cannot ignore the importance of having a website (or three or four or…) for your business.

“It’s just the evolution of business, right? Now, more than ever, knowing how to capitalize on the available technology is as necessary as water, air, and food it seems.”

If you’ve recognized this need and understand the value… you’ve probably also realized that, like riding a bicycle for the first time, creating well crafted, direct marketing, highly responsive, websites looks a whole lot easier than it actually is.

In fact, you may have already come to the conclusion that this technology thing, even with all of it’s benefits and advantages, is downright daunting. Learning the technology, deciding on what the correct approach is, understanding all of the pitfalls to avoid, asking the right questions and getting the right answers is a challenge worth writing a book about (I may just do that someday, actually… the stories I could tell you, ARGH!).

 

 Websites and Technology... a Must? [10:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“Hey! I wanted to be a real estate investor, not a Web Master!” You say… trust me, I’ve heard it and said it myself a hundred times before.

Understand this however, the internet, your websites, your autoresponders; Google AdWords, AdSense, Affiliate products and programs, etc. are NOT YOUR REAL ESTATE BUSINESS!

“There really is no such thing as an “Internet Business” per say… only businesses that are run from the internet, which is a MARKETING TOOL.”

And, like any marketing tool, use it correctly… and you will see HUGE gains, use it incorrectly, and you will go broke, lose sleep, gain nothing, and waste a LOT of time (ask me how I know sometime… you buy the coffee or the beer though).

There are so many options available - none of them seem to be right and they all cost you something, whether time, energy, or MONEY. Most of them, all of the above. The results?

Usually, a look alike website sold to you for thousands of dollars with no support, no direction, no follow up, no help. “Here Mr. Smith… your nice and pretty website for your real estate business. Thank you for the $2,997 and your order. Good luck!”

“Doh!” Can you believe? Yet, I see it all the time. The worst expect you to write all of the content yourself too.

I remember the 1st time I hired a “Web Master” (yeah, right… master my **^&*!), I handed over my $900 for a complete website system for my real estate business (ok… that was a LONG time ago, yes) - all mapped out with links, pages, structure, names, concepts, etc. This thing took me half a year to research and create on paper.

Know what happened? Not a month after he got all of my plans and specs, my $900 and hours of my time - he told me that I had to now… “Provide all of the content for the site, the shell is almost done, but you need to write all of the pages to plug in.”

Looking back, I was naive - I mean, certainly he could not create all of the content, what did he know about real estate? However, he could have told me that before I hired him! Finally, after fighting with him for two weeks about the issue, he charged me an additional $900 to have the content created for me.

Right. Like that happened. After three months, he disappeared… money, site, and all.

I had also hired him to create what I felt was going to be the most advanced on-line tutoring service model I believed was possible. I owned a tutoring service at the time and had, again, spent a year or so developing this model for on-line tutoring.

A year after he disappeared with my money and without doing the job I had hired him for with my real estate websites, I found out that he had taken all of my notes and the volume of maps, models, ideas, etc. for the tutoring sites, and created a complete on-line tutoring system with a friend of his, which they own together and which, to my knowledge, is still running today… profitably, I might ad.

Disgusting. The worse part was that he was only the 1st of about a half a dozen folks that I hired over the years to help me with my websites.

“If I had a nickle for every dollar I threw down that hole… I’d be a LOT wealthier today. If I had a minute for every hour that I wasted, learning, writing, crafting, drafting, drawing, modeling, creating, and explaining… and troubleshooting… with web masters, web hosts, computer companies, printer services, phone services, software companies, etc. I’d be about twenty years old instead of 44 this year!”

I’ve been there and done that, let me tell you. So if you are feeling the pain of technology, I’ve got your back, I understand, I feel your pain.

What to do?

That is the question… and something I’ll be spending some time commenting on for you over the next few posts. So, stay tuned, maybe we can help each other here and you can learn from my mistakes.

I’ll also give you some insights into how you can avoid the same issues I faced… what is working now, what to avoid like the plaque, and what is coming down the road, if all indicators are correct.

So, stay tuned until next time…

Steve