A few weeks ago we talked about a short-term take off strategy for your real estate investor website. This week we will be talking about how to maintain long term success online. If you’re a serious real estate investor, having a website isn’t just for short-term success. You’re in it for the long haul.
It may seem like you are adding content, and adding your website to directories and seeing nothing in return. This is why most people give up after 4 months. But that’s good for you, that means less competition! We’re going to talk about what to do long-term so that you know there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Does all of this sound intimidating? Don’t worry! That’s what we’re here for. Let us be your training wheels. Before you know it you’ll be riding smoothly without needing to look back.
The Transition Into Long Term Success
The transition from short term success to long term success takes time. Too often, people quit early, just before their site starts gaining traction. It can take roughly 8 months for your site to take off and get to the top of the rankings. Keep in mind, this is a long term goal, it won’t happen overnight. Too many people make the mistake of quitting early and never see the results of their site. When traffic is slow in the beginning, stay persistent. It will pick up.
Change Your Mindset
You will see what looks like a drop off in traffic and interaction, that’s normal. Changing your mindset to going long-term is essential for any investment in marketing for motivated sellers. Remember, your presence isn’t just online. You need to stay involved in every part of your real estate investment, that is what the big players have figured out.
Over time your return on investment goes through the roof! The investment is mostly in time and cost in the beginning and then you only need maintenance for your site to keep ranking. Most websites take 8 months or more to see long-term results in competitive markets. That may seem like a long time, but it’s worth it! Remember, most people quit before they become successful. Don’t be one of them.
Example Timeline of What to Expect
If the average person with a website gives up after 4 months, you have to understand why. In the beginning, you won’t see immediate results in the content you’re putting out. Traffic takes time to get to you. So, the first 4-6 months might look slow and unrewarding. However, the turning point comes when the content you already have on your site gets indexed and searched more.
Moz Blog writer Kristina Kledzik talks about the time it takes to see a rank jump on a post for your website. In her study, she focused on rankings with targeted keywords in blogs. The graph below displays her results, showing that it takes about 10 weeks for 1 rank jump, but that the rankings continue to grow the longer the post is live.
Photo credit: Moz Blogs
For your real estate investor website, blogging is the kind of posting you want to be doing. Blogs are a way for you to provide your potential customers with answers to their questions, as well as ways to get in contact with you and promote your services.
More than just that, though, blogs provide Google with more material to index. In this case, less is not more. You want lots of good quality blogs with keywords that are known to be searchable. If your blogs are highly searched, and prove to be useful resources, Google will rank your content higher. And there’s no better way to produce quality content than with SEO.
If your real estate investing business is already time consuming enough, but you need quality content, LeadPropeller provides blog posts as part of our content packs. That way, once you buy the content pack, you’ll have blog posts that are already optimized for search engines that will help your site rank higher faster.
SEO: Long Term Success #1 Tool
Ok, ok, so if you’ve read any of our other blogs you know that we stress the importance of SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) a lot. But we keep bringing it up for good reasons. Maintaining successful long term SEO strategies will keep your website growing in a stable way, which is what Google loves to see!
We’ve talked about keeping a blog associated with your website. That is an excellent starting point. By starting with keyword related blog posts, your real estate investor website will begin to get traffic. However, making the switch from keyword related blogs to blogs that answer customer questions will provide long term stability.
You want to write blogs that answer questions such as “how quickly can my house be bought?”, “what makes a real estate investor different than a realtor?”, and “do you buy houses that don’t need repairs?”
“The best type of article to write is one that answers a customer’s potential question, such as ‘how-to’ guides and ‘what to do when’ style articles,” writes Jayson Demers, founder and CEO of AudienceBloom, “Google analyzes search queries semantically, so when your customers search for answers to those questions, your site will be more likely to come up.”
Creating Quality Content
Aside from creating a quality blog that will maintain your searchability, you also want to be generating different kinds of content to maintain your real estate investor website’s long term success. For example, in this blog post alone there is a featured graphic, and informational graphics throughout.
In addition to that, there will be other graphics and images used as thumbnails to drive traffic to the blog, that will then drive traffic to our site. Our favorite places to make visual content are unsplash.com, easelly.com, and canva.com. The use of visual aids with your brand name and logo on them dramatically help with views and searchability.
According to Jeff Bullas, featured in The New York Times and The Huffington Post, “articles with images get 94% more views.” Bullas explains this phenomenon as a result of the current “age of visual culture.”
Essentially, Bullas states that, because people who are browsing the internet are more motivated to linger on a post with a picture on it, using pictures in your content is an effective strategy. And the numbers don’t lie, if an article or blog with pictures gets 94% more views, why risk it by not adding graphics?
Making content can be time consuming, though. If you don’t have the budget for an in-house content producer, you could find yourself working more on marketing than on your actual real estate investor business. That’s where outsourcing can come in handy. But, like everything, there are definite pros and cons to doing it yourself.
Outsourcing content can save you time, but can cost you control and money. On the other hand, while doing it yourself keeps control in your hands it can also cost you valuable time that you could be spending elsewhere. Either way, it’s up to you to determine what plan works best for your real estate investing business.
Posting Strategy
Regardless of if you’re producing your own content or outsourcing, having a consistent posting schedule will help to maintain your online presence and bring you consistent traffic. This means more than just your social media posts (which we’ve already talked about in previous blogs). Your posting strategy should be one that optimizes the best possible times and platforms to post your content – ALL of it, not just your blog or your sales pages.
Different types of content are appropriate for different platforms. For example, the featured image at the top of this blog is perfect content to use on Pinterest and Instagram (which are both visually heavy mediums), but not the best for LinkedIn (which is a more word heavy medium).
Likewise, this blog will produce enough word content for FaceBook, Twitter, and Google+ posts for the next week. Keep in mind that all of your visual posts should either link back to your blog, or back to your homepage, so as to drive traffic forward.
Think of every post as the opening of a funnel. Platforms like FaceBook, Twitter, Medium, and other social medias are the opening of the funnel that are all there specifically to direct viewers back to your services. They start at your professional social media accounts, then to your blog or online ads (like the Craigslist ads for real estate investors that we talked about last week), and should end up on the phone with you. That is why having an effective posting strategy is so crucial.
Nathan Ellering, a writer for CoSchedule Blog, has compiled studies done on the best times and days to post to social medias. We’ve already covered the importance of posting to different platforms, but now that your real estate investor business is moving into a long-term plan we need to talk about the importance of staying consistent with posting.
Photo credit: CoSchedule Blog
Based on Ellering’s findings, most platforms for posting get the best results on Thursday through Monday between the hours of 9am and 3pm. Of course, that varies for each platform, for instance, Facebook is least responsive on Tuesday and Wednesday while LinkedIn is most responsive on those days. Your blog, though, can be posted live on your website on any day of the week because you will be linking back to it in your other posts. Just remember to stay consistent, if you decide to post on Mondays then stick to Mondays! Long term success is all about staying consistent.
Here’s what’s been working for us:
Now, it should be stated that our method is not the only method, nor is it the best one out there. But, through trial and error we have found that this posting calendar works for us and helps us achieve our needs. In fact, in the last week we have seen an almost 100% increase in likes and followers on our social media platforms.
Using Multiple Landing Pages
A landing page is a part of your website that redirect viewers to something more specific. For example, if someone on your site is going through the probate process you can create a landing page that appeals to their specific needs.
Having lots of landing pages is beneficial because you can then target the specific needs of your customers which is important for remaining relevant and maintaining the long term success of your real estate investor website. Targeting the specific needs of someone browsing your site is key in converting them from a potential customer to an actual customer. By being relevant and helpful to people who come to your site, you are promoting your business’s professionalism and ability to help.
Photo credit: Hubspot
Let’s go back to the person dealing with probate. The odds are, this person is not an expert in real estate and is frustrated or stressed out because of their current situation. Even though you have the skills to solve their problem, they won’t know that unless you specifically target them when they search for you or go to your website.
Having a landing page for every real estate situation you can think of, and having updated and relevant content on those pages, provides your customers with more ways to get to you. Creating content for these specific landing pages can be time consuming, though.
As a real estate investor, we know you would much rather be spending your time finding leads and closing deals. We also understand the importance of the long term success of your real estate investor website.
That’s why LeadPropeller websites come with content geared to many different situations. By using LeadPropeller, your website will have specific landing pages already made so you’re free to do the fun part of real estate investing.
Additionally, having multiple landing pages gives Google more to crawl, which will ultimately help with your long term SEO. Hubspot explains it this way:
“The more landing pages you have, the more landing pages will be indexed in search. And if a searcher stumbles upon a search result that directs them straight to one of your landing pages, you’ll have essentially cut out the extra step of a visitor perusing your site and needing to click on a call-to-action to get them to the same landing page.”
Remember, having sustainable SEO content is key to the long term success of your real estate investor website.
The Best Long-Term Success Solution
Long term success strategies are a bit more in-depth than short-term take off strategies, but ultimately long-term is more beneficial. Long term success for your real estate investor website means long term success for your real estate investor business. This entire process can still take time away from doing what you love: real estate investing.
So to avoid getting caught up in optimizing your website for this long term success strategy, let LeadPropeller take care of that for you. With a LeadPropeller site, you will see organic leads grow over time the longer you have your site.
Plus, with our custom content packs, your website will have more material to be indexed in Google, giving your website more opportunities to rank highly in your area.
Don’t have time or desire to do all of this yourself?
LeadPropeller offers done-for-you real estate investor SEO and Adwords services. With these services you can take advantage of our years of experience so that your website starts generating leads immediate (with Adwords) and over time organically (with SEO).
Don’t just think about long term success, achieve it. Get your LeadPropeller site today.