Success as a Real Estate Agent For Dummies
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Using the web to view homes is common practice for real estate buyers. Buyers enjoy the anonymity of looking online before contacting an agent. A key for real estate agents to prospect and land new clients is to turn online lookers into solid leads and turn those leads into real clients.

Converting lookers to leads

Site visitors are known as eyeballs. The aim of your online strategy is to convert eyeballs to leads by creating and promoting a clear path they can follow from your web page to your business.

You'll never turn every online visitor to a lead, but you can increase your conversion rate dramatically by presenting an effective call to action. These calls to action can be in the form of a specific request for a free report, an offer to request additional property information, or an invitation to fill out a survey.

After you present these calls to action, track the number of lookers you convert to leads. For example, if a thousand users visit your site and 150 request a free brochure titled "How to buy property in our market for 70 cents on the dollar," your conversion rate is 15 percent. Not bad!

Converting leads to clients

After you capture a lead, you need to go into full court press to convert the name and contact information into a prospect for your business. For some reason, agents don't follow up with Internet leads as aggressively as they do with ad call or sign call leads. I consider this a mistake because in today's world you stand to generate more leads online than from any other source.

To get a feel for the way online leads accrue to build your business, look at this example:

  • If your site draws 1,000 visitors and 150 of those visitors request your free report, you'll have a 15 percent visitor-to-lead conversion ratio.

  • If you convert 5 percent of the resulting 150 leads to buyer-consultation interviews, you'll generate 7.5 interviews from the 1,000 site visitors, or a .75 percent site visitor-to-interview conversion rate.

  • Based on your online conversion rates, you'll have a base from which to work with as you adjust your marketing and conversion strategy. For instance, if you want to generate 15 instead of 7.5 interviews, you'll have to either double the number of visitors to your site or double your conversion rate. It all boils down to the numbers.

To improve your web marketing, visit other agents' sites to see how they build, use, market, promote, and track responses. Most importantly, observe how the other agents prompt calls to action. You may even register and request a few offered items to see how they follow up on leads. Most use automatic responders, which send out messages via e-mail without the touch of a human hand, so they won't even know that you, a competing agent, got their stuff.

About This Article

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Dirk Zeller is recognized as the premier coach for the real estate industry. He has developed a system that takes "regular" agents and "regular" managers and transforms them into Champion Agents and Managers.

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