This section will help answer many of your questions before you start any project to create an Internet Marketing Strategy!

What is an Internet Marketing Strategy?

The basics of marketing include setting a business objective, defining your audiences, understanding your competition and positioning your offering. Once these are defined, marketing programs can communicate the value of your offerings to your target audiences. This can be done in a variety of ways – traditional methods include advertising and direct mail as well as personal contact.

The mistake many make with the Internet is to forget the purpose of their Website - to help drive sales! If you are forgetting this purpose then you are wasting money.
An Internet marketing strategy is one that considers how best to use the technology and tools available through the Internet to help you achieve your overall marketing and business goals.

It is not about a Website – this is the tool. It is the strategy that creates the mechanisms, the processes and programs that get people to your Website, keeps their attention when they are there, and has them returning often.

How much does a Website solution cost?

We aim to be highly competitive - our goal is to offer great value for money.
Creating a Buyer’s Agent Website can cost anything from the low $100s, through to a premium site that provides full marketing automation for several thousand dollars.
We provide critically important Site Promotion services on a monthly basis and fees start at less than $100, depending on the service that you need.

Do you build Websites?

We see the Website as an engine that drives your on-line marketing strategy.
An engine on its own, as with a car engine is not much use unless you know what you want to do with it!

The last 6 years have seen some amazing breakthrough approaches in marketing techniques on the web, it’s not about a Website anymore, that’s the destination, the critical issue is how you get people there, how you keep people there, and how you keep them coming back.

This is our expertise, using the Internet and its technologies to drive business results with marketing approaches.
(- so yes, we build Websites)

What industries do you build Websites for?

We focus only on Real Estate and associated industries (e.g. Mortgage Brokers and Title companies).

Do I own the Website?

You own the Website that we build for you. It’s yours, forever.

If you want us to work with a site you already have that was designed by someone else, including “template” sites, we may have problems as some web designers do not give up rights to the sites they design.

Additional problems may also arise if you do not actually own your own domain name.

How do I get started?

We have created a 'How to Get started' planning document that we make available to you before the initial project kick off. This will provide you with a whole range of items to think about and prepare.
To request a copy of this guide, click here

What are the ongoing costs of a Listing Agents site?

Once the site is built, it is yours.

You will need to pay to have the site on the Internet ("hosting") a monthly cost that will depend on how many communities you want to set up.

You may decide that you want continuous technical support to make sure the site is maintained and looked after.

You may want some marketing on the Internet to promote the neighborhood (but this will have a limited effect compared to the personal local efforts of yourselves) - so this is small.

We will give you the tools to make 'news' updates etc. your self, so keeping the site's front page and news section current is your opportunity to regularly communicate with residents

So, for a few hundred dollars a month, you have a community site as a marketing tool.
And remember, you may want to offer "paid for" sponsorship to your partners....this could mean the site actually pays for itself....!

How this compares to your other approaches depends very much on the benefits you get - see next section...

What are the on-going benefits of a Listing Agents site?

As the site becomes more and more used, your sponsorship really starts to pay back. Users of the site will see your name every time they use the site. They will associate your name with a valuable resource in the community. Both the users and the people you speak to will see you as someone who is generally interested in the community and someone who will promote the community as part of their house sale.

As you build more and more credibility and trust they will recognize you as the real estate agent for the neighborhood. You have no competition in this environment. You are the only Agent they see in this site. This site becomes something people use on a daily / weekly / monthly basis. How much would such exposure cost you with traditional methods?

Your initial investment in this site pays back more and more over time as more residents use it and as you promote it. This becomes a valuable resource to the community and an asset that you own, growing in value each year. What other marketing approaches can offer such a return on investment?

And of course, there is the unique opportunity to exclusively use a highly credible channel of communications direct to the community. You will be able to post news and information on the site and have direct access to all email addresses, personal profiles and do on - all to be used with the approval of the residents. Could you achieve this using other methods?

If I have a Listing Agents site will I still need to do traditional marketing?

When the Community Site is established, and as you use it as a tool to build relationships and visibility in the community, you will have more people regularly seeing your name and understanding what you do that you could possibly achieve with many times your current investment in traditional approaches.

Some of these benefits occur instantly - for example, you can immediately start talking to people about the community Website. This will help you create new relationships that you just cannot do currently. THIS ALONE will be enough to fully justify the investment in this type of solution for most Agents. But there's more...

Over time, as the site gets used, the benefit you will receive by users regularly getting visibility of your name and profession, will outweigh the postcard, flyers and other mechanisms you currently use. As we discovered, it is FAR MORE beneficial to actually change marketing programs to promote the community site, than to continue to sell the Real Estate message. WHY? Because, every time you get someone to use the community site, you are GUARANTEEING they will see your name, understand what you do and this is all exclusive to you - no other Agents invited!

So, over time, you may decide to change your marketing strategy to one that promotes value through your Community sites.

Can my site have Photos?

You can add as many photos as you want - all sites are custom designed to meet your needs and this is all set out in the scope of work that defines the work we will do for you.

How do you create a design I like?

All designs are highly subjective. However, we aim to delight you with the designs we create.
We achieve this by asking you to provide details on your likes and dislikes – especially other Websites you do and don't like.

What's the process for building a site?

We use a formal project framework to create your Website. This is organized as a 5-step process.

1. Kick off and planning
2. Content management and branding
3. Build
4. Review and edit
5. Go Live

What language and tools do you use to build my site?

We use DREAMWEAVER as the primary tool to build sites. To ensure optimal performance and quality, all site development and coding is also fine-tuned manually.

Our designers use the latest technology and tools to create effective fast and great looking sites.

What if I don't like my site after it's done?

As the project progresses, we have various check points for you to sign off work completed so far - particularly design work which can be very subjective. This will ensure that we catch any issues or problems well before the end of the project.

In the event of the site not meeting the functions specified in the statement of requirements, we will correct any problems.

Can I update the completed site myself?

Yes. However, if you’re not an experienced web designer, you should only attempt to make simple updates that we jointly agree, as it is easy to corrupt HTML and cause your site to fail.

How long will it take you to create my site?

The two most time consuming activities are

1. Content Management. Identifying and collecting content can take many weeks.
2. Building the site.

Once we have final content, we can usually build sites within a 2 to 3 week period.

What about changes to my site after it is up and running?

The content of your site is can be described as being either “static” (it rarely changes, e.g. community links), or “dynamic” (it can change regularly, e.g. listings).

Changes in dynamic data (e.g. listings) are all taken care of in our service package or through self serve applications that allow you to make the changes you need.
We provide at least 1 hour each month to make any changes in static data that you request.

How do I update my listings?

Our inventory manager application provides an easy mechanism for managing your listings inventory.

What type of content can I put on my site?

When we build your site we can place any content (within technical constraints) onto your Website. Obviously the more content you want, or the more data that content has (e.g. Video, or video virtual tours) the more power and resources your host server will require - it becomes a matter of cost.

How do you ensure my site appears in the search engine top results?

We have considerable experience of on-line marketing built up over the last few years and we continue to add to that knowledge each day.

Marketing on the web is more of a science than an art and search engine technology is getting much cleverer at detecting the true nature of sites. We take a highly professional approach to web marketing. We will not use any suspect techniques or techniques that may cause your site to end up being 'black listed'’ by search engines.
Some examples of spurious techniques include so called ‘gateway’ pages that are now readily recognized by many search engines and will result in their owning sites being black listed.

As with all things marketing, patience is required. The longer we promote your site and the more sustainable traffic that visits you site, the higher ranking you will achieve. We know how to drive QUALITY traffic to your site - this is the keystone of successful Website marketing.

Websites to help you SELL REAL ESTATE	Websites to help you FARM NEIGHBORHOODS	Website Promotion to INCREASE TRAFFIC
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