This post is about how to set up your very own real estate investor website and tips for how to get traffic to that website.
Why You Need A House Buying Website
If you have been flipping houses, or even just learning about flipping houses for a while, you know that finding the deals is the most important part.
If you don’t have leads coming in, you can’t make offers. If you can’t make offers, you can’t do deals.
And… if you don’t do deals, you sure as heck won’t make any money!
There are many ways to get deals. A lot of people spin their wheels going after low hanging fruit on the MLS and chasing foreclosures. YUCK! The competition for those is outrageous…which has caused a lot of people to throw their arms up in the air, and instead of waving them like they just don’t care, they shout “it’s impossible to get a deal!” Maybe you’ve been there…
It doesn’t have to be that way.
I prefer to market to motivated sellers for deals. There are lots of ways to market to motivated sellers, 57 of which I wrote about in this post: http://www.flippingjunkie.com/2012/57-motivated-seller-marketing-ideas.
Bonus: Click Here to Download Danny’s Top 5 Motivated Seller Marketing Methods Guide pdf that will show you, in awesome detail how to use 5 different marketing methods to generate great leads consistently.
I Get Most of My Deals From My Real Estate Investor House Buying Website
It’s no secret that I get most of my deals from my house buying website. If you’ve read my Flipping Houses Exposed book, you’ll know that most of my leads and deals come from my house buying website.
That’s as true today as it was when I documented those 34 weeks of house flipping.
If it weren’t for my website generating my leads, I wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful at flipping houses as I am now. Other people see that and it’s not hard to put two and two together and think, “Geez, I really need to get a website for myself. Why am I always just chasing my tail with the MLS and foreclosures? Why am I still talking to myself?” 🙂
Some people have even put two and two and two together and just decided to ask me where they could get a great real estate investor website. I never really had a place to send them because I had built my own. It always bothered me to have to just tell people “good luck!”…knowing how difficult it is to find a qualified developer to build their site. Not only that, but one that would build it in a way to create maximum benefit.
How do you get maximum benefit?
Well, you have to have a site that has forms that ask the right questions of motivated sellers. You also need to have a site that is built to be SEO friendly so that you can more easily rank it in the search engines so that sellers can even find you (more on this in a bit).
So, fast forward a year or more, and thanks to the freedom that flipping houses has allowed me, I’ve created awesome websites for real estate investors!
I’ve put all of my years of buying houses using my website into these websites.
I’m very proud and super excited to finally be able to share them with you and help you to achieve the same kind of success as I have with them!
Introducing LeadPropeller!
Check out this quick video I did about them:
>>> You can find out more about the websites by visiting: LeadPropeller.com <<<<
Of course, if you’d rather a single-page website that involves very minimal amount of coding, I do offer a free one here (though you would have to pay for hosting from whomever you decide to host it with).
How To Setup Your Website Within As Little As 30 Minutes
You can set up a LeadPropeller website super fast because it doesn’t require any coding or FTP’ing or any knowledge of JavaScript, PHP, HTML, CSS, etc. (don’t worry if you don’t have any clue as to what those even are – you don’t need to know – your head is better filled with strategies to flip houses and make your way to financial freedom :))
The Setup Basically Involves Just 3 Simple Steps
Step 1: Choose your domain name
You choose this when you sign up for a website. If you already own a domain name, there are options to use that for your site as well. I highly recommend a name that is something like ‘dannybuyshouses’ (with your name of course, if still available), or ‘webuysanantoniohouses’ (with your city or town of course), or ‘sellasanantoniohousefast’, or ‘sellyoursellantoniohouse’ etc. You get the idea. You could add in small words if those domains are taken (words like cash, fast, home, etc.).
Step 2: Choose your template
We currently offer 4 different templates to choose from. Each of those templates is completely customizable also. The great thing about them is that they even look awesome. I don’t know about you, but I feel websites should be clean and uncluttered so that visitors know where to look to find out what your site is about and what they need to do to sell their house fast to you.
Step 3: Customize your site
We built a custom editor that is super duper easy to use, that allows you to completely customize your site the way you want it. Change the color scheme in a few clicks, hide and unhide elements, change fonts, font colors, background colors, images, background images, change your links, add pages, remove pages, and more.
This really is the beauty of LeadPropeller. You can even change all occurrences of your phone number and email address on the website with the push of a button! How cool is that.
People will very little computer skills even were able to customize their site without watching any of the many tutorial videos (most under 2 minutes) to find out how to do things.
Once you have your site the way you want it, you save and click the ‘Publish’ button. Then when you type your domain in a browser, you will see your site live as the world will see it. The sites are mobile responsive, which means they will look and work great on any device, not just computers! This is an absolute must in this day in age.
That’s it. You can literally sign up and have your site ready to accept leads within as little as 30 minutes. Forget about finding a developer you trust and paying them thousands to build you a site that doesn’t have the experience of generating leads with his website for nearly the last decade.
But, how do I get traffic to it?
That’s the big question now isn’t it. It’s not enough to just have a website, you have to get people to it or allow them to find it.
Don’t worry. I’ve though about this as well. It’s in both of our best interest to get your site to generate traffic and leads. If it doesn’t, you won’t likely keep it very long (there’s no contracts so you can cancel anytime – you should be worried if I tried to lock you into a long contract :)).
How To Immediately Get Traffic To Your Website
There are several ways to immediately start generating traffic to your house buying website. Here are a few of the quickest:
- Include your website in your other marketing
Do you pass out business cards, mail postcards or letters, place ads in newspapers and in the yellow pages, put up bandit signs, wear ‘I buy houses’ shirts, stick magnets on your car, pass out flyers, or any other form of marketing to buy houses? If so, you can add your web address to this marketing to give the potential sellers another way to contact you and/or find out more about you so that they will contact you. Not all people are comfortable just calling someone from an ad. You’d be wise to give them options.
- Use pay per click advertising
Google Adwords and Bing Ads are a relatively inexpensive way to get your website on the first page of the search results. You pay only when somebody clicks on your ad. This is also a great way to learn which keywords actually convert (a conversion would be when someone goes to your site and fills out the form – if they don’t fill out the form and just leave, that would not be a conversion).
- Word of mouth
I hope you tell everybody you know that you buy houses and are always on the look out to buy more. If they don’t completely understand or would like a way to remember how to contact you, send them to your website so that they can bookmark it.
- Post on social media
There are hundreds of social media websites these days. Don’t worry, you don’t need to sign up for all of them. 🙂 Stick to the most popular like Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. You can get the word out about your website which would generate some traffic and help you a little with ranking your website in the search engines.
- Post ads on craigslist.org
A lot of people generate leads from craigslist. You should too. It’s free to post ads and you can put your website address in the ad.
- Post free ads on other free classified ad sites
There are a lot of free websites that you can post ads on for your website. While most probably won’t generate much traffic, some will. An added benefit is that this could also help you boost your rankings.
You may have quickly read through those, but I’m telling you that the first one is a big one. If you do other forms of marketing, having the website is going to help you tremendously by building credibility, creating rapport and trust, and allowing people to contact you without having to get out of their comfort zone. These things are HUGE!
How do I get my website to rank higher in the search engines though?
I couldn’t possibly answer this in a blog post. There are a lot of factors that go into ranking a website high in the search results.
But, know that I built these sites with SEO in mind. I want your site to rank high so that you get more leads, keep your site because it is making you serious money, and tell all your friends about how they need one!
This puts you at an immediate advantage over others that have no optimization whatsoever on their sites. You think there is a lot of competition, but it’s not nearly as bad as you probably assume.
In addition to free checklists and tips that I am currently making for LeadPropeller site owners, I am going to be setting up a mastermind membership program to coach people through getting their site to rank well, as well as how to better use pay per click advertising.
I want you to succeed, and if you don’t believe that, you haven’t read much of this blog. We are working very hard to make sure LeadPropeller websites are the best and have a lot of new features coming out all the time. I hope you decide to join us in LeadPropeller.
Click here to get your LeadPropeller website (before someone else gets that great domain name!)
How About More Real Life Flip Details?
I’d love to hear your feedback on the video on the websites. Please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments below.
In addition to the release of these websites, I am considering changing up this blog again a little. I’m thinking about sharing more of what is going on in my own flipping business again. Melissa and I were talking about possibly sharing the details of our current flips and how we are systemizing our business more to run without our constant supervision of every little detail. If this sounds like something you would like to read more about, let us know in the comments.
As always, thanks for reading the blog!
Your flipping friend,
Danny Johnson
Bonus: Click Here to Download Danny’s Top 5 Motivated Seller Marketing Methods Guide pdf that will show you, in awesome detail how to use 5 different marketing methods to generate great leads consistently.
Next: 3 Biggest Mistakes Investors Make With Lead Generating Websites
