Make Your Website a Real Estate Marketing Tools

In the last article of this series, we went into setting up a simple email campaign to warm your prospects up and get them excited about becoming private investors. In this article, we talk about another important marketing tool, and that is your website. A website becomes your own capital communications app or your online marketing hub that can do 90% of the work in pre-qualifying your interested prospects.A lot of capital raisers out there get frustrated because they are juggling too many things. On top of trying to manage their portfolio, they’ve got full-time work, kids, family, and a lot of other stuff on the go. Managing fundraising on top of everything else can be overwhelming.The good news is, when you have a well-developed, investor-focused website, it becomes your marketing hub and does the bulk of the pre-qualifying work for you.

The capital raising website focuses 100% on communicating with and educating prospective investors. It needs to be completely focused on this one thing. What you don’t want is a general website covering a wide range of topics with a single tab that says “Investing. A whole bunch of other tabs will only distract your audience from your most important message.For example, back in my lease option days, I created one website devoted to attracting and communicating with rent-to-buy prospects and a separate website devoted to communicating with investors. If you have other ventures other than real estate investing, I highly recommend you do the same.

The website name is what people will type into the address field, like google so you want something that’s easy to remember. Some people like to get fancy and come up with a cool-sounding business name, but the most important thing is to make it memorable.When I first started raising capital, I decided I wanted a name that sounded impressive, so I came up with the URL “investmentalliance.com.” I soon realized that nobody cares, and unless you’re a big brand like Coca-Cola, people don’t remember what you’ve called yourself.For mom-and-pop investors like us, it’s always best to keep it simple. If you’ve been working with the list of prospective investors as we taught in the previous lessons, what’s the one thing people already know about you?It’s your actual name, right? That’s what they will remember the easiest. So, if it’s still possible, try to get “yourname.com” as your URL.It’s okay to go with a URL that ends in .ca if you are in Canada, but we highly recommend you use a .com because that’s what people are used to.You can quickly check whether a URL is available by heading to a site like GoDaddy.com. Type your name into the search box without spaces, and the site will do a quick search and tell you if it’s still free.People with a common name may need to get creative. It’s unlikely a name like Joe Smith will be available, so you may need to switch it up a little and add something to it, like Joe Smith Investments, for example.Difficult-to-spell or hard-to-pronounce names may also need some work. If you’ve got a challenging name that’s difficult to remember, you might want to use a nickname that most people know you by.

You want to have a good mix of content on your website, but videos receive four times more engagement than the same information in text, so get ready to create lots of videos. Here’s a few more content pages you will need to add to your website

You need visitors to opt-in to your email list for regular updates. However, people need a good reason to hand over their email address, so provide something of value to encourage signup.Your visitors are interested in investing and real estate, so they are probably searching for financial freedom. A lead magnet that fits within that theme will attract the most signups.

Your website is your marketing hub, so you want to have all your marketing material published there. Content to include will be video logs, electronic newsletters, and blog posts.The goal is for all your prospects to eventually end up on your website, so you control the conversation. A good website will show you as a professional, but it will also get people curious and learning more about you after they’ve discovered you on Facebook or Google, or wherever else you have an online presence. It’s also where they will do a lot of their due diligence when deciding if you are a good fit for their investment goals.You should fill your website with great content to keep people reading and learning more about you and your business. Once their interest is piqued, they will want to inquire further and book an appointment, so you will need an online calendar where they can do that.An online calendar makes it convenient for visitors to book a call or an appointment as it will automatically list all your available dates and notify you when an appointment has been set. Interactive online calendars are just one of the services we offer our clients, so be sure to check with us to learn more about how to get your website going.

The exercise for this lesson is to go and find your website name using the guidelines discussed above. Buy it so you own it and have control over your online presence. Once you’ve started filling out your website with content that gets people curious and booking, you will need a million-dollar presentation. This is one area of real estate capital raising where people make a lot of mistakes. We show you how to create a presentation that does most of the heavy lifting for you and gets people enrolled as investors.