If you read Real Estate Internet Marketing In a Nutshell, no doubt you left either feeling a) like you couldn’t believe how utterly basic and maybe even banal the points I made were, (Holy Suffering Self-evident, Batman) or b) hungry for walnuts.
Imagine your surprise now when you discover that, as seemingly small and frail as that article was, it was nevertheless pregnant with yet another small and frail article. And so, following the usual twenty-four hour gestation period of the blog post species, here we go.
One of the two main points from the earlier pregnant article was this: “Get people who want to buy and sell real estate to find you.”
Notice we didn’t say “Getting people to find you.” The phrase “who want to buy and sell real estate” is what we mean by qualified traffic. If a person who doesn’t want to buy or sell real estate visits your site, that’s just traffic.
Don’t get me wrong. Traffic all by itself is not a bad thing, especially if your web site is new and you’re just starting to get some. At an early enough stage having even unqualified traffic will encourage you a lot more than having no traffic. However, if you’re interested in making money, eventually you need to start getting more qualified traffic.
What is qualified traffic? Well, think about the whole universe of people poking around on the Internet, fellow bloggers, etc., versus that subgroup of people who just entered “Yourtown Real Estate” into a search engine. Naturally the latter group is much more qualified to buy.
By far the best sources of qualified traffic, therefore, are:
- New people reaching you from real estate related searches.
- People who reached you from real estate related searches in the past, who are returning. (That’s a whole new subject in itself, getting visitors to come back to your site).
The fact that searches are qualification tools is what makes Internet Marketing such a wonderful investment. Even pay-per-click is completely efficient compared to mailing, for example. Consider, would you rather pay $1.00 to mail to one person at random, or $3.00 to get your message in front of one person searching for “Yourtown Real Estate”. Sure, if you’re doing a mailing, you’d try to narrow down the list, but it’s hard to see it ever getting as good as the list of people who are actively looking for your product right now.
