The “NEW” 3 Most Important Words In Real Estate

Location, Location, Location are no longer the three words that are most important in real estate. That distinction is now been awarded to conversion, conversion, conversion!

While the catch phrases are resounding…you know them, Web 2.0, Real Estate 2.0, blogosphere, RE.net…there is a reason we all are engaging in this new technological era. That reason is simply to make money. Let’s not be ashamed of that fact but let’s not lose sight of it either.

While all of the aforementioned components of the new world are important, they amount to nothing if we are not making money. Maybe some aspire to change professions and become journalists, maybe some have decided to abandon their real estate endeavors to save the whales or stop global warming, the rest of us are blogging to make money.

Whether that revenue is derived from advertising sales, real estate sales, seminar enrollments, ebooks, or widgets, we are here to increase the bottom line. Simultaneously we all know we need eyeballs in order for any of that to happen. We all have our own techniques to drive traffic but once the controversial article is written, or last month’s market report divulged…what’s left is conversion. If you are not converting then you are not making any money. If you are not trying to convert..well then you are in real trouble.

Have you ever thrown a party and have no one show up? I think you would agree that it would be kind of embarrassing. What would be even much worse would be for you to throw a party, have 1,000 guests show up and to have them eat your food, dance on your carpet, run amok around your yard, then leave without so much as a thank you, never to be heard from again.

Is your blog throwing that kind of party? Are people showing up, reading your content, sniffing around and leaving without so much as even a comment or a opt-in? If so, you my friend have a conversion problem. either that or your SEO is fantastic and your site stinks…but that’s a whole other problem and article we’ll need you to read.

What is Visitor Conversion?

Conversion is the sales process of getting your blog’s visitors to heed your call to action and actually doing something you are leading them to do. Some common conversions may involve:

• a visitor reading a particular article or page on your site, web page
• downloading an ebook or file
• signing up for your RSS feed, newsletter or email list
• asking for more information on something product you are featuring
• buying something…that’s the end game isn’t it?

You can easily figure out your blogs conversion rate. You can take your conversion rate in different intervals depending upon your various calls to action. for sales you may want a monthly conversion, for downloads you may want a weekly conversion, and for email sign ups you may want a daily conversion. The choice is yours. I like to take a daily conversion on free downloads and a weekly conversion on sales.

The mathematical formula for calculating conversion rate is:

Conversion Rate (%) = Number of Sales*
Number of Visitors

(you can substitute “sales” with downloads, opt-ins, whatever you are measuring)

For example, if you get 1,000 unique visitors to your blog in a day, and 25 of them opt-in to your newsletter you have achieved a conversion rate of 2.5% for subscribers on that given day. As I previously stated, you can take a conversion sample based on your duration variable as you desire.

The most important thing to remember is that you indeed can measure your conversions and THAT should be your desired goal. Traffic is essential for the success of your blog and converting that traffic is essential to your bottomline.

So, how does all of this affect my real estate business. Unless you are running a social blog or commentary, an article on your kittens fur is not really going to make you any money…that is not if it isn’t tied into an overall plan to laser target the demographic you are trying to reach.

Real estate is about selling houses and as a real estate agent, you don’t get paid until the deals actually close. So it is absolutely imperative that you are able to quantify and track your conversion rate. We have read on many websites that an acceptable conversion rate for real estate agent websites is 2-5%. When this rate is discussed, they are talking about mere leads!

If you are only generating 2-5% conversion on leads, you have a lot of work to do to convert those leads into sales. Capture and conversion are two very distinct and separate items. While is may be good to “capture” 2-5% of the visitors on your site as leads, what are you doing to increase your conversion rate which will increase your revenue?

An upcoming article we are researching is going to talk about the methods of increasing your conversion rate. In the interim, it might be beneficial for today’s Web 2.0 real estate agent to take a look at their present conversion rate.