Online Marketing for Real Estate Agents is a must these days. Whether you’re helping your clients sell, buy, or both, you will benefit greatly by building a presence and a following online.

Sure, most people don’t buy real estate more than once every few years — at most, but you’ll still benefit by building relationships with your potential clients.

Remember, they know other people, and those other people might be looking for homes. It’s all about growing your circle of influence, and you’re probably doing plenty of that by way of networking.

But networking online is a whole new ballgame.

Here are a few tips:

Social Media

Yes, you should definitely use social media sites, from Twitter to LinkedIn to Facebook. But don’t stop there.

You Need a Blog

You need to be able to send people somewhere where you can get their contact info and follow up with them. And that means a website or a blog, preferably a website in the form of a blog.

Blogs aren’t just for sharing the minutiae of your life anymore. You can fill yours with information that is valuable to your clients.

Get your visitors’ contact info

But the most important part is that you capture your visitors’ contact information — and with a blog you have a number of options.

You can send your visitors to a so-called Squeeze page first, which is a page that basically gives people two options and only those two options:

Make them give up their contact info or leave.

So how do you get them to give up their contact information? You give them something of value in return. You might write a guide with tips on buying or selling a house. Or how to pick a real estate agent.

Then tell them they’ll get it for FREE if they only pay the “price” of admission, which is their email address and maybe their name as well. Don’t ask for much more than that.

The thing is that more you ask for, the fewer people will sign up. You can always get their phone number later when you offer them free consultations after they’ve had a chance to get to know you.

What to do once they are on your list?

And once you have them on your email list, follow up with them. Provide some value and news of available homes, plus tidbits about legal developments or whatever.

It has to relate to what you do, and it has to be valuable. The rest is up to you.

And if you’d like to find out more about how to market your real estate business online, just sign up for my special report (see top right) and I’ll send you the occasional tip or resource on online marketing for small business.

What you’ll find on MY site and list

Most of the info is not limited to real estate folks, but yo’ll find the down-to-earth instructions for how to get your website found online helpful nonetheless.

How to get targeted traffic

Just click here and send me an email, and we’ll take it from there…