Why You Aren’t Succeeding Online: It’s Not Your Fault

By Mike ParkerPrint Article Print Article

online-webRISMEDIA, May 25, 2009-The statistics are so numbingly familiar that you are sick of hearing them: “87% of residential home sales involve the Internet; 92% of Internet buyers find their agent through a search engine; 90% of all agents feel that they do not receive value from their websites; 880 million real estate-related searches are conducted monthly just on Google…” All this is true, but it doesn’t help you figure out why you can’t succeed online.

You’re ready to junk the whole Internet thing and take up advertising on matchbook covers, until you remember that no one smokes anymore. You’d advertise in the Rocky Mountain News, but it went out of business, just like the Seattle Post Intelligencer. You went to look for advice in the Detroit Free Press, but they don’t deliver weekdays, anymore. You tried to check out the Yellow Pages, then you saw your kid looking something up on Google and you remembered that no one uses the phone book anymore. What’s a real estate professional to do?

Does this sound like anyone you know?

Recently, I was reviewing a major blog, and came across a world-class blogger bemoaning her lack of success online and roasting anyone who stated they were experts in online things. She wrote that she “never had any meaningful return from her website, had never got even one lead until recently when she did it herself, and had never sold a home from an online (anything).” She was junking her page of listings on an aggregate site, she said, and going 100% to blogging.

She has to be the least qualified person to give advice about Internet marketing possible (after all, never having sold even ONE home from her web efforts, all she knows is failure!), but there she was, advising people what to do online. I posted on her thread and offered to give her the means to become an Internet Realtor, if she would only write about it after she was successful.

You might have thought I had insulted her virtue, propounded slashing real estate commissions, or said that FSBO was the way to go in selling one’s home from her reaction. I got chapter and verse of curmudgeonly bite-back. Bottom line, she still isn’t an Internet Realtor and I didn’t get it across to her that she has to become one or face leaving the business. She is so frustrated with her lack of success that she wants to dump the entire online marketing concept. But worse, people will follow this person’s advice-and just like her, they will fail as well online.

Why is the industry so frustrated with the Internet?

It is because the Internet’s promise is not realized by over 90% of agents and brokers. This is so for several important reasons which are as follows:

First, agents and brokers are experts at selling and listing homes, not in navigating the Internet, knowing how to generate leads from the Internet, or knowing what makes Internet visitors become prospects. With the endless array of options as to where to place one’s listings, most agents couldn’t tell you where it is most important to place your listing, other than the local MLS. It may surprise you that data continuously shows that-rather than some single purpose destination website–Google, Yahoo and MSN are the places most folks search for homes and agents; in fact, 92% of Internet buyers find their agents through one of those sources.

Second, a deep and profound cynicism exists in many agents’ minds as to anything they cannot touch, smell or feel, and Internet marketing is often just that. Unless you have the ability to actually see what vendors are doing for you, you can’t know that it’s being done (that’s why we have a multi-million dollar information system our clients can access, for example-so they can actually monitor what we are doing for them). That cynicism, when coupled with a lack of transparency, makes much Internet marketing rife with scammers, who perpetuate the cynicism. “Work at home and make money;” “FROM: International Lottery Headquarters: Congratulations! You are eligible for a $2.7 million jackpot! Just send all your personal info, including bank account to…; “Dear Friend, I am in (name country) and have US $12,000,000 in account of my husband, who has died. I need your help…” We all see these kinds of things daily. They all add to the perception that the Internet is trivial.

Third, huge advances in effectiveness have occurred in the last year or two and many agents tried processes that were not as good then as they are now or that have been exposed as ineffective. The understanding of how it all works together is miles ahead of where it was even four years ago.

Before, for example, we were only concerned with whether we could get folks to the first page of the search engines, not with what happened then. We now know that getting there is just the first step: visitors must be incented to register so they can be properly developed. What many agents fail to recognize is what the prospect needs when they go online and when to give it to them through that online experience, because such things are not what an agent has been trained in how to provide.

This is not accomplished by guesswork, but by good software and product management, monitoring of visitor behavior, and intelligent adjustment. The advantage a professional online marketing services company for Realtors brings is that they are expert in all those things and will help you to give the consumer exactly what that consumer really wants exactly when that consumer wants it. You are not an expert at how to obtain quality leads from the Internet.

True story: two agents are in the same city. Both receive about the same amount of traffic. Agent A allows her online marketing firm to implement proper marketing onto her site so that the site will generate leads for her. Agent B ignores the advice from that same online marketing firm and changes things all the time on his site because Agent B thinks he knows best about online marketing. The difference in results is profound: Agent A generates 100+ leads a month from her site and makes over $200,000 a year in commissions from those very leads because she converts a high percentage of those leads into sales.

Agent B generates few leads and few sales, yet is convinced to this day that he knows best. Respectfully, please consider this: Agents are not trained how to succeed online. Agents are trained to sell houses, not how to generate leads from the Internet. That’s why two agents, same town, same online marketing services firm, can have completely different results: one takes the advice she pays for and refuses to listen to self-proclaimed experts, and one doesn’t.

Are you trying hard, but failing?

To illustrate how even those trying can fail abjectly, last weekend, my partner, the lovely Donna, saw that a house she has long admired was for sale as we drove by it. The sign gave the agent and the brokerage. “Let’s go online and look it up!” she said, excitedly. I am pretty savvy as to how to find things online, but I couldn’t find this house in over 25 minutes of diligent looking. Why? 1) The agent did not have his own website; 2) the brokerage site had that ubiquitous mandatory entry page of what you are looking for-you know, price, bedrooms, bathrooms, etc?

As I didn’t know the price, didn’t know the bedrooms, etc., I couldn’t find the listing. I finally guessed at the market price and searched manually through all those listings until I found the house we wanted to see. Donna said to me: “I would have given up by now!” –and that is precisely the point. Most agents don’t have their own sites, don’t have user-friendly sites, and for certain, do not have search engine-friendly sites. All agents need all of those things. Most consumers will not waste half an hour at a site trying to find what they came looking for.

They will go to another agent’s site, instead. Consumers are Internet savvy even if you aren’t, and they want instant gratification, not 30 minutes of trying to navigate a website that is completely unintuitive and frustrating.

What can I do?

You can take control of your own success. Your own trade group tells you that 87% of residential home sales involve the Internet, but if you are like the curmudgeon blogger mentioned earlier and you won’t believe anyone nor take any positive actions to make 87% of prospects find you, you’re going to fail.

When it is all said and done, we can highlight successful agents and brokers weekly until the cows come home, but if you won’t utilize the successful methods used by successful online agents, you’ll never succeed there. If you want to let others sell the 87% of buyers searching online for homes, just keep doing it the way you are doing it, and in a few years, you’ll be enjoying a new career. It won’t be possible to succeed in real estate without a strong Internet presence. You’re not alone; good help is available to make it happen for you. All it takes is your commitment and the common sense to take good advice.

About the Author: Mike Parker (mparker@theblackwatercg.com) specializes in online marketing services for Realtors® and real estate professionals. Obtain a free copy of his booklet today that shows you what you need to do and to have to maximize the benefit of the Internet—”REAL SEO Explained” by writing to realseo@compassinternetsystems.com. It will be sent to you free and no one will call you. To request a free review of your website to determine if it can be found by internet buyers and if it is set up properly to be effective click here and it will be evaluated free.

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