This post is about how to set up your very own real estate investor website and tips for how to get traffic to that website.
If you have been flipping houses, or even just learning about flipping houses for a while, you know that finding the deals is the most important part.
If you don’t have leads coming in, you can’t make offers. If you can’t make offers, you can’t do deals.
And… if you don’t do deals, you sure as heck won’t make any money!
There are many ways to get deals. A lot of people spin their wheels going after low hanging fruit on the MLS and chasing foreclosures. YUCK! The competition for those is outrageous…which has caused a lot of people to throw their arms up in the air, and instead of waving them like they just don’t care, they shout “it’s impossible to get a deal!” Maybe you’ve been there…
It doesn’t have to be that way.
I prefer to market to motivated sellers for deals. There are lots of ways to market to motivated sellers, 57 of which I wrote about in this post: http://www.flippingjunkie.com/2012/57-motivated-seller-marketing-ideas.
It’s no secret that I get most of my deals from my house buying website. If you’ve read my Flipping Houses Exposed book, you’ll know that most of my leads and deals come from my house buying website.
That’s as true today as it was when I documented those 34 weeks of house flipping.
If it weren’t for my website generating my leads, I wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful at flipping houses as I am now. Other people see that and it’s not hard to put two and two together and think, “Geez, I really need to get a website for myself. Why am I always just chasing my tail with the MLS and foreclosures? Why am I still talking to myself?” 🙂
Some people have even put two and two and two together and just decided to ask me where they could get a great real estate investor website. I never really had a place to send them because I had built my own. It always bothered me to have to just tell people “good luck!”…knowing how difficult it is to find a qualified developer to build their site. Not only that, but one that would build it in a way to create maximum benefit.
How do you get maximum benefit?
Well, you have to have a site that has forms that ask the right questions of motivated sellers. You also need to have a site that is built to be SEO friendly so that you can more easily rank it in the search engines so that sellers can even find you (more on this in a bit).
So, fast forward a year or more, and thanks to the freedom that flipping houses has allowed me, I’ve created awesome websites for real estate investors!
I’ve put all of my years of buying houses using my website into these websites.
I’m very proud and super excited to finally be able to share them with you and help you to achieve the same kind of success as I have with them!
Check out this quick video I did about them:
>>> You can find out more about the websites by visiting: LeadPropeller.com <<<<
Of course, if you’d rather a single-page website that involves very minimal amount of coding, I do offer a free one here (though you would have to pay for hosting from whomever you decide to host it with).
You can set up a LeadPropeller website super fast because it doesn’t require any coding or FTP’ing or any knowledge of JavaScript, PHP, HTML, CSS, etc. (don’t worry if you don’t have any clue as to what those even are – you don’t need to know – your head is better filled with strategies to flip houses and make your way to financial freedom :))
You choose this when you sign up for a website. If you already own a domain name, there are options to use that for your site as well. I highly recommend a name that is something like ‘dannybuyshouses’ (with your name of course, if still available), or ‘webuysanantoniohouses’ (with your city or town of course), or ‘sellasanantoniohousefast’, or ‘sellyoursellantoniohouse’ etc. You get the idea. You could add in small words if those domains are taken (words like cash, fast, home, etc.).
We currently offer 4 different templates to choose from. Each of those templates is completely customizable also. The great thing about them is that they even look awesome. I don’t know about you, but I feel websites should be clean and uncluttered so that visitors know where to look to find out what your site is about and what they need to do to sell their house fast to you.
We built a custom editor that is super duper easy to use, that allows you to completely customize your site the way you want it. Change the color scheme in a few clicks, hide and unhide elements, change fonts, font colors, background colors, images, background images, change your links, add pages, remove pages, and more.
This really is the beauty of LeadPropeller. You can even change all occurrences of your phone number and email address on the website with the push of a button! How cool is that.
People will very little computer skills even were able to customize their site without watching any of the many tutorial videos (most under 2 minutes) to find out how to do things.
Once you have your site the way you want it, you save and click the ‘Publish’ button. Then when you type your domain in a browser, you will see your site live as the world will see it. The sites are mobile responsive, which means they will look and work great on any device, not just computers! This is an absolute must in this day in age.
That’s it. You can literally sign up and have your site ready to accept leads within as little as 30 minutes. Forget about finding a developer you trust and paying them thousands to build you a site that doesn’t have the experience of generating leads with his website for nearly the last decade.
That’s the big question now isn’t it. It’s not enough to just have a website, you have to get people to it or allow them to find it.
Don’t worry. I’ve though about this as well. It’s in both of our best interest to get your site to generate traffic and leads. If it doesn’t, you won’t likely keep it very long (there’s no contracts so you can cancel anytime – you should be worried if I tried to lock you into a long contract :)).
There are several ways to immediately start generating traffic to your house buying website. Here are a few of the quickest:
Do you pass out business cards, mail postcards or letters, place ads in newspapers and in the yellow pages, put up bandit signs, wear ‘I buy houses’ shirts, stick magnets on your car, pass out flyers, or any other form of marketing to buy houses? If so, you can add your web address to this marketing to give the potential sellers another way to contact you and/or find out more about you so that they will contact you. Not all people are comfortable just calling someone from an ad. You’d be wise to give them options.
Google Adwords and Bing Ads are a relatively inexpensive way to get your website on the first page of the search results. You pay only when somebody clicks on your ad. This is also a great way to learn which keywords actually convert (a conversion would be when someone goes to your site and fills out the form – if they don’t fill out the form and just leave, that would not be a conversion).
I hope you tell everybody you know that you buy houses and are always on the look out to buy more. If they don’t completely understand or would like a way to remember how to contact you, send them to your website so that they can bookmark it.
There are hundreds of social media websites these days. Don’t worry, you don’t need to sign up for all of them. 🙂 Stick to the most popular like Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. You can get the word out about your website which would generate some traffic and help you a little with ranking your website in the search engines.
A lot of people generate leads from craigslist. You should too. It’s free to post ads and you can put your website address in the ad.
There are a lot of free websites that you can post ads on for your website. While most probably won’t generate much traffic, some will. An added benefit is that this could also help you boost your rankings.
You may have quickly read through those, but I’m telling you that the first one is a big one. If you do other forms of marketing, having the website is going to help you tremendously by building credibility, creating rapport and trust, and allowing people to contact you without having to get out of their comfort zone. These things are HUGE!
I couldn’t possibly answer this in a blog post. There are a lot of factors that go into ranking a website high in the search results.
But, know that I built these sites with SEO in mind. I want your site to rank high so that you get more leads, keep your site because it is making you serious money, and tell all your friends about how they need one!
This puts you at an immediate advantage over others that have no optimization whatsoever on their sites. You think there is a lot of competition, but it’s not nearly as bad as you probably assume.
In addition to free checklists and tips that I am currently making for LeadPropeller site owners, I am going to be setting up a mastermind membership program to coach people through getting their site to rank well, as well as how to better use pay per click advertising.
I want you to succeed, and if you don’t believe that, you haven’t read much of this blog. We are working very hard to make sure LeadPropeller websites are the best and have a lot of new features coming out all the time. I hope you decide to join us in LeadPropeller.
Click here to get your LeadPropeller website (before someone else gets that great domain name!)
I’d love to hear your feedback on the video on the websites. Please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments below.
In addition to the release of these websites, I am considering changing up this blog again a little. I’m thinking about sharing more of what is going on in my own flipping business again. Melissa and I were talking about possibly sharing the details of our current flips and how we are systemizing our business more to run without our constant supervision of every little detail. If this sounds like something you would like to read more about, let us know in the comments.
As always, thanks for reading the blog!
Your flipping friend,
Danny Johnson
Comments (35)
Lead Propeller sites look FANTASTIC Danny, thanks for building and offering them! I’m on the fence about getting one, but I do know that I need to change some things on my current site in terms of SEO, and am about ready to move into ppc as well.
And I’d absolutely love to know more of the details of your deals. I’m just wholesaling right now but my sister has agreed to be my money partner when I find the right deal!
Dave,
Glad you like the sites. 🙂
I’m going to be doing some blogging on the LeadPropeller site about website promotion and SEO etc pretty soon, so you can get some free tips there if you want.
I like your site by the way and can understand being on the fence when you already have one set up. No problem.
You might be tempted to switch as I release more features and I have a big surprise project I have been working on for years that I will hopefully be able to release just after summer… that will probably sway you. But don’t feel pressured to get a site now. You can wait and see what I release and then make a decision. 😉
Danny
Danny
YES PLEASE on the flipping sharing!!!!!! I love flipping details pron 🙂
I miss it greatly on your site.
Hey Shane!
Long time no commenting.
Yeah, I was getting a little tired of the usual posts lately and felt like FlippingJunkie needed a swift kick in the pants to get the excitement up again.
(I had to change the spelling of your word – which I thought was hilarious – so that Google doesn’t get mad… just in case anyway.)
Danny
I would definitely love to hear more about your current deals as well. Your websites look great! I put together my own website about a year ago and it is ranking fairly well now. It certainly does not look as nice as your Lead Propellor sites, so I am trying to decide if it’s worth the potential shuffle of my current rankings to switch over to Lead Propellor. In any case, keep up the good work. Really enjoy following your blog.
Andrew,
That’s understandable. Of course, it’s always better sooner than later… 😉
Thanks for the input on the content changes for FlippingJunkie.
Danny-
Looks very interesting, and usually things are better when created by someone who is actually in the industry vs. outside looking in.
Thanks, Justin.
I agree…of course. When somebody knows how to code or knows internet marketing but doesn’t know the real estate industry, there are a lot of things they assume will work the same but just doesn’t. Motivated sellers looking to sell a house is a different customer than someone looking to buy a baseball cap from a website. 🙂
Danny
I am fairly new to real estate I am 24 years old from Nyc and have been consumed by creative investing. I know i need to have a website to generate leads I’m just unsure how yours works. Can I also have back links to my domain? Can i create my motivated sellers questionnaire? Also is hiring google Ad word for keywords and other ways to generate traffic a good idea?
Hey Andrew,
Great questions.
You can have backlinks to your domain. LeadPropeller itself does not generate those backlinks for you though. We provide training for you to show you how to better rank your site, get traffic to your site through other sources, and how to improve your site to better your conversions (traffic actually calling you or submitting the form and becoming a lead).
You currently cannot create your own questionnaire as ours are already built to get the right information and ask for it in an optimized way (I’ve been using a website for motivated seller leads for nearly 10 years and have tweaked my site to learn what works best).
Yes, using Adwords for generating traffic quickly can be useful to get your site seen and get leads. One of the major benefits of using them also is to determine which keyword phrases work best so that you know what to target with your SEO.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
Danny
Great thanks,
Im a little confused on the last part however regarding the Adwords and SEO. For example if my domain can be http://www.BuyHousesFastNewYork.com …. What you are saying is Google adwords can help me find a better domain to generate traffic ? Like If I give them a call they can advise me that ex:( CashForHomesNyc.com ) will be better suitable for my area?
Andrew,
Your domain can be buyhousesfastnewyork.com (if it’s available). Google Adwords is a pay per click advertising medium. They don’t suggest better domain names. You sign up for an account, specify keywords and keyword phrases you want your ad to show for, create your ads and set your bid amounts for what you are willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad to go to your website (which would be buyhousesfastnewyork.com if you got that one).
Here is a link to more information from Google on how Adwords works: http://www.google.com/adwords/how-it-works/ads-on-google.html
Hey Danny. I’ve been following you for some time now. I’ve always appreciated the great deal of info you share about your business and your progress so I just wanted to say thanks. I’ve decided to change my format as I’ve been using Freedomsoft since I was new but now I know I don’t need the bells and whistles. I’m going to use LeadPropeller for my seller website. My question is I noticed a spot at the bottom for investors to inquire about deals. Is it possible to add my properties to this website as well for buyers to look at? Or do you offer another website for that. And if not, who do you use for your buyer website? Thanks
Stephen,
Glad you have enjoyed the blog for so long. 🙂
Regarding LeadPropeller, we have a site for selling/renting houses and a site for wholesaling houses that we will be releasing very soon. I’m a firm believer in separating sites for these purposes. Please let me know if you have any further questions. We have a lot of really awesome features in the works for the sites and intend to be always improving them.
Danny
Hi Danny,
Your Lead Propeller site looks great! My husband also can do web design but just doesn’t have the time to get one up and going. We were wondering if there is any way we could put video testimonials in the site? Or once we have it if we alter/add to it if need be??
Thanks!
Jessica,
Yes, we have a section on each template where you can embed a youtube video. So if you have a video, you can upload it to youtube, get the embed code and put it on your site very easily. You can also go back and change it whenever you want. 🙂
Danny
Info is good Danny and being able to learn from what you tell us on how you are doing your deals in detail would really be great. I have been here in San Antonio for 2 years now & I’m always gonna just do it but keep holding myself back from lack of funds to really get started & the lack of website which you are saying is needed. and just really know where to start, all the details that need to be kept in line, I don’t want to make mistakes that get me into trouble so therefore I don’t do anything except study & try to learn more, I’m just frozen it seems. Well now I’ve got maybe a small family coming into my life from overseas & now there is my motivation to get my A## in gear and get started.. So Thanks for any good info that you provide. Michael.
Michael,
Thanks. That really can be difficult to get through. What I always recommend is just taking small steps. Take just a little action at a time and slowly get yourself out of your comfort zone and make things happen. You only need to know enough to do that first little step. You can start by trying to find some motivated sellers by doing a little marketing and then contacting some serious investors in town (I happen to be in San Antonio :)) and see if they would be willing interested in the leads. Then you can move up to wholesaling where you start getting them under contract and just assigning the contract. Then eventually, you will be buying, fixing and selling.
Danny,
Thanks for posting this article. We usually stick to MLS and auctions, and have started to drive for dollars. It is tough! I don’t know if a website will generate as much business as the MLS does, but it certainly is worth looking into. I will check out leadpropeller and get back to you.
Thank you.
Josh,
Websites can certainly provide a great number of leads (as many as a couple per day if you rank highly for a lot of keywords). Of course it depends a lot on the size of your market and the amount of competition that is online.
Just like with anything else, it takes work. But the nice thing about it is that once you get it building momentum it doesn’t require a whole lot of upkeep.
Just another lead source. Another line in the water.
Danny
Great tips! It’s super important to also get traffic right away so all the effort of making the site wasn’t for anything. I’d never thought of making a craigslist post for it, though.
Thanks. Yeah, Craigslist can be good for certain types of ads.
Wow, I had no idea how valuable a website was to getting great leads.Thanks!
I’ve been doing most of what you listed there to generate traffic to my site except PPC, thought I’ve heard of it and will definitely try it soon.Thanks for the good read!
Your websites look great! I have had my website for a year or so and I think that it is ranking alright. I wish that I would have known about Lead Propellor sites before I created mine thru another company. If I enter a new market I would consider using your company. Also I really enjoyed reading this blog post .
Great. Hope you decide to try us out soon.
Danny
I currently have a domain name with Bluehost…..what would be the cost on your end if I transferred that over?
Are you asking the cost to transfer to LeadPropeller? If yes, there is not cost to transfer the domain. You just have to pay the normal cost of signing up for LeadPropeller as specified on the pricing page.
If you are referring to using the free website on this page, you would just need to upload the pages to your blue host account.
I am wondering if there is any data on what websites buyers use when it comes time to search for property. Most of our clients say they use the large national sites like Zillow and Homes (dot) com. They say they rarely use local agency websites to search for property because they worry they are only seeing the listings sold by that agency, rather than seeing all the MLS properties for the area. Has anyone heard similar? Danny, do you know if there is any data out there regarding this?
That seems to be the trend. Our LeadPropeller seller sites are more for having a way to quickly show listing of houses other investors have for rent and for sale so that links to those can be provided on other marketing and advertising. This is helpful for investors that owner finance and sell the houses themselves.
Great Read! Your website is amazing, such a great deal for businesses. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you, Mary Beth! Glad you think so.
If you don’t have deals coming in, you can’t make offers. If you can’t make offers, you cant’t do deals! I absolutely agree on this article, really impressive and very informative. Thanks to the owner. This is a good insights, worth sharing
Thanks, Theresa!
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