Thinking about putting a website for your Michigan real estate investing business?
1. Have a physical address on your website – prominently displayed on every single page. In this age of identity theft, online scams, and spam – if you want somebody to believe anything you are saying – make some darn effort. O.K.?
Work from home? Don’t have an office? So what? So get a Mail Box Etc / UPS Store thing going on for you. It is only $10 per month and you get a physical address. Putting your home address on the Internet is definitely NOT a good idea.
2. Have a fax number on your website – believe it or not, even in this age of Internet and YouTube; billions of faxes fly around merrily. I get tons of faxes every month. Real estate agents and asset management firms still live on faxes.
You can get a cheap fax machine from Staples for around $40 and if you are thinking only getting incoming faxes – you can get an Efax account.
The way Efax works is you get a regular fax number, but somebody faxes you something, instead of a machine spitting out the fax – you get an email from Efax with the faxed document as a PDF file.
Very Cool… I have both – my fax number on this website is an Efax number that I had for over 4 years now. You can read more about Efax here here
3. Use big fonts – I have no idea why you would want to make my eyes water trying to read your size 2 font? Make it BIG, easy on the eyes and we will read it.
4. People, People – use paragraphs. I screw this up sometime too, late on the night but it is very hard to read rambling, 97 line long blocks of text. Break it up.
5. Make Peace With Your Small Shop - O.K. I know for a fact that you are a ONE person shop running out of your basement, so please don’t use the words like “We are a group of real estate investors who have decided….”.
I use to do that a lot, but luckily for me, realized one day how stupid it all sounded. I mean nobody in Michigan really cares if you are big or small – as long as you deliver on what you said you would.
6. Put the name of the cities that you are doing this in Michigan way top on every page. So say you want to flip houses in Livonia, Garden City, and Westland – those three names should be displayed every where on your website.
Obviously you have no interest in Grand Rapids so why not you are making it easier for the people who come to your website to discover that?
7. Take pride in your website. I don’t why most of them seem to be pleading “Oh God why do I have to do this?” look to them.
Hire a high school kid at your local Craigs List Gigs section or ask anybody in your life who is going to High School to find you a resident geek. Every High School in America has at least 1. Pay them well. Treat them good. They will do whole website thing for you in couple of hours and then you are done for a very long time.
Don’t spend too much time thinking about the design about the website. Instead think about who is going to come to your website and how can you help them.
That is what a business website is all about – helping people with something that they are looking for. Whether it is looking for people who can become money partners for you, buy houses from you, are in foreclosure and looking for somebody to solve that headache for them via a quick short sale – they have a challenge and they want some help.
And that is what your website should be all about – helping your website visitors.
Don't think clicks.
Think people.