Internet Business Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

A local real estate contacted my web design company AfterHim Media and wanted to put up a website about him selling real estate. I told him that was a great idea, millions of other real estate salesman and saleswomen have websites. I emphasized the fact that MILLIONS of other websites about real estate salespeople could be found in the farthest reaches of the internet.

He was pretty surprised that my search for “Realtor” yielded 34 million results. That doesn’t include salespeople who are not actually “Realtors”.

I helped him realize that putting up another bad website about a boring guy isn’t going to get him any leads or help him sell anything, including his image. I told him about another route that he could take however, a blog.

He has heard of blogs, and knew that his cousin had something on MySpace, but he didn’t want to start a “journal”. I started by explaining how blogs were just websites that made it easy for someone to add content and it helped them organize it in a meaningful way.

He was finally starting to understand. To put it into perspective, I showed him this site and explained that although it doesn’t look much like a blog, it was, Wordpress in fact.

With this new knowledge he was willing to give it a shot. I designed a pretty simple layout for him also using Wordpress and put some bookmarks on his computer as to the login page and a few simple tutorials. Then I gave him an overview of how to post and good posting techniques.

What this will do for him is two things:

1. Define his expertise. If you write a regular column on auto repair in the Consumer Reports magazine, you are an expert whether you realize it or not. Many people believe the same thing about the internet. If you are writing your own website, you are the expert and nobody can tell you different.

2. Allow him to have something to attract new clients. Through well written articles he will be proud to show his potential clients an article that he has written. He will also have new clients finding him through his blog. Normally these people wouldn’t contact him, but because he is an “expert” (see #1) they contact him to get advice or an appraisal.

Just by having a blog for 3 months, this particular client has already closed one deal (he’s selling a house) for an out-of-town investor who has owned this particular house for 3 years and needs some cash!

Not bad for only 3 months and 18 articles!

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