Are You A Dinosaur? Establish Your Web Presence Now

If you are a wholesaler, a landlord, or a rehabber you need to have a web presence. More and more people are turning to the web to find all of their goods. I recently read that between 66 and 75% of homebuyers found their home by searching on the internet. Almost ¾ of all the buyers out there found their home by looking on the internet. They still may have gone to a realtor afterwards, but they found their house first looking on the internet and then went to a realtor to help secure the deal. If you are not on the internet, if you don't have an internet presence what are you throwing away? You are throwing away ¾ of the buyers that are out there. See the internet is fast becoming the medium of choice to locate housing. Why? It is fast, easy and available right in people's home.
As an investor, if you don't have a web presence and not advertising on the internet then you are missing out on a major opportunity. The web is a great way to build up your identity and add to your brand recognition. It also gives you credibility with a seller. You are able to build up more of your brand and your identity once they get to your website. There are a lot of people that like to go to your website first. I'm one of those. If I'm looking for a product of service the first thing I look for is do they have a website. The internet becomes that non threatening place to get more information. And it is an easy place that you can provide a whole lot of information. On the internet you can let all these people come and visit and easily get as much information as they want. Plus you can give them inside and outside color pictures of the house and all of the information about the house.
The internet allows you to reach a wider target audience. You can pull from a further distance than you can from offline marketing. If you are doing offline marketing like signs, you're going to keep pretty local for the most part. With the internet you can attract buyers and sellers from across the country, a much wider target audience. Say that you have a rehab that you are trying to sell or even a rental that you are trying to rent. There are people from across the country that are moving into the area. These people can go to your website and see the house. You even have local people who decide on area to live in and then go to the web to search and see what houses are available. Whether they were buying the house or going to rent the house they're going to the web first. You want to be there.
The internet is a much less costly way to advertise. First of all, the quality of the information, the pictures that you can put up there is so much better than anything you can do in print. And you can do so much more of it. I can have literally pages and pages of information for somebody to look at on the internet, but imagine trying to put that into a brochure and then get it mailed out to somebody. The internet is so much faster. They can literally go on and see it right away.
For example, let's look at the travel industry. It used to be when I was a traveler I wanted to see the different resorts. I would hear about a resort and I would see their advertising and then I would have to call them up and talk to them a little bit and ask for them to send me a brochure. Then about a week later they would send me a brochure that had some basic pictures on it and that's it. Now I go to the internet. I pull up their website and I have instantaneous access to that information. I see a whole lot more pictures than I ever could before. I get all the information I want. If you're not on the web you are missing out on ¾ of your buyers.
The other thing you want to do on the web is capture their information using something called an autoresponder. If you are able to capture an e-mail address, then you have the ability to talk to them over and over again at really no cost. Imagine trying to mail a regular letter to a prospect every week and how costly that would get. Yet you could do that with e-mail at no cost whatsoever. You have got to establish your web presence. If you are not on the internet right now you need to make every effort to get there.
Lou Castillo is a national real estate investing expert and mentor to thousands of successful investors. Lou specializes in creating powerful systems that allow investors to work less and earn more using the power of the internet in the real estate investing business. To get more information or get Investing tips straight from Lou, visit: http://www.freerealestatestrategies.com/