When creating an internet presence and building a new public website, the first thing you’ll want to do is identify a domain name as close as possible to your company or property name. Don’t bother searching in multiple locations for your potential site’s name—you’re too busy for that! Go straight to a search engine like namechecklist.com.
Create your website on a platform such as WordPress. Put in the time, effort, and money to design and plan the site. Consider paying a designer to create a logo and graphics. Add content to the site with pages like:
- About Us
- Services Properties and/or Listings
- Team
- Executive Bios
- Contact Us
- Affiliations
- Blog
- Testimonials
After all this work is done—content is added; graphics are selected; colors are finalized; fonts, headlines, and widget boxes are chosen—you can send out an email to everyone in your contact list to say, “Look! We have a new website and blog!”
But then, if you’re like most website owners, the site sits, and sits, and sits. From time to time, you might add a blog article or update your rental listings. If you’re smart, you thought to add a live feed of listings from another database service provider that’s integrated into the site. When new employees come and go, maybe you’ll update the site when you get around to it.
Don’t fall into this trap! Your website should be a living, breathing, active representation of you and your company. Make time to promote on social media. Push out your blog articles to LinkedIn and all of the groups you belong to. Encourage your team to tell all of their contacts about your new website or blog. Ensure that the domain URL is on every single thing you publish or post. Place simple share buttons on your pages or blog posts via the admin tools. Anything less, and you’re virtually guaranteeing that no one will ever share anything about you, your firm, or your great content.
While you’re at it, let your employees have access to sites like Facebook, and encourage them to keep an up-to-date LinkedIn profile (the modern-day business card). Your people and properties will be found and links will be out there in Google, where they can be discovered by new clients. If your website is found, that means traffic! Traffic is numbers, and numbers mean increased chances that you’ll meet a new client, tenant, or even find a buyer.
And make a Twitter account. Twitter is neither complicated nor difficult to navigate. It will bring t-r-a-f-f-i-c to your firm, which is only a problem if you plan to remain under the radar. Remember, you want every client to see your name in the media or an online content stream.
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