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The point of a real estate website and/or blog is to attract you new customers and leads, so in a way the real estate website blog should be making you money. But there are many ways to make money with a blog (I do it everyday on several blogs!) so I thought maybe for all of you tech savvy real estate agents that I would share a few ideas on monetizing your real estate blog.
Before you get started, you need to make sure it is OKAY WITH YOUR BROKER. My broker does not allow Internet Ads on their agents personal websites, and so they wouldn’t be able to really monetize their blog without being super sneaky, which of course I would not recommend! If you are the broker, or have a lot of control on what goes on your real estate blog though, then you have the opportunity to monetize your blog. You’ll also want to make sure whatever monetization methods you implement are appropriate and legal. You wouldn’t want to recommend to your real estate website visitors that they should try getting paid to do surveys or risk doing something illegal by putting ads for mortgage companies and lenders.
Here are Some Ideas for Ways to Monetize Your Real Estate Blog:
Ad Spots: Most blogs have great places for ad spots. Sidebars, headers, within posts. You’ll notice I have some selectively placed ads here on Upstart Agent. If you are going to be selling advertisement spots to individuals, you will ideally want to be getting good traffic numbers – otherwise the ad placement may not be worthwhile for them. The general rule of thumb that I’ve followed in the past is $1 per 1000 pageviews each month. So if you get 10,000 pageviews a month, you can charge $10 a month per ad – get 4 or 5 people to do this and you can make an effortless extra $50 each month. Network with blogging professionals around you – attorneys, home inspectors, child care centers, etc could all be good places to start.
In Post Link Ads: There are a variety of websites that companies will hire you to put links in your posts, or you can make arrangements privately and on your own. Linking takes just a few minutes of your time. Remember the higher your pagerank, the higher value you should put on those link posts.
Affiliate Programs: There are plenty of affiliate programs to join: Commission Junction, Clickbank, Linkshare – each will pay you a small commission if somebody buys something from your website. Be sure it’s done tastefully and compliments your site and as I said earlier doesn’t interfere with RESPA or other liability/laws that may affect you. For example, this ebook on selling a home in 21 days or less could be appropriate. A bonus is you will get the person’s email address too so you can follow up for them after the sale. Affiliate marketing though is not for the faint of heart – and you very well may never make a single dime from any effort you put into it.
Be sure when monetizing your website you do not place ads that would also detract visitors from remembering the most important thing: calling you for a sale! For this reason, I would not recommend Google Adsense. Though it could be profitable, you risk them clicking an ad for a competing agent near you and calling them instead! A few cents or dollars is not a good trade off for what could potentially be several thousand dollars in commission!
Have you monetized your website or real estate blog? What have your experiences been?
13 Comments
While I agree that these are some great ideas for Monetizing real estate traffic I whose tenacity to place ads on any of my sites. I just don’t like the idea of sending potential clients away from my site. The 50 to 100 dollars a month in advertising income just does not seem worth the risk of potentially losing a client that could generate me 10k 15k or 20k in potential commission.
These are some great points, but nothing is better thah selling real estate with your blog
I totally agree with you! A website can introduce a whole new set of traffic. However, there is nothing better than just selling the home!
These are some good ideas and because this blog is geared towards real estate agents, I think the tips work on this site. But if the blog is targeted at real estate consumers, and designed to generate real estate business, you need to be careful not to distract from that goal. That doesn’t mean that a real estate blog should have no ads, they just need to be well designed and placed, so as to not distract from the blogs ultimate goal.
Great advise! I have been working on my blog for the past few months and it seems to be helping alot. I don’t have ads on my real estate site, but I do have them on my affiliate site and it works great.
Yes, it is very important that the ads to not detract from your main goal of getting more clients!
Real estate blogs seem to be a dime a dozen. Are these still decently profitable?
I can see how this would help in getting some money to cover the costs. But sometimes it’s hard to determine what your readers would be interested in when it comes to ads. And of course, it wouldn’t be wise to send a reader away if you have the potential of selling the house.
I can see maybe doing an ad for a local loan partner. I can see it on a site like this that is a realtor facing blog. But on a consumer site– I just wouldnt do it.
I cant see a way to do it where it doesnt take away from the purpose of the site which is to sell real estate.
Cant you veto adds or chose the keywords in order to avoid click away to a competitor?
Yeah it would be hard to post ads if you thought you would lose visitors going off to realtor . com or whatever. I can see if a blog that is real estate related instead of being a realtor blog.
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…And cant you just have them click into a new window rather than away from yours?