Monetizing Your Real Estate Website/Blog

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 thoughts 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 Thoughts for Ways to Monetize Your Real Estate Blog:

Ad Spots: Most blogs have fantastic 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 excellent 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 excellent places to start.

In Post Link Ads: There are a variety of websites that companies will hire you to place 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 place 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 place into it.

Be sure when monetizing your website you do not place ads that would also detract visitors from remembering the most vital 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 excellent 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?