Before I get into this list of real estate wordpress themes, I have an important question for you: Is Your Business Worth $20?

So many agents spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on tons of marketing materials like newspaper ads and everything else – only to see little actual return on investment. A professional looking website when executed properly however is worth a goldmine, advertising you and your services 24/7 infinitely for less than what it costs for an ad in the newspaper for one week.

I see so many bad real estate websites out there on a constant basis, and it’s time to give your blog a face lift. When you can have an impressive looking site that doesn’t require you to edit a single line of html or php code for anywhere between $20 to $100 (depending on which design you pick from the ones available below), why wouldn’t you do it?

As most of you know, I’m a huge advocate of WordPress, a free open source blogging platform. WordPress is one of the easiest ways for any real estate agent to set up a low cost and affordable website solution. While there are a number of free wordpress real estate themes, some of the best of them are paid (aka “premium”) – and many of them are just between $25 and $35. If you ask me, $25 for a professional looking website that helps you convert visitors into clients and commissions is a heck of a steal – and you and your business is worth every penny spent.

If you think you’re worth $25, then you need to pick one of these themes and do something today.

Here are some of my top picks for themes for real estate agents to use, whether you’re a commercial real estate agent or a residential one:

Our Home Real Estate Theme

This is a sharp looking light theme that gives an excellent emphasis on listings. Demo and More Info

Real Estate Theme

This is one of those incredible themes I was talking about where you could get a professional looking site for only $25. It features three possible color schemes, featured post section for listings, and an admin panel to customize everything with no need to touch a line of code. Demo and More Info

Villa Grand Real Estate Theme

What I like most about this theme is that it has a built in search function that is featured right as visitors come to your site. It also has some nice details and a good layout for those who are blogging also. Demo & More Info

Evolution Theme

While this is not a theme specific for real estate agents, it has a clean and nice layout that could easily be adapted into a theme for a real estate agent. It also features multiple color schemes so you can make it match with your company logo. Demo & More Info

Eminence WordPress Theme

This is another super affordable theme that is not specific for real estate agents but has a nice layout where you can not only feature listings, but also sections for your services as well. It features multiple color schemes, and it’s my top pick for a commercial real estate blog. Demo & More Info

WP Pro Real Estate Theme

I love this theme too, again for its clean color scheme and design layout. Demo & More Info

Smooth Real Estate Theme

The Smooth Real Estate theme features a great clean layout and a few custom plug-ins to help you manage listings. It has a ton of advanced features such as a nice gallery for featured listings, auto thumbnail generation, and an easy to use admin panel. Click here to view more details & live demo.

Bel Air Theme

This is another elegant and stylish theme for real estate agents. It features multiple color schemes and a clean and well organized layout. Click here to visit Aloha Themes.

Open House

This is yet another awesome theme. (Are you seeing a trend here? All of these are great and affordable!) No custom fields are required and images are automatically resized, which is making it even easier than before to use a theme like this. Click here to view more details.

Homeowner Real Estate Theme

This is another great looking theme that offers features like built in map integration and again doesn’t require messing around with code or custom fields. Click here to view more details

StudioPress Agent Real Estate Theme

StudioPress is one of the most known premium theme creators, and their theme for real estate agents is a nice variation from the original Revolution Theme. Click here to visit StudioPress.

DeCasa Real Estate Theme

This is another theme many people don’t realize is available. It’s white and clean and well organized. Click here to visit ThemeShift.

eBusiness Theme

This is another great “not real estate specific but pretty dang good” theme that I like. It offers a wide selection of 15 different color options and is super affordable at just $19.95. Not only is it a good price, but you can also download unlimited copies of 20 other themes as well! I am a member of this site and can personally attest that the themes are cleanly coded, pretty decent out of the box for SEO, and there’s even a nice support forum with a lot of other members to help you out if for some reason you should get stuck. Visit Elegant Themes for more details

Thesis WordPress Theme

For those of you looking for a wordpress theme that has more of a blog feel, Thesis is the theme most pros use. Not only is it highly customizable and probably one of the leading themes in terms of SEO, but it looks great, too. Learn More.

So that’s my round-up of the best 15 WordPress Themes a real estate agent could use. Some of these start at just $20 and none of them are over $100 – so its a well worth it investment to take your site to the next level. All of these themes provide an option panel perfect for the person who does not want to become a wordpress theme expert just to have a strong online presence. The hardest part about any of these themes of course will be deciding between which of these you like the best and want to use!

Do you know of any wordpress themes I might have missed? Using one of these themes and want to show off your site? More importantly, is your business worth at least $25 to you? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

In my last post on Social Media Marketing VS. Search Marketing I wrote about how important it is to get search traffic. Not just because it is less time consuming than the endless updating of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and the thousands of others – but because it brings you a great deal of hungry, ready, willing, and able buyers and sellers to you.

The problem is, most people don’t understand how search marketing actually works. While most people can grasp that you want your website to be one of the first search result pages when someone searches for a term like “California Houses” – a lot of people have no idea how to get to that number one spot, especially if there are A LOT of different sites out there all trying to be number one.

In order to get search traffic, there is a simple formula you need to know:

Good Keywords + Quality Backlinks = Traffic

Keywords are the phrases that people type into a search engine like Google or Yahoo or Bing (these days I have to mention Bing or someone says “Well what about Bing?) when they are looking for something. If you go online and you need to find something, you’ll type in a few words to describe it – that’s a keyword.

There are two types of keywords – long tail keywords and short tail keywords. Long tail keywords are usually much easier to rank for, but they aren’t as popularly searched. An example of a long tail keyword phrase is “How much money do I need to buy a condo in New York?” A short tail keyword is much more shorter – such as “New York Condos”.

Obviously, you’re going to want to find keywords that get a lot of searches, and you’re going to want to rank highly for these keywords in the search results pages.

You can find basic info on search phrases from a very easy and simple easy tool – it’s called the Free Keyword Tool from WordTracker.com. You simply enter any phrase that you want and it will give you an estimate of how many searches per day. It’s not exact or entirely accurate all of the time – but I do know that it’s pretty darn close and that if you use it a lot you will never have an end of words to be targeting.

Once you research these keywords, you’ll want to add some blog posts and articles on your site that contain these words and phrases.

The next step is to build backlinks. This is the most time consuming and annoying part of getting your website to rank highly in search engines. Backlinks are when someone links to your site. For example, if I give Jay the Phoenix Real Estate Guy a link like I just did in this article, that’s a backlink for him and it helps tell search engines that his website is about a Guy in Phoenix who works in real estate.

Getting backlinks takes a lot of time, but it’s something that will continously pay off. Unlike social networking, which also requires a lot of time, once you’re ranking up there in search results pages you won’t have to do nearly as much work as often online. With social media however, typically if you drop the ball in updating all of your social sites, you also kind of drop a lot of traffic and interest.

Backlinks can be obtained in a number of ways – link exchanging with other relevant real estate websites (hit up other real estate bloggers you’ve met online that are in another target market) as well as a number of social networking sites and article directory sites. You might also want to try to swap some links with other local businesses in your area.

I know you were probably hoping for something a little more exciting or something that could be done instantly and automagically, but you’ve got to do a little work for it. Fortunately, it will pay off for itself many times over within just a few months most likely.

If you want lots of search traffic, research your keywords and build links to your site. It really is that simple.

Any questions? Comments? Share them in the comments below!

I know many of my readers here at UpstartAgent currently use wordpress to run and maintain their real estate blogs. If you haven’t updated already, it’s a good time to make sure you’ve got the latest version of 2.8.4.

Normally I’m a little hesitant to upgrade since a lot of times it seems like something always breaks due to a wordpress plug-in or other mishap. But after one of my sites was hacked into (thankfully not this site!) it took me hours to figure out and fix the problem.

The worm pretty much finds a security glitch in older versions (I was using 2.7.1 on the sites that were hacked into) and creates a new user as an administrator. The administrator is invisible, meaning you won’t see it from your users dashboard – though you might notice you have two administrators instead of one.

The other problem you might notice is that all of your permalinks are broken. The one site I update often I noticed this right away when I went to add a new post – there were a lot of weird characters after the permalink title. The other blog unfortunately took me almost a week to realize it was affected – and it dropped down significantly in pageviews and traffic – and lost its pagerank also.

To fix this problem here’s what I did – and I’m hoping that it really does fix it, I can’t seem to find anything specific on it so if you have any tips or are a wordpress hacker expert then please let me know!

1. BackUp Everything: Back up your database, back up all the files on your site by downloading them onto your computer. This might take a while if you have a lot of posts like I did, but at least then you’ll have the hacked into version to revert back to if you completely mess it all up, as I was terrified of doing.

2. Log-in to PHP Admin: I logged into my database and went under the table of users. Sure enough, there was my mystery man. I deleted him manually because I couldn’t figure out how to do it from the wordpress interface.

3. Delete Every File From Your Server: Yikes, I know, this is terrifying. But I did it. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACK UP AND DON’T NEGLECT THEMES, PLUG-INS, AND UPLOADS FOLDERS WITH YOUR PHOTOS!

4. Download the Latest WordPress: Download the latest wordpress and make sure you replace the uploads folder with the one you had on your server – this has all of your pictures and media files. Also make sure you place your theme into the themes folder and all of the plug-in files you used. You’ll also need to put your database info into the wp-config file like you did the first time you installed wordpress.

5. Upload New WordPress: Use Filezilla or another FTP client and upload all of your files back to your server and cross your fingers.

6. Adjust Settings: You’ll need to check your settings for things like permalinks – be sure that those pesky characters in the custom permakinks section are gone – it should just look something like this:

/%postname%/

If you see anything with the words eval or “)” symbols delete it.

You’ll also want to reinstall your plug-ins and set up any other settings you had in the other options.

7. Visit Your Site: Hopefully everything is back to normal. You can verify that everything is okay by reading your source code (go to view source under the View tab of your web browser) – if you see anything fishy do a google of it and see what it is.

Like I said, I am no expert in understanding wordpress worms and security bugs and fixes, so if anyone has any other precautions I should do please let me know. Hopefully this will help you all out if you do somehow get affected, and it’s just another lesson for me to learn to keep my sites up to date with the latest wordpress versions and to check them regularly even if there is no seemingly need to do so.

Has your site ever been hacked into? Any advice for dealing with wordpress hackers? Share your experiences and comments below.

Social media marketing VS. Search marketing is something I feel is pretty important to talk about with those of you who have your own real estate websites and blogs and are part of the many of different blogging communities available to real estate agents. I often see a lot of discussions related to “how much time per week do you spend networking online” and I’ve realized that for many new to this it can be pretty overwhelming and confusing.

Most agents with websites have grabbed the concept of social networking pretty easily – but search engine marketing can take quite awhile to effectively master.

While both are ways to drive traffic to your websites and hopefully result in increased business, there are major differences in how they affect not only the type of traffic you receive but also your bottom line when it comes to time and sales.

Let’s take a look at what each one is first:

Social Media Marketing is pretty much basically online networking. It’s like going to a chamber of commerce meeting except there’s no limit to the size of the room or number of members. You can go on a site like Facebook or Twitter and immediately connect with thousands of people who have related interests as you. In theory it’s a beautiful concept – rather than attending long boring meetings to pass out business cards or making cold calls all day you can simply send a few messages rather easily.

We all know in real estate networking is the name of the game when it comes to meeting people and getting clients. If you don’t have a solid network chances are you won’t have much business coming your way naturally and effortlessly. There are plenty of different ways to capitalize on social networking, which we’ll probably save for a future post here on UpstartAgent.

Search Engine Marketing is a whole different beast when it comes to generating business online in my opinion. Rather than spending all of your time reading other people’s blogs and profiles, you’ll spend most of it doing significant keyword research and optimizing your personal website to become the #1 spot in the search engines for targeted traffic driving words like “real estate in ABC City” or “best real estate agent ABC city” and “sell house ABC city”. You won’t be too worried about posting to Twitter or whether you have a gazillion online friends. Rather than getting caught up in a popularity contest of sorts, you’ll be focused on making only 1 friend – Google.

There’s advantages and disadvantages to both methods. If you’re on the social networking bandwagon, then you’ll naturally be in a good position for people to feel comfortable with you in asking their real estate questions and visiting your site. As you build online relationships, people will feel like they know you – even if they’ve never actually met you in person. They’ll come to trust you – and naturally when they decide it’s time to buy or sell a house they’ll likely think of you first.

The disadvantage to this is it can be time consuming. You could potentially spend all day in front of your computer leaving comments, making new friends, etc. etc. – and not see one solid sale as a result – or wait months before you finally interest a client.

Search engine marketing on the other hand is comparable to floor time. You might get anywhere from 10-100 people that stop by your website. Some of them are tire kickers, some of them are genuine potential clients. These guys are in the decision making process and doing research. The hard part of this is trying to rank in the first few listings on Google’s search result pages – and competition can be pretty fierce.

You can’t really say that one of these methods is better or worse than the other. Instead, you can only really look at them comparatively, and then decide what combination of using the two suits you best. Knowing the balance between them is what is going to make your online presence a success.

If you ask me for my solid straight out opinion on what ratio of time you should spend on search marketing and social networking, my answer is this: Spend 80% of your time on search marketing, and the other 20% on the social stuff.

Obviously, not everyone will agree with me, and it’s true that may not even be the best solution for you. However, what I do know is that search traffic brings results if you can convert it effectively. Search traffic brings people who are ready to go right now – they are looking for answers and for solutions, and hopefully your website will offer it.

There is a reason however I think you should have that 20% of social networking – and that is you will need some online friends to ever get ahead in search marketing. Search engines rely on the amount of links you have pointed at your website to establish authority and trust – and having others online who freely and happily link to you will help you rank higher. Not to mention, I do genuinely value the ability to learn new things and meet new people online – you never know what you might stumble across.

What do you think? What are your thoughts regarding search marketing versus social networking online? Comments are always welcomed below.

P.S.- My next post will be all about helping you do better in search marketing. If you haven’t already you may want to Subscribe to Upstart Agent by Email to be notified when it comes.

The reason for this post is the other day we had a customer call and she was giving us all these great details about her house (all the way down the groundhog living in the backyard) and it was so crazy sounding we of course were naturally curious as to what the real story was with this property.

Now, we could have hurried up and got into our cars and drove right down there beforehand to kind of see what we should expect – but decided instead to check it out online. And it occurred to me, especially since she told us she didn’t have a camera to email us pictures, that she probably had no idea that we could see her property in great detail online. Sure enough, with a few keystrokes and clicks of the mouse, we understood immediately her woes with property. We didn’t have to spend a few hours driving – we had it all in front of us so we can be better prepared when we actually meet her face to face.

You can see how this can be a huge advantage, and if just in case you didn’t know about this little online tool, now you do. We’ll also share some of our other good ideas for using it below as well.

What is Google Maps?

Google maps started out as their version of mapquest – you can use it to pretty much get driving directions anywhere. (Visit the site here.)

It has a few features – you can look at it as a regular map with street names and landmarks, or you can use it for a satellite view or even a street view.

What Can I do With It?

Look Up Any Property: If you type in an address and then in the top left hand corner of the map where the zooming features are click on the “Street View” option you can see great details for most properties. You can see the house, the neighbors – and if the photograph was taken at an inopportune moment you may even see the inside of their garage or other details. Before you get in your car to do a drive-by, you can try there first and maybe save you some time and gas money.

Advertise On It: What better way to get local traffic than to advertise on a website with local maps? You’ll have to set up an adwords account to do this, but it’s not that difficult to get started and it may show off to be beneficial.

Put it On Your Website: Many sites are already integrating Google Maps into your site, and you can too, even without any huge account with Google. All you need is to go to the Maps main page and click on “My Maps” where you can create a map and list all the details and even links to other nearby resources. Then you just embed the code where you want to show it up on your site by clicking on the Done Button and then the link button on the right hand side of the screen. (IE: Inside a blog post like I’ll do right here:)

View Mars in a larger map

Put Pictures In Print: This is especially helpful if you are selling vacant land or estates and want to have an aerial view for your brochures or postcards. One way of doing this is to once you have the picture you want, open up a program such as Microsoft Publisher. Click the button on your computer that says “Print Screen” and then click on Paste in Publisher – you’ll have a map then that you can edit and crop to the size you need. (Make sure you can do it for whatever use you’re planning on using it for by visiting the site’s legal notices – there are some copyright concerns you should be aware of for using it in print material).

I’m sure there are many other ways to use Google Maps – and if you’ve got a creative way for using them or some other helpful tips, I’d love to hear about it in our comments section below!