With most of the buyers starting their search for a new home on the internet, you must put a system in place to get these buyers coming to your website and capturing them as sales leads. This is not that difficult. While there are several ways to do this, let's explore just one.
Since most people are using the internet to search for homes, it would seem obvious that in order for you to have a website that is effective in your real estate marketing, you would have to provide a means of searching your local MLS for homes for sale. This can be done through an IDX (Internet Data Exchange). These are usually provided by most MLS system. Contact them for the details of your MLS.
Once you have a web page up to provide what buyers are searching for, you will want to have a way of capturing their names and contact information in order to follow up with them. Most real estate websites make the mistake of being an information providing service but fail to capture the name of the person visiting. This is a big mistake that most websites make.
Rather than just provide the information they want, you must first require them to give you their contact information in the form of a onetime registration. In this way you can send them follow-up emails or call them on the phone. So the whole system looks like this.
Set up a webpage that offers local search information through your local MLS system. Send traffic to a name capture page first. Have the visitor fill in the required information in order to get to the search page. Don't overdo it; just name, email, and phone should be good enough. You can add other things such as area and price range if you want. Once they submit their information, they are sent to the search page and you are sent an email notifying you that you have a new lead. Then you just need to follow up.
Many ask if this doesn't cause some to leave the site without giving you their contact information and the answer is yes. But don't confuse quantity with quality. Having hundreds or even thousands of visitors does you no good if you can't follow up with them somehow. So yes, not everyone will leave their contact information. But more than enough will to keep you busy. When we first did this we got over 200 leads the first month which is good for about 8 sales.