News

We’ve been working months and months on our brand new Predesigned Websites that Work platform. If you follow this blog, you know we’ve been in BETA stage for a couple months. We have about 25 people in our beta program, have worked out the kinks, and are finally ready to remove the BETA tag. We’ve talked to agents all over the country and the verdict is loud and clear; here’s what you’ve told us you you want in a WordPress real estate website offering:

WordPress: You want your website to be built on WordPress to take advantage of it’s ease of use, blogging capability, SEO friendliness, and long term flexibility.

SIMPLE: Above all, you want something that’s simple and just WORKS. You don’t want to deal with the headache of setting up & customizing WordPress.org on your own. And you want a simple interface to manage your entire site.

Beautiful, professional design: You want to make it clear to buyers and sellers that you are serious about your business. You know first impressions matter, and even more so online than in person because it’s so easy for someone to click over to someone else — and never to be “seen” again.

Built with conversion & SEO in mind: You know that if your website is not converting your traffic to leads and clients, then you’re missing out. Yes, you want a professional design, but you want a site that generates business and maximizes the chances you’ll attract organic SEO traffic if you are putting time and energy into creating unique content.

And last, but not least, you want it to be affordable.

Does this sound like you? If so, we have just the product for you. Our brand new Predesigned Websites that Work wordpress platform. For $699, we handle your website setup and it’s up and running within days with zero hassle. It’s simple, professionally designed, and built with results in mind. We manage your web presence so you can focus on what you do best — selling real estate. You’ll still want to add content to your site to generate traffic and build engagement with your audience, but we take the guesswork out of the setup, design, and activation step. Our predesigned sites have a monthly charge of $99, which covers support, automatic upgrades, security fixes, hosting, dsIDXpress, and Altos Research “lite”.

Here are a couple predesigned websites to look at:

Loribee.com – Waxhaw and Charlotte Real Estate

Lori was the absolute FIRST person we signed up for our BETA program back in late November. Her feedback and patience throughout the process has been invaluable to us along the way. Though we had to go through a few iterations of her branding (she recently switched to Allen Tate), we’re absolutely thrilled with the way her site turned out.

HomeSalesOrangeCounty.com – Laguna Beach and Orange County Real Estate

Amy Mosley & Steve Craig – This was our 2nd signup. I knew Steve and Amy from their time with YouReach Media last spring and summer (at the time, I was working for YouReach part-time). They’ve been amazingly patient with us over the past few weeks as our first “live” site sitting on an external domain. They have 2,100+ pages indexed on their domain already, which is awesome to see!

The WordPress theme you see on these two sites, which we’ve named “Under Pressure” (after the Queen song), is only the first theme on our platform. This theme is currently available in 10 different colors. We’ll be adding entirely new themes as we go, and certainly be announcing those new themes here on the VR Blog when they are released. We have a number of additional sites just about ready to unveil, but waiting for a few IDX activations & a bit more content to be added to them before showing them off.

Tech savvy agents KNOW that WordPress is the ONLY option when it comes to a complete blog and website platform. Tech savvy agents also know that when it come to WordPress, there are four options:

• WordPress.com – free, but very limited flexibility
• Do It Yourself WordPress.org – Frankly, we’ve really yet to see an agent pull this off and build a PROFESSIONAL looking website on their own. But feel free to try.
• Template or Predesigned w/ Customization – price range varies from $500-$3000 depending on level of customization. And if you are dealing with a freelance designer or developer, be prepared to spend a considerable amount of time going back and forth getting the website to look the way you want it to.
• Full custom – $5k and above

No one is telling you that you can’t learn the ins and outs of setting up and customizing WordPress; you can. But the trade off is your time. You can spend your time learning WordPress, or you can spend your time selling real estate and building your sphere. You decide what’s a better use of your time.

If you know Jim Marks or me, you know selling low quality products just to make money doesn’t get our juices flowing. We are not here to beat all our competitors with the lowest priced WordPress offering available, we’re here to knock your socks off with the best damn real estate sites available anywhere on the web. These websites ARE the best real estate website product available under $1,500. Bar none.

What are you waiting for? SIGN UP for your site here and have a professionally designed blog working & functional by Monday (*IDX approval in some areas may take longer)! You can take a look at our FAQ page and product overview if you want to learn more about the features and benefits of the predesigned websites. If you have questions beyond that, feel free to give us a call at 206-395-6338.

[Formstack id=1038639 viewkey=a7QFL4nvtR]

If you made it this far, you’re obviously somewhat interested in upgrading your website in 2011 — and we’re going to off you a special reward for reading every last word of this post. Enter the discount code “websitesthatrock” in the form above and you’ll receive $25 off the setup cost – for a limited time only.

If you are a Virtual Results client, and LOVE Facebook (who doesn’t), please join our brand new Facebook group! The group is a closed group, so you HAVE to be a Virtual Results client to be a member. This is an exclusive Facebook group for Virtual Results clients to exchange ideas, connect with each other, and keep up to speed with the latest and greatest internet marketing, social media, and website tips and tricks from the Team at Virtual Results!

ASK TO JOIN THE GROUP HERE.

Note: If you want to turn off email notifications (which are on by default) and still be part of the group, you can do so by clicking “edit settings” from the group landing page. Screen shot.

Not a Virtual Results client yet? What are you waiting for?

Now, onward…

The 3rd edition of our “VR Sales Q&A” is the topic of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). “Will the site SEO?” or “How good will the site rank in the search engines?” comes up on just about every call I have with an agent interested in either our predesigned websites that work or our full custom websites that work. It’s an extremely broad question that I wanted to address in further detail here. First, and I’m sorry to have to break this to you, but know that setting up a website — or moving your existing site to a new WordPress platform such as ours — by itself will not take you straight to the top of the search engines for your keywords. Most people just hear somewhere that their site “must SEO well”, but don’t have the faintest idea what that means or what to look for in a website provider to maximize (not guarantee) the chances of that happening. Some actually believe that a website provider can guarantee top placement in the search engines, which is completely bogus.

The short answer to the question of whether Virtual Results websites “SEO well” is as follows: we’ll provide you a highly SEO-optimized site to use as the underlying structure for your SEO efforts going forward. Without a website with solid onsite SEO to link build against, your linkbuilding time is likely being wasted. With a predesigned or custom website that works, you just have to being plug in your content to your new site and go! For those who really want to better understand SEO, I’ve included some additional commentary below.

Ranking well in Google (and other search engines) comes down to two primary areas — onsite seo and offsite seo. Here is some further background on each of those areas, and how Virtual Results thinks about each one.

Onsite SEO – Onsite SEO involves everything on your website that you (or your webmaster) can control such as URL structure, internal linking, title tags, H1 tags, domain age, meta tags, and redirects (among other things). Wordpress by itself is 70% of what Google is looking for in terms of site structure, and Virtual Results takes the site the other 30%. We build each and every web site with SEO in mind; it’s core to what we do. While great onsite SEO will certainly help your site rank highly, great onsite SEO by itself won’t instantaneously shoot you to the top of the rankings — you still need offsite SEO, particularly for ranking for competitive keywords.

Offsite SEO – This entails everything OFF of your domain, with the primary component being link building. There are no short cuts to getting other websites to link to your site, it requires knowing other website owners, getting your name out there as an expert, and creating fantastic content that attracts links naturally. One important thing to note is that all links are NOT created equal. The same way you’ll get more recognition if Oprah says you are the greatest agent on the planet than if your friend Susie down the street does, a link from a prominent site like CNN or Yahoo will give you considerably more SEO value than a link from JoeRealtor.com across town. Aside from guiding you in the right direction in terms of suggestions to build links or ideas for topics to write about, offsite SEO services are not part of either one of our website packages.

That said, we provide world class SEO services, but it’s an additional monthly expense beyond building a website. If you’re interested in learning more about the SEO services we offer, please fill out our contact form and we’ll get back to you.

Search Engine Optimization is an extremely broad subject that I could write about for hours — and still not 100% explain in that time period. If you have specific questions, please leave them in the comments or email me at drew at virtualresults dot net.

Our next edition of VR Sales Q&A is the question of traffic acquisition. In other words, once a website is setup, how do you get traffic to it? Even if you have the best converting website on the planet, you still need traffic to convert to leads and clients. When speaking to agents, I generally tell them traffic acquisition breaks down into three primary areas:

1) Organic SEO traffic – The best approach to attracting organic SEO traffic is to pump out lots and lots (and lots) of unique content over an extended period of time, and do a good job of cross linking internally between blog posts and landing pages. And simultaneously build a number of backlinks to your domain. Great content will naturally attract links from other bloggers, but networking with other bloggers is a great way to build links over the long run. This is a long term strategy; if you stick with this strategy for an extended period of time, it will pay off — but do not expect to start blogging tomorrow and generating significant traffic (and leads) in the first few months. You can pay for SEO Perth services if you want to speed up the process.

2) Paid traffic (via Google Adwords or other methods) – If you have a website that converts traffic to leads at a high enough percentage, you can make a living from paid traffic. There are numerous sources of paid traffic, the most common being Google Adwords campaigns.

3) Market your site offline – bring your existing offline sphere online to your website, and engage them with market reports, home search, and community news and information. Put your URL on your business cards, letterhead, your email signature, and everywhere else!

Questions? Leave them in the comments!

I’ve talked to a number of real estate agents with regards to the predesigned websites that work product offering we’re about to release. One of the questions that comes up over and over is “What’s included for $99 per month?“. First, let me preface the answer by saying this — you get what you pay for. Virtual Results builds high quality products that work; we don’t build subpar website products that don’t produce results. A big reason that I ended up working with Jim Marks at Virtual Results is that he cares more about building great products than everyone else in this industry. Our goal at Virtual Results is not to build products just to have something to sell to real estate professionals; our goal is to build the best damn real estate products on the web — and I think our high standards are apparent by looking at any of the custom sites we’ve built over the last few years (Gellens, San Diego Castles, San Francisco Real Estate Services, Rancho Sante Fe Community Home Finder, Sergio Banks). So, can you go setup a WordPress site and pay less than $99 a month? Yes. But does that mean you should? Not necessarily.

Without further adieu, here is what’s included for $99 a month when you sign up for a Virtual Results predesigned website:

• Laser Fast Web Hosting – We’ve got a killer server setup that means your website will always load fast and won’t go down in the middle of a listing presentation.
• dsIDXpress (from Diverse Solutions) – this is an extremely powerful WordPress plugin that provides fully indexable property listings on your domain, as well as home search functionality. It is largely due to dsIDXpress that some agent and broker sites have over 20,000 indexed pages (screen shot). Learn more about dsIDXpress here.
• Altos Research “Lite” – Easy to use WordPress plugins that allow you to easily populate your website up to date market statistics, with integrated lead capture capabilities. Altos “Lite” provides access to market data for 4 ZIP codes. Learn more about Altos Research here.
• Support – Access to “Geek Estate Pro”, a new internet marketing and WordPress community for tech savvy real estate professionals with a special section dedicated to resolving Virtual Results client questions. As a Virtual Results client, you’ll also have access to email and phone support should you need it.
• Automatic updates & backups – We handle all WordPress core and plugin upgrades so you don’t have to worry about maintaining your WordPress instance and getting hacked. We backup your data so you don’t have to worry about losing it to a technical glitch.
• Platform improvements – Part of what you get for the $99 monthly fee is continual upgrades to our WordPress website platform and access to new themes as we release them. The website you start with is not going to be the same website you have 2 years from now. In two years, it’ll be much much better with new features, functionality, and conversion tools.
• A world class design and development team managing your website. We’ve been doing this a long time, and we know how to build websites that work.

If you want to sign up for a predesigned website that works, you can fill out the form located here.

If you have other questions about Virtual Results products or services you’d like answered, please drop me a note at drew at virtualresults dot net (or on Twitter @drewmeyers) and I’m happy to answer them (either publicly or privately).

Last week, we mentioned that we were waiving the setup fee on two of our Predesigned Websites that Work to celebrate the coming launch of our new WordPress platform. Let’s get straight to the point — our two lucky winners are…

Winner # 1: Sarah Herda with Keller Williams Towne Square Realty
Winner # 2: Kristi Ferrara at Prudential Kansas City Realty

I’ll be in touch with both of them shortly with next steps to getting their website in the works! We’re still wrapping up some last minute details on our predesigned websites that work WordPress platform, but I assure you we’re getting closer by the day. I’ll post another update when we have our first live BETA site 100% ready so you can take a look at and click through a live site — but for now, to get a feel for these sites, you’ll just have to settle for a mock up located here. We’ve filled up our initial BETA group, but feel free to contact us if you’re interested in being one of the first agents to get a website after our BETA group!

Congratulations to both Sarah and Kristi!!

Does your website suck? Do you want it not to in 2011? Well, if that’s you – then this post is geared towards you!

To celebrate the arrival of 2011 and the coming announcement of our first live beta clients for the new Predesigned Websites that Work platform – Virtual Results is giving away two Predesigned Websites that Work at Inman NY, this week!! There will still be the standard $99 per month charge for the website, but we’re willing to waive the $699 setup fee entirely for 2 people this week.

How do you enter you might ask? Simple. There are two ways to win:

1. Find either Jim or me in New York City anytime between now and Friday and hand us a business card. We’ll randomly pick one business card from whatever cards we end up with this week, and waive the $699 setup fee for a Predesigned Website that Works complete with your own custom header.
2. We know not everyone can be in New York this week, so we’re also giving away a site to someone who sends the following tweet to us “@drewmeyers @jimmarks http://bit.ly/hQ9I5H I want a Virtual Results Predesigned Website that Works #vr #icny #rebcny ” (yes, CLICK IT or copy/paste into your Twitter app). We’ll collect all the twitter handles from those who @ reply us with that tweet by end of day Friday (12 pm EST) into a spreadsheet, and randomly select one individual to receive the free site.

We know we don’t have a live site to point you to as of yet (we do have an example design file to look at), but there is no doubt in our minds this will be the best real estate website product on the market for less than $1,000. Virtual Results has been building websites for a long time, and if there’s one thing we know, it’s how to build a simple, yet effective seo-optimized site that convert web traffic to leads. What do you have to lose by not tweeting? Oh yea, another year of paying for a website that doesn’t work and adds nothing to your bottom line.

If you win, you’ll have your fully functional website by the first week of February. And for our current BETA clients who I’ve spoken with and already signed up, you can absolutely win as well – we’ll refund your setup fee or give you a credit for several months of free hosting if you’re selected.

Good luck, and happy tweeting!!

Both Jim and I will be New York City this coming week for RE BarCamp NY and Real Estate Connect. As some of you know, I’ve been out of the country for most of 2010, but am now back full time. I’ve spent much of the last month catching up with old friends and colleagues in person here in Seattle, but the real estate industry is a big place that spans the entire country — I haven’t seen many of my friends from the RE.net since New York Inman a year ago. Wow, how time flies. Hence, the reason I’m so excited for this trip to the East Coast. And as a company, Virtual Results has some amazing, amazing things in store for 2011. Our new predesigned website platform is going to rock, and our custom sites are getting better and better (and we’ve got a few amazing sites in the works)!

While in NYC, both Jim and I both be checking in via FourSquare (Jim, Drew) and Facebook throughout the week, and Foursquare checkins populate to Twitter (@jimmarks, @drewmeyers), so you have no excuse for not knowing where we are. Whether you’re an agent looking to figure out your web presence in 2011 (we DEFINITELY have something for you), a brokerage trying to figure out the best way to maximize your website to convert traffic to leads and optimize it for SEO purposes, or just want to kick back over a pint or two, we’ll be around and would love to talk to you. If you want to arrange a meeting with either one of us during the week, please either DM me or email me at drew at virtualresults dot net.

Looking forward to an awesome week!!

Only a few months after we launched Brad Coy’s site, we’d like to welcome one of the other co-founders of the RE BarCamp movement, Andy Kaufman, to the growing Virtual Results family. For those of you that aren’t aware, I LOVE RE BarCamps) and am looking forward to attending a few of them in 2011. Andy has been a friend of both Jim and myself for several years now as a result of the RE BarCamp movement, and it was a no brainer when he came to us looking for a site a couple months ago — OF COURSE we’d love to build a bitching website for him. I know I can speak for Jim when I say we couldn’t be more excited to work with Andy and his team going forward — he’s one of those people that’s just impossible not to like. Not a bad way to kick off the new year if I may say so myself…Andy, whenever i see you IRL again, next beer is on me!

Head on over to My East Bay Agent and let us (and him) know what you think!! If you want your own site, let us know.

The entire team here at Virtual Results has been incredibly busy building some amazing custom sites for our clients, but as both Jim and I alluded to, we’re also working on a brand new website product offering.

If you follow us regularly, you know that the Virtual Results differentiator is that we take a very analytical approach to website creation, and test and refine EVERYTHING. I think our design is among the best in the industry, but it’s design aligned with analytics — not straight design with the sole intent of looking beautiful. If, at the end of the day, your website is not turning traffic into leads, then you’re missing the POINT of having a website.

Until NOW, Virtual Results only builds CUSTOM websites that cost 5K and up. However, starting sometime after the first of the year, we’ll be releasing our brand new “predesigned websites that work” product offering utilizing much of the same great code we use today — for only $699! But it gets better. We are looking to fill our “BETA” group with 20 agents who are looking to revamp their web presence in 2011 and giving a discount on the setup fee in exchange for taking a bit of leap of faith based on our reputation for doing great work. We’ve filled about half that group already, so if you’re interested in being one of the early adopters for an awesome website offering at an extremely affordable price, please email me at drew at virtualresults dot net or use our contact form and select “Interested in our new Predesigned Website Offering” in the contact reason drop down and I’ll provide you further details.

We’ll handle your web presence, so you can focus on what you specialize in — selling real estate. Look forward to hearing from you! And yes, I know this blog post is a bit vague – I promise I’ll share more details offline 🙂