(June 18th, 2007) If you are a real estate agent you are probably aware of some pretty interesting numbers. According to Salary.com real estate agents make on average $33,915 per year. Agents in the top 75th percentile earn a little more at $43,139 and agents in the top 10 percentile earn just under $10,000 / year. The difference between the average salary and the top real estate agent salary is quite dramatic.

It’s interesting to note that there are obvious and strong correlations between real estate marketing efforts and income. For example, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), "...the amount of investment in Web sites has a direct relationship to the number of leads coming from the Internet. Thus, 40 percent of those who spent more than $5,000 on their Web site showed that more than 60 percent of their leads come from the Internet."

So with such a close correlation online marketing investments and leads, why would anyone overlook their online marketing strategies? Well there are more than a few answers to help us shed light on this issue including, but not limited to, the fear of the unknown, doubting the facts, not having the capital to invest in outcomes based advertising incentives and the list could go on.

If you want to get started in investment based marketing strategies for your real estate website, then start thinking about implementing the following things into your website.

1. Get a professionally designed real estate website. Real estate websites can no longer be gloried business cards. They need a unique character, tone and inviting color scheme. Attention needs to be paid to elements of typography and user interaction. If you have confidence to implement professional design elements into your website, then go for it, if not, consider hiring outside help.

2. Implement lead generation tools into your website design. For starters you should have an auto-email function that sends website users automatic emails when someone posts a property that meets their search criteria (i.e. price, location etc). This is a great way to maintain communication with potential clients without having to do much work.

3. You should also have some type of monthly contact (email reminders, newsletters etc), to be able to stay in contact with your website users and develop a relationship that is going to be necessary for them to choose you as their agent.

4. Pay for advertising or search engine optimize your website for your local search terms. Google and Yahoo both have fantastic advertising programs where you can monitor the success of your advertising campaign to ensure it remains an advertising investment and not a marketing expense.

Real estate marketing is no easy task, online real estate marketing is no exception. PaperclipCMS offers real estate professionals a few tools to help make their marketing jobs easier. We offer an ebook on real estate marketing as well as a search engine tracking tools to help find and monitor your monthly website changes.

Remember, your real estate marketing goal is to find ways to boost your business until you are in the top 10% of real estate professionals. You can also visit our forum to find more real estate email marketing tips.

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