A place for real estate professionals to learn about digital marketing

You absolutely need a website for your business. It’s the most important part of your marketing.

If you’re just starting out as a real estate agent getting a website built can seem like a pretty difficult task. Especially if you don’t know anything about building a website.

Fortunately though there are a ton of fantastic tools and resources out there (an on this website) that can help.

In 2017 it’s completely possible to build a professionally design, mobile and search engine optimized website for less than $5 a month.

Sounds too good to be true? Here’s how.

 

The 3 Major Things Your Website Needs

When you’re building a new website there are three major things you need.

  • A domain name
  • Web hosting
  • The website itself

The domain name is the web address for your site. Usually this is something like yourbusinessname.com.

Domains typically cost between $10 to $15 a year to register. They have to be renewed every year.

It is however possible to get a domain for free as we’ll explain later in this post.

Web hosting is the actual hard drive space on a server where you store the pages and files of your website.

There are tons of options for web hosting but for your first website you don’t need anything too fancy. Web hosting is something you can always upgrade later if you ever need.

With web hosting you have to pay a monthly fee because you’re essentially renting hard drive space on someone’s server. Most web hosting companies will let you pay for a year or two at a time, usually at a discount.

Finally you need the website itself. You need to come up with a design for the visuals of your website and then you need to actually build the individual pages on the website.

It also helps if you have some kind of system to manage everything for you so you don’t have to write the code for everything yourself. This is known as a Content Management System or CMS.

All of these items you can take care of yourself and the only real expense you’re going to have is for web hosting. If you follow our instructions this can be less than $5 a month!

 

Setting Everything Up

We can take care of setting up pretty much everything for you and we can do so for free!

Visit our free website setup page here.

Click through the Bluehost signup link on the page and sign up for web hosting. You most likely only need the basic web hosting package.

We have a guide explaining the different options and how to sign up for Bluehost here.

You must click the link on our website first before you sign up. Bluehost pays our setup fees which is why this service is free to you. If you don’t click the link before signing up Bluehost has no way to match your account to our website.

When you sign up you’ll get to register domain name for free as well!

Once that’s done you’ve taken care of both your domain and web hosting.

Then return to our site and send us your account details.

Now we’ll take care of installing WordPress on your hosting. WordPress is probably the best CMS for a number of reasons. Most importantly it’ll make building and managing your website way easier than you think.

Next we’ll install your choice of a professionally designed theme from StudioPress. These themes regularly cost anywhere from $100 to $130 but if you use our setup service you get one for free!

There are two StudioPress themes designed specifically for real estate agents too!

Agent Focused Theme
Your website could look like this!
Agent Press Theme
Or it could look like this!

The StudioPress theme you choose will give your website a beautiful, professional design that optimized for mobile devices as well.

Once that’s all set up the only thing left is to build the pages you need for your website.

We’ll even install the theme’s demo data so you just have to edit what’s there instead of starting from nothing.

 

Building Your Website with WordPress

Building things like pages, menus and a blog is incredibly easy with WordPress.

In fact we’ve put together a giant tutorial explaining everything you’ll ever need to know about WordPress!

The Ultimate Beginner?s Guide to WordPress

The StudioPress theme you choose is made using software called the Genesis Framework.

The Genesis Framework adds some additional features to your website that we cover in another tutorial.

A Beginner?s Guide to the Genesis Framework

We’ve also written a few other posts that you might find helpful.

5 Free WordPress Plugins You can Use to Add Real Estate Listings to Your Site

9 Awesome (and Mostly Free) WordPress Plugins to Inspire Your Visitors to Take Action

 

Search Engine Optimization

Making sure your website is search engine optimized is another very important step once you have everything the way you want.

Fortunately this is another thing you can take care of completely on your own and for free!

First check out our guide to search engine optimization. It’ll explain how everything works and will give you a basic understanding of all the concepts you need to know.

The Beginner?s Guide to Search Engine Optimization

You’ll probably find our glossary of search engine optimization terms helpful as well.

A Master Glossary of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Terms

Once you’ve got a basic understanding of the various aspects of SEO we recommend you install a free WordPress plugin called Yoast SEO.

This plugin will take care of pretty much all your on-site SEO.

And we even have a guide explaining how to install it and set everything up.

The Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimizing Your WordPress Site

 

In Conclusion

As you can see setting up a new website is much easier than you thought. Long gone are the days where you had to write pages and pages of HTML code yourself.

If you’re just starting out and you don’t have too much money to invest in a website then setting up a WordPress site yourself is a fantastic option.

It’ll just take a few hours of your time to read through our guides. Once you understand how everything works you’ll have a beautiful website up and running in no time at all!