This month’s Agent Success Newsletter features William “Sean” French of RE/MAX Town Center at Easton in Columbus, Ohio.

After years of trial and error, Sean has a website that captures above average visitors, and business practices and processes in place that are making his business more successful than ever.

Sean French has seen a high ROI from the BuyerLink program that drives buyers to his website – last year he invested $18,000 and saw $75,000 in return!

During our exclusive interview with Sean, he gives advice on the following topics:

• What a successful website should include
• Where to send website visitors
• 4 steps to better qualifying leads
• How to hit home runs with follow up phone calls

Listen to Sean French’s advice and business strategies:

To hear more HomeGain Radio interviews, plus find real estate articles, survey results and more, visit our Media Center!

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I spent some time today looking at other real estate agent websites and landing pages both of HomeGain clients and in the search engines. I will say that most HomeGain agents are doing it correctly or are close.

However, this email is really for the others who are not doing it right, or if you are marketing on the Internet and still use your home page as your landing page.

It’s amazing to me how many Realtor and Broker websites don’t even try to capture names, emails, and phone numbers. Their [home buyer and seller] visitors come to their websites, use their tools, and then call another agent.

Firstly, do you understand what a landing page is?

I know, some of you might be smirking right now, but there are a lot of people that don’t have any idea what that means. A landing page is the page in which a customer coming to your site lands on.

For instance, if a customer comes to your site from the Internet and when they click on a link they end up on your Continue reading this post

On Cinco de Mayo (May 5th), HomeGain had a special treat, as Kelly Barnes, a Realtor from Hawaii, came to visit us in Emeryville.

Mr. Barnes has extensive real estate knowledge within the Honolulu and West Coast mainland areas. He owns several multi-family apartment buildings in the Honolulu area and is accustomed to handling real estate transactions of tremendous value.

A BuyerLink subscriber for over a year, Kelly provided some great insight into what’s happening in his market as well as what HomeGain has done for his business.

“I feel confidant investing my marketing dollars with HomeGain, due to the simple fact that it works,” said Kelly.

Ryan Monsanto, Senior Sales Manager at HomeGain, stated, “Kelly had a great time visiting us and the feeling was mutual for HomeGain, as we are focused on building strong relationships with our clients.” Continue reading this post

Why is HomeGain’s BuyerLink program successful for our business? It is just PPC (pay per click), isn’t it? Couldn’t I do this myself and save money? Wouldn’t it be better to just use the natural search and not pay for clicks at all?

These are all valid questions I have asked myself – especially in a tough market like this – and I am sure I am not the only one asking! We all need to run our budgets as lean and mean as possible right now.

Isn’t the BuyerLink program just PPC and couldn’t I do this myself?

BuyerLink is a form of PPC but it is professionally administered. There is a whole learning curve involved with learning to run a successful PPC campaign. You will pay for this learning curve in one way or another. We could run it ourselves and just make the mistakes that are inherent when an amateur attempts something like this. That is one way to pay for it.

Another way is to simply hire someone to teach us. This is another form of payment but what if things change and the skills we learn become obsolete? Will we be able to keep up with current trends? Probably not.

The final way to pay for PPC is simply to allow HomeGain to administer it for us with skilled professionals who do this every day. To me that makes the most sense as I have other things to do and this is not my expertise. Continue reading this post

Linda Davis’ combined comments from her 2 part blog posts, “My Dirty Little Secrets”, on ActiveRain totals to an impressive 234!

She’s honest and frank and voices a side that I’m certain a lot of other agents feel as well.

In Linda’s part 1 ActiveRain blog post she reveals that she still sends out postcards and a newsletter. She doesn’t feel guilty for licking stamps versus sending out drip marketing emails, because her clients respond to her and would lose 40% of her business if she stopped.

Her part 2 blog post reveals that she uses HomeGain’s BuyerLink program, which has been responsible for an extra 25 sales a year for her team for the past few years.

Here are some comments generated by ActiveRain readers:

“Thanks for sharing! I’ve been paying about $0.75 – $1.00 per click on Google AdWords to drive potential buyers / sellers to my website, so I think I may give that a rest for a few months and give HomeGain a try.”

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We’ve heard all the arguments about lead generation companies. It’s been debated on blogs, in real estate forums and at office meetings. I recently read a blog comment which likened a certain lead generation company to a drug dealer.

Pretty strong stuff.

I’m the little guy with a little office. Even though I work for a franchise, I can’t personally compete in my area with the big franchises or the public MLS when it comes to driving traffic to my IDX website. If you do a search using the most sought after search terms in my area, all the big franchises are right there on the top of the first page, along with HomeGain and a few other lead aggregators. They can afford to outspend me to get there.

Blogging does keep me competitive with the big guys. As far as long tail searches, my blog is all I need, and I can outmaneuver the best of them on that playing field. But being the competitive person that I am, I wanted anther tool in my arsenal. In 2005 I signed on to HomeGain’s BuyerLink. At that time I had 3 buyer’s agents and needed to keep them fed with a good supply of leads. HomeGain generated about 30% of our team income that first year by driving traffic to our IDX site. Continue reading this post