Every Realtor knows where to go to get the business. You farm, hit FSBO’s, work expired listings and call into your sphere of influence. Part of the drill has always been to do some sort of mailing and follow up to each of these categories. But following up can be tricky.

Working FSBO’s is as much about timing as anything, expired listings need gentle handling and working your sphere takes time. Sometimes it seems that you need to clone yourself just to keep up with it all. Your web site can help. If you do it well, your web site can be your clone. It can handle a lot of the leg work caused by your mail campaigns. But you need to tie the two together.

Websites offer the advantages of flexibility, versatility and 24 hour virtual access to you. When you can’t be there, your website can, pumping up prospects with reasons to work with you. What a web site needs to do is extend your marketing. It needs to be there when that FSBO is frustrated and looking for help, and it needs to be there when that disappointed expired listing is almost ready to try again.

When you send out mailers to these market segments, tying your print to your website is as simple as telling the prospect in print that your website has some helpful information. Letting FSBO’s know that you know how to help them sell, and telling expired listings that you know why their property didn’t sell is powerful stuff. Let the print tell them what you got and where to go to get it, and let the web site deliver it.

For each of the market segments you work and mail to, your website should have an extensive section that covers it. In these sections you put all your best copy that has worked in the past. Here, you capture all your best dialogue and sales technique that convert prospects to listings and customers to sales. This makes the site an extension of you. Picture it as if you are standing on a front porch, trying to get past typical objections.

Simply put, the site needs to have some killer copy that sells for you when you can’t be there to sell for yourself. In fact, you want your site to be your 24 hour a day sales partner. When a FSBO you’ve been working for the past two weeks gets frustrated at 2:00 am, you want him on your site. When an expired listing realizes they still want to sell, it’s your site you want them to go to. When someone in your sphere of influence wants the latest sales and listing info for their area, you want them searching for it on your site.

You want your site to be a virtual you. There to follow up on the copy you sent out in your mailing. When that FSBO got your flyer in the mail today telling them you can help them sell in this troubled market, your website needs to back the claim up. And it needs to back the claim up in a way that positions you as an expert. The goal of the site is to pre qualify your prospects for you. By the time your phone rings from the result of your print and web campaign, you want the prospect ready to work with you.

The site needs to educate the prospect much as you would if you were working with them face to face. When you’re dealing with an expired, you know that the biggest reason the property didn’t sell is price. You also know that that’s the hardest thing to get across to the prospect. But if you’ve set your expired listings section of your website up properly, you’ve given the prospect enough third party statistics that back up your claim. You’ve also educated them to your way of thinking about pricing along the way.

What your print campaigns need to do is let all these folks know that the answers they seek are on your site. The copy you produce in print needs to be the bait that entices prospects to your site. Without the print, they will likely never know that your site exists and that it holds the answers to all their questions.

Your print copy needs to cut through the clutter that comes in the mail every day. It needs to get the attention of the prospect, and it needs to get them interested in what you have to offer. Print copy, like any good copy needs to be written in a way that understands what the prospect needs, and then delivers it to them. Once it has their attention, it needs to get them excited about your website.

Print to web coordination is effective when a synergy is created that lead prospects to rely on you as the sole source of real estate information. You want the two streams to convince prospects that you are the exclusive and best source of information around when it comes to real estate.

peyman aleagha is the founder and president of realtysoft.com. realtysoft provides realtors with real estate web design, real estate print marketing and free idx solutions. find out more about realtysoft by visiting realtysoft.com

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