How To Make Money Online Generating Leads For Local Real Estate Agents

Any Real Estate agent will tell you that his number one concern is generating leads. He can be the best salesman in the world and have a list of prime properties as long as his arm, but if he doesn’t have anyone to sell to he’s toast.

Of course, if he’s smart, that Real Estate agent has some type of website, even if it’s just one page with his contact information. He also knows that having a website is a must for any business these days, especially businesses that operate locally, and he could generate a lot more of those valuable leads if he’d only beef up his site.

The problem is, like most small business owners, he doesn’t have time to learn everything he needs to know to set up a quality site, nor does he have the desire, because he’s too busy trying to generate leads! It’s a vicious circle, that’s for sure, and that’s where you come in. Here’s how you can make money online generating leads for local Real Estate agents.

1. Create a Website: The first thing you need to do is set up your own lead generating website and take all the necessary steps to make sure you appear in local search results. Register your site with Google Business, make sure you appear on Google Maps, submit your site to the various search engines and get to work creating plenty of content focusing on keywords relevant to the local Real Estate Market.
2. Get Creative with Your Content: You can set up a nice site that’s nothing but Real Estate listings but you’ll have a much better site if you include informative articles about the city, too. When people are thinking about buying a house they want more than just information about the house. They want to know about the city – the school system, the parks and recreational activities, shopping, business, traffic, special events.
3. Include a Lead Generation form: You’ll definitely need to include a lead generation form on your site. Offer your visitors a free list of local Real Estate agents or a list of local mortgage companies in exchange for their email address.

Now that you have your lead generation site, there are several methods you can use to make money:

• Sell Those Leads: This is the most basic method you can use to make money with your site. Just call a few local Real Estate Agents and tell them you have a list of 10 or 20 new people this week who are all interested in more information. Be careful about sharing email addresses, though. Instead, for a small fee of course, offer to send a referral email to each of those new leads on behalf of the agent.
• Sell ad space: This is another pretty basic monetization method. Set up an informative site about your particular city and just sell ad space to local agents and let them have a banner in your sidebar. It’s easy enough to set up and, as long as you do the work to keep the site ranking well, you’ll always have plenty of takers.
  Go a step further with this and offer your agents the opportunity to sponsor that Top 10 list your leads get when they opt-in to your list. For example, maybe you’ve created a PDF download of the Top 10 Reasons Louisville is the Best Place to Live. Charge your agents a few bucks a month and include …”Brought to you by…” at the top of the page.
• Rent Out Space: So far, you might not even have any information about specific Real Estate listings on your site. But if you have a quality site that’s generating a good number of leads, then take the next step and start including sponsored content. Start renting out space on your site.

Let’s face it, so far we’ve talked about $20 here and $20 there and that’s not a whole lot of money. If you really want to make money online generating leads for local Real Estate agents, the best way to do it is to create a network-type site and let your agents pay you a monthly fee for access. Here’s how it works:

1. You continue to do the necessary work to promote your home website and then set up separate pages or sub-domains for each Real Estate agent who wants to participate.
2. Link these pages or subs to your homepage, of course, so they’ll benefit from the home site’s traffic. (As a side benefit, your home site will also benefit from the additional local content that these agents will be adding.)
3. Charge the agents a monthly fee and give them access to their page or sub-domain and let them put up whatever content they want. They can advertise new listings, talk about mortgage rates and lenders, all that stuff that Real Estate agents like to talk about, and all you have to do is sit back and collect their rent.

You might think that it will be difficult getting these agents to take you up on your offer. But Real Estate agents are a competitive lot and they all know what everyone else is doing. All it will take is one and soon the others will be begging you for network space.

The only hard part about making money online generating leads for Real Estate agents is setting up a site and getting the traffic. And if you know what you’re doing, then even that’s a piece of cake.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!