Promote your retirement home on the Net
Saturday, October 23rd, 2010 | Great Sites
If you’re serious about marketing your retirement home on the World wide web, then this post will offer you a quick overview of what’s required. Web Marketing is a huge subject - many books have been written on the topic, and there are literally hundreds of websites devoted to it - it is impossible to deal with everything in one post, but with any luck this short introduction will serve as a helpful jumping-off point, to get you going.
You don’t need to have the most advanced corporate website for your retirement home - actually a simple but informative website generally works better. You can simply hire a local web designer to create a site (ask around locallyfor recommendations). Many firms prefer to build their own site, to make it easy to alter the information in future. It may be time-consuming, but needn’t be complicated - there are lots of wonderful services like Yola and Google Sites that will help you to build an attractive website quickly and easily.
One very important word of advice - set up an analytics system on your site so you can keep track of the success of your marketing efforts. Experienced Internet Marketers could not do without a good analytics program on their sites, so don’t ruin your endeavours with a beginners mistake. There are superb web stats programs available free - and they’re simple to install and set-up - so there’s no reason not to do it.
Getting your website displayed in a few standard directories is a very good place to start off with marketing. Nearly everybody knows the Yahoo directory - but it’s really pricey these days at $299, and won’t actually send much traffic. Free directories including DMOZ, or less expensive paid ones like JoeAnt or BestOfTheWeb are generally a better option for a lot of people.
retirement home sites that will list your details will typically charge you money - but the ones that have high visitor numbers and will send lots of people to your website, it may well be money well spent. From time to time you can even find a free website that deals with your sector - for example http://www.ClickRetirementHomes.co.uk/ for the retirement home market.
Among the speediest ways to get site visitors to your web site is using Pay Per Click advertising services like Google Adwords. These can be set up in a few minutes, and begin delivering targeted visitors today! Of course you have to take care and make sure that you’re not spending too much - but since you only pay for people who click through to your website - not for people who look at your ad but do not click, it could be an effective way to drive traffic. It’s important to track your Pay Per Click campaigns very carefully to ensure they’re profitable - so it’s good that you installed Analytics software already!
Now that customers are coming to your website - make sure to ask for their email address, so you can email them information, announcements and special deals - or simply remind them to keep coming back to your site and see what’s changed. Providers like GetResponse make it straightforward to capture email addresses and send emails to your potential customers.
In a post this size, I’ve only been able to give a brief overview of the key topics involved in marketing your retirement home on the net - there’s lots that I’ve been forced to miss out. Fortunately, all the information you will need is out there on the net, and readily available - so you’ll very easily be able to obtain more detailed material on any of the topics mentioned above.