Having a professional website is part of your image and identity for your business.
Your website says a lot about your business. If you have a website, does it say “professional“, or does it say, “wannabe”?
And, of course, if you don’t have a website at all, you look like you’re not even in business because what business today doesn’t have a website? So I’ll assume you know you need a website.
What makes a great website?
It depends a lot on the type of business. As a multi-family property investor, your needs are much different from an investor who flips single-family homes. You’re not necessarily too concerned about lots of people finding you on search engines like Google and generating large numbers of leads.
Your website is primarily a credibility tool. Its main purpose is to make you look like a pro, someone who knows what they’re doing and is well-established. Since your main goal is making a great first impression, your website needs to be very polished. You don’t want to go for “cute”. You want to go more for “corporate”.
Your business is dealing with large transactions, so you need to look like a company that does that kind of thing every day. Your website should have a modern, big-company feel.
You shouldn’t use the “website builder” services out there. These are services that let you build your own websites, like Wix, Weebly, and many others. There are a number of reasons why you shouldn’t do this.
Why you shouldn’t use a website builder service to build your own website
- A do-it-yourself website almost always looks like a do-it-yourself website. You may be really proud of your work, and it’s easy to convince yourself it looks great because you worked so hard on it. But does it really measure up? Are the brokers, agents, and investors going to be as impressed as you are with your work? Unfortunately, they probably won’t. If people pick up on the fact that you built your own website, your credibility is shot. Think about what brokers or investors would think if they see that you built your own website. What successful business owner is going to build their own website using a website builder service?
You should be spending your time on other things. The reality is, there’s more involved with putting up a website than you might think. The design is one part of it, which is very important. But there’s also content and images to think about. Then there are more technical things like contact forms. It’s easy to get in over your head quickly. A lot of business owners decide they’re going to build their own website, thinking it’s going to take a few days or maybe a couple of weeks. Fast forward months down the road and their website still aren’t finished. They’re still trying to figure things out and still writing content.Some people get so hung up on creating their website that they never even launch their business. Why do that to yourself? As the business owner, you really need to be focused on other things, like finding deals, making connections with people, marketing, etc. Those are things you have to be involved with. A website is not. Don’t waste your time doing something someone else can do better. Your time is worth more than that.- Website builder services will tell people you’re using their service. Many of these website builders will have a link at the bottom of your site that says something like, “Website by ___” (It will say the name of their service and it will probably have a link to their website.) With some of the plans, they might remove those links if you pay enough. Think people won’t be able to tell then? If you get someone slightly tech savvy, they can view the source code of your website and instantly see that you’re using one of these services. The people you’re trying to convince to work with you will not be impressed. They’ll think you’re either a cheapskate or a wannabe who doesn’t know what they’re doing.
Be Careful When You Hire
Even if you hire someone to build your website for you, be careful because you still could be getting into more than you realize.
If you hire someone to build a really nice looking site, you’re likely going to be looking at thousands of dollars. But even then, all you have is a design. Most web designers aren’t going to write the content for you. Writing content for websites is hard in general, but it’s especially important for this business that you put a lot of thought into the wording. It may not sound too hard, but when it comes down to it, you’re most likely looking at multiple weeks of work. Content is where most people usually run into trouble. I’ve seen multiple businesses get so hung up on writing the content for their site that they never get it done and never even put up their website.
That’s why with our Apartment Investor Pro service we’ve not only done all the design for you, but we also wrote all the content. Sure, you can tweak it or change it however you want. But you don’t have to if you don’t want to. It gets you up and running as quickly as possible. No agonizing over whether to use this color or that color or this word or that word. You just sign up and you’re ready to go. We also don’t put any links or anything about Apartment Investor Pro on your website. You don’t want people to know how little you paid. The website you get with us looks like it cost thousands of dollars, and we won’t give away your secret.