Marketing Strategies For Real Estate Investors

People are increasingly investing in real estate after the uncertainties of the stock market. Many real estate investors are new to this market and often make mistakes leading to losses. They need to plan strategies for investing in real estate. People invest in real estate for selling at a later stage for a handsome profit. For this they need to have a marketing strategy in place.

Buy At Bargain Prices;

Many real estate investors have entered the business because they saw someone else do the same, and make oodles of money. This is a big mistake, as it may not always work for you. As you will be selling your property later, you need to make bargain purchases, where you pay only around 80% of the current market value. Not easy, but possible.

Buy foreclosure properties; buy properties that are off the beaten path; properties that people avoid due to some adverse aspect they have such as a massive roof leak condemned by the board of health.

Foreclosed properties are always bargain buys, and you may even get them cheaper than 80% of the current market value.

Upgrade The Properties;

By upgrading the properties, you add market value to them. A property condemned by the board of health due to a massive roof leak, with a market value of $300,000 could be bought for, say, $200,000. You can upgrade the property by effecting roof repairs, which could cost about $40,000. You can make a neat little profit, just by effecting little repairs, and easily selling for about $280,000, which is below the current market value.

Upgrading does not mean cosmetic changes. Cosmetic changes will not fetch you a high price, though you may have spent a bundle on it.

Flipping

This is a very common strategy, but is risky at times. Some real estate investors, as a form of marketing strategy, buy and hold real estate properties for a short period and sell it at a profit. This is based on the assumption that the real estate prices will rise.

Flipping is not an easy way to make money, and you need to have enough cash flow, if you are not able to sell your property fast, and may have to hold on to it because of adverse real estate prices. Real estate investors, who are real flippers, combine the strategies of bargain buying and upgrading the properties to make decent profits.

Real estate investors must develop a marketing strategy for their properties. Depending alone on the tenet that all property prices always go up and never come down, may not be safe, as there are times of slump in the markets. Real estate prices do come down occasionally, and real estate investors should not believe in blind faith.

Alexander Gordon is a writer for http://www.smallbusinessconsulting.com - The Small Business Consulting Community. Sign-up for the free success steps newsletter and get our booklet valued at $24.95 for free as a special bonus. The newsletter provides daily strategies on starting and significantly growing a business.

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Smart File Names For High Rankings

One of the simplest methods to improve your search engine optimization is to look at the way you name your files.

Keywords in file names are a good thing. Don't call your webpages names like "services.html" or "products.html" actually use your keywords. Here is an example for you.

Let's say you sell tennis balls online and you have three brands available, Slazenger, Wimbledon and Wilson and your webstore is at www.bigballsintennis.com.

A mistake would be to call your sales page something like this

www.bigballsintennis.com/product1.html
www.bigballsintennis.com/product2.html
www.bigballsintennis.com/product3.html

This just tells search engines that you sell products! What you want to do is use the keywords for the main search terms you want that page to show up for in search engines. Something like this would be better.

www.bigballsintennis.com/slazenger-tennis-balls.html
www.bigballsintennis.com/wimbledon-tennis-balls.html
www.bigballsintennis.com/wilson-tennis-balls.html

Note that it would also be a good idea to have a tennis balls homepage that links to all those pages but focuses on the keyword tennis balls only. Something like:

www.bigballsintennis.com/tennis-balls.html

Conduct Keyword Research

Now remember you probably face a bit of competition for the keywords "tennis balls" since globally you might have a few competitors also selling online. You should conduct some keyword research first and determine which phrases you want to work towards optimizing for.

You might notice there is little competition for Slazenger and work towards optimising for sales of that brand. Maybe your research shows that most people are using the phrase "tennis ball shop" so you should optimize for those keywords. Or you might consider working towards a local geographical niche, like "tennis balls Bahamas" or your home town or state.

Remember you don't have to get things right the first time. Do some keyword research, choose some keywords and then test to see how high up you can get your pages to rank for certain key phrases. If those phrases don't bring in traffic keep testing until you find a combination that works. Remember though that file names are only a small part of the overall SEO process and if you only optimize your file names and not the on-page copy, the incoming links, your internal site structure etc. etc, your efforts in file name design will have little impact.

How To Structure Long File Names

Dashes make for better file naming - at least that's what research in Google has demonstrated.

When I say dashes it's like this -

www.bigballsintennis.com/wilson-tennis-balls.html

as opposed to this -

www.bigballsintennis.com/wilson_tennis_balls.html

I have been structuring my files with dashes for a long time now. I made this decision not only for SEO purposes but for human navigation too. Many people don't know what an underscore is and even have trouble finding it on their keyboard. Dashes look clearer on screen and act as a good divider for keywords.

The only thing to be careful with is to not go over board with file names. Don't do this -

www.bigballsintennis.com/the-best-cheapest-most-impressive-wilson-tennis-balls-you-will-find-online.html

Clearly this is just silly. You are diluting your keywords, creating a page that is next to impossible to remember or type in manually and are certainly not helping your search engine optimization.

By Yaro Starak
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

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