Sourcing Your First Buy To Let Property - Websites

My most success for buying property to add to my portfolio has came from my websites. Over the years I have had many websites, and used various methods to get traffic to them.

In the early days of my property investment career what I used to do was leaflet dropping. The leaflets would go out in my local area, headed up with 'SELL YOUR HOUSE FOR FAST CASH', and the response was great.

At the bottom of the flyer I used to have my website address, and people would visit the site directly. 

However, as more 'quick sale' companies started to trade around my area, I found myself getting shoved out from the big boys will professional websites and flyers. My little black and white A5 flyer was proving less and less effective, and my website was becoming redundant.

Pay Per Click Advertising.

This is when I first discovered Pay-Per-Click Advertising. In the early days of Google when the internet was a fairly new concept, not many companies where utilising it to it's full potential. Google offer a service known as PPC, which is basically where you bid for particular keywords in order to rank in the search engine, so your ad gets seen and gets clicks.

For example one of the most popular keywords on PPC in the quick sale niche is 'sell house fast', a term that everyone is after. When I first started out doing PPC on my site, it would cost me £0.50p per click, (every time someone typed in 'sell house fast' and clicked my ad).

However, now the cost per click with the rise in competitors in the niche is on average £9 per click, which can prove to be very expensive.

The beauty of PPC is that you can geo-target, ie only show your ads in your local area. This means you only get the enquiries that you want and need. However what you need to keep constantly improving is your sites conversion rate which I will explain next.

Website Conversion Monitoring.

Website conversion is the amount of clicks versus the amount of actions that someone takes when they visit your site. For me, my main action is to get a vendor to fill out a form in order to receive a free valuation and cash offer from me. For others it may be a phone call or download of a PDF.

Whatever it is, when it comes to PPC you need to keep a firm eye on it or the costs can run away with you and you will find that you have very little leads for a lot of money.

Lets look at an example of a good conversion from one of my sites from a day last week:-

50 clicks in a day from PPC, 5 ring ins, 17 valuation enquiries.

This means my site is converting at 44% which is a very decent conversion.

Search Engine Optimisation.

The other form of advertising on the search engines is using SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation in full. Basically this is a method of getting a free listing in the search engines, and a way of achieving free enquiries once your site is positioned in the top 10.

However, not just anyone can do SEO, it is a difficult and long process. You have to not only compete with time served professionals who have being practising SEO for many years, you also have to compete with the search engines who are constantly monitoring and tweaking their algorithms in order to stop manipulation of the results from the SEO's.

Everyone always prefers SEO to PPC, however there are no guarantees that your site will list, and there are no guarantees that SEO will work for you. It can also become a money pit if you choose the wrong company, and end up out of pocket from SEO that hasn't worked.