To understand real estate marketing online, you first have to understand how consumers have evolved over recent years. This article will show you how to improve your online messaging to an "info savvy" audience.

Each year, more and more consumers go online to look for homes and search for real estate agents. Smart real estate marketers know this, so they venture online themselves, with a personal marketing website.

But simply having a website is not enough. You must have an effective website -- one that moves the visitor toward that all-important goal of contacting you.

The First (and Only) Law of Web Marketing:

Seems everyone these days has an unsupported opinion about what does or doesn't work in web marketing. But the only thing these people can say for certain is what has or hasn't worked for them.

A tactic that fails miserably on one website could succeed wildly on another site. There is testing, and then there's conjecture ... the key is to know the difference.

You never know if something will work until you try it.

Marketing to the Info Savvy

To understand real estate marketing online, you first have to understand how consumers have evolved over recent years. Consumers have become increasingly skilled at using the Internet as a research tool. The glut of information we face on a daily basis has led to a nation of "info savvy" individuals.

In short, the problem of information overload has yielded the solution of information savvy. As a result, new skill sets have emerged.

Skills of the "Info Savvy" Web User:

* Able to quickly judge the value of a website

* Able to recognize and assess the information "hot spots" of a website

* Able to skim and scan web pages with brutal efficiency

* Able to read selectively while ignoring suspected advertising spots

Don't Underestimate Your Readers

Read enough articles on web writing and you'll hear the phrase "short attention span" used to describe web readers. Nothing could be further from the truth. A short attention span implies some kind of mental deficiency, a handicap of sorts.

On the contrary, the average web reader is anything but handicapped. They don't suffer from short attention spans -- they enjoy heightened powers of selectiveness.

They don't scan pages because they're averse to reading -- they scan pages because they know there's a lot of bad websites out there, and they've developed the tools to screen them with great efficiency.

So if you want your website to engage the reader, and ideally evoke a response, you must first get the reader to stop. You must use words, images or a combination of the two to tell the reader, "Hey, you've found something worth your while. Slow down for a minute!"

If your website fails in this regard, it fails entirely.

On a personal marketing website, the obvious goal is to motivate or persuade the reader. To channel them toward the desired goal. And speaking of "channels," it's about time for an acronym.

SECTO: Stop ... Engage ... Channel ... Tell ... Offer.

Keep SECTO in mind when building (or having built) your personal marketing website, especially on those pages where you're trying to evoke a response.

SECTO:

* Stop the reader (perhaps with your headline, imagery, or a combination of the two). * Engage the reader with relevant content that delivers on the headline's promise.

* Channel the reader toward the specific action you want them to take.

* Tell the reader how to take that action.

* Offer the reader an incentive or reward for taking that action. Statistics show that 77 percent of buyers use the Internet at some point during their home search. With numbers like that, your mission is clear -- you must have a website to stay competitive.

The question is, what have you done to make your website more effective than the websites of all your competitors?

About the author:

Brandon Cornett has worked as a writer and advertising manager within the direct mail industry. He now dedicates his time to helping agents and brokers improve their real estate marketing programs. His website guide and his free newsletter are both available at: www.ArmingYourFa rming.com