BUSINESS
How to start Real Estate Affiliate Program
Are you interested in starting a Real Estate Affiliate Program but unfortunately not a certified real estate broker?
What if you can offer to rent or sell houses without any certification? Yes, you can do this through affiliate marketing.
Focus on the real estate industry and you will know how you can make money selling homes or renting homes without commuting or even making calls. All you need is a good website to promote your niche!
If you’re still wondering how to start your own Real Estate Affiliate Program without leaving your home, you can see how it’s done on Dr. Housing Bubble, a website dedicated to investing in the real estate industry. Visitors can get tons of good information and advice from this website as it is primarily a blog. Additionally, the website has an autoresponder, which is a good marketing tool for promoting offers. In addition, it earns on advertising space.
What is the Real Estate Affiliate Program?
Definition of a niche
Now that you’ve seen a few sample sites in the real estate niche, you may be wondering what they consist of. What is its scope? And above all, what is the niche in the real estate market?
Simply put, real estate is the activity of buying, selling, and/or leasing land and/or construction.
As the website examples above show, you can promote this niche as a general niche, encompassing various properties for sale or rent, OR you can focus on a smaller lower niche like HomeToGo.
Whether you choose a generic niche site or a subsite, see our niche selection guidelines.
Where is the Real Estate Affiliate Program now?
Popularity
There is no doubt that the real estate industry is one of the most lucrative niches. Google’s trends show relatively high and consistent popularity over the past five years as shown in the chart below:
Real estate as an industry employs over 2 million people. The recent downturn in the US economy has affected its prosperity but is now showing steady growth.
Of particular interest is the fact that, of all the numbers I’ve looked at, 92% of potential buyers use the Internet to look for potential homes. The same research on digital home searches shows that 69% of people who visit a real estate website started with a local internet search.
However, if you plan to promote this niche next, you will also need to consider the latest market research.
The niche is constantly growing based on the requirements of the constantly changing market. An article published by Deloitte shows that the real estate industry in 2017 was heavily influenced by two factors: technological progress and demographic changes.
The transition to the market, mostly made up of baby boomers and millennials, is contributing significantly to the changing demands of the industry. If you are planning to build your site around real estate, you can do further research on these demographics.
How to search keywords for Real Estate Affiliate Program
Keyword research
As I always recommend, when searching for keywords, the first thing you need to do is get all the essential keywords in your niche. Later, you will sort your keywords and finalize your list based on your competition levels.
Your initial keywords are simply keywords that you can use to rank in the SERP and promote your bids. The more relevant your initial keyword list is, the more targeted your website traffic will be.
When it comes to the real estate market, you can use several keyword research tools such as Google Trends, Ubersuggest, and our own AffiloTools tools.
Use of Google Trends
Go to Google Trends and enter “real estate” in the search box. You will see the search data immediately. Just scroll down the page to find the “Related Topics” and “Related Queries” sections (shown below) for introductory keywords that you can use on your site.
Using Ubersuggest
Go to Ubersuggest and type “properties” in the search box for more initial keywords as shown below:
Using the AffiloTools keyword research tool
AffiloTools Keyword Research is one of the easiest keyword-seeding tools to use. Just log into your AffiloTools account and go directly to Research> Keywords in the side menu to start using the Keyword Tool.
When you get to the keyword tool, just type “real estate” in the field and hit the search button. You should immediately see results like the ones shown below:
For complete instructions on keyword searches, you can check out our guide to using AffiloTools to search for keywords here.
I also suggest that you check out our tips for doing relevant keyword research so that you can target the right keywords for your real estate website.
How to Sell Like a Real Estate Professional
After building your Real Estate Affiliate Program website, the most difficult phase comes: driving traffic to your website. While it’s important to get it right, it’s more important to get started. This is no time to paralyze analysis and the key to successfully driving traffic to your website is having a clever guide to link building and inbound marketing.
You can create your strategy guide even when you are doing niche research. When looking around authority sites in a niche, pay attention to them and consider how you can promote your site in the community. Once you have a list of methods, it will be easy to go through them and see which ones work and which don’t.
No guesswork. No paralysis.
1. Start generating free traffic through SEO
This is probably one of the oldest methods of Internet marketing, but many affiliate marketers do not include SEO in their marketing campaigns. Many of these marketers say SEO is no longer working or working, but too hard to do. While it’s true that SEO is quite difficult, the claim that SEO no longer works is completely false. Sure, it works, but you’ll have to stick to the white hat techniques to see how profitable this strategy is in the long run.
You can check out our SEO checklist here and use it on your real estate website.
Never underestimate the power of social media, especially in the real estate industry, where much of the market today is made up of a generation of millennials who are always online and active on social networks.
There is tons of information and tutorials on promoting your real estate business on social media, but you also need to do your research as most of these sites have pitfalls that can do more harm than good. Don’t fall into these traps; learn about the dangers of social media here.
3. Build a good sales copy
Always write for your audience. A good copy of the sale on a real estate website provides readers with the answers and more.
One good strategy to persuade your readers to buy is to use words that evoke emotions in your readers. The more honest you are, the better your sales copy will be in terms of conversion.
Read our member’s post on “Detecting a Sales Page That Will Get Converted: 5 Basic Questions to Ask Yourself” for some additional tips!
4. Create a movie that sells
Video marketing is another popular marketing strategy that works well in a niche in the real estate market. You can post videos on your site to get additional content and/or share it on social networks such as YouTube and Facebook.
I strongly encourage you to read Gina’s post “The Video Marketing Path: Proof of It Works and 5 Easy Steps to Follow” for our video marketing plan.
5. Use Google AdWords
If you’re looking for paid ads, try AdWords. It is one of the most popular PPC ad networks and works well with the real estate niche.
For more PPC tips, you can check out our PPC Lessons here.
Move-in or move-out?
Is the Real Estate Affiliate Program is good niche to promote?
This niche has earning potential. The commissions are worth the effort. However, as I said before, this niche requires a lot of research. There is a lot to learn and a lot of technical information to review. But the market is HUGE and the demand is high.
Of course, when it comes to competition, expect it to be fierce in this niche. You’ll need a good strategy to stay ahead of the rest in the Real Estate Affiliate Program.
