So you bit the bullet and had a firm design a killer WordPress website for your Real Estate business. You took painstaking steps to make sure your theme was custom, represents your unique value proposition, and makes you stand out from the crowd. Great job! All that’s left now is being found on the web, and converting prospects. Easy right?
Obviously if that were easy, everyone would become a Realtor®. Contrary to what some in the public think, being a Realtor® is VERY hard. Have no fear though. The wonderful thing about WordPress is that there are hundreds, if not thousands of people designing plug-ins to make your life a bit easier and help generate even more chances for you to be found online, and convert and close those inquiries you receive.
Because we are a marketing company, and because we are always working to help people attract, and close more business, in this post I’m simply going to focus on the 5 best plugins I’ve found that can assist you in doing both these things.
1. All in One SEO Pack- This one should be a no-brainer. If you do not know why, CALL US, or contact your web developer, and they can tell you why. This WordPress SEO plugin is the most downloaded plugin in “WordPress Land”. These guys are the original, and this plugin is the standard for all WordPress sites we build for our clients.
2. Gravity Forms – Our most successful clients use market specific, or niche landing pages and capture forms, virtually every day in their business. They use them with our print marketing services, with our electronic marketing services, and even in some cases with their Craigslist advertising.
This is a plug-in in the sense that it gives our clients the ability to create their own forms, on the fly, and not have to rely on us to help them get a campaign started. Even more, with very little effort, they can program these forms to feed directly into our CRM, or whatever CRM system they may be using.
3. Backup Buddy- Nobody should be without a solid backup strategy. After all, you’ve worked very hard on your content. Why let a crashed server destroy everything you’ve spent countless hours creating.
Knowing your valuable data is protected is BLISS! Even better is the cloud interaction this plugin has, easily backing your database up to things like Dropbox, and many other cloud storage solutions.
4. Pippity- This one perhaps is my very favorite. Let’s face it, pop ups suck, BUT, if you want to convert visitors into clients, they are pretty important.
Enter Pippity. Pippity delivers your users popups in a very unobtrusive way, while helping you to increase conversions. We’ve started using it on our blog and our conversion rate is increasing at an astronomical rate. Even better, they have a connector that makes is super easy to connect it to Mail Chimp, Constant Contact, Our Leading Agent CRM system, or even a your own existing solution (with some HTML programming).
5. Jetpack- Every website we design for our clients is set up with Google Analytics. The problem we’ve found though is that many agents don’t like the Google Analytics interface and often call us to translate what everything means.
The same guys that designed WordPress.com (the hosted version of the blogging platform), have designed this plugin. It gives users the ability to use the same, easy to understand statistics dashboard that can be found on the hosted version of wordpress, in their WordPress website. Not only that, it also gives users other great features, such as blog subscription widgets, spell checkers, social sharing options, and enhanced distribution features.
Like I mentioned, there are hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of plugins for your WordPress Real Estate Website. These are five that I think are great and you should definitely consider taking them for a test drive on your website.
If you don’t have a WordPress Real Estate Website yet, and have been considering “taking the plunge”, feel free to contact me anytime. I’m more than happy to show you some samples of what top producing agents in your industry are doing with their sites, and brainstorm ideas that will help you get your business to the next level!
Do you have a WordPress site already, have a bunch of plugins installed and think I missed one that should have made it into my top 5? Please comment below. I’d love to know what you’re using and how it’s helped your Real Estate Business.
Happy Plugging(in) 
Chris Leo is a Silicon Valley, CA entrepreneur, complete workaholic, top notch marketer, type “A” personality, shameless self-promoter and never ending “connector”.
Even though he is seemingly always working, when he does take breaks, the “work hard, play hard” motto takes on a whole new meaning. His life is controlled chaos and he loves it.
