I post 3 analysis articles per month plus some random number of articles relating to local, state or national events. If you take a look at the articles up there now, you can see what I am talking about.
The site, as it currently exists, has been up since july. I had a different site that was way more static before that.
One of the reasons I went with Joomla was that it was more search engine friendly and there are some great extensions to create google sitemaps and to analyze traffic to my site. When people visit my site, I know their IP address, if they found my site via a search engine and what search words they used, what link they clicked on to come to my site (if at all). For instance, I know that 4 people in the last 24 hours have clicked on the link in my signature on this site from this thread to visit my site. It also tells me all the pages on my site a visitor looks at. It's pretty cool.
As for building traffic, you can suddenly go from a few visitors a day to thousands. The big boost in the traffic to my site happened like that. I wrote an article about the practice of re-listing and a week or two after posting it, I suddenly got 1400 unique hits in a single day where I was normally getting 20 or 30. It was nuts. That single article is still one of the big things that draws people to my site. It is linked to by dozens of sites out on the net and for whatever strange reason, I will still get about 1 day a week where my unique visitors spikes up to over 1000.
Now, remember, I am talking about UNIQUE visitors... not hits. Hits is a much bigger number. My site tracks unique visitors by their IP address. So if one guy looks at 200 different pages of my site, that is 200 hits by only 1 unique hit.
As for the broker question, I do plan to offer my agents a website to help them get their business going. However, I strongly suggest you make sure and keep as much control of your online presence as possible. After all, if you get some great site going under your brokers umbrella, if you leave that office, you are likely to lose all that traffic you have built up.
The best solution for all agents is to get your own URL. For instance, mine is
www.soldbyrobert.com (along with a few others I thought were good like soldinmorganhill.com, robertwhitelaw.com, etc.). Once you have those, you can "point" them anywhere. So let your broker provide that site, but make sure that people get to your portion of the site (which might have a url like
www.mybroker.com/agents/ca/mysite.htm) by entering your URL address. That way, when/if you do leave that broker, you can take your sites traffic with you since you can point your urls wherever you want.
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