New home sales in July fell to a record low 276,000 annual rate. Not good for industry professionals, homeowners, or the economy. Many experts expected a drop in sales following the expiration of the home buyer tax credit, but few expected them to fall off a cliff during the administration’s Recovery Summer.
It’s been a rough nearly half decade and the only good news is that the government tax credit is over, and they haven’t extended it.
Let’s not give up; stay positive. It’s the best thing you can do, I guarantee it.
In the meantime, focus on improving your situation by gaining market share. Cut costs and find more effective ways to sell homes. Doing so will leave you with a bigger piece of the pie.
Since web traffic can easily mean more sales, why not start there? Here are 3 easy ways you can get more web traffic today.
1. Analyze your current traffic sources and get more exposure from the hidden gems you know nothing about.
I guarantee that many of you are listed on websites as a resource, and either you didn’t pay for it, or it didn’t cost you a lot, so you know nothing about it. Review all of your traffic sources to see if you can get more exposure and more traffic. If you’re getting quality traffic from a website you know nothing about, you could easily double or triple the traffic if you paid some attention to it. Do yourself a favor and review every traffic source you have. You’ll likely discover a hidden gem or two that will help you get more sales.
2. Use Google’s AdWords tool to determine what each web visitor should cost you, and get rid of services that charge more than AdWords.
You can get more traffic than you’ll ever need from PPC services offered by Google, Yahoo! & Bing, so why pay more? I like being on XYZ.com doesn’t cut it during a recession; neither does we’ve always used their service. Get rid of overpriced traffic sources (you know who they are) and find new sources of web traffic that cost less. Pay attention to time on site too, you may be getting 1,000s of visitors from somewhere, but if they’re only on your site for an average of 20 seconds, isn’t that wasted money? I guarantee it’s bad traffic. If you’re paying thousands of dollars a month and you’re not getting thousands of visitors, you’re paying too much. Yes, it’s that simple.
3. Distribute positive content about your new homes and communities to industry websites.
A builder sent us an informational article about a promotion a couple weeks ago and asked us to publish it. He got 1 sale and two interested leads that week, and it didn’t cost him a dime.
Write unique content about your new homes and communities and ask new home platforms to publish it for you, we always will. Make sure it’s unique though, if you submit the same article to multiple places, they may not publish it, but more importantly, Google will likely only keep instance of the article in their index and remove all others. Submitting the same article just wastes every one’s time.
See Also:
Sales Tips & Advice from Gurus
New home sales drop to record lows – MarketWatch.com
I am a Managing Partner, Internet Marketer and Blogger at New Homes Section. Follow me on 
We have over half of our new clients come from internet searches. It is becoming more apparent that we need to be making an impact through the web. Thanks for backing that theory.
Randy, thanks for stopping by. I just visited your website and saw the pop-up video in the right sidebar. It’s been a few years since I’ve experimented with that technology.
How’s it working for you?
I highly recommend Google adwords. It has completely changed our business. I love how it levels the playing field.
Good points. If it is more expensive to advertise elsewhere than on Adwords, then it’s time to give it up and focus on those that have the biggest ROI.
You list some great points. I think however, that there should be a warning that goes up with using PPC. If it’s not setup properly, it can financially devastate your online marketing budget and it can also do it extremely fast.
@Carmen & Maui Condos – thanks for stopping by and chiming in.
@CA Garage Doors – great point. PPC can easily kill your budget and give you nothing in return. That said, Google & Bing/Yahoo! have done a great job of making the system(s) easy to use effectively.
Best advice is probably just to be cautious with your budget and monitor the activity daily.
Hi smart point to be noticed. Well will suggest for Google adwords and Query Ads. These both are good source to get traffic.
Very Good advice for those who dont really do there own internet SEO and marketing
All good advice and just like everything even the internet is getting competitive but as they say if you dont promote something terrible happens!
NOTHING
good info. you definitely have to measure your results and keep tweaking what you’re doing and it will pay off. Be diligent..just saying
I agree that AdWords are an interesting possibility, at least in some markets. Can also recommend Facebook adverstising if you are in the B2C market.
I would add to invest the money in SEM for long term results, rather than paying google through their PPC program Adwords. Is a long term plan but it is cheaper than paying 2-5$ for each visitor.