I renewed 350 domain names in bulk last week with GoDaddy. I like the internet. It’s that great frontier of the Wild West West and it’s presently available for you to stake your claim. Incidentally, Business.com sold last week for $345M and, unlike the dot-com blowouts of Y2K, the company is profitable with $50M in revenues. So I think there’s something to this whole World Wide Web thing and I’ll offer a few of my thoughts and encourage any of you who might not be involved as of yet to get involved and watch your mortgage business grow.
First and foremost, thanks to Todd for the work that he does here on Lenderama, REMBEX, and all of the other online projects he leads which are geared towards the mortgage/real estate community. He makes it easy for an originator to get involved. One simple way to build a web presence is to create a free blog with blogger [in about five minutes], and use that blogger user/pw to post comments to Lenderama. Go ahead, try it – post a comment. Also, you don’t have to agree with the author. Personally, I think it makes for more interesting and truthful reading when people with divergent opinions clash in a friendly way and everyone grows as a result. So go ahead, post a comment – I’m not made of paper.
In February of last year, I created a blog on the subject of credit repair and responsible mortgage lending. Today it is the #1 credit blog in Google out of over 100M sites. The site generates 150 to 200 leads per week every week. More importantly, the site helps people improve their lives. That’s what makes it worthwhile for me. As a LO, I’m sure you’ve seen credit reports with stellar credit and then one $100 collection that drops the score 70 points. The collection agencies of the world provide a never-ending supply of subject matter for the Broken Credit Blog to write about. The website is my persona, but I’m not the only author, as brokencredit.com has over a dozen ghostwriters. By the way, that’s what I believe it takes to make a site [or anything in life] successful for the long-term – cooperation and teamwork. That’s why I’m encouraging those of you who are committed to this industry to get involved. We are in an unprecedented time and the internet breaks down barriers in ways it hasn’t done before. Last week presidential candidates faced questions sent in via YouTube!
OK, so maybe this is a little daunting for some as it may seem as though being found through a search engine for whatever search terms is about as likely as being spotted on TV in a crowd inside the stadium during the Super Bowl. Let me tell you about an amazing website that is providing a most excellent service free of charge for the mortgage/real estate community. It’s a networking site with around 11,000 members; it has a great vibe and powerful PageRank. How would you like your page to be in the top fifty sites for a Google search for ‘your city + real estate’? Now is your chance; that is, if your city and state haven’t already been taken. WannaNetwork is looking for mortgage or real estate professionals to write a one-page description about their city and state. This is a great opportunity for search placement, so hurry up, before your city is taken. Heck, if you can’t write [or don’t want to], then pay a professional writer $100 to write the text for you. Imagine the leads you would get from Google searches for ‘your city + real estate’ over the next few years from simply writing one article.
So, there you have it. An invitation to create your website and grow your mortgage business. For those of you who’ve already been doing that, I’m hopeful it’s a positive message you’ve been promoting all along. For everyone else, the environment and timing are right to begin building a presence on the World Wide Web. I can’t guarantee you’ll end up selling your domain for $345M; but, if your investment is in people, you’ve already shown a profit.
Posted by Paul – Broken Credit
