In the internet economy every real estate professional and investor needs a real estate website.

The easiest, quickest and cheapest way to build your own website, with no help from anyone, is to build a blog. 

I’m going to show you how to build your own real estate website and use it as the foundation of your internet and social media marketing strategy. Everything you do will flow through to your website so it’s important that you get it right. 

In the past this would have been an expensive and time consuming exercise. You would have needed html programming skills or a web developer to build your site. 

Not any more. 

Welcome to the world of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) technology. 

Now you can build and publish your own website even if you have absolutely zero programming and web development skills. 

I now use blog systems as my primary websites. It’s much cheaper than hiring a webmaster, designer and database developer (at a cost of thousands of dollars) you can publish your own blog site in just a few minutes. 

It’s a much cheaper alternative to building a web site. 

Another cool thing about blogs is that thousands of third party developer support the major blog platforms and have created amazing applications and plug-ins that you get to use for free. 

It’s just like your cell phone. Remember the day when you used your phone for making and receiving calls? Well now it’s also a PDA, a camera, a calculator and so much more. 

That’s what’s happened to blogs. They’ve evolved from simple blogs to sophisticated websites but maintained their user friendliness. 

Just like the Model-T Ford brought transport to the working man, so too has the blog brought websites to the people. 

Here’s how you do it! 

The easiest, quickest and cheapest way to build your own website, with no help from anyone, is to build a blog. 

The cool part is that your blog doesn’t need to look like a blog. It can look like a normal website if you use a blog theme. 

Take my website for example, www.realestateadvocate.com. The site is built on simple blog technology and has been customized to look less like a blog and more like a traditional website. 

Blog software is incredibly cheap – starting at FREE. 

The most popular blog systems act as a content management system with an idiot proof dashboard that allows you to publish content in just a few minutes. 

There are two types of blog systems that you can use.

i.          Hosted Blog Platforms 

The first system is a hosted system where you simply log onto the blog platform and create a blog that is hosted by the platform. This means you don’t need to know anything about hosting a site, uploading software of managing a server. All you do is type your posts like you were typing a Microsoft word document. 

The two systems that I recommend are Blogger and WordPress. 

Blogger is owned by Google so not surprisingly it features well in search engine rankings. It’s a turnkey blog solution that includes all the search engine optimized (SEO) tools and features.

In no time your blog will appear on Google and can be found by the rest of the world.

To get your own blog, go to www.blogger.com and create an account. When you name your blog make sure it is relevant to the content that will appear in your blog. As an example, if your business is focused on downtown condos in Dallas, you may elect to call the blog “Downtown Dallas Condos” and your blog address would be http://downtowndallascondos.blogspot.com. 

To show you how easy it is to do, take a look at the blog I set up in five minutes at http://realestatesocialmedia.blogger.com. 

You can do exactly the same thing with WordPress and set up a blog on WordPress’s hosted platform. The only difference is that your address would be http://downtowndallascondos.wordpress.com. 

Now I have a special tip for you. 

You can set up your own WordPress blog on www.erealestate.com, a real estate platform that has been designed specifically for the real estate industry. The huge advantage to this is your blog comes fully loaded with all the essential plug-ins and widgets and is already loved by the search engines. The reason the search engines already love your blog is because it sits on a keyword rich domain that is fully SEO optimized and already gets a ton of visitor. 

If you’re going to get a blog you might as well get one that already gets traffic and is built for your industry. 

Just go to http://erealestate.com/wp-login.php and set up your blog. You’ll be up and running in 10 minutes – but watch out for all that delicious Google juice. 

ii.         Host Your Own Blog 

The second type of blogging system allows you to host your blog on your own server. 

There are considerable advantages to hosting you own blog, not least of which is that you have complete control of your website. The disadvantage is that you do need some technical knowledge to set up your hosting account and install WordPress on your server but it doesn’t take long to learn how to do it yourself. It’s also cheap to hire someone to do an installation. 

I only recommend one standalone blogging system. I only recommend WordPress. 

You can set up a new blog and be up and running in 15 minutes. Just go to www.wordpress.com and download the software. Your hosting company may also have a One Click Application that allows you to upload WordPress from your hosting account. 

If you need a hosting company I recommend MediaTemple.net. I’ve tried many hosting companies and Media Temple has been the most helpful and reliable. 

We use their grid server account as it allows me to host an unlimited number of websites and email accounts for just $20 a month. 

The best thing about hosting your own WordPress blog is that you can use a customized theme and add incredibly useful applications, called plug ins, to your blog. This is because Word Press is supported by thousands of third party applications and widget developers. 

The main erealestate.com website is built on an enterprise level WordPress platform called WordPress MU. We use a very clean and simple theme called Frugal that you can purchase for $39 to $149, depending on how many websites will use the theme. 

We also have dozens of other websites built on another theme called Studio Press. Real Estate Advocate is built on a Studio Press theme. Studio Press is a little technical but it has a number of excellent real estate themes. 

There it is! It’s that easy to set up your own website.

About Ross Hair

Ross Hair is the Real Estate Advocate and founder of eRealEstate.com, a social network for real estate professionals and real estate investors.

Articles are a great source of free information. Just about every real estate investment web site will carry a number of real estate investment articles written by local experts that are free to read and download.

Most web sites use articles as a tool to bring you to their web site. The concept is quite simple – the publisher gives you free information as a means to promote its business. The problem is that the articles have not been cataloged and lack the structure and organization that you get in a book or course.

That problem is largely solved by a number of web sites that have cataloged their article database.

i.          Search for Articles

The best general article site is Ezine Articles. It’s a very popular article directory that is well organized and contains excellent free content. You can do a search right now on “real estate investment” and you’ll come up with over 2500 foreclosure articles and almost 5000 real estate investing articles.

You can also use eZines. eZines is a portal that allows authors to publish articles for free on their web site.

The great news for real estate investors is that a number of real estate investment portals offer excellent article directories. Their articles are cataloged, easy to find and written by industry experts.

ii.         Best Article Library

REI Club

REI Club is a great place to start you real estate investment career as it has an excellent article data base that you can access at any time.

Dozens of experts in their real estate investing niche have written short educational articles.

Another feature that I really like is that REI Club provides you with a license to publish their articles on your web site. It is subject to the condition that you do not alter the article and acknowledge the author. It’s a fair deal – you get an extensive article base and REI Club gets promoted through the articles.

About Ross Hair

Ross Hair is the Real Estate Advocate and the President of Real Estate Investment Association

Do you know that it’s federal law that the credit bureaus are obliged, on request, to give you one free copy of your credit report per year. This is in addition to their obligation to give you a copy of your credit report if you’re turned down for credit based on a credit review. 

The key part to the process is that you need to ask for a copy of your credit report. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. 

Before you get too excited please note that there is a big difference between your credit report and your credit score. 

Your credit report is a history of your credit activity. Your credit score is a mathematical calculation of your credit history represented most commonly as your FICO score.

The credit bureaus are required by law to give you at least one free copy of your credit report per year but are not required to give you a free credit score. 

You can get your free credit report at Annual Credit Report. 

This is the official site set up by the three main credit bureaus to provide you with your free annual credit report. This is the only official site. Every other site with a variation of the domain name is just a lead capture service that wants to sell you credit products. 

The problem with AnnualCreditReport.com is that you only get your credit report and not your credit score. You can only get your credit score if you pay a fee, about $15 per credit score per bureau.

 A quick tip – ask your mortgage broker to do a tri-merge credit pull. This will give you your credit score from all three major bureaus (Equifax, Experian and Trans Union) and is the same score used by most mortgage lenders. The advantage to using your broker is that it’s much cheaper. 

About Ross Hair

Ross Hair is the Real Estate Advocate and the President of Real Estate Investment Association 

by Ross Hair, the Real Estate Advocate

Here’s the money saving tip for the day for real estate investors…. why hire a real estate attorney when you can write your own real estate investment legal contracts for a fraction of the price?

I have the advantage of having practiced real estate law so I’m very comfortable reading and writing legal agreements. The one thing that I can tell you about real estate lawyers and legal contracts is that every attorney borrows from other attorney’s contracts and uses them as a basis for their own agreements. The end result is that a “standard” agreement soon emerges for the most common legal contracts. In real estate investment the standard agreements are purchase agreements, lease agreements and simple things like assignment contracts.

The important point that I want to make is that it’s possible to get all the standard real estate agreements that you need without spending thousands of dollars with your attorney.  

The first place you should start is with your local Real Estate Commission (REC). Your local REC publishes standard forms and agreements that licensed real estate agents in that state are compelled to use.

The advantage of REC forms and agreements is that their contracts have been thoroughly vetted by their real estate attorney. It’s like having your own attorney write up all your standard agreements for free. It’s also a great source for “legal compliant” out-of-state agreements if you’re doing an out-of-state deal. The disadvantage is that they are always long and cumbersome documents that try to cover every potential circumstance and were drafted for real estate agents and not for real estate investors. 

The second resource that you should use is to buy an off-the-shelf product from a real estate contract vendor. I use Socrates plus about three other companies and have spent a total of about $200 for all my contracts. That’s less than an hour with my real estate attorney.

You can immediately download most real estate legal agreements that you’ll need for your real estate investment business. The agreements can be customized to your personal needs and are very affordable.

About Ross Hair

Ross Hair is the Real Estate Advocate and the founder of Real Estate Investment Association.