Noel Nissen, Manager of IT Services at RE/MAX of Western Canada recently hosted an intensive training session for our group, covering some of the technology tools that RE/MAX offers.
The session was 2 ½ hours long, so we have broken it up into a series of posts and added the Coles Notes for reference.
Part 1. Leadstreet – how leads are generated and distributed
Part 2. MAX CENTER – configuring your RE/MAX and LeadStreet profiles
Part 3. Agent LeadStreet websites – configuring LeadStreet components and your agent website
Part 4. Design Centre – creating RE/MAX branded marketing materials
Part 5. RankMyAgent (post coming soon)
Video for this segment starts at 1:11:52 and ends at 2:03:20. It is approximately 52 minutes long. Information about configuring the design of your website starts at 1:33:53.
Your RE/MAX agent LeadStreet website
Every agent is given a RE/MAX agent website with their membership. This site will always rank high in search engine results because of the strength of the RE/MAX brand and its web presence. If you’d prefer to use a different site, you can still take advantage of the remax.ca SEO boost by redirecting your remax.ca site to your custom site. Instructions can be found below.
To find your LeadStreet website, take the first part of your remax.net email address, and add .remax.ca. e.g. yourname.remax.ca
The website is configured via the Apps link in the LeadStreet dashboard through MAX CENTER. Before we get to the website design, let’s investigate some of the other LeadStreet components. They are all related to the website configuration or lead generation in one way or another.
Leads & Contacts
LeadStreet does more than just deliver leads to you and give you a website. It’s a fully functioning contact management system as well, where you can add buyer profiles and schedule tasks to keep on top of all the little details involved in real estate transactions.
It is designed to create traffic and generate leads, keeping people within your ecosystem. LeadStreet will auto-send any listings that match a buyer’s search criteria, and if they request more information they will be redirected back to your site.
If you have a DocuSign account it can be integrated here, making your contacts’ information available to the program.
Lead Gator setup – If you decide that you want to use LeadStreet as your contact management system, you can aggregate leads from other sources into LeadStreet. When you sign up with a third party service e.g. rew.ca, use the email address that LeadGator provides, instead of your regular email address for receiving leads. When a lead is generated through that service, a contact will automatically be added in LeadStreet.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing lets you send an individual or bulk email message, launch automated email marketing campaigns, save and reuse your customized messages. There is a large library of messages to choose from and edit, or create your own.
Listings
- MLS® listings will be automatically pulled from the Real Estate Board.
- You may enhance your listings here, providing richer information on your LeadStreet website, remax.ca and global.remax.com.
- Exclusive listings can also be entered here, and they will show up on the sites mentioned above.
- Featured listings – you can configure which listings show up on your home page.
Business Intelligence
This utility has limitations. Yep, we said it. We recommend that you install Google Analytics to get a better idea of who is visiting your website and when.
Social Networking
If you have imported all of your contacts into the contact manager, this will prove to be a very powerful tool. It will complete each contact profile with information that is available on Facebook.
Homes.com Social
Social Broadcaster works like a mini blog. Anything that you post here, on Facebook or Twitter will flow through to your RE/MAX website. This will help with your search engine placement.
Website
Click on the “Website” icon to get to the website overview and edit the Advanced Settings.
SEO advantage
Having yourname.remax.ca as a web address gives you a huge boost to your website presence because of the power of the RE/MAX brand.
If you’d like to take advantage of the remax.ca affiliation but prefer not use the website that RE/MAX provides, then use the 301 Redirect Manager to point the remax.ca site to your custom site.
Alternatively, if you have an awesome domain name that you love, or perhaps a site that isn’t doing so well, you could point that domain back to the remax.ca site that is created for you.
Design Themes
- There are many design themes to choose from.
- All sites that RE/MAX provides for you that are mobile friendly. This is important these days for visibility on Google.
- All are very customizable, except for RE/MAX WC Fusion.
- Canadian pictures have been added and more are coming.
- The ability to upload your own background picture will be coming soon.
- You may set different colour schemes.
- We recommend that you update the text to personalize your site and make it unique.
Pages
There are many pre-configured pages to choose from. Use the Page Manager to edit content, configure page titles and add the pages to your site. This is also where you would configure meta descriptions and meta keywords.
Header & Footer
If you understand code to some degree, then you can start adding things like Google Analytics, Tracking pixels, Google Translate, etc.
Menu Builder
Use the menu builder to create and edit menus for your site.
Best practices
Here is a summary of recommendations that have been mentioned throughout the series. Whether you choose to use the website provided by RE/MAX or pay for your own custom site, these tips will help your optimize your search results.
In part 4 of this series we will cover the RE/MAX Design Centre.
