How do you capture the e-mail addresses and names of your real estate investor website visitors?

It's not that easy to get someone volunteer their e-mail address and name to you.

1.  You have to ask in more than one place, and

2.  You must offer your visitors something of value to them, and

3.  You should try coming up with different reasons for your visitors to give you their e-mail.

Here's what I mean.

1. Ask in more than one place.

On your website homepage you could have a pop-up window with the request for an e-mail address, so they can get/download something from you.

Some of your visitors will sign up through a pop-up.

Because of the proliferation and abuse of pop-ups, there's quite a bit of "pop-up resistance". A lot of your visitors will automatically close the pop-up without even looking at it.

Not only that, but now 2 main Internet browsers, Explorer and Netscape have pop-up filtering capacity, allowing users to disable pop-ups.

On top of that, some of major Internet Service Providers, such as AOL and Earthlink are coming up with their own ways to disable pop-ups.

What can you do to replicate the pop-up functionality in a different way?

You should have the same request/offer as a part of your home page design.

Some of your visitors will sign up through that area of your home page. Perhaps you can also have it on other pages.

Example: Look at the right side of this home page, where visitors (Sellers) are being offered a free report and asked for their e-mail address. Click Here to see.

You could have another "attempt" at the same by putting a navigation link somewhere on your main page (or even throughout your site's pages) where the link offers something. The link leads to a separate page with the same offer.

Example: On the same page above, look at the spot at the very bottom of the center section, where Sellers are offered a report. It leads to a different page where Sellers would sign up.

Some of your website visitors will click on the link and sign up on that special page.

2. Offer visitors something of value.

You have to give it some thought.

- What could be of value to your visitors?

- What kind of ad did you run to bring them to your website in the first place?

Let's talk about home buyers, for example.

Someone who has a shaky credit might be interested in getting information on alternative financing strategies without credit checks or with less stringent qualifying guidelines.

Example: Click Here to see how Buyers are being asked for an e-mail address in exchange for a special report in a manner similar the prior examples.

Someone who has limited funds might be interested in low or no down payment programs.

If your visitor is a home seller, again, you could offer him some information of value to him.

What could it be? A variety of different topics:

- 10 mistakes sellers make when signing a sale contract

- When realtors are not effective

- 7 things to spend on to improve your home appearance, and 25 not to.

- How a lender could screw up a perfect closing

- How to minimize buyer's remorse factor

- etc.

You can offer a report that educates your visitors on these subjects. The key is to create a VERY BENEFIT ORIENTED, PROVOKATIVE HEADLINE for your report.

The headline must be interesting and enticing enough for them to give you their e-mail and name information.

3.  Have different reasons for your visitors to give you their e-mail.

We talked about having an informational report to offer to your visitors in exchange for their e-mail address.

How about offering to sign up for something totally different, for instance:

- Sign up for an e-mail notices when new listings in your desired area are added to our database, or

- Sign up for notices for special sales and other promotional events, like holiday specials.

- Sign up for e-mail notices of price reductions.

The bottom line is - give them a good reason that has value to them - and some of them will give you their e-mail address.

Example: Click Here to see how Buyers are being asked for an e-mail address in to subscribe for special sale announcements.

Stop and think for a moment.

You've been through the process of giving someone else your e-mail address - probably more than once.

If fact, in order to receive this course from me, you complied with my request to go to a certain web page and plug in your e-mail address.

Think carefully, what made you do that?

We all have a natural resistance to giving out our e-mail addresses when asked. Apparently in this case the offer was good enough for you to sign up for it.

There's always something, an offer that's good enough - that'll get you your visitors' e-mail addresses.

I gave you some ideas. You may come up with better ones of your own.