Cameron North

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Hi Guys, I didn't realize such a small thing on my site would create the buzz it did. For those of you that think having a sign up process is the right way to go, I applaud you. For everyone else, good luck getting business. Let me tell you the background behind it a little bit. Initially when the site launched, it had no sign up procedure at all. We logged IP's and searches, so we can tell how many searches were done each day. This also told us how many unique people were at the site each day. We would get a few contacts here and there and I stayed busy enough not to look for another job. This was my first year in Real Estate and I ended up making about 65k, which was 'OK', but I wasn't satisfied with that. After quite some time, we changed it so that you had to sign up before you could do any searches or anything. We noticed that the number of people doing searches dropped by quite a bit, but we were now capturing everyone's name, phone and email. Some of the info was legit, while about half was not. This gave us a great way to contact the legit members and sell ourselves and our business. I rarely spoke to someone that didn't welcome my call. It's a warm call at that point, not a cold call. I suddenly got extremely busy working with people. I finished my second year in RE off by surpassing the 6 figure mark. Now in my third year, we made another change. We opened the site up to people so that you could access any section of the website except for the property details of each listing. We wanted people to see what we offered before they had to sign up. This actually made the signup process even easier. Now we are getting even more members and the contact info is more accurate than ever. People are seeing the value they are getting and making the decision to sign up whereas before it was mandatory before they even got any value. Now in my third year, I have been able to hire 4 other agents to work for me, I started a mortgage company with another guy and have all the business I need. I'm even opening the site to advertisers now, which seems to be a success as I have gotten a ton of requests from other businesses. I'm making money buy closing on the home, the loan, selling the leads I capture, and selling a small bit of advertising space on the site. I am easily in the 6 figures again this year, even with the market being the way it is, and all the scare of the public. I hope you get my point. Those of you that think the sign-up process is not worth it, you may seriously want to reconsider. Those of you that want to question me from a analytics stand point. I'm not that geeky, but my business partner is, and he handles that aspect. What he tells me is that the way the site is now shows very few bounces, and we actually have a time on site of like 18 minutes, and the averages number of each pages that our members view is 12/person. There really is no argument if you've lived through all of it and experienced both signing up and not. Sorry for my ramble, but I thought it was important to share my experiences. Thanks guys! Cameron North Real Estate Professional www.zoomUTAH.com