5 Things I Learned Launching A New Site

Active note investors are going to want their own websites to establish credibility and do business more efficiently online. Whether you are using online assets to raise money to buy notes, or sell your notes, here are five things I learned in the process of developing new websites over the past couple of months.

While we still haven’t unveiled a new look for theNNG Capital Fund website yet, we’ve been busy building and redeveloping sites for note investors, facilitating workouts with distressed borrowers and providing more education and insights for real estate and note investors.

Here are some key takeaways from the process that may help you with your next website…

1. You Can Find Value

Commissioning a new website has typically proven to be a frustrating experience for most real estate and note investors. It usually seems to take months longer than promised. Then you normally have to pick from highly overpriced designers who are good and do what they say, but are far from cheap, or cheap offshore solutions which take so much work to deal with that they can be as expensive by the time you are done. I’m glad to say we found a good value solution for getting new websites done swiftly, without overpaying, or having to go crazy with hard to communicate providers. You can find a good solution if you look.

2. You’ll Constantly Be Updating

Much like your next home purchase or note investment, your next website is unlikely to be your last. Design trends, website capabilities, and what consumers want and expect are always changing. Too many people get bogged down and take too long to make decisions, and then by the time they do so they are starting all over from scratch again. Many homebuyers spend years waiting for the perfect forever home. They want everything to be perfect from day one, down to the carpet color in the third bedroom, and at a price they can afford. Yet, few people stay in their homes more than seven years. All the wasted time could have been time accumulating equity and saving on rent so they can leverage that into buying their real dream home. The same goes for notes. No matter how much you learn chances are that you could always do better than you did on your first note deal. You could do a little better due diligence, negotiate a stronger workout, could have saved a little more on taxes with a different structure, etc. Yet, unless you get started you’ll never gain the experience or start making money in the note business. The same goes for a website. If you spend 6 months or a year trying to perfect a website before you start doing business, design trends could have totally changed by the time you’re ready to launch and you probably missed countless opportunities to make real money. Get going, do deals, and expect you’ll be updating your online presence at least every five years or so.

3. It’s Always Smart to Backup Your Data (Early)

If you always immediately backup your data you’ll never risk losing it, along with all the investment you made in it. This definitely applies to website content, and everything involved with it. We ran into one snag in not immediately downloading all the copies of the logos and backing them up to our own storage. The third party provider took them down half way through the site build and caused several hours of dealing with support. So, don’t wait. Save copies locally and in your own online storage. Hard copies of everything can be useful too. If you have an old site you’ve lost, try using the Way Back Machine at Archive.org to retrieve an old copy.

4. You Don’t Have to Micromanage Everything

You want your site to be good, but you don’t have time to micromanage it. Hire good people, connect your team members together and let them do their work and get out of your own way. I actually got to take off for a family vacation to Aruba during the process of building our last site without any real hiccups. Check out thebusiness lessons I learned from Aruba here.

5. The Importance of a Good CMS

A good Content Management System gives you and your in-house team more ownership and control over your content and makes it easier and more cost efficient to keep updating your site and publish new content, without being held ransom by an expensive designer. WordPress is great for this. If you are just starting out on a tight budget you can find even more affordable domain hosting over at HostGator.

What headaches and success stories have you had with building real estate and note business websites? What tips can you share?

Image by 3D Animation Production Company from Pixabay