Tens of thousands of loan officers are making a massive marketing mistake by not having a domain name they control. They either don’t see the need or the benefit to having their own mortgage domain name. The reality is that it can prevent headaches now and into the future.
Why Every Loan Officer Should Own and Use A Mortgage Domain Name
1. Simple and Professional
Which of the following looks more professional?
http://www.yourmortgagecompany.com/heidi-johnson.html
or
http://www.loansbyheidi.com
What if you have potential client or referral partner and they ask for your website, which would be easier to give over the phone? Which one fits better on a business card? Which one would you rather type into a search engine?
2. Branding
This can be anything you want it to be, as long as the domain is available. It could be something catchy like GreatRateKate.com, just your name, something area specific like PortlandMortgage.pro or it could be product specific like BuildWithBob.com. The key is to keep it short, simple and memorable.
3. You Won’t Lose All Your Hard Work
Personally I think this is one of the most important reasons why you should have our own domain name. Think about all the places you are promoting your business online and offline. Without your own domain name you are promoting either the company’s main website or your personal page on their site.
What happens when you switch companies? All of that work to promote your business will now be generating clicks, calls and leads for a company you no longer work with. Sure, you can try to clean it up, but you will never find all the places you promoted yourself or the companies website.
4. Take It With You
If you do decide to switch companies it is easy to log into your account and switch where the domain is being forwarded. It is a simple solution that takes less than 5 minutes compared to what could be days of work trying to clean up your previous promotions.
5. You Are Promoting You
Many mortgage companies will not allow their loan officers to have their own website. This makes total sense from a compliance standpoint. However, there is no reason a mortgage company would not allow a loan officer to have their own domain name.
6. It Is Cheap and Easy
A domain will cost anywhere from a couple dollars to usually no more than $35 per year depending on the extension such as .com, .net, .org. There are also all kinds of new extensions such as .mortgage, .loan and .expert.
Once a domain is registered you simply forward the domain to where ever you want the people clicking on it or typing it in to go. For example, many loan officers have a personal page on their companies’ website or they have their own website as a subdomain, you could forward it there.
There are three types domain forwarding. I don’t want to get to technical here so I will just tell you what I do and why.
I forward my domains as a 301 redirect through the registrar. The registrar is where you registered your domain name. Most registrars offer several different types of redirects and have plenty of tutorials on how to do it. It is not complicated in most cases.
If you are having trouble, you can usually get on chat and they can walk you through the steps you need to take to forward the domain.
The reason I 301 the domain is so any links I get through guest blogging, social media, parasites, or anywhere else will pass those links on to the site I am forwarding to. This helps with search engine optimization (SEO).
If the domain ever changes or if I were to switch companies, where ever I forward that domain to will get the power that has already been created.
I just re-read all of this and I feel and sound like a super nerd.
