Articles
Lowering Google AdWords Costs
Google AdWords for Realtors is a real crap shoot it seems with people paying anywhere from $1 per click to $5 per click. But what if I was to tell you that you may be throwing away most of that money and that ther is a better way.
To lower your cost per click you just need to look at the following variables:
Your ad - Make sure that oyu ad is relevent to your customers. The more often that your ad is clicked the more that Google will trust your ad
Your keywords- Everyone wants to rank for
Your landing page - Making sure that you landing page that you are sending your traffic to is realted to your keyword is critical. The more relevant that it is the better.
When looking at these three variables you can see that making the most of your ad being seen with the right keyword and clicking through giving a relevant page is a lot of work. I would bet that you can cut that $3 - $5 keyword down to 20 - 30 cents per click.
There is one more thing that can help you a lot besides the above three variables and that is the ad groups. If you are writing an ad directed at First Time Buyers then the ad is going to look a lot different than the ad you have going to First Time Buyers or Real Estate Investors so do not bother trying to mix and match instead set up a few ad groups.
Once you have three or four different ad groups then write the Google AdWords ad and then give it keywords and a good landing page, different landing pages for each keyword if possible or necessary and then move on to the next ad group.
There is no shortage to optimizing that you can do with your Google Adwords using the Ad Groups, ads, keywords and landing page quality.
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Newspaper advertising is a black hole
As a computer nerd and marketing guy I love to see a pile of stats that I can analyze and mine the information. When I do any pay per click advertising I can look at my analytics stats and see how well my individual pages are converting.
One of the things that drives me crazy is marketing in ways that are hard to track. One of the most popular methods of doing advertising in real estate is using classified ads. Classifieds are a tough way to track and the only way that anyone seems to track the effectiveness of classified advertising is by the number of calls that they get after they put an ad in the paper. I remember when people would say things like "That was agreat ad I got three calls on it"
Well times change and tracking should also change and get better. I was just tracking a new real estate site that is not getting any Google traffic. I watched and monitored two kinds of advertising. I had Google Analytics set up to track all visits to the site and had the following types of traffic going to the site.
1. Classified ads running that were advertising the site and a phone number to call if the person wanted to.
2. Google Adwords that were costing about 23 cents per visitor.
In the tracking over the last few weeks I noticed that the classified ads were bringing over about 3-5 visitors a day for a $75 per week adspend and the Google Adwords were bringing in about double the people for about a 11-12 dollar per week adspend.
Here is the breakdown per visitor for the classified ad at best $75 divided by a total of 30 visitors for a total of $2.50 per visitor from the newspaper versus 23 cents per visitor over the Google AdWords.
There are of course other factors that we can look at between the newspaper advertising and the Google Adwords including the fact that some people may phone the number instead of visiting the website.
In the end tracking for newspaper classified ads for Realtors sucks because it is not as smooth and can not be changed as easily for split tested as queickly as web advertising is. If you are looking to test how well a page will convert then doing a quick test with Google AdWords or some other pay per click is a lot better use of time or money then almost any other form of testing. Give up the newspaper and find leads on the web instead.
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Newspaper advertising is a black hole
As a computer nerd and marketing guy I love to see a pile of stats that I can analyze and mine the information. When I do any pay per click advertising I can look at my analytics stats and see how well my individual pages are converting.
One of the things that drives me crazy is marketing in ways that are hard to track. One of the most popular methods of doing advertising in real estate is using classified ads. Classifieds are a tough way to track and the only way that anyone seems to track the effectiveness of classified advertising is by the number of calls that they get after they put an ad in the paper. I remember when people would say things like "That was agreat ad I got three calls on it"
Well times change and tracking should also change and get better. I was just tracking a new real estate site that is not getting any Google traffic. I watched and monitored two kinds of advertising. I had Google Analytics set up to track all visits to the site and had the following types of traffic going to the site.
1. Classified ads running that were advertising the site and a phone number to call if the person wanted to.
2. Google Adwords that were costing about 23 cents per visitor.
In the tracking over the last few weeks I noticed that the classified ads were bringing over about 3-5 visitors a day for a $75 per week adspend and the Google Adwords were bringing in about double the people for about a 11-12 dollar per week adspend.
Here is the breakdown per visitor for the classified ad at best $75 divided by a total of 30 visitors for a total of $2.50 per visitor from the newspaper versus 23 cents per visitor over the Google AdWords.
There are of course other factors that we can look at between the newspaper advertising and the Google Adwords including the fact that some people may phone the number instead of visiting the website.
In the end tracking for newspaper classified ads for Realtors sucks because it is not as smooth and can not be changed as easily for split tested as queickly as web advertising is. If you are looking to test how well a page will convert then doing a quick test with Google AdWords or some other pay per click is a lot better use of time or money then almost any other form of testing. Give up the newspaper and find leads on the web instead.
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Flyer design and printer tips
Real estate marketing is about communicating with people and staying on top of the industry. You need to communicate with your past clients, locate new clients, and generate leads through multiple methodologies. When you aren't there in person, your advertisements must speak for you. It is critical that realtors adopt highly effective print advertising campaigns with newspaper inserts and full-color flyers in order to cast a wider net and secure present and future business.
The key to becoming a successful realtor is your ability to market yourself and your properties. You need to maintain a first-rate image if you want to attract the best clients and generate more income.
You will need to research your market(s), develop a strategy based on your competitors and market needs, and put together an advertising campaign that truly makes you the best option for your potential clients. Choosing proven flyer design techniques and a knowledgeable printer can help you achieve your goals with each campaign ...and you may even learn a little in the process! So let's get to the good stuff - below you will find helpful real estate flyer design and printing tips!
Follow these 7 simple tips to make your real estate flyers more effective:
1. Print in full-color on glossy paper - never print low quality materials
2. Design the flyer around the images and properties - not the price!
3. For each property create a positive headline - differentiate each property
4. Use a subheading that only highlights the homes best features (the history, # of rooms, etc)
5. Pictures speak a thousand words - minimize the text, reduce the "boring" factor
6. Pick 2 fonts and stick with them - one for headlines, one for information
7. Always use ultra-high quality images on your flyers (300 dpi)
Once you've designed the perfect real estate flyer follow these 7 printing tips:
1. Print in full color 4/4 - this means full color on both sides of the paper
2. Print with a "bleed" - a bleed means that the images extend all the way to the edge of the page
3. Print on 60# or 80# gloss paper - use 100# gloss paper for upscale areas (ie: Gold Coast, etc)
4. Choose an online print resource center that understands print advertising
5. Ship your flyers direct to your local newspaper for insertion to save time and money
6. Choose a printer with an experienced and friendly staff that will review your file before printing.
Chris Barr is an experienced marketing professional and graduate of Christopher Newport University. He specializes in print advertising, business development, web business strategic positioning, and technical writing. For the lowest prices on printed flyers, newspaper inserts, brochures, menus, and postcards please visit http://www.taradel.com
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Tips for Realtor Website Links
Kathleen over at the "Build Real Estate Results" blog has a post today about some great things to think about when getting incoming links to your real estate blog or website
More Ways to Get Good Incoming Links
One of the real overlooked keys that she mentions in this article is to get links to many pages on your site. One of the things that we need to be aware of is that Google and other search engines rank pages and not sites. Your home page may be very powerful and rank well but those inner pages of your site contain most if not all of the content that is going to help people make the decision to work with you. Make sure that other sites have a reason to link to your content on your inner pages.
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Realtors and reciprocal links
One of the common ways that Realtors will get links on the internet is by reciprocal linking. This means that you see another site and you both decide to add a link to each other, this is a little like blogrolls on some blogs that you see today. The idea behind reciprocal linking is that when you add a link to your site and another site links back to you that google will like you both better as you have another link pointing to your own site.
That is not quite right though.
The reason that Google likes incoming links to your site is that gives your site authority status, people should trust your site because others trust you enough to add a link to your page. If you give a link to another site Google looks at this as you giving authority to another site so they would cancel out. But this is still not quite right because if this was the case then you should never link to another site and then everyone linking back to you will give you a number one ranking in Google but this is not actually the case because Google does still like links, if you give out none then Google will not really trust you.
So now this idea of linking to and from other sites comes down to trust. There are very complex algorithyms at the Googleplex where the Googlers try to make sure the results at the top of the search engine are the best results. To do this there are a lot of factors that Google looks at. The best thing for you to do though is to not try to trick the system with reciprocal or other links but instead to look at the content that your readers would be most interested in and giving that to them. At the same time make sure that you are using the social networking sites like Digg, Reddit, stumbleupon, Activerain and others to make sure that your site is at least getting noticed and if your content is good enough then you deserve anyway to be an authority, which is what you were trying to be in the first place.
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Free Realtor Internet Marketing Book
A few months ago, seven actually, I finished up my Realtor Internet Marketing Book and put it up for sale. Now times are changing of course but I as I was looking a couple of days ago I realized that the book that I had all but forgotten is still very relevant, so I have decided to start to give it away to the subscribers of my newsletter.
I have spent the last couple of days making some changes to the book, updating some info and now I believe that it is all complete. If you would like a copy of the book all you need to do is visit the Realtor Marketing book website at www.realtormarketingbook.com.
Have you forgotten what was in the book? I was reminded as well and now that I have looked more closely I realize that I should have probably broken it up in more pieces at the outset, Here are the Realtor Marketing Book chapters
Finding your target market online - You need to focus even more online to find your market then you do offline
Search engine Optimization - Get more people to your site by making sure that the search engines, including Google, know what you page is about
Blogs - Blogs, if done right, are a great way to get people to know your and get more visitors
Websites - It is time to get your website to work for you instead of just look good.
Social Networking - Social Networking is a new and exciting way of getting the word out about your site.
Autoresponders - If someone is interested in buying or selling, then you want to build the know, like, and trust that will keep them with you. That is what an autoresponder can do for you.
Promotion - There are some great ways to promote your internet presence. Lots of people want you to spend lots of money but there are many inexpensive or even FREE ways to promote yourself online.
Newsletters - Do you have a newsletter? Do you wonder why you would need an online newsletter.
Everything that I wrote I wrote from the angle of an internet marketer instead of just from my Realtor background so although you will recognize some of the terminology a lot of it may be a a bit foreign to you...this is of course fine.
Go to the Realtor Internet Marketing Book website and get the book now.
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3 Points for your Real Estate Marketing Strategy
This article will discuss three key points on your market strategy. To look at your market strategy, you will first want to define your market. You cannot make any credible decisions until you have defined the market you are going after along with the submarkets and your acquisition strategy.
The first key points when looking for a market and what to buy is that it must be a good deal. This is easier said than done. There been many companies and individuals who have bought overpriced deals in the past based upon the faith that the property would appreciate. You want your deal to be good enough that you can hold onto the property through a down cycle and still make money. Set yourself up so that in case some kind of disaster happens you are able to hold onto the property and still make money.
A good example is the current market. There has been a downturn within real estate residentially over the last three years but this does not necessarily correspond to the commercial side as well. There have been 10 to 12 years when everything has been going ip but ultimately when it comes on economics, everything is cyclical. At some point there's going to be down cycle.
The second key to your market strategy is to not put all of your eggs in one basket. Because real estate goes through cycles, you want to have some reserves in place so that if a down cycle does take place, you have an opportunity to take advantage of some of the deals which will occur. The down cycle is almost always one of the best ways to find new good deals due to how many sellers are on the market at that time.
The third key when looking at market strategy is to know what your exit strategy will be. It is very important to know what to look for in buying a property but half the battle is knowing how to sell a property as well. If you buy a property for cheap and sell it for cheap, have you made as much money as you can? Have set guidelines in place for the type of return you would like. Knowing your exit strategy and what the market will allow will allow you to maximize your return. If you are not aware of the market and what is selling, you are cheating yourself out of money that you could have made. You have to work hard to turn around the deal so why not work on getting the most of your hard work that is possible?
You should have both a short-term and long-term view of your market strategy. Figure out what you need to do in the short term to make money but also have a long-term plan in place which you are continually building upon. Your short-term plan should build upon your long-term plan.
Hopefully this article on market strategy has given you some insight into what you need to do to create a good market strategy. A good strategy will help you avoid many mistakes and provide you with more opportunities as you'll know what you want to look for.
David Lindahl, also known as the “Apartment King” has been successfully investing in single family homes and apartments for the last 10 years. David regularly shares his secrets and experience on the same stage as Tony Robbins, Robert Kiyosaki, and Donald Trump! If you would like a free copy of the Special Report: 27 Ways to Buy a Multi-Family Property with No Money Down, please go to http://www.davespecialoffer.com/
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Selling homes to seniors
Have you noticed? Senior citizens aren't as old as they used to be. At least some aren't. And that means you cannot market to all seniors in the same way.
Senior buyers come in two varieties. The first are those who are actually suffering from the ravages of age - and are only too happy to tell you all about it. They'll give you a list of ailments and things they can no longer do, so your job in finding them a home is a bit more straightforward.
You can openly discuss issues like stairways, counter heights, doorway widths, and space to install grab bars in the bathroom. They'll tell you what they need and want so you can go out and find it for them.
When you're selling to this group, go preview homes before you take them along.
When people are having a hard time getting around, need a wheelchair or walker, or are just unsteady on their feet, they don't need to be dragged around looking at all the wrong homes. They won't appreciate you wasting their energy by showing them homes that are obviously wrong.
So pay careful attention to their needs, and if you eliminate a house they've asked about, tell them why. It might be because the bathrooms and bedrooms are on the second floor and the laundry room is in the basement - or perhaps because of steep steps leading to the house. Maybe the garage is too narrow to allow them room to put a wheel chair in and out of the car, or the bathroom door is too narrow for the wheel chair to get through.
Do your homework, tell them the straight facts, and you'll earn their loyalty.
This segment of the senior population may be focused on living within minutes of a medical facility, and they'll probably tell you which one.
But what about the second group? What about the ones who are officially senior citizens, but have no intention of acknowledging the fact?
You'd do well not to mention the words "Senior citizen" in their presence.
Instead, find out more about them and their lives. Many are still working, so see if they want to locate near the workplace. After that, inquire about hobbies and other leisure time activities. Your new seniors may be avid golfers, they may want to hit the gym three days a week, they make require fast access to a swimming pool, or perhaps want to locate near a boarding facility where they can keep a horse.
They may even want a home with a bit of pasture so they can take care of that horse themselves.
Don't assume anything. Some seniors are anxious to leave yard care behind so they can pursue other interests, while others have been waiting for retirement to have time to landscape a yard and grow a huge garden.
Take the time to listen. Listening is important no matter who your client is, but when you're selling to senior citizens, you need to listen to the subtle hints as well as the open statements.
Remember, in the back of their minds, they're recognizing the possibility of ill-health in the future. How could they avoid it, with the television and newspapers shouting it at every turn?
They know that the day could be coming soon when they won't be able to easily navigate those stairways - and they know that a wheel chair could be a part of their future. They may even have a secret fear of living too far from a medical facility.
But many simply do not want to talk about that. So don't bring it up unless they do.
Selling to seniors isn't really all that different from selling to anyone else. Your job is to listen and pay attention to what you hear. When you do that with each and every customer and client you'll be head and shoulders above your competition - because listening is almost a lost art.
Marte Cliff is a Freelance Copywriter and former real estate broker who specializes in writing for real estate and related industries.
Marte offers a free mini-course for Realtors trying to build a business, as well as web copywriting and lead generation packages. Learn more about them at http://www.copybymarte.com
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Reuters notices Realtor Websites
The following article is being pushed by Reuters to show that even in a slumping market the demand for Real Estate sites is growing as most consumers are going online to browse before they go out looking at houses.
As a Realtor you job is to get into the head of your customers future and current before they go out looking.
Home buyers and home sellers alike can find more innovative and useful features than ever on real estate Web sites, which are nimbly adapting to the U.S. housing slump.
For those poking around the real estate market, it might be worthwhile to check out sites like buysiderealty.com, iggyshouse.com, zillow.com and trulia.com to see just how much online home shopping has changed lately.
In the past, most real estate sites primarily offered property listing services. That's no longer the case thanks to improved online mapping services and the spread of broadband connections, which have allowed sites to take advantage of new technology.
What's more, as a means to drum up business, real estate sites have looked to expand their features to include services like alerts, "heat maps" showing active sales areas, video postings, home estimates and Q&A forums. Some are even offering rebates to home buyers.
Chuck Cole, for instance, recently bought a home in Oakland, California, worth almost $450,000 -- and met his realtor just once through the entire month-long process.
Cole used the multiple listing service tool on buysiderealty.com to pick the properties he wanted to visit. Later, after deciding on a house and submitting an offer, he had a realtor from buysiderealty.com handle the transaction.
For doing all the groundwork himself and bypassing a traditional realtor, Cole was rewarded with a rebate of over $8,000, or 75 percent of the buyer's commission that buysiderealty.com earned from the deal.
"We liked that everything was done pretty much by e-mail and phone. When we've worked with realtors in the past it was a big pain in the neck to try to connect with people in person and to have to go to their office," said Cole.
MARKET SLUMP SPURS BOOM
If you're looking to sell your house without using a real estate agent, consider a visit to iggyshouse.com, a sister concern of buysiderealty.com.
The site lures sellers with freebies like a multiple listing service, a listing on realtor.com and posts on other sites. Home sellers once paid agents a premium for such services.
Iggyshouse.com also lets sellers and real estate agents post photographs, videos and details about the property for sale -- at no cost.
"With 75 or 80 percent of sellers (also) being buyers, we know that if we give them this free service and they are self directed enough to sell on their own, there is a pretty good chance that they'd want to use (the) buyside," said Joe Fox, chief executive of iggyshouse.com and buysiderealty.com.
"We're basically giving a free service to educate consumers about another service that pays them to use it and that's exactly what is happening today," said Fox.
Another Web site that has entered this increasingly crowded space is zillow.com, which launched in early 2006. It not only offers free property listings, but also gives away a home valuation service it calls Zestimate.
Pete Flint, CEO of trulia.com, says the housing market's downturn has played to the strengths of real estate Web sites.
"Although it's unfortunate what's going on in the housing market, it's really the online sites that are benefiting because consumers are spending a little bit more time before they make decisions and traditional real estate brokers are rethinking the way they're marketing themselves," Flint said.
"So the change in the housing market has forced a change both in consumer behavior and forced a change within marketing activity for real estate professionals and we are a perfect platform for them both," he added.
Trulia.com, which launched in 2005, has signed agreements with thousands of agencies that post all their available property listings on the site. Trulia.com, in turn, generates revenue through advertisements placed on its site.
On the site you'll find services like trulia voices, which allows you to pose questions to local residents and agents on subjects as unexpected as the location of the nearest dog park.
If you'd like to be alerted every time a property in a particular neighborhood goes on sale, trulia.com also sends you free alerts. Another feature is "heat maps" that help you gauge the demand and average price of properties in certain spots.
"The reality is that the actual (real estate) transaction is not changing, so people are still going to go to open houses and drive around neighborhoods, but the actual process of research for the real estate transaction has radically changed," said Flint.
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Outsourcing work
I always find that Realtors are some of the worst businesspeople for offloading work. Perhaps it is part of the can do attitude, or the idea that we kind of work in an office, or that the individual commissions are so high that every job has to be done by one person. No matter what the reason it is important that you find the parts of the business that you should offload and quickly get a process in place to outsource.
There are a few reasons that people are resistant to moving out some of the work that they do.
First is that “If I get someone else to do this they may not do a good job”, well no one cares about your business more than you but if you give people guidance and control over a process then they will do a job possibly better than you.
Second excuse is “I can’t afford to outsource” This is the farthest thing from the truth. If you are looking for a way to make money then it is by doing your core competencies, finding buyers and sellers, showing properties, listing appointments, and negotiating deals are you most important jobs and the ones that make you money. You do not outsource these jobs.
So if you are going to agree with me that outsourcing is good for you business, what can you outsource?
Listing packages – share an assistant with some other Realtors to put together any listing presentations.
Booking showings – never do this yourself it is definitely low value work
Flyer and newsletter creation – there is no reason to think that you would be best at this.
Supplies and busywork – this eats up more time than anything. Get an unlicensed assistant to do this.
I have already hinted at how to get this new system to work for you and that is to share and assistant between a few Realtors in the office and to leverage the staff that the office already has. One of the great books that I have read on this is the 4 hour work week where the author, Tim Ferriss goes into detail on what does and does not matter as far as your work goes.
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Squidoo - The place for Realtor marketing
Squidoo is another site like hubpages where you can build a page and the community gets to vote for it. There are a lot of options and page pieces to add but first of all we can look at what is important for you to do.
First go to the site www.squidoo.com. Sign up for free and you can then start to build your lenses. A lense is just a page but as you start you should add one text module. Each text module can hold 2500 characters which is around 600 words. Write and add that content and then go to the “add modules” and add (or make sure that you have) a text block, Google Blog Search, Link List, and GuestBook. There are new rules going in soon that will force you to have four modules. In your links list list your website home page and make sure to leave your guestbook at the very bottom of the page.
Now publish your lense and note the web address of the lense.
After you have created your page make sure that you go to the different groups on Squidoo and add your lense to as many related groups as you can. Also comment or add yourself to the guestbook, with your link, to any high ranking lenses like your own.
Now that squidoo is done. Go to pingoat.com and “ping” with the name of your lense and the web address, leave the xml blank. Also make sure that you add your lense to Stumbleupon, Digg (if the page is like news in some way), delicious and any other bookmarking sites that you belong to.
Squidoo is very popular to Google and using your content you can create many lenses that will all drive traffic back your site thanks to your links list. All you need to do now is to build more lenses focused on good keywords for your market.
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Hubpages for Realtor Backlinks
There is a great new site out that will allow you to add another great backlink to your real estate arsenal and that site is www.hubpages.com.
Hubpages is one of the new breed of social networking sites that allows you to add an article and with that article you will be reated by all of the other people that have pages on the site as well. I have an idea, as usual, of a strategy that you can use to add help to your site by ranking well with Hubpages.
First of all create your real estate specific page and make sure that on that page you mention your city and real estate. Make sure there are six of so of this phrase and that the content that you have on the page is very good content for a home buyer or seller without the hint of salesmanship but at the end of that article refer back to your website with a link. You can, if you like create the text in Microsoft Word and then copy and paste it into your hub. Try to make the article around 600-700 words.
After you have created your hub and have a page name for it then go to your stumbleupon account (you have one I am guessing, right?) and add your page to stumbleupon. After you have done this add it to delicious and go to pingoat and ping with your page name and the address, skip the xml page as you do not have that with a hubpage.
Hubpages are good in that they give you stats that you can see how many visitors that you have and where they have come from so once you start getting Google traffic to your hubpage you know that you are getting another link to your website from hubpages which is of course what we are all striving for to raise the Google ranking for your home page as well as to get traffic to our site from a page that will rank high in Google and therefore get more traffic directly to your site.
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Tough market for Realtors in Hartford
Well here is a good balanced article about what life is like for Realtors as a whole. We get to see lots of Realtors making a million + per year but as we all know the average Realtor makes less than $15,000 per year.
Housing Slowdown Smacks Realtors Hard
This article not only points out what we all know but also calls out that Realtors are struggling a bit more now than last year, at least in hartford, because of dropping prices and dropping number of sales.
This week we will look more at what you can do to start making the most of a tough market by cleaning up your schedule and filling quality hours instead of just filling hours.
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Is there free energy?
I ran across this non real estate related articles and thought it was interesting enough to put it on the blog. What do you think? Is it possible to live off the grid? Real Estate-wise what would it take to not use city power and use your own instead.
In 2006 our family started contemplating the possibilities of living off the grid, producing our own electricity with Renewable Energy sources. Our electricity bill was about $200 a month and it just kept on growing. We knew there was a better way, so we looked at living off the grid. We decided we wanted to find ways of living off the grid mainly for economic reasons but we also wanted to keep the lifestyle we were already living.
We just didn’t want to give up all of our regular household appliances. As we dug deeper it became clear that with a bit of planning and patience and some serious conservation practices we could achieve this goal. It looked like we could be living off the grid within a few months if we worked hard at it.
Thankfully, we already owned a small cottage that we had been planning on moving to in the future anyways. It was an easy option for us, but there are a lot of country properties for reasonable prices out there too, if you decide to make this option work for you.
Our property was only 40 minutes from town, so there would be no job finding necessary either, just a slightly longer commute to work. We also made arrangements to work from home a couple days a week, so we could enjoy our new found off grid lifestyle.
Years before we had looked at bringing electricity to the cottage, but the hydro authority had told us that it would cost over $14,000 to do so. We didn’t proceed with it because of the high cost. Why would we bring in grid hydro if it would still cost $200 a month and $14,000 just to get it there. Living off the grid now made perfect sense from an economic point of view.
We could use the $14,000 to install Renewable Energy to run our cottage/home. Plus, if we added a conservative 2 years of electricity service expense to the total what would have otherwise been spent on electric bills that’s another $4800.
The total would be $18,800 we could spend on a Renewable Energy system and still be money ahead when compared to bringing in grid electricity. After 2 years we would be money ahead! We would not have to pay electric bills ever again.
We chose solar panels to install in our new home because they were easier to install. We found a great website that offered up tons of advice and really helped with the installation. We wanted to put up a wind generator but we just didn’t have the resources at that point. Later we actually built a wind generator with plans we found. We also had a back room that we could convert into a battery storage area and control room for the inverter, charge controllers etc.
We bought 12 Kyocera solar panels, all of them about 170 watts of power producing capacity. That would give us about 2Kw of production and that was a good start. An electrician friend helped us wire up the system with 16 huge forklift batteries and an inverter for AC power, all charge controlled and set up in case of lightning too. He said that it happens occasionally and you have to protect your investment, so we did.
We run a DC deep well pump and DC lights directly from the batteries. The whole house is run from this system and only occasionally do we have to start up the backup generator.
We didn’t have much money when we were done and we still wanted a wind generator, so we decided to build one. We found some great plans and all that helpful solar panel advice at www.off-grid-living.com We could not have done it without them.
We have been living off the grid for over a year now, and we could not have done it without the helpful folks at http://www.off-grid-living.com
Visit the linked site at the bottom of this article. There is a lot of interesting articles at that site as well.
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