Back to School: The 10 Best Online Courses for Real Estate Agents to Upgrade Their Skills
It’s never too late to go back to school and upgrade your skills.
Fortunately for real estate agents, most skill upgrades can happen online, from the comfort of home. There’s a wealth of high-quality, professional-grade online training on marketing topics that real estate agents can use to level up and grow their business.
What better time than September to hit the books and add new skills to your arsenal?
In the spirit of back-to-school, we’ve rounded up some of the best online courses for real estate agents. The courses below cover a wide variety of subjects, from Instagram marketing to copywriting (great for writing better listings!) to graphic design.
The Best Online Digital Marketing Courses
Hubspot: Inbound Marketing Training Program
Cost: Free
Length: 4 hours, 12 minutes
Best for: Those just getting started on their content strategy; anyone who wants to focus on content marketing as a central pillar of their business.
A lot of what we talk about on this blog has to do with inbound marketing for real estate agents.
Inbound marketing is all about bringing potential leads to your website by way of great content that they’re actually interested in. Blog posts, Instagram, video content, and good SEO is all part of an inbound marketing strategy.
This Hubspot course is a great way to kick off your inbound marketing strategy for real estate. It covers everything from the high-level, like putting together your plan, to the nitty-gritty, like creating a blog post.
EliseDarma: Instagram Masterclass
Cost: Free
Length: About 60 minutes
Best for: Those who have been using Instagram for their real estate business without thinking too much about strategy, or who haven’t been seeing results and need some direction.
Elise is one of the foremost experts on how entrepreneurs — yes, real estate agents are entrepreneurs — can use Instagram to grow their businesses. She’s also a former real estate agent herself.
Her training on how to use Instagram to attract paying customers and clients has helped her course-takers bring in nearly $1 million in combined revenue. The testimonials and case studies are pretty, pretty convincing.
Elise’s free Instagram Masterclass covers essential Instagram strategies that you can easily and instantly implement to start fast-tracking your results.
If you complete the class and want to take things further, Elise offers a comprehensive paid program called InstaGrowth Boss. It’s packed with step-by-step lessons, a deeper dive into strategy and all kinds of templates and cheat sheets.
Lynda: Content Marketing: Newsletters
Cost: Free with a one-month trial ($34.99/month after the trial ends)
Length: 36 minutes
Best for: Anyone who isn’t really putting their database of leads and contacts to good use
Newsletter marketing may seem old-school, but it’s still a hugely effective tool for turning your prospects into real customers.
This Lynda course covers everything you need to make email marketing an effective part of your real estate content marketing strategy.
You’ll learn how to build your email subscriber list using tactics like landing pages, how to incorporate your personal brand into your emails and how to write real estate subject lines that work.
Skillshare: Facebook Advertising Hacks, Tricks, and Tips: How To Save Money And Get Massive Results
Cost: Between $11.75 and $20 per month for an annual membership (includes unlimited access to thousands of courses)
Length: 2 hours, 40 minutes
Best for: Those with some familiarity using Facebook ads for real estate but who are looking to level up
Facebook ads are a great tool for real estate agents. They’re pretty easy to use once you’ve got the hang of it, they don’t have to break the bank and they can offer impressive results.
But using Facebook ads successfully, while sticking to your marketing budget, definitely requires some expertise. Enter this Skillshare course, where social consultant Austin Iuliano takes viewers through choosing their target audience, what kinds of conversions to aim for, how to A/B test, and so on.
Cost: FREE!
Best for: these free real estate marketing e-books have been created for all real estate agents and updated regularly with the latest trends. Whether you have years of experience or are just getting into the business, we hope they will help you in getting a leading edge with your real estate marketing.
The Best Copywriting Courses
Skillshare: Copywriting For Beginners: How To Write Web Copy That Sells Without Being Cheesy
Cost: Between $11.75 and $20 per month for an annual membership (includes unlimited access to thousands of courses)
Length: 1 hour
Best for: Everyone
Copywriting is a hugely helpful skill for real estate agents.
Great copywriting chops are what help make your personal real estate website, blog headlines, Instagram captions, newsletters, landing pages and listings come to life, get clicks and stand out from the competition.
It’s one thing to be a decent writer; it’s another thing entirely to know how to write copy that truly sells and turns your real estate leads into real clients.
This course covers how to write for all sorts of applications (from calls-to-action to headlines), along with tips on understanding your audience, incorporating visuals and overcoming the dreaded writer’s block.
Cost: Between $11.75 and $20 per month for an annual membership (includes unlimited access to thousands of courses)
Length: 57 minutes
Best for: Real estate agents who know about landing pages, but aren’t sure how to go about using them effectively
We love landing pages for offering new opportunities to bring potential leads to your website and into your database.
This course offers actionable advice on how to go about creating a landing page that actually convinces viewers — using strategic copy and design — to click and enter their contact info.
The Best Online Analytics and SEO Courses
Google: Google Analytics for Beginners
Cost: Free
Length: 4-6 hours
Best for: Agents who want to learn more about how their website is performing — in order to improve it
Knowing how your website is performing is key to making it perform better.
Google Analytics is one of the most popular tools for analyzing where visitors to your website are coming from, how long they spend on what pages and what they’re clicking on. But if you’ve ever logged into a Google Analytics account, you know how intimidating it can be. It’s hard to know where to look, what to look for and what it all means.
Do yourself a favour and take Google’s own course on Google Analytics for beginners. It will teach you how to set your website up with Google Analytics, and then how to use the tool to successfully track your site’s performance.
SEMrush Academy: SEO Fundamentals Course with Greg Gifford
Cost: Free
Length: 4 hours
Best for: Real estate agents with a basic knowledge of what SEO is, but who want to know how to do it in order to drive more traffic to their website
When you search for a topic on Google, do you click one of the links on the first page? Or do you keep clicking through pages to find what you’re looking for?
Most people, for most searches, will choose one of the links on the first page of results. That’s the power of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. SEO is what helps your real estate agent website get discovered when someone searches for words or phrases that are relevant to your business.
Anyone looking to generate website traffic needs to know the fundamentals of how SEO works and how to apply it to their own website efforts; this course teaches exactly that.
The Best Online Design Courses
Cost: Free
Length: Approximately 22 minutes
Best for: Agents looking to create unique visual branding for their real estate business
Branding plays a key role in helping businesses get recognized. A combination of specifically chosen colours, logos and fonts, used consistently, all help make a statement, create distinction and build familiarity. It’s not just for big businesses like McDonald’s and Nike; branding is for any business owner that wants to stand out from their competition.
Canva offers a short-and-sweet, easy-to-apply course that can help real estate agents create a basic visual identity for their real estate business. With proper branding, your website, social media channels, postcard campaigns and other marketing materials will look, sound and feel cohesive, unique and convincing.
Cost: Free
Best for: real estate agents with a subscription to myRealPage real estate websites. BrandApp is included free with every subscription and lets you easily create beautiful marketing materials directly from your IDX listings. Automate the creation of your Just Listed and Sold marketing images today!
myRealPage’s brandApp is so simple that you can immediately use it, without training. Start with a Facebook, Twitter or Instagram template designed by experts. Quickly get it to be an eye catching post or story that will help drive engagement on social media.
Skillshare: Canva: Graphic Design Theory Volume 1
Cost: Between $11.75 and $20 per month for an annual membership (includes unlimited access to thousands of courses)
Length: 2 hours, 36 minutes
Best for: Real estate agents who want their social media graphics, website, ads and newsletters to look more professional
Most agents don’t have the budget to hire a graphic designer. That means it’s up to them to produce graphics for Instagram, featured images for their blog posts and visual elements for their newsletter.
Making something look good is way easier said than done. But with a grasp on beginner-friendly graphic design principles, your odds of success go way up.
That’s what this course delivers, but within the context of Canva, one of the most popular, affordable and easy-to-use online tools for creating awesome graphics — no design experience necessary.
