With the Internet boom, it became obvious to franchisors that the web was the place to be marketing. As a result, these franchisors have put a lot of resources toward developing their own real estate portals to primarily feed the business of franchisees. Of course, every real estate website, regardless of size and scale, is dependent on the listing of homes to attract visitors and potential prospects. The home data featured is provided via Internet Data Exchange (IDX) agreements with local Multiple Listing Services (MLS) of which franchisee real estate brokers are members.

Per a previous N.A.R. rule change in January of this year, franchisors were permitted to showcase IDX data on their website by virtue of having a representative franchisee who was an existing local MLS participant. An example of one such IDX agent feed is on a website like this one for Highlands Ranch, Colorado real estate.

The previous rule change created some trouble, however, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there are some franchisees that don’t want help from their franchisor in this regard. They have their own website portals for serving a regional area and didn’t want to be forced to compete with their own franchisor to garner website traffic.

Secondly, there are independent websites and companies that also compete directly with real estate franchisors for traffic. It is their view that the January rule change gave franchisors and unfair competitive advantage in advertising home data to which they were not entitled.

So as a compromise, the N.A.R. board pushed the new “opt-in” rule change through. However, the matter is certainly not settled and one can expect to see more fireworks as real estate companies, brokers and agents continue to struggle over the territories in the web space.

However, where the realtors are concerned, setting up agent websites can make their wallets lighter by several hundred dollars in addition to the requirement of paying a monthly fee of approximately $30-60 for running the website. In such a situation the realtor blogs are an advantage as many of them can be set up for free and with maintenance costs of just $5-10 per month. In fact, there are many realtors who have created their own blogs to complement their realtor websites.

Realtor blogs are more advantageous than agent websites since in the blog entries are always made in a reverse chronological order. This way the most recent information is available first. Since the most up-to-date information is available almost at a glance, the client is more attracted to the blog than to the website. Also, since blogs are nothing but personalized websites, there are greater chances of the blog being updated rather than agent websites.

Unlike the websites for realtors that just provide information regarding properties available, photographs, contact information etc., blogs are more personalized in that they present the information from the standpoint of the realtor. This gives a more comprehensive view about a property to the client than the information available through websites.

Both agent websites and blogs provide property information to prospective clients albeit in different ways. However, realtor blogs seem to have a slight edge over the websites for realtors because they provide up-to-date information at a glance and in a more personalized manner. Additionally, costs of setting up and maintaining a blog are a lot less than maintaining a website. Owing to these reasons it is quite possible that blogs might gain an upper-hand over websites in the online real estate scenario.

All said and done, using realtor websites and blogs as a complement to each other would be best option in expanding a real estate business as both have their own plus and minus points.

Although blogs appear to be better than realtor websites, for realtors it would be wise to use both the websites and the blogs to advertise their business and stand out in a large crowd.

Using social media in your real estate business allows you to develop a relationship with your customer. You can post witty, personal, special, or funny blogs, posts, or videos for your clients to see. After a while they begin to see your business as a friend, someone they can communicate with and receive information about. The relationship you develop leads to loyalty and as a business owner loyalty from customers can make or break your business. A business with loyal customers is a business that stays in business.

Not only will you form relationships with your customers but it is a great place to pick up new customers, offer new coupons, announce new deals or specials, or just to let everyone know how important they are to your business. You can also post pictures of your business, videos, or commercials, which, again helps your customer feel as if they are a part of your businesses life.

If you are not using social media to its full capability you are not maximizing your available reach to potential clients. The best thing about it is that it’s free if you choose to run your accounts yourself. There are companies that you can pay to run an effective campaign for you, if you choose. Either way you should be marketing your business through social media.

I don’t need a website for my friends. They get my mailings or my phone calls. I don’t need a website for my local newspaper advertising. They call me off the ad.

So why do I need a website? I need a website for those Connecticut, Massachusetts or New York people who are browsing the internet, who think they want Vermont real estate, but I need them to find ME (along with the Woodstock VT real estate they are after). Sure, I’ll give them what everyone else does…good search capabilities in a web site… but I also want them to get to know us through video. Maybe they will like us well enough to give us a call.

You know what? It’s working.

For instance…and this will sound pretty funny….we did a video blog on snow plowing in Vermont while my business partner got hit by a 500lb snow ball. The down country buyer we were after wants to have a flavor for the Woodstock Vermont area we live in so why not show him how the roads are cleared in a VT snow storm?

Frankly you can do this on most any subject you want to talk about. I recalled an old story on Vermont water testing from 25 years ago and just sat on a snow bank and started talking. I’m not terribly gifted, I’m not a great actor, but I’m competent and genuine and when people get to know me they are usually OK with the results. I just want my website to give me the opportunity to get that phone call, saying it in video is far better than words. Something about “a picture is worth a thous…….” you get the idea.

Twitter already has millions of users all around the world that makes it much easier for you to find prospective buyers. The best thing about this is that it’s absolutely free. By using it you are not only given a chance to promote your real estate business for free but you can also build relationships and make friends with other users. Introduce yourself to them and you’ll start to make new friends. This is a great way to win their trust and begin selling your houses to them.

To make friends in Twitter and to able to gain more followers, you need to interact with them by replying to the comments of other user’s tweets. As much as possible you have to make them feel important so for you to get a better response to your tweets. It is also essential for you to update and send interesting and informative tweets on a regular basis.

The key in Twitter advertising is to connect and communicate with your followers more often and do less marketing. This way you’ll be making more friends thus you have a bigger chance of promoting your real estate business. Once you begin gaining followers, you will also begin to build leads with Twitter.

Learning the proper use of advertising in Twitter will help you get incredible results. With Twitter being one of the highest ranked websites in the internet today, it is really obvious that when it comes to marketing your business, it is the right place to be.

If you don’t already know, Craigslist is one of the most visited websites online today. It gets billions of hits and it is one of the top searched sites for every major city in the US. Not only is this site free, it’s great to boost web traffic and get in front of a targeted audience.

As a wholesaler, Craigslist should be on top of your must do list everyday. Although it may seem as easy as placing an ad on the site and calling it a day, its not as easy. As any marketing campaign you implement, there should be a schedule and an order of doing things. Here are my tips that will help you when posting Craigslist ads for your real estate wholesale deals.

Repetition – Make sure you put up 20 ads or so a week. Craigslist lists the ads based on the date they were posted so the later the day goes, the farther down on the page your ad will show. Make sure you post ads in the morning and in the afternoon. Friday and Saturdays are the best for some odd reason.

Headline – Your headline is high end real estate. When an investor or potential buyer goes onto Craigslist and looks up property in the real estate tab, they might use keywords in the search bar to narrow down the number of ads. By placing the words wholesale and investment on the headline, you will draw more attention from the search tools.

Un-Spam it Yourself – Never have a link back to your email, or an anonymous link. Just put a phone number along with a link to your website. When posting ads for wholesale real estate I get a lot of lame marketing attempts of no-name websites trying to get me to post my deal on their site. By limiting the ways people get a hold of you, you control the flow and filter the spammers.

SEO – Put your websites name inside the city box next to the headline. If someone does a search for wholesale deals in their city and up comes 30 different ads, yet 10 of those say your website, you will get people going to the site just to check it out. Its very important that you make yourself stand out, even this little bit helps go a long way.

Picture This – Having a picture whose root file name is cash buyers or wholesale deals, will help you in many ways. First of all, nobody wants to see an ad for a wholesale deal with out a picture. Its one less thing they can filter out. Also if you name your picture wholesale deals or cash buyers, when someone Google’s images for wholesale deals or cash buyers in your city, your image will come up in the top search.

There you have it. Those were five basic tips and things to know when posting wholesale deals on Craigslist. I know about other sites like Backpage and Kijiji, but who cares for now. Start with the sites that matter and work our way over when you begin branding yourself more.

The website is certainly pleasing to the eye with a mix of warm graphics and Arizona luxury home photographs. The real power of the site is in its showcasing of the different North Scottsdale communities. Property and community information are easily accessible via a map on the website or by clicking the neighborhood of your choice through the community selector.

The home page also features a Quick Search for easy MLS browsing, along with an additional choice of viewing specific lifestyle homes. Participating realtors can be found in the North Scottsdale’s Finest Agents section in case the visitor was looking for quality representation.

More times than I can count, I’ve had to tell an unhappy real estate agent that the website company they just hired for thousands of dollars to do a beautiful real estate website produced a site that was virtually invisible to the search engines. I’ve seen tens of thousands of dollars wasted on bad sites that could never rank well on the search engines.

That’s because many graphic designers are not necessarily trained in search engine optimization, sales, and marketing. That said, everyone likes a nice looking site, and the pride of ownership factor should keep us all striving to produce visually compelling websites and blogs.

For the novice real estate agent/blogger, there is no easier way to spice of a real estate site than with some well-placed real state stock photos. To that end, I encourage all of my Real Estate Marketing Tips newsletter subscribers to invest in a small library of real estate stock photography.

In fact, it might surprise some to find out that studies have shown that relevant stock photography can improve the conversion rate of a site. As an author, you can hold the attention of your readership longer with some graphics to break up the text.

As a writer, I prefer more text than rather than less, but that’s not the norm. The right amount of graphics can dramatically increase the professionalism of your site and conversion rate.

You should experiment with what works in your market for your site. You may find that stock photos of homes get better response, or you may find that stock photos of smiling happy couples standing in front of their house work better. There is no single rule. That’s why it’s best to have a variety of stock photos to choose from.

The way I personally manage my stock photo collection is I subscribe to a monthly service that allows me to download 750 photos per month. I subscribe for one month at a time when I want to expand my collection, then I have them on hand for future website, blog posts, flyers, and other marketing materials.

Before Multiple Listing Services like Long Island real estate listings came into being, real estate brokers did not even collaborate with each other. Each agent was restricted to his own properties, which means buyers or sellers were compelled to employ many agents to find the property they were looking for.

After some time, different brokers started to collaborate with each other; the collaboration was limited to brokers only, who shared their listings (and commissions) with other brokers. It was still beneficial to property buyers or sellers who do not have to hire many brokers now. They just went to their broker and would pay a small fee in order to get their property listed on a multiple listing service (MLS). These listings were in printed form and limited to a small locality.

Post-Internet Era:

Numerous property portals have cropped up since the advent of internet. These property portals cover entire cities, entire states like Hawaii real estate listings, or even countries. And unlike the typical multiple listing services, these websites are not receptive to real estate brokers only. A big majority of these websites are open to all including brokers, agents, buyers, sellers, tenants, developers and other interested parties.

In the start, they were limited to just property details and prices but the more advanced ones are now listing the address, images, map, area, bedrooms, floors, pools or garages details. What’s more, some of these property listing services now allow the users to upload videos with their properties, which means that the sellers can have a virtual tour without even going to the property themselves. Such extensive property data means that buyers or sellers are no more bound to take agents into service, just to get their homes on listing services, though there are many other reasons to hire an agent.

This marketing technique builds upon knowing what a WordPress blog is. If you’re unfamiliar with WordPress or blogs in general, check out WordPress’s website and the rest of this article will make much more sense.

So now that you know some of the basics of what a WordPress blog is and what a Studio theme/template is for your blog, we can go a little more in-depth about search engine optimization (SEO) marketing for your blog, which is what’s going to drive all that wonderful, free, targeted traffic to your blog.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a big term but the concept is simple. And it’s a great marketing idea for us Realtors or agents to learn if you want free traffic visiting your website or blog.

Let me explain…

You know when you do a Google search for something and a list of website results are returned that match your search term you typed in? There are usually pages and pages of results but you only look at the first 1-2 pages, right?

Well, if you look in the upper search bar, you’ll see the total number of results that Google found, which is usually in the millions. You’d have to go through pages and pages of results to see the millions of website results.

So how do some of these websites owners have the marketing genius to get listed on the first 1-2 pages while the other millions of websites stay at the bottom of the results? SEO marketing!

There are ways to optimize your website so that search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN Bing, etc. rank your website to be most relevant to what the person is searching for. Therefore, you get rewarded with a higher ranking on the results page and get more traffic to your real estate website or blog.

Tons of SEO companies and tech guys try to “game” the search engines so their sites come up as the #1 or #2 result. The problem is that search engines like Google are changing their requirements all the time so it’s almost impossible to artificially get higher rankings.

But of course, there are some foundational ways to get higher rankings and most of them directly relate to the content on your site.

The content on your site, or the text/words, is one of the main aspects search engines scan to evaluate your website. This is why I think blogs are so effective because you are constantly writing new, relevant content for search engines to find.

You can do the same thing with regular static websites but it’s tougher. You’d have to constantly update and add new content, which is much more time consuming and technically difficult than with a WordPress blog. Plus, WordPress is much more user-friendly for “non-techy” Realtors or agents like me.

Here’s where we start to get a little more technical so buckle up…

Within your WordPress blog, there are tools called “plugins” that software developers have made to enhance different aspects of your WordPress blog. They’re incredible for all aspects of your marketing.

Many plugins are free, some cost a little money. They’re easy to install; you just search for the plugin you want, download it and activate it and “Forget about it!” (sorry, that’s my best Italian impression).

For example, I use a plugin called “Contact Form 7″, which automatically creates a contact form on our “Contact Us” page. I don’t have to deal with any programming, coding, HTML or any of that junk. I just download the plugin, adjust the settings and it’s up and running on my WordPress blog. It seems like programmers have thought of a solution like this for anything you can think of. It’s fabulous!

Since most of us web surfers don’t look past the first 1-2 pages of results when searching, we need to get our Realtor or agent blogs up as high as possible on those results pages, right? Of course, that assumes you want free, automated traffic.

This is going to be a little tough to picture if you haven’t seen or used a WordPress blog but we’ll try it anyway. When you write a post for your blog, you’ll be writing a Title, a Description and the actual Content (or Body) of your blog post.

The title you write will show up on the search engine results page. Go ahead and do a search on Google right now so you know what I’m talking about. See that blue colored “headline” for all the results? That’s the title. Just like any other marketing piece, the title or headline is vital to catch your prospects attention. So put extra effort into this part.

Underneath that title will be your description, which will tell the surfer what your post is all about, in a nutshell. See it? It’s usually about 2 sentences long, right under the blue colored title.

The content of your blog post won’t show up on the search results page but search engines will still be scouring that content with their little robots.

Now, there are certain “keywords” that people commonly search with, like “Seattle real estate” or “real estate jobs”. Search engines want to see good keywords in your title, description and blog post content.

Anyway, I hope this marketing idea wasn’t too hard to follow along with. If you’re a “techy” you’re probably saying, “Dude, give me a break. I already know this stuff.” And the rest of you are thinking, “Blog what? Search eng… huh?” In either case, this is a great marketing tool to use and learn more about.

Now go close some deals!