Real estate is all about marketing, and if you don’t have a good PR, the ship has already sunk before hitting the ocean. And one of the key sources of marketing is the Internet, where every consumer household has at least one workstation connected to the web.

There are a variety of options available as part of the web marketing package.

What do I do?

You can start with developing a website, ensuring that you know what your target message is. Depending on the level of professionalism you want to exude, you’ll need to look for an appropriate web development firm to handle and develop your project scope. See the Related Articles for further information.

Why focus on the content?

Only because it is the most important area of your site. The text sells your service, and if you don’t have engaging, interesting and interactive content, your visitors won’t come back. Work with a web development firm to incorporate the corporate image you want to shine through in the content.

Marketing, Marketing, Marketing

It’s all in the marketing and now that you’ve developed the website and incorporated the required content, you need to ensure you’re getting the website out to the right people.

It’s divided into four important categories:

• Search Engine Optimisation
• Linking Strategies
• Email Strategies
• Paid Advertising Strategies

Search Engine Optimisation

This is one of the easiest and cheapest form of marketing. SEO is a process by which you rank high for your preferred words on the major search engines. Search engines send robot “spiders” to index the content on a webpage. The trick is to not trick the bots but allow them clues as to what your website is about.

For more information, please see the Related Articles below.

Linking Strategies

One of the most important forms of marketing is the links to other sites bringing in traffic, especially since major search engines take the incoming links to your website otherwise referred to as link popularity, as an increase in ranking. Most prominently, Google’s PageRank technology.

One way to boost the number of incoming links is to submit your website to key directories, for instance the Open and Yahoo directories. These directories are administered by human editors who parse through the information, and provide content feed to all important search engines besides providing a link that guarantees an “in”, especially to Google.

Another way is to create a business blog. If it offers a wealth of informative, engaging content and consistent industry comment, other sites will link to it thereby increasing your link popularity.

Email Strategies

Don’t think neglect email as an important marketing strategy, as long as you don’t spam ie send bulk, unsolicited emails to your site visitors, it’s a cheap and efficient way to propogate your services.

One of the best ways is to attach a signature to your email program with a link to your website. In addition, incorporate email newsletters into your website informing subscribers about properties in their locale.

Paid Advertising Strategies

The methods outlined above provide cost-effective, virtually free ways of boosting your sales with web marketing. However, if you’re out to expand quickly, you’ll need to pay for increased traffic. There are three key concepts to Paid Advertising:

• CPM (Cost Per Thousand views)
• PPC (Pay Per Click)
• PPA (Pay Per Action)

CPM

Buying a text ad in an email newletter is an effective form to implement CPM. By placing your ad in newsletters associated with your company’s categories, you generate buzz in the targeted audience likely to visit your website. However, since banner ads generate low click through rates, it isn’t recommended to pay too much for them. Their costs usually range from $.50-$1.00.

PPC

Purchasing Pay-Per-Click or PPC ads through Yahoo!’s Overture and Google’s AdWords are steadily growing in importance and popularity. The top ads appear on the right of the traditional search engine results for the keywords. Depending on the keywords bid amount, the ranking varies. The higher the bid, the higher the ranking. However, the sum is only paid out once a user has clicked on the link, and in this way this method is extremely cost-effective once properly used. Yahoo! even offers free credit to get started.

PPA

One of the key forms of pay-per-action is to either begin an affiliate program or join an existing program. The goal of an affiliate program is to build a network of affiliates who have a financial stake in promoting your website. Merchants need to determine the advertising cost, hire a company that will manage the technical details of the site and promote the program to the right kind of affiliates.

Podcasting

Podcasting has gained increasing popularity and its potentials for the real estate industry are huge. Both audio “pods” and video can be uploaded and incorporated into the website in the form of listings in paricular areas as well as video tours of properties. The advantage of this is that the pods are available for download and can be transferred to iPods and other mp3 players and listened to in the car for easy accessibility.

Because of the universality of these marketing strategies, not only will they work well with real estate agents, but can also be applied to other market niches.

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