Advanced Access Blog

Driving visitors to your website and having them contact you is the whole point of having a real estate website. I wanted to share with you some ideas passed along from one of our Website Marketing Specialists regarding the art of driving visitors to your website, and capturing them as leads. Over the coming months, several Weekly Marketing Tips will be authored by our Website Marketing Specialists who are on the “front lines” of optimizing real estate websites for the best results.

Broadcast Your Listings on the Web

Most of you have your listings available via your local Multiple Listing Service (MLS) and also advertise them by other means for your sellers, such as sign riders and print advertisements. Here’s a reminder to all that Advanced Access customers have the capability to upload their listings to major real estate portal sites such as Homes.com (fees may apply), Trulia, Oodle, Yahoo and Zillow.com. These are major websites that gets millions of visitors each month searching for listings in nearly all localities across the nation. Having your listings syndicated to all these sites enhances your presence and increases the chances of visitors coming to your website to see more of your listings and contacting you.

By uploading your listings to ListNOW in your Virtual Office your listings are exported to the portal sites, you just need to input the listings information and make sure you leave the “Export” option on (which is its default setting). Now is the time to update and add any new listings in ListNOW so they are displayed on your Featured Listings page – don’t neglect your listings display on your website!

Capturing Visitor Information

When visitors get to your website, are there reasons for them to want to contact you? There are many websites out there, so the difference between a successful real estate website and a bland one is all in the features and how they are displayed. The first impression is most important; a positive impression will help a visitor contact you. What incentives do they have for doing so? What would they get out of it?

Have some prominent items displayed on your homepage that will direct your visitors to the most important information, and to help them find what they are looking for. Here are some examples of what successful websites have displayed on their homepage:

1) High quality photos of featured listings – be sure to add captions with some general information. Link each photo directly to the corresponding listing detail page.

2) Remember to feature your “Hot Listings” (such as reduced sales prices or “need to sell fast” homes).

3) Signup form for foreclosures, short sales, or bank owned listings. Generate buzz about these discounted priced homes, and request that they contact you for the details.

These are some things you can add to your homepage to help create interest. You want give visitors a reason to want to contact you, and make it easy for them to do so.

If you need assistance with listing export information, or implementing changes to your website, remember our Customer Support team is here to help!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 10:01 am and is filed under Weekly Marketing Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.