Track Your Successes (and Your Failures).
When you advertise listings online, how effective are your efforts? If that question caught you off guard or left you without a solid answer, then you are not
tracking the results of your expended marketing effort!
With the explosive and ongoing growth of the internet over the past 5 years,
marketing listings online has become a necessity. Whether you're promoting property listings, eBay listings, auto listings, or any other type of listings, you need to have them on the internet. But just as important, is the information that tells you
where your advertising is effective and where it is failing.Our
tracking reports and details give you the essential information you need to view the
impact that your online flyers have made in different areas. You can see the website url's that people have viewed and clicked your flyers on, reports on the popularity of your flyers in different areas, and graphs that display the success of your flyer over a specified period of time. If used right, this type of data will allow you to analyze your targeted markets and
design a plan that can monetize your online advertising efforts.
Put your efforts where they are paying off. And remember, to do that, you
need to know where your efforts are paying off.
Flyer tracking data is available for all paid flyers.Labels: autos, classified flyer ads, ebay, flyer tracking, free member features, real estate, track advertising success
Members Blog Profiles Put Them on Google
Have you filled out your blog profile yet?
If not, then get to it! Having a completed
blog profile can bring pleasantly surprising benefits to your online presence, since we syndicate it to search engines every 30 days. You can talk about yourself, your business, your listings, your town, or anything else you want to tell the world. The most effective blog profiles have a relevant title, keyword rich content, several links, and blog posts. Members who take full advantage of their FREE blog profile often rank on the first page of Google for related search terms. Just go to the “Edit Profile” link after you log in and fill in the “About Me” section. It’s a simple way to make a big impact.
Check out Tina and Darren’s blog profiles to get inspired!Labels: autos, blog profile, classified flyer ads, ebay, google ranking, member benefits, real estate
Another Handy eBay Widget
In response to a great customer request, we recently developed an
eBay slideshow widget to showcase your eBay listings in a fancy way. The widget comes in a horizontal or vertical style so you can place it easily on any part of your sites or blog. It transitions through all of your eBay listings at a speed set by the viewer, and comes in seven different color options (because hey, your widget should match your blog!).
The widget displays each eBay listing with a photo and link back to the listing for purchase. Once you customize your widget the way you want it, you can paste the embed code all over the place online to give your eBay listings maximum internet exposure.
You may also want to check out our
real estate slideshow widget as well!
Labels: ebay, ebay widgets, online listing exposure, real estate, real estate widgets, slideshow widgets
Local Area Widget for Real Estate Blogs
We've just created a new widget to help our Real Estate members! The
Local Area Widget has a sleek, attractive design and can be customized to fit your needs.
This new tool uses the power of GoogleMaps technology to give visitors and potential homebuyers information about local areas. Take a look:
With links to dozens of local places, this little widget is such a useful reference for visitors to your blog or website, and one that will keep them coming back. All links open in a new window, so buyers will not lose your page.
And as with all of our widgets, this one is free to our members! Have fun with it.
Labels: blog widgets, classified flyer ads, listing widgets, local area widget, real estate, real estate widgets
Increased Traffic and Leads for Members
More traffic in the city is a bad thing, however, more traffic to your listings and website is definitely a good thing! Our members have really been experiencing this truth, as hits to their online flyers have been increasing more every month.
Over the past 18 months ClassifiedFlyerAds.com has experienced a traffic growth rate exceeding 11% per month, in large amount due to increased prospect views of member’s online flyers. In the last 3 months alone, site traffic has steadily increased by 30 – 40 thousand unique visitors per month. This is great news for our members who are looking to establish themselves online and get their listings noticed by buyers.
Go Smart Solutions Director of Business Development, Patrick Thompson reflects, “With the downturn in the economy, more and more people are looking less into traditional methods for advertising their listings such as expensive print media and more into cost-effective emerging technologies like online ad directory syndication. Our surge in membership and site usage bear witness to how well our services are being received."
Congratulations to all our members who have reaped the benefits of increased traffic!*Go Smart Solutions is the parent company of ClassifiedFlyerAds.com.Labels: autos, classified flyer ads, ebay, increased leads, increased website traffic, jobs, online flyers, real estate
Capture Your Online Leads
If you’re using ClassifiedFlyerAds.com to list homes, you know that you’re getting lots of good online leads, but how do you ensure you don’t drop the ball and miss a great potential buyer?
Realtor.org offers the
6 Best Practices for Online Leads that include always using your email signature, responding as quickly as you can and treating the lead like a human being. Read more
here and don’t let our great leads go to waste!
Labels: real estate
Homeowners May Be in Denial About Home’s Worth
How much is your home worth? According to a recent survey conducted by
Zillow.com, one of our most popular real estate directories, home-owners are not realistic about their home’s value.
The Zillow® survey of homeowner confidence conducted by Harris Interactive® found that 72 percent of homeowners believe their home's value has increased or stayed the same the past year. However, according to Zillow, the reality is that 75 percent of U.S. homes actually decreased in value from the same period a year ago.
They also found that homeowners in the Northeast are closer to reality on their home’s value, while those in the West were way more optimistic regarding the number of homes whose value has decreased compared with the actual numbers.
"While we assume there's a fair bit of owner denial reflected in these results, we also believe a large portion of the population simply isn't paying close attention to their housing market because they're not currently looking to sell or finance," says Stan Humphries, Zillow.com vice president of data and analytics. "But even among those who say they're planning home-related activities this year, confidence appears strong despite continuing declines. Approximately one-third of homeowners say they are equally or more likely to sell their home, refinance or take out a home equity line of credit this year, which is essentially unchanged from sentiment in the fourth quarter."
Labels: directories, real estate
More Mileage for Your Home Sale Flyer
Now you’re getting even more mileage out of every home listing flyer you post to our site. We’ve recently added four new real estate directories, some of which are doing some really cool things, to our list to which all home sale flyers are posted. The new directories include Housefront, USAMLS, Properazzi and DotHomes. Let us tell you a little bit about them.
HouseFront provides consumers with access to property valuations, details, market trends and sales history on more than 100 million homes in the U.S. directly to their mobile phone or desktop computer.
USAMLS, a Free National Open Access Multiple Listing Service, allows realtors, builders and consumers to list both national and international properties for sale alongside a mapped location of the listing. The site also allows potential buyers to easily request more information from the listing brokerage.
The world’s largest property portal with listings in more than 50 countries,
Properazzi aggregates millions of properties from just as many estate agents and property Web sites.
Finally,
DotHomes is a real estate search engine that provides house hunters with access to more than one million results summaries that link to directly property details on the original listing broker Web sites.
We’re always looking for ways to give you more bang for your buck and get your listings out in front of more potential buyers.
Labels: directories, real estate
Take a Virtual Stroll Through Your New Neighborhood
Trulia, one of the most popular sites that we post all real estate flyers to, has added a new feature to help its viewers get a better feel for a home’s surroundings. Trulia says it is the first national real estate site to add Google Map’s Street View technology, which allows visitors to “virtually” walk through a home’s neighborhood with 360-degree views using real photos.
The company already used Google Maps; however, says Trulia co-founder and CEO Pete Flint, this takes it one step further. "Our users tell us that they are looking to move into a community, not just a house,” he says. “With the addition of Google Maps Street View, consumers can see everything they need to know about a home on Trulia without ever leaving the comfort of their couch. With Street View now available on Trulia, you can get the true view of a neighborhood and narrow down your choices before ever making a visit."
The new feature is currently available for 40 metropolitan areas.
According to Trulia, it is the fastest growing US real estate Web site with more than 4 million unique visitors per month.
Labels: directories, real estate
Get Creative to Sell Your Home Listing
Certainly posting your home listing on ClassifiedFlyerAds.com increases the number of eyes who might be interesting in buying, but some home-sellers are taking it one step further to make their home stand out.
An
article from the Associated Press recently noted a Colorado couple who is holding an essay contest to sell their home. By charging $200 per entry (they’ve had 500 entries to date), the couple hopes to raise enough money to cover their mortgage and give their home to the winning essay writer.
Others are offering boats, cars, club memberships, golf lessons for a home on a golf course, and even a snowplow for a home in a high-snow area.
What can you do to make your home listing stand out from the rest?
Labels: real estate
Make Your Listing a Winner
Realtors: What can you do to increase the chances of selling your home listings (besides putting them on ClassifiedFlyerAds.com!)? Well, one place to start is to help the owner update the home’s interior design.
Realtor.com offers a look at the 10 hottest trends for home interiors in this
slide show. Here’s a hint: some of the trends include faux wood trim, the color blue and sustainable furniture.
Labels: real estate
Go Commercial
While the bad news continues to roll in about residential real estate, the good news is that commercial real estate has not been hit as hard. Realtor.com recently offered some tips from Jerry Chautin, a business counselor with SCORE in Manasota, Fla., on how realtors can get started in the commercial side of the business:
- Join professional organizations. For instance, attending meetings of the International Council of Shopping Centers and getting to know its developer members can lead to opportunities down the road.
- Volunteer at trade shows and other industry events. Being visible in organizations where there are people with opportunities to share can lead to good things.
- Subscribe to trade magazines. Magazines like “Retail Traffic” report on which developers are doing deals and point out the competition.
- Consider buying prospect lists. Lists are sold by ZIP code and are not necessarily high cost.
- Take a course or two. The Institute of Real Estate Management and Urban Land Institute are known for income-producing real estate education.
Labels: real estate
Trulia Breaks Top 10
One of our directories that we post all flyers to, Trulia, a real estate search engine, is now one of the top 10 most visited real estate Web sites in the U.S., according to an
article on MediaPost. Providing information on homes for sale, including neighborhood guides and discussion boards, the site reported in December that it almost tripled its audience from the year before, growing from 579,000 unique visitors to 1.6 million. So rest assured that your flyers are getting lots of views online just from this one directory alone!
Labels: directories, real estate, Trulia
10 Ways to Spice up Your Real Estate Web Site
We know one of the most popular classified ad categories on our site is for real estate, and we thought we’d pass along some information to our friends and clients who are real estate agents. As much as we hope our flyers help you sell homes, we also understand the importance of having a user-friendly, top-notch Web site for your customers to view your listings.
RISMedia, the publisher of Real Estate Magazine, suggests that the must-have tool in today’s real estate sales business is a Web site that is full of useful information, but still stands out in an oversaturated market. Here are their 10 recommendations for creating a successful Web site:
1. Offer an exhaustive search capability.
2. Construct pre-defined searches.
3. Employ interactive mapping
4. Provide compelling and relevant visual content.
5. Make your site the local authority on community and lifestyle information.
6. Give your site’s visitors an Ivy League real estate education.
7. Offer nonintrusive lead-generation forms.
8. Use objective data and third-party testimonials.
9. Learn and implement Internet syndication.
10. Build a robust administrative/back-page area for your site.
View the original article
here.
Labels: flyers, real estate, Web site
Zillow Joins Our Listings
We are always looking for quality directories to add to our syndication list and are happy to announce that we now post all real estate listings to Zillow.com, a popular online real estate Web site. Adding Zillow.com to our list of directories will certainly help add value to your flyers and produce more results for you and your clients.
If you know of a quality directory that you think we should include, please let us know.
Email us, submit your idea
online or chat with us live!
Labels: directories, real estate, Zillow.com
Real Estate SEO Tips
We have compiled a list of tips and resources for those of you who want to do your own search engine optimization (SEO) for your real estate Web sites and blogs.
The first resources I want to discuss are blogs and social networks. I must say that
Activerain is a great resource for real estate SEO. Activerain was coded to be very search engine friendly. For example, have you noticed that the title you use in blog posts actually end up being the page name and they are hyperlinked? These are just a couple of great things that the Activerain team has implemented that search engines love.
A lot of you have already experienced the benefits of Activerain and other blogs by having your actual blog posts or profiles show up in searches.
Here are some other tips:
- Press Releases and Articles – Having a quality press release or article written and then distributed to the top media networks can be a great way to not only bring in more traffic to your site but it's also a great SEO method. Press releases and articles generally have links back to your site and services, and if written well, the articles will be optimized to be search engine friendly.
- RSS Feeds – Have an RSS feed of your property listings programmed. Add a link to your RSS feed to your blogs and add the feed to RSS feed directories.
- Don’t use too much Flash or JavaScript. Search engines cannot index Flash or JavaScript. There are some great widgets out there, but most of them utilize Flash or JavaScript technology. For example, if you have a Flash or JavaScript listing widget that displays all your listings, search engines will not index that widget. But if you have an HTML widget of your listings, then search engines will index all the listings and the links back to your listings will also be indexed. So to sum it up, if you are using widgets, adlets or any other utilities/tools, check to see if there is an HTML version available.
- Keyword Hyperlinks – Link keywords in your pages and blogs and make sure and attach titles to your links. For example: create a hyperlink like Listing Widgets and link it back to the page rather than a direct url like http://www.classifiedflyerads.com/adlets.php
- Surround your main page title by header, h1 tags. You will need to be familiar with HTML to utilize this method.
- Properly code your Web page title tags so the title tag in the HTML is relevant to the page. For example, if your page talks about Email Signature Widgets then your page title tag be the same. You will need to be familiar with HTML to utilize this method or contact your Web developer and ask him/her about this.
- CSS/Hyperlink Menus – Use hyperlink/CSS menus on your Web sites rather than image, Flash or JavaScript menus. Ask your Web developer if CSS hyperlink menus are being used.
There is a whole lot more in regards to SEO, but the above list outlines some of the most important techniques. Please feel free to ask questions and we would be happy to answer. We also welcome any tips anyone else can add to this list.
Labels: real estate, seo
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