Online real estate advertising is a form of promotion that uses the Internet to send marketing messages to attract potential real estate customers. Examples of online advertising include:
- Contextual ads
- Advertising
- blog
- rich media ads
- social media advertising
- interstitial ads
- online classified ads
- ad networks
- Junk mail
Additional Bonuses Offered by Blog Hosting Companies
Some real estate advertisements are free and others are not. Some specialized real estate blog providers offer additional bonuses that can complement your search engine business plan (SEBP) at least for a period of time. For example, some SEBP programs incorporate the use of Google AdWords or Yahoo! Advertising Solutions. These are adware that you can use to help increase your overall website traffic for a fee. Some web hosting providers offer free credits called bonuses. These bonus programs can be a great way to help you get started with real estate marketing. The hosting company we currently use offers the following credits if you purchase one of their hosting plans:
- $100 free Google Adwords credit
- Free Up to $100 Bing™/Yahoo! Find credits
- Free $50 Facebook Ad Credits
- Fotolia photo credits
Don’t let these bonuses be the deciding factor for your online marketing campaigns.
Do you really need real estate advertising?
Online promotion to generate leads depends on your budget, know-how and time. You need to ask yourself, “Do I need leads right now, or can I wait and generate leads the traditional way?” And, in general, people don’t necessarily trust advertisers. Also, when you stop paying advertising money, that’s it, your attraction will stop, which means no one will find you unless you start advertising again. Some agents spend up to $5,000 (and sometimes more) per month to try to capitalize on qualified prospects. We know some agents who spend so much and don’t make a dime. Their referral business keeps them afloat, rightly so!
There are other online alternatives to attract home buyers and sellers that do more than just advertise. They build brand, authority and relationships.
Real estate advertising alternatives
A good advertising campaign is based on unique content. But, not just any content. It should be content that is based on what search engine users (ie buyers and sellers) type into the search boxes. Search engine optimization (SEO) professionals call this content marketing. Unique keyword rich content is king. Your content should educate and inspire your readers, keeping them engaged while helping them see how they can overcome their challenges and achieve their goals using your real estate services. Real estate content marketing is an SEO marketing strategy to constantly create and distribute relevant, valuable, and useful content to attract, acquire, and engage readers. The goal is to convert readers into leads, and then into customers. Real estate content marketing is based on market research and includes keywords and phrases.
You must have content to attract internet customers effectively, but there are also other phases including:
- Market research
- website development
- MLS Integration
- optimization page
- Content Marketing
- Link management (also known as backlinks)
- Results Tracking
The one point above that is mostly forgotten is link management or backlinks. The number of links you have pointing to your site, from outside your site, greatly affects your search engine ranking. Here are some techniques to build a network of backlinks:
- Bookmarks on Twitter, Facebook and Google+
- web profiles
- social bookmarking
- video marketing
- Web 2.0 Marketing
- Merchandising of articles
The important thing to know here is that if you stop creating content or links, your brand and authority will survive because of what you post on the web. This is so because nothing is really thrown away; It just gets indexed. By adding the above features to your website and blogs, you will have created your own real estate advertising program without spending a penny on advertising. The only way it doesn’t work is if you don’t do it right.