Inside Real Estate

These days the web is evolving rapidly. It is no longer enough to have a website, optimize it for your location and try to capture the top spot in Google.

Chances are that won't be enough. There will almost always be a few people out there - usually spurred on and advised by someone in the web promotion business - who is being much more aggressive than you.

Today, being aggressive means using Web 2.0 tactics. What are these tactics? There's so many it will make your head spin. "Web 2.0" refers to next generation web technologies that encourage interaction and reader involvement.

A good example is Youtube.com - anybody with a free account can post videos of just about anything. Other people watch them, and comment on them. The viewing frequency of particular videos will push the popular ones to the top of the list and so they'll get even more views.

Wikipedia is another good example. Anybody can start a page on virtually anything. For instance, if you consider yourself an expert on 18th century Hungarian folk music, go ahead and create a page (although there's probably already one there). Then anybody else can just add to or edit your work.

Craigslist is another example. Post free classified ads in major cities across North America and around the world. Your ad stays in circulation for usually about 45 days. If they pass the automated CL (craigslist) filters and if nobody else tags it as spam or inappropriate you've got your message in front of millions of potential viewers for free.

Real estate agents and brokers have a real leg up when it comes to this kind of stuff. Why? Because their target markets are generally localized. It is much easier to dominate the search engines for local search terms (e.g., "Elora Real Estate") than it is for more generic ones like "real estate" or "for sale by owner".

But there are efficient ways to use the new media and some pretty inefficient ways. I spell some of this out in a more general way at my online promotion site. You need to do some analysis and planning, and then you (or someone working for you) has to do some ongoing work.

You can't just put up another website and expect it to the job for you. You have to keep adding to your focused blog, commenting on blogs or forums, creating new targeted resources like Squidoo pages, and yes you might even consider doing some videos and posting them around the web on sites like Youtube.

And you might get serious about email advertising too. This all may take time and cost a bit, but hey, you're probably already spending (wasting?)piles of money on things like directory listings and park bench advertising, so just cut back in a few other places and give the new media a shot.