Top 7 Free Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Website
1. Add More Listings - Get Free Exposure on Real Estate Search Websites.
One of the major ways of getting more free traffic to your website is by taking advantage of Listing Syndication for your listings. Some website providers, including Z57, provide this service for you - posting your listings on popular real estate search websites like Zillow, Yahoo, Oodle, Trulia, Vast and LiveDeal, all of which generate free traffic back to your website! Make sure you don’t just frame your home listings into your website, doing this doesn’t get you this exposure - if you have a Z57 website, use the listings manager in your MCC. If your website provider does not provide this valuable service for you, find a provider that does, or post your listings through someone like Postlets.
2. Craigslist/BackPage.com Postings
These two websites can generate you considerable buyer traffic for your home listings. All you have to do is look on either of these major websites and look for your nearest major city’s version and make posts for your individual home listings (and make sure your post has a link to the listing on your website). Even if your nearest major city listed on there is an hour away, it’s worth posting your individual home listings in that area to gain qualified traffic.
www.Craigslist.org
www.BackPage.com
3. Create Content/Start Blogging
A great way to get good rankings in the search engines and thus more free traffic is to create your own content. The more search engine friendly content you have, the more traffic you will generate. A great way to take advantage of this is by making use of your custom pages to build special promotion pages, or featured local resources and interview pages, and build your keyword phrases into them as much as possible. Blogging is also a great simple way of creating new content, which is great for search engine content and also very useful community resource for clients - it turns you into an expert and is great for driving repeat traffic. Here are some examples of good real estate blogs:
http://mirealestate.wordpress.com
http://www.raincityguide.com
4. Build up Your Link Popularity
It’s no longer good enough to simply exchange links with other real estate agent’s websites. You need to get popular websites to link to your website. This not only gets you visits from these websites, but more importantly improves your search rankings in Google because of their page ranking (PR) system. Try and look for popular business websites in similar industries, like mortgage and appraisal websites. If you download the Google search toolbar, you can see PR ratings for websites. Avoid links from 0 or 1 PR rated websites - the PR is a ranking out of 10, so look for 4s, 5s and 6s for best chance of success.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34432
5. Tie Your Offline Marketing to Your Online Efforts
All your offline efforts like bench ads, voicemail recordings and newspaper ads should all make sure they mention your URL and have a good call to action that will inspire people to visit your website. This is a simple one, but I see many real estate agents forgetting this basic step. You are wasting money on your offline efforts if you don’t direct them to your website with a call to action like ‘Receive home search listings via email’.
6. Get a MySpace Profile and Start Networking!
MySpace.com isn’t just for teenagers anymore - more and more Realtors are using this as a great way of networking with local businesses and potential clients. After all, the more exposure your website and brand gets, the more traffic and business you will generate - and MySpace is a perfect vehicle for this. It also gives your business the ‘cool’ factor with younger audiences. MySpace is one of the biggest websites on the Internet right now - why would you ignore it and the great networking it can do for your business?
http://www.myspace.com/finecoastal http://www.sundaymorningtalk.com/2006/10/20/
selling-your-space-on-myspace/
7. Make Sure Your URL is Always in Your Email!
Finally, another simple but often neglected one - emails. Don’t forget to put your URL in your email footer, with a good call to action to get people to your website! Give them a reason why they should come to your website. This can drive tremendous traffic to your website for free.
Some of these methods may seem obvious, but if you are ignoring any of these, you are definitely missing important pieces of the ‘how do I get free website traffic’ puzzle.
Am I involved in listing syndication? Are my listing posted on Zillow?
Yes Mindy, we submit your listings to Zillow, although it appears ListHub is as well, so the traffic generated doesn’t go back to your website.
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
Very nice information. Thanks for this.
I’m not big on commenting, but nice post.
Thanks for such a great article…Its well written and concise.
I am a member of John Beck’s real estate program. I have learnt a lot from his steps strategies. I have come to know more information from your post. Good contribution. I will be looking forward for more posts.
Great quality stuff.
Every time i come here I am not dissapointed, nice post
When’s an integrated blog with our z57 site coming??? As much fun as Blogger is…
Cooper - we appreciate the feedback about adding a blog to our website product. We have been debating this for quite some time but the general concensus from our most of the customers that we have spoken to has been that they would not take the time to use it.
Thanks for getting this information out there. It’s a constant process that is always changing. Web marketing is more and more important every day.
Nice post. Thank you.
When will Z57 offer blogging as part of it’s web package?? I have been waiting…
About the comment “most people won’t use it”… how hard could it be to code a blog for those of us who would use it? Or integrate wordpress into the site.
If that is your position, maybe I need to find another website provider. That just seems like a lame excuse.
Sherry -
Perhaps my response was not quite complete. What I probably should have said was that since our clients can very easily integrate an outside blog into their websites, we haven’t had enough groundswell to build our own internal solution, but have rather focused our efforts on other projects. For those of our clients who do want to blog, it is easy to integrate blog software like Wordpress on their Z57 sites. I apologize for the lack of clarity.
Some examples of Z57 clients with blogs:
http://www.homeclarksville.com
http://www.eastorlandodreamhomes.com
http://www.finehomesofminneapolis.com
http://www.petesellsshasta.com
http://www.newmanrealtyillinois.com/
I just wanted to point out a guide we recently made to marketing on twitter. It’s a pretty huge traffic source if you leverage it properly. Anyway, have a look: http://www.mortgageloanplace.com/twitter.html
great article.
its all about quality content and some online marketing.