Caution: Don’t try these hot tips without adequate lead capturing tools on your website, such as Interactive IDX.
Sizzling Tip #1
Emphasize your web address on all print materials, including your “For Sale” signage, your print advertisements, your email signature and your stationery. Every place you use a phone number, you should include your web address. Where you can only include one or the other, consider the context, but often a web address is preferable to your intended audience, especially if you have a website address that is easy to remember. If your signage was printed before you created your website, add a rider with your web address. Is your web address already on your signs? Add a rider that says “Search 1000’s of listings like this one on my website.”
Sizzling Tip #2
Reference your web address in your voicemail message(s). Consider also mentioning that property listings can be searched on your website. Many people call for information and if they cannot reach you immediately, they are just as happy to learn that they can access the information they want in another easy manner. There is certainly no harm including your web address in your message, as long as it is short, easy to remember and does not require extra explanation.
Sizzling Tip #3
Make sure that your website is listed on your company’s website as well as any other real estate- or consumer-oriented website. Any website where the site owner spends any amount of money to drive real estate consumers is a worthwhile place for you to have a live link to your personal website. This includes your company’s website, Realtor.com and other real estate and/or community portals. The key is to attract attention to yourself (to the extent permitted) and entice visitors to click through to your personal website. Once there, these visitors are likely not to turn back because of the robust set of real estate tools offered on your website and the easy to navigate way in which they are offered.
Sizzling Tip #4
Use email accounts branded to your domain name. Between messages you send out and your messages that get forwarded by your recipients on to other recipients, email messages travel far and wide over the worldwide web. A branded email address presents a cheap and invaluable branding opportunity and invitation to visit your website. Imagine seeing an email address like sold@best-LA-realestate.com or info@best-LA-realestate.com or even just sally@best-LA-realestate.com on somebody’s email. If you are a consumer interested in real estate in the Los Angeles area, how could you resist the opportunity to visit www.best-LA-realestate.com and see what information is available. And then to visit this site and find out that you can register to get email notifications each day about brand new Los Angeles listings that match your criteria? You would be one happy consumer!

Sizzling Tip #5
Broadcast an electronic newsletter (or even just a series of simple real estate tips and tricks) to all of your contacts with useful information and a live link to your website. As long as your message is short and relevant to your audience, it will get scanned, at a minimum. Consider only relaying only the first couple of paragraphs of your article(s) with a link to your website to get the rest of the article. Be sure and encourage your readers to refer their friends and family with questions. Consider adding a referral button to your newsletter and/or website to make referrals easier.
Bonus Sizzling Tip: Marketing to the Search Engines
Nearly 75% of consumers start their transaction research in the search engines. Google, one of the most influential of the large search engines, launched half a billion real estate-related search results in 2004. Registering your site in Google, as well as the other search engines, greatly enhances your chances of attracting traffic to your website, but search engine optimization and placement is a time-consuming and tricky business. We recommend that you outsource this task to an expert. This type of marketing is more expensive than the tips provided above, but the leads that come from this form of marketing are extremely qualified and easier to convert to live business if handled correctly. For information on our search engine marketing services, please click here or register to have one of our online marketing specialists contact you about creating your own personal search engine marketing strategy.