Show your clients the weather near their new home. It’s very easy to add weather badges into web pages, blog posts or incorporate into your design.

The fist step is to find a weather badge or widget that works best for your site.  Here are a few recommended providers with lots of options.

Accuweather http://netweather.accuweather.com

Accuweather provides a simple to use interface which creates a badge in 9 sizes and 10 colors.  Options include the ability to display current conditions, 5 day forecast, temperature, radar and precipitation maps.

Example:

Weather Underground: http://www.wunderground.com/

This site has the most options, but can little more difficult to navigate.

Example:

Plan your trip Local Radar Detailed Forecast

To add a weather badge simply copy the code provided and paste the code into your website, blog or community filters page.

By now most agents and brokers understand and agree that there is little point to having a website if they don’t have IDX listings on it. Consumers seek out real estate websites for listings and the easiest source of listings for websites is IDX.
But is your MLS’s free or low-cost IDX solution enough?  I submit at least six reasons that free IDX solutions do not serve your ultimate marketing goal – meeting and developing new client relationships. Look at my reasoning below and give me your thoughts.
1. Most free solutions offer no lead capturing at all. Free or cheap IDX solutions offer a one-way stream of listings data, but nothing except your phone number and maybe an email link for contact information. Recognizing that this is an incredible waste of good content, most website vendors suggest that agents put a guestbook over the solution! That is just plain nuts. When was the last time you greeted potential clients at your office’s front door with a guestbook? Real estate is a service business. Show your prospective clients you have something to offer before demanding their contact information. Even if you get consumers to register in one of these cover guestbooks (most won’t, would you?), you’re starting the relationship off on a negative note, especially if you have a weak IDX solution on the other side of that registration form.
2. Free solutions that do offer an invitation to register are clunky and counter-intuitive. The first thing to remember is that online consumers have a short attention span and most definitely do not want to be “captured.” To increase your odds of getting contact information with which to start a relationship, you need to make a compelling offer and you need to make the information exchange easy and effortless. Ask for registration in exchange for a property address or in exchange for daily new listing updates. Once the consumer agrees to give up some contact information, make the registration process simple. Make your required fields minimal. Add optional fields for additional information. If a prospect is inclined to give up extra information about him- or herself, you’ve provided the opportunity, but you haven’t forced the point.
3. Free solutions liberally brand the listing office. Of course this is going to happen. Listing brokers are members of the MLS, too. Display rules for most MLS’s don’t require this high level of branding for the listing office, but neither does the MLS have any incentive to play down the listing office. Yes, most MLS’s require that the listing office name appear on the listing detail page, but even this information can be downplayed and still be compliant with display rules. An example of this is the free solution provided in Florida through the state association. That solution provides the listing office and often their logo on the thumbnail page (the page that comes back first after a query is submitted with the brief descriptions of the matching listings). Most of the MLS’s don’t require this listing office branding on the thumbnail page. A private vendor is your advocate and doesn’t have to please the listing office for constituency reasons. Private packages are designed with the purchaser in mind.
4. Listings results are presented lowest price first with free solutions. Do you specialize in low end properties? This strategy might work for you. Yes, visitors can usually specify a price range, but the lowest price in the range still comes first and how many of the listings will the consumer have attention span to review? (hint: not many!) Effective IDX solutions return your listings first and then make it really easy to re-sort the listings the way the visitor wants to see them, such as highest price first, lowest price first or newly listed. Feature windows can further highlight your listings.
5. Free solutions don’t give your visitors any reason to come back to your site. Unless your solution invites visitors to save specific listings of interest to a private watchlist or register to get daily new listing updates by email, you’re out of luck if the visitor leaves your site without contacting you or registering. Why would they come back? Because your site has lots of great content? That content had better be pretty darned compelling, and nothing is as compelling as offering your visitor a place to “park” his or her homework or to get new listings “hot off the presses” by email.
6. Free solutions don’t allow you to build automated pages of farm listings. Specialize in luxury listings in a particular neighborhood? I haven’t met a free solution yet that let you create these pages. And even if you can, what lead capturing tools do you have? Nothing says neighborhood expert like a page of listings on your site for your farm area. Manually creating and updating these pages is tedious, mind-numbing and not a great use of your time. An IDX solution that automatically creates these pages and provides effective lead capturing is worth its weight in gold.
It is indisputable that consumers come to real estate websites to see listings. If you’re spending any budget or energy to bring these visitors to your website, you owe it to yourself to have a strong listings-based lead capturing system on your site to protect your investment. At $40/month (the going rate for a solid, interactive, effective lead capturing tool), why wouldn’t you?

Not sure if your IDX solution measures up? Drop me a note with your web address and I’ll send you some brief comments back.
Absolutely certain that your sub-$40 solution does measure up? Drop me the same note and I guarantee you that I can find at least three ways that a $40 IDX solution can improve your bottom line.