The best and most powerful marketing campaign a real estate agent can utilize is a targeted and effective internet marketing campaign. The interest marketing techniques we ill discuss should not necessarily be employed alone but in conjunction with other more traditional methods as your budget allows. That being said the most important marketing strategy that an agent can employ is an internet campaign and if your budget allows only one mode of marketing for your real estate career it should be the internet. The first step you should take is to acquire your own name and another descriptive name for you domain name. You should acquire your name in full i.e. sallysmith.* and then the extension .com or .net are the preferred choices in that order. If you have a long name you should purchase both your full name and your first initial and last name i.e. jabrahamson.* . The descriptive url that you purchase should be something that includes keywords that describe your site. Do not include your brokerage name or a trademarked franchise name in your main site url (in case you make a change). Something that includes words that are relevant to your services like "dallashomes" or "tulsarealestate" are great and will help your search engine ranking. Next you should develop a site using your hosting companies free tools and templates. We recommend networksolutions they have a great hosting package and great prices and their tools that come free with the basic package can be worth thousands of dollars. You can develop a professional looking website with proper keywords and meta tags by simply following the instructions laid out by them in their free tools. It is truly a great deal and if you have your site somewhere else you should move it over. After you get your site up and running make sure it has valuable information and a searchable MLS feature. Most local realtor organizations offer an IDX function to incorporate in your site and they are really inexpensive. I also recommend reading about Search engine optimization. There are great blogs and sites out there that will explain in detail how to get your site found by the search engines. The key elements are links (don't trade links or post links) that are naturally acquired. Don't pay for links as they are generally discounted by the search engines and your site may be punished for using them. Don't put a bunch of links on your site to other sites. All of the sites that you link to will "suck" your pages value to them. Your goal should be to get as many links going to your site as you can without ANY going out. You will "suck" a fraction of every sites link juice that links to you. Another great strategy to get natural placement on the search engines is top use the google webmaster tools. You can set up a google account free and use the google tools to optimize your site. Follow their instructions carefully and you will be amazed at the results. Be patient and you will have great results and get tons of great leads. If you are not up to doing all that work and a bigger budget you can employ pay per click advertising. By using the programs with google, yahoo, and MSN you can get your site to the top of the list without waiting. In 20 minutes (if you have enough money) you can be at the very top of all of the major search engines. I personally find that the google ppc campaigns are the most user friendly and easy to use.
