Online Marketing

Online Real Estate Marketing Using Craigslist Techniques

One of the viable Online Marketing for the Real Estate Agent and the Real Estate Investor alike is Craig’s List. For those of you who are not familiar with Craig’s List, you can visit the site at www.craigslist.com and browse to your city.

There are different techniques to use with Craig’s List, some are well known, and some advanced techniques I will teach you how to implement in this article.

Posting To Solicit New Business

Depending on your goals, there are different sections to Craigs’s List:

Real Estate section under Services

If you are looking to network with other Real Estate Agents, Realtors, Mortgage Brokers, and Investors or if you would like to offer your services to solicit new business, then you should post under this section.

Financial section under Services

Use this section to solicit private funds, or if you would like to network with Mortgage Brokers. If you are soliciting private funds, make sure to read the SEC regulations regarding public solicitation.

Real Estate For Sale under Housing

I have mixed feelings about this section when it comes to finding For Sale By Owner (FSBO) leads because, and this highly depends on where you live, majority of the ads are by Real Estate Agents, Realtors, and Real Estate Investors.

As a Real Estate Agent or Realtor, you can contact FSBO sellers, including the Investors to solicit listing their property if it does not sell. Remember that over 80% of FSBOs end up being listed.

Contacting others is a tedious task and time consuming since you will need to email each one of them, unless you know how to automate it. I will show you in a second how to automate this process.

Another use for this section is to POST your properties for sale. It being free service, makes viable media to market to.

apt / housing section under Housing

This section deals with Rentals. Some of the posts are for apartments, others for single family homes and Plexes. This is great place to contact and market to For Rent By Owner (FRBO). Some of them trying to rent as an alternative to not being able to sell, or they may decide to sell if they could not rent.

For effective marketing, this too needs to be automated as we will see later.

How to write effective advertising for Craig’s List

Marketing Online is not much different than the traditional offline marketing when it comes to style.

You need a powerful headline that SUCKS the reader’s attention and makes them want to know more and open your post or ad. This is a must if you want to see results.

If you are looking for networking or to solicit new business, the content of the ad should follow Sales Letters formats, or be written well enough to compel them to visit your site for more information. Make sure you have a powerful website, not an over sized business card online.

If you are posting houses for sale, then you should take advantage of free service offered by PostLets.com. PostLets.com allows you to provide an effective format for your listing, include pictures, populates some of the data for you from Zillow.com such as the number of rooms, size and so forth and more. PostLets.com also allows you to save the generated HTML and all you have to do is paste that HTML into your Craig’s List post.

You should post often to get better response

Some of the trend I have observed by Craig’s List users is that they tend to mainly look at the newer posts and lose interest as they visit older posts.

You need to stay on top of your game, and post your ads daily. Make it a habit to post all your ads before you go to bed. so you are at the end of Today’s list, or toward the beginning of Tomorrow’s list. This makes the ad more visible.

The nice thing about Craig’s List is that there is no limit to the number of posts you put out as long as you do not repeat the post within certain period of time. You could always rewrite the ad or change few words on it to beat their control though.

There are software that automate the posting for you, but Craig’s List constantly changing their submission process to break them. It is your call.

So are you ready for THE BEST MARKETING TECHNIQUE, CAREER ROCKETING, MONEY MAKING IDEA? You better be!

This is a goldmine if you implement it! I have to warn you though, you may get some hate mail and angry callers! but that is good! if your marketing is not roughing some feathers, it is not doing its job.

Here is what you will need to do:

1. Hire a college kid to write you a small application, this can be written in PHP, Visual Basic, or even VBScript.
2. Instruct him to do the following:
    2.1 Create an application that reads Feeds. Feeds are a way to share HTML content with others, and Craig’s List offers it
    2.2 Decide on the sections you want to market to, for example FSBO and FRBO
    2.3 Navigate to that section and toward the bottom right, you will see an icon that reads "RSS". This is the URL for the Feed
    2.4 Let the kid read feeds and pragmatically visit each post and strip out the email address that follows the "Reply too:" string.
    2.5 Save the emails to a list, or send an email to each right away. I rather you save it so you can mail them weekly till they complain or do business with you
    2.6 Make sure he codes it so it does not pick up the same date more than once, so you do not spam the same prospect
3. Now you have the email addresses of all the posts, generate a sales letter email for each type of prospect (FSBO, FRBO, or for networking with other professionals) and email them.

You may want to have him filter Real Estate Agent posts by looking at the Is Licensed string in the content or similar indicators to avoid sending to other agents.

This program should cost you couple of hundreds to get it developed, but think of the benefits you will gain from it! Heck, want to make money? SELL IT!

Happy Marketing!

© 2008 Fadi Zeidan’s Articles.