An agent website is one of the best tools available to you for establishing yourself as a real estate expert.

Think about it: as more and more people are starting their search for a home online, and as more and more people expect professionals to have a web presence, you simply can’t afford NOT to have a website.

If you don’t have a website, or if you have a poorly designed agent site, many potential clients will immediately dismiss you as “not serious,” “unprofessional” or as a non-savvy realtor.

In fact, this is true for any small business these days. Regardless of how small a business is, it should have a website if it is to be taken seriously by customers.

The good news: creating a website today is much easier, and certainly more affordable, than it used to be just a decade ago. Reputable real estate website providers such as Properties Online enable you to create a professionally designed, affordable agent website with all the tools you need in today’s technology driven market, including SEO tools, social media tools and more.

Think about your real estate site as your digital business card, or your online portfolio. An agent site provides you with an excellent way to prove to prospects that you are everything they’ve been looking for in an agent – that you are savvy, experienced, knowledgeable, and not afraid of leveraging technology as a marketing tool.

Email can be a great marketing tool for realtors. Sure, our main focus these days is on the Internet, and this includes having a high quality agent website filled with valuable information, and on using social media tools to connect with clients and prospects and to establish yourself as a real estate expert. But you shouldn’t neglect email – it’s still an important communication tool for most people and can definitely help you market your real estate business.

A few email tips for realtors:

1. Add a link to your website and to your social networks to your email signature. You probably send out many emails per day. Each such email can serve to effortlessly market your agent site if you simply include a link in your email signature.

2. Use email to stay in touch with prospects and with clients. Having someone in your database is worthless if you never communicate with them. Send your contacts periodic updates on the real estate market, tips on home buying and selling, and even personal notes on birthdays and anniversaries.

3. Don’t overdo it. While staying in touch is important, you should remember that your clients and prospects are just as busy as you are and space out your communications with them so that they are never seen as spam. Keep your messages short and clear, avoid attachments, and write short, catchy email titles that will entice your recipients to click through and read your email.

4. Automate your email marketing. If your contact list contains more than a handful of emails, keeping in touch with all of them can be very time consuming. Invest in an affordable email drip marketing system that would enable you to effortlessly keep in touch and stay top of mind with your contacts.

We are excited to tell you about a new feature upgrade for your agent website. We have just added Listing Syndication to our growing list of website features for our.

We have just completed beta testing our new Listing Syndication tool that will allow you to feed your listing data to the major property website portals like Trulia, Zillow, Yahoo Real Estate and several others.

To take advantage of this free service, login to your account and click on the new “Syndication” tool located on the Main Menu. This is the page you see first when you login.

At RealEstateSites.com, we are very aware of how busy you are. In order to make the important task of marketing your listing significantly easier, we have made it our goal to include as many useful tools and features as possible in our agent websites.

One of the best features we have included in our agent websites is the ability to create beautiful craigslist flyers. Our flyer builder will generate a snippet of html code that that will dynamically pull all your listing details, photos and your contact information. This html snippet enables you to easily cut and paste your data into online classified sites such as the very popular Craigslist, Backpage or Ebay.

We Maximize Your Clicks!

There are literally hundreds of ads every day for real estate. You need to get your message across quickly and effectively. The ads we create for you fit the bill perfectly because we use HTML to format them. Your property will stand hand and shoulders above the competition.

You can expect anywhere from 5% to 10% of people viewing an effective ad on Craigslist to click-through to your website. This is considerabily higher than the adverage click thru banner advertisement rate of just 1.9%.*

Tracking Your Results

Another fantastic tool related to our craigslist flyer campaigns is the ability to track your results. With our ad campaign stats you can see exactly how many views your classified ad received, and how many people clicked thru to your website.

Don’t forget to take advantage of this free service. Craigslist can be a powerful tool for generating free traffic to your property website. It is one of the most popular websites in the world, with millions of daily visitors.

Regularly posting relevant Craigslist classifieds that point to your listings and include a link to your single property page have the potential of driving significant amounts of highly targeted traffic to your property websites. Get in the habit of using our handy html snippet for each listing and you can see a real difference in the amount of traffic your site receives.

*Average accross all Properties Online users in 2009. According to a study of more than 10 billion banner inquiries across Europe from ADTECH the average click-through rate fluctuates between 0.11% and 0.19%

Real estate market reports are extremely interesting – and valuable – to clients and to prospects. They enable clients to get detailed information about recent home sales in their neighborhood.

Since one of your main goals as a real estate professional is to make your website as “sticky” as possible – to make people stay longer on your site and return for future visits, adding market reports and recently sold properties to your agent website makes a lot of sense.

Market reports also have the added benefit of adding depth to your website. The more interactive your real estate site is, the more you fill it with relevant tools and information, the more attractive it becomes to clients and to prospects.

Our real estate sites include built-in market reports (except for non-disclosure states and counties, where this service is not available). Using tax record information and graphs provided by Zillow, your clients can run an instant report showing them all of the recent home sales in their neighborhood.

If this tool is available in your state, do remember to take advantage of it. It is one of the best tools we offer for keeping clients engaged and interested in your real estate website.

Glenn Gephart did a great job branding  with the youtube plug in feature @ http://GlennGephart.com

Our goal is to capture as many real estate leads for you as we can. This means that just about every page on your agent website will come with a lead generator. Your clients can request additional information about a listing, request a CMA, sign up for free listing updates, download a report or check out the recent home sales in their neighborhood – ALL of which require them to enter their contact information.

Once you have captured a real estate web lead, it is crucial that you immediately follow up on that lead if you want to close a transaction. Many real estate professionals find that with good online real estate marketing campaigns, lead generation is not that hard anymore, but you still face the challenge of turning those leads into lifelong customers.

The most important thing you can do to turn real estate leads into customers is to follow up, and the sooner, the better. Imagine being able to contact a lead while they are still browsing your real estate site – that would be the ultimate in capturing leads!

Our Real Estate Sites enable you to do just that. When you use our agent site, you receive instant leads by a text message. With our LEADS2TEXT service, you can have your website leads sent immediately to your text-enabled cell phone.

If someone fills out a form on your website, our program will convert their message to text and transmit it to your cell phone, so you can follow up while your prospect is still viewing your website! This is one of the best ways to turn such a prospect into a customer, so make sure you take advantage of this free service.

Great news! We just released our new flyer builder that will allow you to post your listings (in style) on craigslist.org!

The new and improved flyer builder allows you to:

• Choose your photos
• Choose your layout
• Choose your color scheme
• Choose a graphic header
• Track your results — see how many times the flyer was viewed and clicked!
• View Sample

You can use the html code that is generated to also post your flyer on your blog or anywhere that allows html posting. The craigslist flyers are just the tip of the iceberg! Be on the look out for our new Agent Announce service that will send these flyers to agents in your area alerting them of new listings, price updates, or status changes. You will be able to send out 1,000 e-flyers using our database of agents for as low as $10.00. In addition to agent announce, we are improving our professionally printed products as well. Soon, in addition to our line of Just Listed, and Just Sold postcards, you will be able to order beautifully designed flyers to match your website and brand identity.

Our new craigslist flyer builder program is available FREE of charge to all Listing Domains users –  And coming soon for Real Estate Site users.

An important part of running a website – any website – is periodically checking your website statistics. After you’ve done everything you can to promote your website, including search engine optimization and social media marketing, you need to check and see if your efforts are paying off, and fine-tune your marketing efforts accordingly.

To help you stay on top of your real estate marketing campaign, each of our real estate websites comes with advanced website statistics. Our stats are live – you can see what’s happening right now – and they allow you to track not only where your visitors are coming from, but what they are doing on your site.

You can see which pages get the most page views, where your visitors are staying the longest (and where they bounce off right away and leave your site), and where they click on your links.

With our detailed graphs and charts, you can tell if your real estate marketing campaign is working and check your ROI.

Knowing what your traffic is doing can help you focus your most important content to the pages that get the most traffic. It can also help you see where you need to make improvements to your site  – which pages need additional tweaking to get more page views.

Creating an agent website is an important step in the right direction when it comes to real estate marketing. But creating a real estate website is not enough: you want people to actually find your website when they search for an agent or for listings.

This is where search engine optimization becomes important. There are many things you can do to help major search engines such as Google index your site correctly, and we help you with them. One of the things you need to do is submit your website to all the major search engines. We do that for you – one less thing to worry about!

We also include a link exchange opportunity in our agent sites. When you get legitimate links from other websites that point at your site, you increase your site’s authority and therefor its visibility in the search engines.

When it comes to on-page optimization, or in other words the way you optimize your own site to include important keywords, our real estate sites enable you to modify your meta tags to include your surrounding areas and your areas of expertise.

We also provide tutorials on pay per click marketing using tools such as Google Adwords, on blogs (blogging is a great way to add relevant, optimized content to your agent site!), and other ways to help drive traffic to your real estate site .