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.

When visitors arrive at your real estate website you want them to be able to find what they are looking for. A real estate website should be rich in information, but it should never be cluttered.

That’s why it’s imperative that you organize your agent website into easy to navigate categories. A great way to do that is by using our Hot Sheets.

Hot Sheets enable you to organize your listings into different lists and categories. They help guide your website visitors and make it easy for them to find what they are looking for.

For example, you can create a hot sheet of your commercial properties, a separate hot sheet of your rental properties, and another for your 3 bedroom properties. Other ideas for organizing listings include organizing them by newer or older homes, by the square footage of the yard, or by the school district.

The possibilities are endless! You know your market better than anyone else – you know what buyers are looking for and what is the criteria that plays a role in your market. For example, “beach front properties” may be a very relevant hot-sheet criteria in certain markets, while in other real estate markets, a downtown location may be desirable.

Hot sheets are included in all our agent websites. Take advantage of them to organize your listings and make your website easier to navigate. An easy to navigate website is a sticky website – it makes buyers stay and browse rather than leave right away.

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

Lu Anne Finlayson is so smart to use ListingDomains for commercial sales like www.DanceStudioForSale.com because the buyers can get so much more info then any other type of advertisement 

We have already discussed the importance of using social media in marketing real estate. Today we’d like to add that an important part of any real estate social media marketing campaign is using property widgets.

Property widgets are dynamic buttons that you can place online to showcase and promote your listings. A property widget is an excellent teaser – it shows just enough to entice people and make them want to click on the widget, which then takes them to your agent website.

At Real Estate Sites, we deeply believe in utilizing social media marketing as much as possible. Therefore, we automatically create an RSS feed for your listings. This enables you to build property widgets and post them to your blog, to micro blogging sites such as Twitter, and to social networking sites such as Facebook.

Because RSS is dynamic, and changes whenever you change your listings or add a new listing, your widget will automatically reflect that – the widget gets updated whenever you add or remove a listing.

By adding a property widget to your various social media outlets, you can create more awareness around your offerings, strengthen your brand, and drive highly targeted traffic to your agent website.

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.

Creating a single property website for each of your listings is an excellent way to use online tools to enhance your real estate marketing efforts.

However, as any seasoned webmaster knows, creating a website is not enough – you need to make sure the website is actually found by search engines and by potential home buyers.

At Listing Domains, we are aware that you need to market your website, and we are also very aware of how busy you are and how little time you have to engage in marketing efforts. This is why we included so many social media and online marketing tools in our single property websites. The tools are built right in, so that you can easily use them to promote your listings. In many cases, the tools are doing the work for you.

Whenever you create a single property website with Listing Domains, we automatically feed your website to all the major search engines such as Google and Bing. We also add your meta tags for you, to make sure each website is indexed properly by search engines.

In addition to sending your property websites to search engines, we also feed them to major property website portals, including GoogleBase, Trulia, Zillow, and more.

Making sure your website is included in search engines and in property website portals helps your website get the most traffic in the least amount of time.

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.