I have learned that to be successful in marketing your real estate business online there are two basic rules.

1)  Claim as much real estate as possible. 

2)  Continually drive links to those online properties.

When the web started, it was enough to have one site and do a little search optimization or pay per view advertising and even through this is still how many REALTORs operate, this approach is no longer very useful.  Because of the sheer volume of sites, and the competitive nature of the medium, having just one website with no other presence is no longer enough.   In addition, the rules of market now require that you engage your prospects in an online conversation, let them own your personal brand, and lead your value proposition.  These new requirements from your online customers require a completely different approach, and more importantly, a much more pervasive online presence. For example, if you google my our group, 4MySales, about 3600 listings will come back.  Now 4MySales.com has been around a while so it has a number of backlinks, but if you look at the list on the first page of google, you will see that 4MySales has its own website, an independent blog, an active rain blog, a facebook page, a few squidoo and tumblr lenses, a number of social bookmarks, and many more related links. The point is simply that if you are marketing your real estate business online, not only do you need a primary site and a blog hosted on that site, but you need the multitude of associated social and free accounts as well.  Essentially, you need to put your brand everywhere your prospective clients hang out.  A more recent example of how this is applied can be seen on the Agents Online or Real Estate Country sites this I used to demonstrate the basic approach to SEO.

So without spending hundreds of hours online, how do you maximize your lead generation activities online?  The steps are not complicated, but simply require registering and linking to numerous sites.  If you are just a beginner to online marketing, I would recommend that you get started as follows:

1) Choose a set of target keywords and register your website and blog with these keywords in the URL

2) Create a blog in the home directory of your main site to support internal links and SEO.

3)  Create a related, but unique, blog on blogger and wordpress.

4) Install mybloglog on each of those blogs

5)  If you haven’t already, create your corporate facebook page, or tweak your Facebook page to relate to your brand.  Link your facebook page to your home page and blogs.  Do the same for MySpace.

6) Register for an account on ActiveRain, Broker Agent Social, LinkedIn, and WannaNetwork  Put links to your sites and blogs from each account.

7)  Register for a Twitter account and customize the look and feel of your twitter page.  Link your account to your home page.

8)  Go to squidoo.com and tumblr.com and make a few websites dedicated to your personal brand.  Link those sites to your blog and home page.

9)  Register for del.ici.ous,  stumbleupon, mrwong, newsvine, and many of the other online social networks and bookmark sites.

10)  Routinely update your blog and twitter account.  Use the available plugins to automatically post your updates to your bookmarking sites.

11)  Now that you have your basic web presence established, register for google adwords and Yahoo search advertising. 

Depending on your site and your target keywords, you should be expect aggregate web traffic of between 500 and 10,000 hits per day simply by setting up this system.  From there, track how customers find you and how they move through your sales funnel to become active leads.  This approach has been very successful in getting Real Estate Country to the to of Google, Agents Online to the top of the second page, and around 15,000 hits per day looking at our discount offer for online listing leads from RedX.