I got up this morning ready to blog on Active Rain, and I saw a featured post by Bob Haywood about web sites that should be paying us for our listings, primarily realtor.com. Let me add to Bob's conversation. You may have noticed that I did not hyperlink realtor.com and I never do. I will never forget the fraud of this site, the fact that when it started we paid a lot of dough to be on it and it took 7 clicks deep just to find us. Meanwhile you the banner ads at the top you clicked on took you out of the site. It was with gratitude that the Feds put executives in jail for fraud, and I for one will never forget that this was a site that was put on us by NAR. But let's broadwn the topic. Not only does realtor.com want your money for enhanced listings, but so does sites like Trulia and Zillow. I will never forget the CEO of Trulia at the Inman Conference in July 2008 saying to the crowd, if you don't put your listings on Trulia, you should not be in the real estate business. Ah, the arrogance of realtor.com repeated. But folks, I am serious about web 2.0 that allows us to gofdirecetly to the source without paying unnecessary fees for enhancement. Here are some stats from http://www.ranking.com about where we should be.
The Top 25 Sites:
Number 1 is Google. Number 2 is Facebook. Number 3 is Yahoo. Number 4 is Youtube. Number 11 is Bing. Number 13 is Twitter. Number 15 is Craigslist. Number 19 is Photobucket. Number 24 is Flickr.
The Also Rans:
Number 201 is realtor.com. Number 261 is Zillow. Number 400 is Trulia.
I am not saying these are bad rankings but I believe at the end of the year they will be no higher, probably lower. Is this who you want to pay the big money to? I can blog here on Active Rain or my Wordpress blog and go directly to the search engines. I can social network on Facebook and build business pages to enhance my market awareness. I can take a video camera and input a listing to my Youtube channel. I can directly put my listings on Craigslist, and do direct photo and slideshow presentations on Flickr and Photobucket. I can also go directly to people in Real Time on Twitter List. My Virtual Tours and Vflyers autopopulate to Trulia and Zillow at no extra charge. Because of these sites I can show a six figure commission gross directly tied to directly marketing to the Top 25 with little or no cost. So my question to you is how much would you pay to be found on Number 201 and down when for just about free you can market to the cream of traffic?
One plea to Active Rain. Localism.com is rated 13,701. This is a rare gem in real estate that is still in the mine waiting to be dug up and sent to the jeweler. You got the servers right, now please, let's all work together to get this up to being a premeir site. Just tell me how I can help.
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