What Syndication Can Do for You

These days, broad exposure online is crucial to the modern business. But with so many different websites to promote your business on, building a presence on each one would be a very time-consuming and tedious process. Where are the most important places to promote oneself online, and how can you get your content there in the most efficient manner? One way to quickly gain broad exposure is through syndication, or the automatic distribution of a listing to multiple websites. vFlyer is one of a number of online services that automatically submits listings to online marketplaces and classifieds sites. In this post, we’ll break down the various sites to which we syndicate and give you an idea of the exposure our platform can yield.

vFlyer partner site traffic in millions of viewers each month:*

1. Google Maps 35.8

2. Indeed 12.6

3. Yahoo! Real Estate 6.4

4. Zillow 5.1

5. Trulia 4.1

6. Simply Hired 4.0

7. Oodle 3.9

8. eBay Classifieds 3.7

9. Backpage 2.8

10. AOL Real Estate 1.4

11. FrontDoor 1.4

12. OLX 1.2

13. Vast 0.9

14. HotPads 0.9

15. Geebo 0.25

16. Cyberhomes 0.12

17. Jobalot 0.11

*Traffic data from Compete.com. Compete compiles data from a panel of over 2 million consumers - read about their methodology here.

You might be asking yourself, why are vFlyer listings showing up on Google Maps? About a year ago, real estate and rental listings submitted to Google Base were integrated into Google Maps as part of the retiring of Google Base’s search interface. So while vFlyer continues to send a data feed to Google Base, housing listings now appear on Google Maps. There’s even a separate real estate search option in Maps that allows you to find real estate and rentals in a particular area.

Second on the list with a whopping 12 million unique views per month is the job site Indeed, a job “aggregator” site that, unlike some large job boards (e.g., Monster.com), has recently enjoyed tremendous growth. An emphasis on search engine optimization has allowed Indeed to capture a huge amount of traffic straight from Google, and for vFlyer users looking to hire, this is good news... indeed.

Getting back to real estate, let’s have a look at the top five real estate-specific sites on the list. Yahoo! Real Estate comes in first with 6.4 million viewers, Zillow is second with 5.1 million, Trulia third with 4.1 million, AOL Real Estate fourth with 1.4 million, and FrontDoor fifth with 1.4 million.



With the exception of AOL Real Estate, all of these sites show overall growth in the year 2010, with Trulia up 1.17 million unique views per month, and Yahoo! Real Estate up 1.16 million compared to this month last year. These are companies that, despite a poor housing market, have continued to gain traffic by improving their portals and enabling online consumers with more information. With Yahoo! Real Estate and Zillow recently teaming up, Yahoo! Real Estate has gotten a nice boost in listings, and Zillow has become an absolute must for syndication. Combined, traffic on these two sites challenges Realtor.com, the longtime leader in the space. Let’s now take a look at some of the broader online marketplaces and classifieds sites to which vFlyer syndicates: Oodle, with 3.9 million unique views per month, eBay Classifieds (3.7 million), Backpage (2.8 million), OLX (1.2 million), and Vast (0.9 million).



Check out eBay Classifieds (shown in red), with a stratospheric jump of over 3.6 million monthly visits in the past year. As many vFlyer users will recall, this site used to be known as Kijiji. While the name remains in Canada, Kijiji USA was rebranded as eBay Classifieds at the end of March. This seems to have been an effective move by eBay (note the difference between March and April), and with a parent site (eBay.com) ranked #22 worldwide by Alexa, there’s reason to believe eBay Classifieds will continue to grow in the near future. To put this all in perspective, let’s look at Craigslist. With nearly 60 million visitors last month, Craigslist is the undisputed king of classifieds sites. This should come as no surprise to most of you, but the magnitude of difference between traffic on a top real estate site like Trulia and Craigslist is quite staggering. Just for fun, let’s throw in Facebook and Twitter as well.



These are three of the top 10 sites in the US (according to Alexa): Facebook at #1, Twitter at #9, and Craigslist at #10. To answer the question I posed earlier, these are now the most important places to establish oneself online. But let’s not discount the other classifieds sites we reviewed. Diligent Craigslist posting and staying on top of the social media game take a big chunk out of one’s marketing resources (read: time). Syndication is the proverbial low-hanging fruit of online marketing. While these sites alone may not generate the number of leads you might get from posting regularly to Craigslist, they still account for a huge amount of online traffic; having your listings syndicated to them by vFlyer allows you to "pluck the fruit", and leaves you time to focus on building your audience through Facebook, Twitter, and your blog. I'll finish with another question: what role does listing syndication play in your online marketing? And are there any other classifieds sites that you’d like vFlyer to syndicate to? (Sorry, Craigslist is not an option.)