Making Something out of Nothing

Yesterday, I made a new website, just for bank-owned homes.  It really wasn't that difficult, I just made a pretty Google map, embedded it on a blog page, and bought a domain for it.  And then the Google map has links to lists of bank-owned homes for that area on the map, it just links out to a different site.

But it looks pretty cool.  In reality, it's stuff I already had, I just framed it a little differently.  And now I can promote that I have these lists of bargain homes to attract buyers.

I was reminded of that when I read ActiveBrad's excellent post today about a woman who put a nice looking search at the bottom of her posts.  Now, buttons at the bottom of posts to search homes isn't all that new, but hers has dropdown boxes so that a reader can select what kind of home they want to search.  Now, imagine if she had a post about a specific neighborhood or home, and could have those boxes already set to search homes in that area.  That's incredible power.

It's an iframe, which means that little search widget is a tool provided to her by her IDX, so all she has to do is copy and paste that little line of code in wherever she wants a search.  So incredibly easy.  And that's the whole point of having an MLS search on your site is that you should be able to integrate listings and your posts with extreme ease.

Now, with that tool, that little quick search widget, think about what else you could make out of it.  If I wanted to target a neighborhood, I could buy a domain for that neighborhood, make a page with that quick search, write a few paragraphs about it, and promote that.  I could whip one of those up for a listing pretty quick, use that special neighborhood domain on my listing advertising.  I could put it on my single property websites - if people look at the single property website and don't like that particular house, then they can search other homes easily, right from that widget.  Heck, if the widget is the right size, you could embed it in your AR sidebar and provide a listing search - in a prominent location - for anyone that visits your blog.

With the right tools, making something from nothing is easy.  And making something that your site visitors will appreciate and return to is even better.  Sometimes, it's not about adding more stuff, it's about using the right stuff in new ways.



(By the way, our iframe quick search looks like this, and embeds just about anywhere too.)