A great tool for real estate agents to have in their online marketing toolbox is Scribd. Scribd is an online document hosting site - sounds boring, doesn’t it? But really, it’s an excellent tool to take advantage of to increase inbound links to your own site (which is great for SEO), as well as getting your information out there to be found in the search engines.
From Scribd’s Website: “With Scribd’s iPaper document reader, anyone can easily upload and immediately share their original works on Scribd.com or any other website. iPaper transforms PDF, Word, PowerPoint and many other file formats into an elegant web display. Your work can be shared with Scribd’s community of passionate readers, and because every word of your document is indexed for search engine optimization, your screenplay, novel or even sheet music and recipes also can be discovered by the world.”
Essentially, almost anything on your hard drive can be shared if you like. So if there’s something of value to potential clients, share it! You’ll benefit from the incoming links and the search engine traffic and best of all, these readers will appreciate the great information you’re providing them.
Scribd hosts the document for you, saving you space on your hosting, but also lets you embed the document on your blog or website, so you don’t have to send your own visitors off-site to view the information.
Ways to use Scribd for Real Estate:
Add copies of flyers: You’ve gone to the trouble of creating flyers for homes you’re listing, why not get more use out of them? Take the digital version (Word, PDF, etc.), tag the document with the homes’ keywords, and have another potential source of internet traffic for the home, all in just a few minutes.
Share a Powerpoint Presentation: Have you done presentations in your community on a real estate topic? Did you use a Powerpoint Presentation? This is a great place to share that with everyone, not just the people that were able to attend. Whether it was on the value of owning versus renting for new Home Buyers, a presentation to sellers on how you will market their home, or something related to local government/your neighborhood, anything that showcases your expertise can be posted and shared with the world.
Host real estate disclosure documents: You have the option to make your Scribd documents private, so they can be uploaded, then embedded onto your website in the appropriate spot without being found in the search engines or by anyone that doesn’t need to see them.
Publish your ebook: Have you written up an ebook, either as an incentive for email sign ups, or just to share with your clients? Think about adding it to Scribd as well. While it may seem contradictory to give away your white paper for free without sign up, it could be worth it from an SEO standpoint. Letting potential clients who may never have found you otherwise read your valuable information could lead to a new client or two (or more!).
Market Data publishing: Do you put together monthly Market Data for your blog or clients? Instead of hosting the document on your own blog, host it on Scribd to take advantage of the SEO benefits, then embed it onto your site. Anyone looking for market data for your area will then be lead back to your site.
A Series of your blog posts or articles: If you’ve been submitting articles for search engine marketing, take these articles and post to Scribd. In this way, it can also function as an article site. Or, put together a series of blog posts into a longer article, and publish that. Repurposing content you’ve already written is a time saver and makes sites like Scribd more valuable for the benefit versus time spent using the site.
Use as a research tool: Are you looking for ideas for content, or need to find out more about a subject? Browse Scribd as a user. There are more than 50 million people a month finding or sharing documents on Scribd, so whatever you are looking for is probably there.
These are just a few ideas to get you started. There are lots of other possibilities - as Scribd says, “Liberate your hard drive!”. There are a few best practices for setting up your Scribd profile for maximum results, so take a look at this video on setting up your Scribd profile before you get started.
There are a few best practices for setting up your Scribd profile for maximum results, so here is a good video on setting up your Scribd profile.
And feel free to check out my page as well: Rich Rogala - Real Estate Marketing Coach
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