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Marketing Your Real Estate Services Via Forums. Part 1

By RealtyTech Inc.

Real Estate Technology with Real Estate Technology and Marketing

February 04, 2011 04:45 AM

In addition to optimizing your real estate website, setting up Twitter and Facebook accounts so that you may engage potential clients via social media marketing, blogging, and sending e-mail newsletters, a great way to market your real estate services is through forum posting.

Posting on forums is free, by the way.

Forum posts often come up in search engine results as people search for information on a product or service. Literally hundreds of thousands of forums exist online and cover millions of topics. Real estate is one of the more popular topics.

Naturally, some real estate forums are geared just for Realtors

and other real estate professionals, some are for homebuyers and sellers (consumers) and others are for both.

We recommend you opt for forums where consumers congregate.

To begin, do a search on Google, Yahoo! or other search engine of your choice and look for "real estate forums." You also should search for a forum that's geared for your geographic region ("real estate forums Pennsylvania," for example). Aim to find a forum with a good amount of traffic. You can check out Alexa.com, place the forum's url in the form at the top and see how Alexa ranks it. The lower the ranking number, the more people visit it. For example, a site with an Alexa ranking of 7,500 is visited much, much more than one with a ranking of 955,000....

Register as a member of a couple of forums you think will be worthwhile. Write a short description or bio of yourself/your business carefully. Forum participants may check it out.

Yet one of the most important things you'll do is the setting up of your "signature." This is the information that will appear at the bottom of each and every of your forum posts. It is this signature that will generate leads to your real estate website.

If the real estate forum allows your signature to include your picture, by all means, include it. Your picture need not be a photo of yourself -- it could be your company logo. But we highly recommend that you avoid placing one of those animated avatars, cutesie cartoons of yourself, etc. You want to come across as professional and knowledgeable, yet approachable, as possible.

You'll want to be sure to include a link to your blog and/or website within your signature. If there's room, include a link to your Facebook and/or Twitter pages. Place your branding tagline, as well. Keep it short (two to seven words) , but make it memorable.

Our next post will discuss how you should conduct yourself on forums in order to receive the maximum benefit from it.

Give RealtyTech.com a call when you want your real estate website to get found by potential clients. We can help your site receive a lot of traffic, resulting in more listings and more sales for your business. Contact us today.