Real Estate Marketing: How to post property on 20 big sites at once for free

Real estate marketing is about more than just selling property, but selling property is a critical, fundamental skill that you need to succeed in this business.

And yet, so many folks jump into real estate without any clue how to sell property.

They wanna get listings, and they wanna buy inventory to flip… but they don’t really know what to do once they’ve got a property to sell.

Real estate investors – and real estate agents – don’t realize how much cash they’re missing out on.

Marketing a property in the right ways can easily boost your sales price by 5-10% or more. In many cases, you could be leaving thousands of dollars on the table simply by not creating enough awareness that you’ve got a property for sale.

I’m gonna show you an easy trick that you can use to get a whole bunch of exposure for a property for free. By itself, it’s not a substitute for a killer marketing plan… I’ll tell you more about that in a second.

First, the cool free thing… Meet Postlets.

Postlets.com allows you to quickly create property listings complete with photos, maps, videos and more… and syndicates them across 20+ of the most trafficked real estate sites. It’s a really fast way to get a whole lot more exposure for your property… and the best part: it’s totally free.

Postlets is a joint project between Zillow and Yahoo, who teamed up a few years back in an attempt to fight back against Google’s crushing competition for advertising dollars.

They let you post listings for free on this site because they’re gonna call you and hit you up for paid advertising.

You probably don’t need to buy anything from them.

You can get a huge amount of value out of ’em for free – and I’ll let you know a little secret that we use to get huge discounts off of their ad network for our clients. More about that here soon, first I wanna show you a little more about this free tool.

Once you list a property for sale or rent, your listing gets posted across a bunch of big search networks, like FrontDoor, BackPage, ByOwnerMLS, Vast, Yahoo!, AOL Real Estate, Trulia, MSN Real Estate… heck, let me just show you the full list:

Postlets will shoot your listing across some of the hugest networks out there… there’s a ton of potential exposure there to bring traffic and high-priced offers for your property.

But here’s a word of caution: Zillow and Yahoo are in business to get leads, too – so you’ve gotta make sure that you’re using these tools to your advantage (instead of theirs).

I’ll explain a little more…. with a simple visual:

Capture traffic from Zillow… don’t let them capture traffic from you.

I’m not dissing on Zillow.

In fact, I think they’re a really cool company, and I admire the heck out of how they’ve disrupted the industry. But that doesn’t mean they’re looking out for your best interests.

A lot of the real estate agents I’ve met hate them… including some investors.

Those folks get annoyed because Zillow gives away a huge amount of information to consumers, and sometimes it’s just because those danged Zestimates are often way off from the actual market value.

I get it – it can be annoying to explain to sellers why you can’t pay them as much as they want for a property.

If you’re annoyed… Get used to it!! It’s just gonna get worse.

Zillow has built some powerful tools… and they’re not the only ones giving consumers huge amounts of access to data. Personally, I think that’s a great thing… there’s lots of ways that real estate investors and brokers can use these tools to their advantage.

I use Zillow to send me alerts on property, to boost my online credibility, and for research. They put out some phenomenal statistics that are great for content marketing – you just have to add some of the story to to the data to help people make sense of it.

One of the most important content marketing strategies for any real estate professional should be to position themselves as a Community Expert Resource.

But that’s a “branding” type of activity… it’s not the same as “marketing” a property in order to sell it.

Our sites help you do both. When our sites are used right, they get great results for investors.

As you know, we’ve built InvestorCarrot websites to empower business owners who want to convert traffic into great leads.

That’s really different than how I see Zillow (and other advertisers) positioning themselves. Most of Zillow’s tools are built to create dependency on their ad networks – so you have to pay to get each lead.

If you want to cover a major market, they want you to pay thru the nose.

We want to help you build strong assets for your brand, and that’s a totally different approach than the one that Zillow is taking… they are building strong assets for their brand, then selling you leads via a PPC model.

(Sidenote on PPC: Often we can get you WAY lower rates on a cost-per-click basis thru our unique PPC tool… it targets ads across 99% of the places people search, INCLUDING Yahoo, Google, Zillow and the other major networks. It’s one of the ways we help our members get leads at the lowest possible costs, and very little effort. Check it out here.)

We offer a PPC service because it’s an effective and profitable way for us to help our investor clients to generate leads, but it’s not something that we push really hard.

We saw folks paying WAY too much into Google by not doing a good job optimizing their ads (and losing out on a lot of other traffic, since Google misses out on about 35% of the search traffic out there). So we found a better way to do it, and we offer it to our customers cause it saves them time and money… it’s a win-win, and that’s what we look for with every client.

Zillow and Google have a similar model… they give away a lot of great free stuff so that a lot of people use their tools, and then they make money selling ads off of the traffic they generate.

It’s great, and clearly it’s working very well for their shareholders.

But if you’re spending all of your marketing budget on PPC, you’re not building a strong brand.

There’s nothing wrong with making money from doing deals – I know a lot of wholesalers who are perfectly happy paying for each lead so they don’t have to think about their own marketing.

You don’t need a strong brand, or inbound marketing, in order to make money… it’s just gonna cost you more if you don’t really have a good marketing strategy… and you’ll miss a lot of great opportunities.

(We’re helping some of our members to build super strong marketing for their businesses with a killer strategic planning service that includes a whole bunch of “extras” to help you build local search rankings… you can check it out here).

If you’re doing a great job with your inbound marketing strategy, you’re already growing your lists of sellers, buyers, tenants, lenders, etc… and that’s great.

Just don’t leave money on the table by doing less marketing than you need to do!