Real Estate Agents Maximize Online Marketing With Wordpress/idx Integration

Remember the good old days when Real Estate Agents could just advertise in the Sunday newspaper and list all their Open Houses for the weekend? Agents could also easily get ahold of address lists and just send a few thousand postcards to homeowners and advertise their service. Well, we all know that the times have changed and now Agents are adapting to online marketing strategies with varied results.

Buyers and Sellers now do their searching online using sites like Trulia, Zillow and Google to locate homes they are interested in or just to see what other homes are selling for before they decide to put theirs on the market.

One major change is that Buyers and Sellers now prefer just to like with a Real Estate Agent via social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn oftentimes before giving up their email address or contact information as well.

So, what does this mean for Real Estate Agents trying to get new leads and keep their pipeline going strong?

First of all, Agents have to adapt to the changes but also balance the time between mastering all these new marketing tools... and also doing their job and meeting clients to show homes and all the face-to-face work that the internet won't do.

The only option we have really seen that works for busy Real Estate Agents is to crossover to Wordpress as their primary website marketing strategy which allows Agents to easily access design themes, plugins and painless integration with all of these social networking tools.

With Wordpress 3.0, there is some new functionality that also helps Agents tremendously which is the "Multi-Site" feature. Agents can easily create multiple sites for their business which can allow them to use one IDX/Broker Reciprocity Service but also having multiple versions of their website on the same domain that market completely different aspects such as Luxury Properties, Foreclosures, Short Sales, Condos, Waterfront Homes and much more.

There are some great Wordpress Video Tutorials that show even newbies how to quickly "point and click" a few options and have an amazing Real Estate Website setup in minutes. You just need a little patience and you'll be quickly impressed with the results.

When setting up your Wordpress site, you will want to be sure to add some of the vital plugins that assist you in automatically SEO'ing your website and handling the Search Engine page submissions "on the fly" as you are creating or modifying your web content.

The days of print marketing are finished in the Real Estate business... so you will need to begin adapting to the new way of business to keep your leads coming in strong. The first place to begin is with Wordpress 3.0.