Marketing Your Home with Web 2.0-Top Ten FSBO Edition 1- Start a Blog for your Home: A blog can be the quickest way to get your home the exposure it needs online and sites such as Typepad.com and Wordpress.com make it easy to get started. Check out our main blog at www.MadisonRealEstateShow.com for an example of what can be done. Remember that what you “post” to a blog should always be Fair Housing Friendly and you should assume everything that you post will be permanently out there even if you delete it. 2- Produce a Video for your Home: Home Buyers have so much to choose from right now. You need to make them take notice of your home right away. A few color photos on a brochure or online might be nice but what if you could allow them to see your home as if they were walking thru it? Shoot some high quality video of your home- add some voice (Fair Housing Friendly) and music to it- and you have got a good start. 3- Syndicate your Video both Nationally and Locally- If you have the greatest video of your home and no one can find it online then what good is it? You need to strategically place your video where the buyers are. Put it on your blog. Put it on Google. Put in on Yahoo. Put it on lots of other video sites. Just be sure that you remember where you put it so that if you need to remove it or change it in any way you can. 4- Offers Video CD’s of your Home at Open Houses- Give people leaving your Open House a great way to remember your home. Let’s face it- when buyers who have visited a handful of open houses get home they usually have a small stack of brochures to try and remember the different houses with. Your video will make your home very hard to forget. John & Vicky Schroeder- RE/MAX Preferred 608-225-0926 John@HomesByJV.com www.HomesByJV.com & www.MadisonRealEstateShow.com 5- Take a Lot of High Quality Photos- Take as many photos as you possibly can. Then when you think that you are all done take a lot more. Digital Cameras are one of the greatest inventions for someone marketing a home. Use these photos on your blog and put them into high quality brochures. When you put your photos of your home on your blog- label them accurately. The search engines don’t give as much weight to 001.jpg as they do to WaunakeeCondoDiningRoom.jpg 6- Send Email Flyers to Agents- Many companies have come out with products that make it easy to create “flyers” to send via email to a list of email addresses. Real Estate agents have been quick to adopt this with varying degrees of success. www.VFlyer.com offers a free (check with them for details) service that is fairly easy to use. Gathering Real Estate agents email addresses by visiting their company’s website should be a fairly effective way to get your email list. Combine the two and you have a way to distribute your home- complete with photos and all of the particulars to local real estate agents. Be sure to keep in mind potential commissions that a Realtor will want for bringing you a buyer for your home. 7- Post Flyers on many Real Estate sites- Once you have created this eye-catching flyer you need to make sure that it is distributed to all of the popular real estate sites. That includes but is not limited to: Craigslist, Trulia, Backpage, Oodle, Ebay, Vast, GoogleBase, and many more. Again if you have the greatest home, which is detailed by the greatest flyer, offered at the best price, but no one sees it- it will do you no good. John & Vicky Schroeder- RE/MAX Preferred 608-225-0926 John@HomesByJV.com www.HomesByJV.com & www.MadisonRealEstateShow.com 8- Create a page on Facebook for it- Consider creating a page on Facebook for it and then advertising it. If creating a page seems like too much trouble than maybe try to create a listing or widget for it and sharing it with your friends who are on Facebook. Word of mouth among friends is still one of the greatest forms of advertisement. I’m sure that your friends and family members would love to help out. 9- Subscribe to a Local Real Estate Market SnapshotREALTORS have a wealth of information at their disposal. Why not tap into it a bit? Realtor.com has come out with a very cool application full of local real estate info called their Market Snapshot program. This continually updating program- which you can receive via email- contains recent sold, currently listed, maps, graphs, and other useful info on your local real estate market. Chances are a REALTOR in your area offers it. If you are in the Madison, WI area you can find ours at www.MadisonRealEstateMarketSnapshot.com or www.JVMarketSnapshot.com 10-Put your Home in as many Spots online as PossibleThis last one is kind of a catch all. The more qualified potential buyers- and REALTORS with qualified buyers- that see your home the better chance that you have of getting an offer. To that end technology has really opened up lots of possibilities for someone looking to sell their home on their own. Staying up with the current technology is important and could give you the edge that you need to sell your home. These are just tips to help you sell your home and are not guaranteed to work in all cases. Please use your own best judgment when implementing any online or offline marketing for your property. Call or email with any questions. We know Web 2.0 Marketing for properties. If your home is currently listed with another broker than this is not to be considered a solicitation for a listing contract. John & Vicky Schroeder- RE/MAX Preferred 608-225-0926 John@HomesByJV.com www.HomesByJV.com & www.MadisonRealEstateShow.com