Here are five SEO tips to avoid getting flagged on Craigslist:

1. Never post more than one ad at a time in a given category.

2. Avoid repeatedly deleting and reposting.

3. Try not to make your ad too annoying or spam related.

4. Don’t draw too much attention to yourself. An effective ad is informative and concise. The key here is to avoid making your ad too good. A well-written ad is excellent in the eyes of flaggers and excellence attracts envy, and on Craigslist that means getting flagged by malicious competitors.

5. Do not violate the Craigslist Terms of Service. Pretty simple. It’s completely possible to use Craigslist for SEO purposes without violating its terms of agreement.

Remember, Craigslist can be a great tool for your real estate marketing. Learn how marketing with Craigslist can be made easy with Single Property Websites

The post How to avoid getting flagged on Craigslist appeared first on Real Estate Marketing and Property Marketing Blog by Single Property Sites.

MoreLoans4u allows you to market each listing with a unique property-address URL, sign riders and mobile & SMS TXT marketing. You can then post property flyers to Craigslist and more using the SPS automated marketing systems, which will automatically give every listing website extensive coverage on all our partner websites. SPS makes it easy to syndicate listing data everywhere where buyers are looking!

Here are some ways in which the SPS system AUTOMATICALLY helps you to promote your property across the web:

• Syndication of listing data to Trulia, Zillow and many more
• TEXT messaging flyers for drive-by buyers
• Mobile version of your Web page
• Beautiful HTML Craigslist Property Flyers created and posted
• Sign riders with your domain name
• PDF Flyers
• Embed Widgets and maps with your properties for your personal or other websites

With MORELOANS4U.com offering SPS, Loan Officers can now offer this powerful mortgage marketing system to their Real Estate Agent clients and FSBOs as their own branded marketing service.

The post More exposure is a good thing appeared first on Real Estate Marketing and Property Marketing Blog by Single Property Sites.

Here are three reasons why SMS matters to your business:

1. It’s a differentiator. When you deliver information – whether it’s your latest lead or property fliers – via SMS, it commands attention. Unlike e-mail marketing or direct mail, SMS still commands attention. It’s new, sleek and different – something the average agent isn’t doing. This can be levied to your advantage both with buyers and sellers. Sellers will be impressed at how complete and modern your marketing plan is, while buyers will be eager to recieve your listing information on their phone.

Think about why the Obama text message got so much attention: precisesly because it was sent via SMS. If Obama had sent an e-mail blast to millions of subscribers, no one would have cared. It’s bland – it’s been done. But SMS still attracts attention.

2. It’s sticky. With an SMS text message, you have an opportunity to give your buyers all the information they need about a property to have at their disposal at any time. If a buyer visits your Web site, they may or may not bookmark the page or sign up for e-mail alerts. In fact, the odds are pretty low. And if they want to get more information again later, they may or may not put in the effort to find your site again.  With e-mail, buyers will have all your important information saved in a message, but this isn’t accessible from anywhere.

SMS solves these problems. If you are using technology – like SPS Mobile Marketer – to generate and send SMS flyers to your buyer’s phones, you are giving something that’s both durable and accessible. All the property information – and your contact details – will be saved in the message into perpetuity AND it’s accessible at any time from any where from their cell phone. The minute they think about your property, they’ll be able to find out all the details immediately.

3. It’s easy – and cheap. It used to be that SMS was expensive to deliver, but now it costs very little for you and your buyers. As a seller, SMS flyers are free with a ProSPS subscription with no per-property costs or per-message fees. And your buyers pay only the standard text message rate charged by their cell phone carrier.  Click here to learn more.

The post Three Reasons That You Should Pay Attention to SMS appeared first on Real Estate Marketing and Property Marketing Blog by Single Property Sites.

In Part I and Part II of this series of articles on Mobile Real Estate Marketing, we focused on how the mobile market is poised to explode in the United States and why Agents haven’t jumped on the bandwagon with mobile technology quite yet.  In this article – Part III – we’re going to look at why the time is right for Realtors to start considering mobile marketing as a part of their business.

Realtors aren’t necessarily early adopters of technology – many still aren’t using the Internet to the fullest – but the time is right for every agent to explore mobile marketing.  More and more Americans use mobile technology in more and more ways, and vendors are finally beginning to understand the needs of the real estate market.  Here’s why we expect mobile marketing to become the next big thing in real estate marketing within just a few years:

Realtors Will Intuitively Understand Mobile Technology

Many realtors – especially older realtors – had a steep learning curve when it came to the Internet and are still struggling to catch up.  That isn’t the case with mobile technology.  Realtors have to be considered one of the most enthusiastic users of mobile technology out there today – as we said in part II, you’d be hard-pressed to find a Realtor without a cell phone attached to their ear.

Mobile real estate marketing, then, is just a short jump from what Realtors are already doing every day – texting, calling and using the mobile Internet.  These are technologies Agents know well, and vendors who make mobile marketing simple will likely find eager adopters in the real estate market.

Mobile Marketing is Becoming More Affordable

Mobile marketing is becoming more affordable – both from vendors and from the wireless companies themselves.  The price of text messaging used to hover around 50 cents a text message – a price barrier tough for anyone to get over.  But prices have gone down, encouraging the growth of text messaging in the United States. Now mobile users can get hundreds of text messages for just a few dollars a month, making them more likely to use their phone to respond to mobile marketing.

Concurrent to this, vendors in the real estate industry are beginning to make mobile marketing solutions available for a much cheaper price.  Services like text message flyers and mobile Web sites used to cost Agents as much as $30-40 a month per property – a difficult price to swallow on top of all the costs Agents already face. Vendors today face very few costs in delivering content over the mobile platform, which has made it possible for vendors like Single Property Sites to offer mobile marketing solutions as a free value-add included with other services.   Realtors interested in mobile marketing have few startup costs.

Vendors understand the need of Agents better

Early mobile real estate marketing solutions were often cumbersome, but the latest suite of services on the market is designed with a much better understanding of the needs of the modern real estate agent.

First, many vendors are focusing less on cutting-edge technology like the iPhone and more on widely-adopted mobile technologies in use by huge segments of the market – namely SMS text messaging and the mobile Internet.  This means a realtor’s mobile marketing efforts are viewable and usable by much more people, rather than just a small segment of the market.

Vendors understand the value of an agent’s time too and have built mobile marketing solutions on top of services Realtors are already using.  For example, Single Property Sites is able to take an agent’s listing information and turn it into a Web site, a mobile Web site, a text message flyer and a print flyer in one single step.  There’s no need for agents to manage multiple technologies from multiple services – agents can handle it all in one place.

Finally, vendors are making it easy for agents to put their mobile marketing in front of the eyes of their viewers.  Many services include sign riders with mobile web addresses and text message flyer information, making it easy for drive-by traffic to quickly and easily learn more about a property via their cell phones.  Many agents are eschewing paper flyers altogether – they find maintenance-free SMS text flyers just as effective.

So what are you waiting for?

Real estate agents have an opportunity to be on the leading edge of a rapidly expanding mobile market.  The barriers to entry are lower than ever before – mobile real estate marketing is cost-effective and nearly effortless with the right vendor.  With the solutions out there today, there’s no reason mobile marketing should be a large part of an agent’s expenses, but every reason it should generate a large proportion of that agent’s leads.  There’s no better way to directly connect and interact with real estate consumers.

SPS recently announced SPS Mobile Marketer, which offers Agents an automated and FREE way to engage mobile consumers with Instant Text Property Flyers, Mobile Web sites and Text Lead Alerts.  For more information, go to http://singlepropertysites.com/mobile-features.shtml

The post Part III: Why Mobile is the Next Big Thing in Real Estate Marketing appeared first on Real Estate Marketing and Property Marketing Blog by Single Property Sites.

In this article, Part II, we will explore the current approaches Realtors are taking toward mobile technology and the trends in the industry today. Make no mistake about it: agents are using mobile technologies and having success with it right now.  But there are still several shortcomings and blind spots holding the real estate industry back from widespread adoption of the mobile platform.  In Part III of this series, we’re going to try and predict the best mobile strategies for real estate agents that will develop as the market matures.

While no firm numbers exist, the total percentage of Realtors using mobile technology for anything other than personal use has to be quite small.  Here’s why:

Realtors use mobile technology – but not mobile marketing technology.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a real estate agent without a cell phone glued to his or her hand, but that doesn’t mean they’re putting mobile technology to its full use.  It’s fair to say the real estate industry has a blind spot when it comes to mobile technology – they use it to keep in touch with their clients but they don’t yet see it as a tool to build their businesses.

Many vendors make mobile marketing complicated

Current mobile technology implementations are often both counterintuitive and time-consuming, and Realtors feel their time is often better spent elsewhere.  In addition, vendors often charge fees of more than $50 per month per property – a price point that scares a lot of realtors away.

There’s no single solution or answer out there on how to reach the mobile consumer.

Current vendors in mobile technology take a shotgun approach to the market – fire a lot of shells out there and hope something sticks.  This creates a confusing market for the real estate agent – especially if they’re not mobile-savvy to begin with.  There are so many different solutions and so many different strategies out there – how is an agent suppose to know what works?  Add in the fact that many vendors charge huge fees for their service, and you can see why agents are staying away.  Even a brief foray into mobile marketing can be an expensive proposition.

There’s an overinvestment in single-platform technology like the iPhone.

As soon as the iPhone came out, there was a huge wave of vendors who started to offer Agents solutions to market their properties on the iPhone.  Lost in this veritable frenzy of development was the fact that only a miniscule percentage of the market actually had an iPhone … just .3 percent as of August!  Moreover, this number isn’t going to grow markedly anytime soon. Think about it – even if a new cell phone comes out with enormous buzz like the iPhone, most mobile customers are locked into long-term contracts with their wireless provider.  There’s a lag time before the vast majority even can afford to get the technology.  Realtors who invested time and money in solutions for products like the iPhone must feel swindled because their fancy new technology was viewable only by a small percentage of their leads.  Mobile marketing vendors need to focus more widely used technology like SMS text messaging and the mobile web.

BUT DON’T FEAR – THIS IS CHANGING!

Like any technology, mobile real estate marketing was bound to suffer some growing pains.  But as the mobile market grows and matures, so too do the solutions available for realtors.  The good news is it’s becoming easier and more affordable for agents to reach out to customers on the mobile platform.  The dark days of difficult, expensive and proprietary solutions are ending, and mobile marketing is becoming viable for realtors in every market. Vendors are beginning to look past the bleeding edge of mobile technology and focus on more time-tested mobile marketing solutions that hold real value for Agents.

Stay tuned for Part III, where we tell you all about it.

SPS recently announced SPS Mobile Marketer, which offers Agents an automated and FREE way to engage mobile consumers with Instant Text Property Flyers, Mobile Web sites and Text Lead Alerts.  For more information, go to http://singlepropertysites.com/mobile-features.shtml

The post Part II: Why Real Estate Agents (Largely) Haven’t Adopted Mobile Technology appeared first on Real Estate Marketing and Property Marketing Blog by Single Property Sites.

In the coming years, real estate agents will need to adapt their marketing strategies or risk becoming an anachronism in a digital world. The old mediums of the past are giving way to two new ways of reaching buyers: the Internet and the mobile platform. There have been countless articles written about the benefits of marketing online; we’re not going to explore that here. Mobile marketing has received less attention, but the importance – and benefit – to Realtors is just as real.

In this three part series, we’re going to explore the world of mobile marketing as it relates to real estate agents. This article – Part I – will take a look at how the mobile market is poised to explode. Part II will take a look at the current mobile strategies real estate agents are using and their effectiveness. Part III will try and predict where the technology is headed.

Lately there has been tons of hype in the mobile market in United States. With the iPhone, 3G networks and the coming release of the Blackberry Bold, it seems like we’re leading the world in mobile innovation. In reality, this buzz masks the fact that the United States trails the world in mobile use. From Europe to Asia, the mobile platform has (generally) matured much further. And all signs point that it’s only a matter of time before the extraordinary growth abroad trickles down to the United States – both in terms of uses and technology.

Two recent reports, one by Limbo – a mobile marketing tracking group – and the other by Nielsen Mobile shed the following light on mobile growth worldwide:

• There are currently 262 million cell phone users in the United States
• Of those, 55 percent actively use text messaging. In Britain, 93 percent use text messaging. In India, 94 percent.
• The number of text message users in the U.S. grows by several percentage points each quarter.
• In the U.S., just 37 percent of users recall seeing a mobile advertisement on their phone, versus 51 percent in the UK and 85 percent in India
• In the U.S., 60 percent of mobile users between the ages of 18-24 recall seeing a mobile advertisement. This is an increase of nearly 10 percent over the past six months.
• As of May 2008, there were 40 million active users of the mobile Internet in the U.S.

What sort of takeaways can you get from these statistics?

• There is a huge untapped market in the United States. With 262 million active cell phone users, the potential market is quite big. However, the U.S. isn’t fully using the mobile technology at their disposal quite yet. The number of users actively text messaging grows each quarter, as does the number of mobile Internet users. There’s every indication that our usage will catch up with Britain and Asia – it just has taken a bit longer.
• Mobile marketing is a great way of reaching a younger audience. Not only are younger demographics more likely to use rich mobile technologies, they also encounter more advertisements (or at least remember them better).
• The Mobile Internet is maturing, and will continue to. According to Nielsen Mobile, the U.S. actually is one of the largest mobile Internet market in the world. While just 15.6 percent of users use the mobile Internet, that still is more than 40 million people. And the number continues to grow as new technology like the iPhone makes mobile Internet browsing easier.

How fast will the marketing component mature? The U.K. and Europe saw nearly exponential growth once their subscribers started using more and more mobile technology, and as the U.S. market grows, experts predict we’ll see the same. This from Brandweek:

“Forrester Research forecasts that mobile-marketing spending in the U.S. will surge from the $270 million it stands at now to $405 million in 2009. Then it all goes exponential, doubling every year through 2012, at which point the Cambridge, Mass.-based research firm predicts mobile marketing will be worth $2.8 billion.”

So how can you as a real estate agent tap into this huge market and make a difference in your bottom line? What technologies are at your disposal? Find out more in parts II and III, coming soon.

SPS recently announced SPS Mobile Marketer which offers Agents an automated and FREE way to engage mobile consumers with Instant Text Property Flyers, Mobile Web sites and Text Lead Alerts. For more information, go to http://singlepropertysites.com/mobile-features.shtml

The post Part I: The Coming Boom in Mobile Real Estate Marketing appeared first on Real Estate Marketing and Property Marketing Blog by Single Property Sites.