Every seller wants a detailed explanation on how much exposure you’ll give their home. The more specific you are, the more you are proving your worth. Remember every real estate professional needs to PROVE they are worth the commission they are charging.  Give lots of detail on your promotional plans and show them all the methods you’ll use, especially the online methods. Two promotional methods you’ll certainly want to emphasize to your listing prospects are your opt-in email database and online classifieds sites.

Opt-In Email Database

Your database can be anyone that’s ever emailed you about a listing or anything else regarding real estate. Even if you’ve had lots of email inquiries over time and haven’t converted those people into customers you’re sitting on tons of untapped potential. Even if you’ve deleted all those inquiries you needn’t worry if you use Microsoft Outlook. There’s a great program called Email Address Collector that can help. The program gathers email addresses from any of your Outlook folders (even the deleted messages folder) and from any files on your computer. You can then put all your contact’s email addresses into a single file and readily know how large your database is. Be sure to tell your prospects how many people are in your database, how often you’ll be contacting them, and the types of messages you’ll be sending them. Show them printouts of the emails you’ve sent for previous listings. Tell them you’ll advertise open houses to this database. They’ll be impressed when you tell them you’ll be sending multiple invitations to several hundred or even several thousand people advertising their open house weekends. Try to quantify the number of people you’ll likely attract to their open houses by keeping track of each listing’s open houses and asking the people attending how they heard about the open house. A great tool for advertising open houses is the online event management system Event Brite. It’s free to use, allows you to send upto 2000 emails per day, and has an RSVP system. It also reports which prospects opened each email and who clicked a link within the email. Tell your listing prospect you follow up by phone with each person who clicked the email when you have their phone number to remind them of the upcoming open house and confirm their attendance.

Online Classifieds

Posting lots of ads on online classifieds sites serves two purposes: great listing exposure and search engine optimization for your website. The two most popular online classifieds sites are Kijiji and Craig’s List.

Kijiji

Kijiji is a newer classifieds site but benefits hugely from being owned by eBay, the world’s most visited E-Commerce site. It has many more local classifieds sites for Ontario than Craig’s List and has recently overtaken Craig’s List as the most popular classifieds site for Canadians, ranked 12th most visited site in the world by Canadians by Alexa.com. The great thing about Kijiji is you can post identical ads to their many local Ontario sites as often as you want. It’s free to post ads on Kijiji.  This is excellent value because there are currently only 5 Toronto area listings in the premium section, yet as of November 2008 there are currently over 10,000 postings in this section. Consistently having your ad in this premium section will help your search engine optimization greatly because Kijiji is the top ranked classifieds site for Canadians. MLS Canada isn’t even in Alexa.com’s list of the top 100 sites visited by Canadians.

Craig’s List

According to Alexa.com, Craig’s List is the 16th most visited site for Canadians on the internet. Thirty million new classified advertisements are posted each month across the various local Craig’s sites worldwide and those sites collectively get 9 billion hits per month.

Craig’s List has local classifieds sites for 25 Ontario cities and the Toronto site is by far the busiest. You can’t post the exact same ad on more than one Craig’s site, even if it’s in a different city, so you need to change the ad somewhat to post it multiple times on different Craig’s List sites. At the very least advertise on the Toronto board. The Toronto site gets over 200 postings per day in the Real Estate For Sale section, and you can post for free, so it’s important to post regularly here, otherwise your listings get lost in the shuffle quickly. There is software available to automate the ad posting process for both Kijiji and Craig’s List.

Posting on Craig’s List and Kijiji’s regular classifieds sections has short-term effect on your website’s search engine optimization because they are very popular sites and thus having your links on their pages means more to search engines than having your links on less popular sites. Classified ads on Craig’s List expire after 45 days and the pages hosting your ads get wiped shortly thereafter. However, on some smaller, local Ontario classifieds sites your ads aren’t deleted and will sit there indefinitely, sometimes for years! So you will want to be sure you check these sites to ensure your listings are current or deleted.