According to the State of Real Estate Marketing 2007 report from Inman News, 63 percent of agents plan this year to use listings promotion websites like Google Base, Oodle and Zillow to market their listings. Why? Two reasons. According to the 2007 NAR REALTOR Technology Survey, more than 50 percent of agents are using sites like Realtor.com, their own website, their broker's site and the local MLS site to advertise their listings. Also according to the survey, 79 percent of agents aren't satisfied with the amount of leads they're getting from the Internet. If what everybody is doing isn't working, isn't it time to do something else? You bet. More than 70 percent of home buyers search for homes on the Internet. Where are they going?

The answer is the second reason so many agents plan to use listings promotion sites. Sites like Craigslist, Google Base, HomeGain, Oodle and Zillow are where today's younger, Web-savvy buyers are. 25 million people use Craigslist each month. Five million use HomeGain, making it the second-most visited dedicated real estate website on the Internet. Oodle aggregates classified ads from 60,000 different Web sites. Ads posted on Google Base show up prominently in Google search rankings. And with its aggressive PR and consumer mindshare, Zillow may end up being grandaddy of them all. The site started letting owners and agents post homes for sale in December, 2006. Since then more than 50,000 agents have signed up to market their listings there.

So you want to get your listings where buyers will see them -- but you also want to bring buyers to your website. That's another huge reason to circulate your listings out on these sites. Your site's search engine rankings depend in large part on inbound links -- which some call backlinks. Simply put, the more often your website is linked from other websites, including sites like Craigslist, HomeGain and Zillow, the more weight search engines will give it when displaying results for home buyers searching for homes and agents. When your listings are posted on these listings sites, they include links back to your website, boosting the probability your website will score high with search engines.

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