1) Define your personal or business brand uniquely; what make your or your agency different from your direct competitors in your market - consumers are fickle, as you well know. Effective online marketing for realtors means building a consistent message across all marketing initiatives; i.e. Social Media, Web Site, EMail, Newsletter, Pay Per Click and Press Relations.

2) Couldn’t emphasize this enough, your web site is ground zero for any online marketing campaign for you as a realtor - core strategy for effective online marketing for realtors.  The vast majority of your customers are going to look hard at your web site - you have 8-12 seconds to garner their attention - their fickle to say the least.

Your web site navigation (menus) has to work well, contact forms should be short (name, phone number, email with more information as an option), your site search has to be easy to access and work flawlessly, you need to have a good overview of your Agency, its core services/specialization, thumbnail sketches of your Agents, Brokers and even Operations Staff.

3) For IDX Feed Technology we’d recommend IHome Finder’s IDX Services; their IDX Feed Technology and related services are low cost and high value, work extremely well, are nicely integrated with Google’s Maps and let your visitors save searches and easily contact you.

4) You want to have a clearly defined Social Media Strategy for your Brokerage and agents that fits the size of your agency and one that dovetails with your other online marketing activities, assuming this also fits the organizational structure of the master franchiser (if any) that you work with

5) Social Media Marketing is certainly garnering a tremendous amount of press as the “go to” online marketing medium. We recommend dipping your toes in the online marketing process by starting out with a Blog on a WordPress platform and possibly coupling this with Twitter and Facebook accounts. You may also want to set up a Flickr account (photo sharing), depending on your budget and time - Social media marketing is very effective online marketing for realtors.

6) Blogging can be a wonderful thing for your online presence if done correctly; we see so many blogs that tarnish the client’s brand. They need to be done right to be effective; meaning: insightful content with data that drives brand credibility, good keyword research as an outline for the blog,  the right plug ins to drive traffic and visibility, Feedburner (now part of Google’s services)  integration so people can subscribe to your Blog via email or Newsreader.

7) There are a ton of listing syndication services out there; with Google Base being one of the best free services, requiring Google Account.  But, one of your challenge is the marketing for listing syndication is always evolving - save yourself time and money by using ListHub Listing Syndication services.

ListHub  has free and low cost monthly service, with options for Brokers and Agents. Their comprehensive services have grown very fast the last three years we have been working with them and they now have 30-40 sites and vendors for the listing syndication services they provide.

8) YouTube is emerging quickly as a viable and very effective online marketing for realtors. Like other social media marketing processes, it needs to be done properly if you want to succeed. Be sure to build the right presence on YouTube by correctly annotating your account (bio) and individual videos with keywords in the description, build a channel, etc.

9) Video is a very low cost way to get strong and immediate search engine rankings too, as Google “likes” well annotated videos. No need for expensive equipment, buy a Flip Camera - it includes all the basic editing online that you need (titles, inserts, stop/start, etc.) and uploads directly to YouTube. You won’t have “James Cameron” special effects capability, but you’ll have enough firepower with a Flip to get the job done.

10) Public relations marketing should be part of your online marketing for - it’s great for generating critical back links to your site, building immediate visibility with local and national media contacts for interviews, underscores your brand as the market leader and much more. Hire an agency that understands search engine optimization for PR; many generic PR firms don’t and will waste your advertising dollars.

We have years of experience helping realtors successfully generate leads and a high impact market presence online - please contact us if you’d like to learn more about our effective online marketing for realtors services. Twitter/LinkedMedia.