Use a Blog for a Single Property Web Site

Both inexpensive and highly effective, blogging for listings is the way to go.

A marketing tool that is gaining acceptance is the single property web site. A listing agent builds a small web site presence for each listing and purchases a domain name just for that listing. Many use all or a part of the address for the domain, as in "www.123MainStreet.com." The strategy is two-fold:

Impress the seller - Most listing prospects are quite happy to see their home featured on its own website.

Search engines - By cross-linking listing sites with each other and with your main web site, some SEO advantages might be gained.

Consider another approach that will still make the seller just as happy, but will also do more with the search engines. Instead of a static web site for each listing, use a blog. With a blog for each listing, you can:

purchase a unique domain name to point to each blog;

easily change and replicate the format for consistency;

construct each property blog very quickly;

easily build and display photo albums;

use the RSS feed function to announce the new listing;

use the RSS feed function to announce price changes or other listing updates to the web and to the seller; and

use tools designed for blogs to display maps and more.

There are a number of blogging platforms out there that will work for this purpose, but probably not the free ones. For under $100/year for unlimited blogs, TypePad.com (Buy Direct) is a good choice. The learning curve isn't too great and standard formatting and color choices are varied.

For more formatting and customization options, the free Wordpress platform is used by most of the top bloggers in the world. It's a bit more to learn, but amazing things can be accomplished. The best way to do this for most of us is to set up on a host that provides one-click Wordpress installation, such as Yahoo.com (Buy Direct). For a very small monthly cost, you'll get unlimited Wordpress blogs hosted with very easy installation of the files. There's an added advantage to going this route, in that you can also combine the blogs with normal static web page content for a listing display site. Read about The Ultimate Internet Listing Strategy here.