Are you being used?

Another Free Website for you Listings. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. You really need to know what you are giving up in the name of FREE.

Most FREE or (real cheap) Real Estate Websites generate their revenues from product advertisements placed strategically on their websites. Those that “click-through” on these advertisements generate income from the product advertisers, paid to these FREE websites.

So it’s Free for you. That’s good. Or is it really?

Who is the real customer on these websites? Is it the Realtor® Agent or the product advertiser? What difference does it make? A lot.

You must consider what you want to gain from your Internet Marketing. There are long and short term benefits and or detriments in knowing and acting on the following facts.

Most of these so called FREE real estate websites do not promote your listings into Google. Many use Click Trackers to block Google from following the link to your site. Many others actually place “no-follow” code in the links to tell Google to not bother with your website. Why would they do this? Because they need the traffic from your Listings. They USE your listings and you for “Google ranking” to boost to sell more product advertisements. Driving buyer or renters to you is far down the list of priorities in their business model. They must control the visitors coming to their website. They must be able to show statistics that all the traffic is coming to their product advertiser pages (not property pages) to support higher priced ads and more of them. If they do not get the traffic to these product advertisements, they don’t get paid.

So, if you don’t get many Listing Page Visits or Quality leads……well it’s FREE, so what?

There is a BIG “so what” here.

Today the most important results you are striving for is to get your Name, your Website and your Property Listings into the Search Engines; specifically Google. Why the Search Engines? We now know that 90% of searchers start with Google to find a match with whatever they are looking for. You want buyers and renters; they want properties you are offering like (homes, condos, commercial offices, land and so on). Being dependent on the real estate marketing websites to get your listings found means knowing what you are getting from these websites and what you are not.

Consider the choices for Internet Real Estate Marketing these days. Who do you keep, who do you add? Making informed decisions and not merely based on “FREE or FEE” services, requires that you know the basics about the real estate websites business model you are considering. Be sure you know the service you use is is NOT using you