Adding listings to your real estate web site is a great start to success but does it really sell the listings themselves? Effective advertising is getting harder as major search engines turn to pay for service models and as competition for top 20 rankings for any word increases. How then can you maximize exposure to your listings if you cannot maximize traffic?

The grand majority of professionals spend less than $25 a month on things other than hosting, design updates, and support. This includes advertising which leads directly to traffic generation. Unfortunately, the latest Internet trends are making this spending level completely inadequate for the purposes of traffic building.

This raises a vital issue to real estate professionals as to the overall value of listings. If you have listings but no traffic are your listings of any value whatsoever? With a limited budget what is the best way to achieve exposure and sales of your web site listings via the web? Let's examine the options you have.

Option 1 - Not Put Listings on Your Web Site
Why do people come to a Web Site? During the infancy years of the Internet, used employed it as a sort of phone book where they could find services and goods. They then contacted the supplier directly and obtained what they needed.

As the Internet has aged, the usage patterns have changed from the time when Users were impressed with a "resume" style site to now where they expect not only information about you and your service but also substance. This can include tools and information that they can review on their own terms.

For real estate professionals, this means calculators, checklists and, most importantly, listings. Without these things it is highly unlikely that you will attract or retain your traffic to obtain sales.

Option 2 - Put your listings on your own site and do nothing
As you have likely experienced, an Internet site that is not marketed is essentially dead and serves very little purpose.

A surprisingly large number of people have indicated to me that they are extremely disappointed with their web sites. When I ask them what they are doing to market it the standard response is that they have done little, if anything. Amazingly, a number of people don't even have their web address on their business cards!

Adding your listings to your site and then not marketing the site is an all too common problem. The result is extremely low traffic and very few, if any, new leads. Ultimately, the point of adding listings is lost because no one ever sees them.

Option 3 - Put your listings on your own site and pay for all the marketing
This starts to make sense. The key to adding your listings to your web site is to ensure that they are viewed by potential buyers and not just you and your web designer.

Setting up an advertising budget is a long term process which involves trial and error. It is hard to determine what works and what doesn't until you try it. To add another wrinkle, what may work on one advertising medium may not work on another.

For example, a company can have substantially different click through rates on banners that they use on different sites. The key is that each site they advertise on has a different user base and that user base reacts differently to the same stimulus.

Setting up your ad budget is an important step in developing the long term viability of your web site and is vital for you to do. However, there may be a better solution than trying to deliver traffic to your listings only through your site.

Option 4 - Put your listings on various sites and use their ad budgets
Why is it that before the Internet, agents and owners advertised their homes in the local paper? The answer is that the newspaper (or any other ad medium) allowed them to expose their listings over a wider base affordably. Trying to advertise to 500,000 directly would take too much time and would cost too much.

In essence, anyone who advertises through traditional means is balancing the importance of exclusive advertising for the averaging down the costs of marketing. The very same principles hold true for Internet advertising. Why spend your own money when you can share in the results of the advertising budget of someone else?

Trying to compete for traffic to your listings does not make sense when you realize that exposing your listings is the key to success and not where you expose them. Whether you expose your listings solely through your own site or through a third party service is irrelevant so long as the listings are exposed to the highest number of visitors possible. The key here is a balance that maximizes exposure but minimizes cost including the opportunity cost.

Your site may be more affordable but does it really maximize exposure? If it doesn't and the listings don't sell over your web site what is the opportunity cost? Given commission structures the opportunity cost is extremely high because you have to turn to traditional marketing means to sell the home.

Third party listing services provide an easy answer to the exposure issue in that a significant part of their traffic base is already coming specifically to see properties. The fact that they may see other properties in your area is not a negative but is a bonus in that they have a readily available comparison point without having to visit another site, namely your competitors.

The additional bonus to you the owner or agent is that the third party service's business is dependent on the visibility of those listings and as such, they will likely be spending a significant amount of their resources to increase exposure. You directly benefit from this because every dollar they spend can be allocated to each and every listing including yours.

Conclusion
An important fact to understand is that your web site is simply an advertisement and nothing more. It may be interactive through forms, tools, etc. but the essential character is that of an ad.

This leaves you with some important questions as to how to market your advertisement because the heart of your business is sale of a listing(s) or the attraction of buyers and sellers. The size and mass of the Internet is making the promotion of your site more and more difficult because of increased competition for top rankings amongst the larger engines. Needless to say, the recent demise of sites like Go.com will only accelerate the problem.

Adding your listings to both your site and a third party service makes sense in this environment because it allows you to leverage your ad budget further and over a wider field of influence. The result is that your listings will be seen by more and more people from places that you could not hope to reach. This then can lead to the payoff that you are seeking which is the sale of that listing or the development of a contact that may purchase other product through you.

Ron Thibeault is a retired real estate lawyer and contributing Editor to ThinkRelo.com. His extensive experience in real estate law gives him valuable insight into the needs of clients, realtors and all other players in real estate transactions.