Choosing Your Publishers Wisely

This post comes to us from the ListHub newsletter:

Making choices about where to send your listings used to be really easy--because most people just sent them everywhere! Remember that? That was before folks started to realize that not all sites are created equally, and some of them have business practices that don't necessarily mesh with your own.

Our industry has come a long way toward having tools and information at our fingertips that help us to understand what all these websites do, and which ones might best "fit" our own company's business model.

A few years ago, our team at ListHub launched The Channel Scorecard. This was the first step toward making the features and practices of each site transparent to brokers. The Scorecard was presented in both an online flip-book format, as well as an enormous matrix in a spreadsheet. If brokers took the time, they could look up sites to find out dozens of important items, like whether they provided fast response times, or whether the site also powered a mobile app. The Scorecard resource is still maintained by ListHub and available in the ListHub dashboard.

Just last year, this concept was evolved to make it even easier. We launched the Preferred Publisher program that now allows you to filter sites based on some of the most popular criteria that brokers were using to make their advertising choices. The criteria include things like, "Displays Broker Contact Info" and "Doesn't Re-syndicate Your Listings." There are nine filters available in all. So now, instead of sifting through a spreadsheet to evaluate the sites, all you have to do is click a button in your dashboard to see the list of sites that meet the criteria (or combination of criteria) that are meaningful to you. Then, making your publisher choices is just another click of the button.

You can even setup the option to add future publishers based on your selected criteria! That means that when new publishers are added to the network, ListHub will match them to your criteria, and subscribe you to the new site automatically as long as the site meets your business requirements.

Today, more and more buyers are using their mobile devices to search for homes. According to the NAR Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers about 1 in 10 buyers used mobile or tablet apps, websites, or search engines in their home search process in 2012. How can you ensure your listings are being sent to publishers who have mobile applications? It is simple with The Preferred Publisher filters. In December, we added three new filters including "Refreshes Daily", "No FSBOs", and "Mobile App Available."

Every company has a different philosophy when it comes to making advertising decisions. So regardless of whether your company wants to maximize all marketing online and prefers the widest possible distribution, or whether your company prefers to be selective, holding to certain standards, ListHub has tools for you to make it easy so that you can focus on what you do best--selling real estate.