Why Craigslist is Your Ticket to Home Sale Leads

Guest contributor Properties Online says:

For all the attention given to Zillow and Trulia, the fact of the matter is that even if you combine their power, Craigslist still drives more traffic to single property websites. Craigslist's sheer size, volume and community offer a landmine to real estate agents online. This is why Craigslist is your ticket to home sale leads.

Seasoned agents know the truth – when you place a listing on Craigslist, it gets you more traffic and leads than any other real estate portal.

Craigslist> was started in 1995 by Craig Newmark with the modest goal of helping people find affordable housing in San Francisco. It is now the most popular online classifieds website in the world, with over 10 million monthly visitors.

"Agents can take advantage of this huge traffic by posting free ads and by scanning 'seeking homes' ads and answering them," says Amanda Cornelius, cofounder and CEO of Properties Online.

Craigslist is free to use in most locations, making it a valuable, affordable lead-generating machine. Create single ads for specific properties, or an ad listing all your available properties for an area, with no coding design or HTML knowledge necessary.

Furthermore, Craigslist is targeted. The real estate section goes a step beyond cities, localities and topics, allowing the agent to select from categories such as apartments/houses for rent, office and commercial, real estate for sale, vacation rentals and more.

Make the most of Craigslist and your single property websites by:

• Including images in your ad. Pictures prompt responses.
• Choose your title carefully. Be descriptive, catchy and consider words that buyers will use when searching for a property like the one you're listing/selling.
• Take advantage of Craigslist Flyers, through the flyer builder program offered by Properties Online. These will generate a snippet of HTML code that will dynamically pull all your listing details, property photos and your contact information. This HTML snippet enables you to easily cut and paste your data into online classified sites such as the very popular Craigslist, Backpage or Ebay. And it's free with your subscription!
• Regularly post relevant Craigslist classifieds that point to your listings and include a link to your single property page to drive significant amounts of highly targeted traffic to your property websites.
• Track your results with ad campaign statistics to see exactly how many views your classified ad received, and how many people clicked through to your listing domain website.

To view the original article, visit the Properties Online blog.