My mom, a realtor with ReeceNichols in Kansas City (www.Kansascitylifestyles.com), just made the decision to cancel her Zillow Premier agent membership because her fees went from $500 a month to $1240 a month for the same zip code! Wow, talk about the power of a monopoly!
If you are in the same boat, or if you want to just try to get more leads from places like Zillow, here is a step by step guide on how to fight back, and get more leads without giving up an arm and a leg.
Step 1. Upload the Call2Action photo to your MLS, and place it in photo spot #3. Learn more about the Call2Action photo here
The Call2Action photo is a free composite image we create of the photos and the floorplan (or if photos only, just the photos). You can download this photo by going to Manage Tours, then click on the Photos & Marketing Tools link under Tour Details.
The idea is this image is used it as a “teaser” to let the viewer know there is more exclusive content on the tour – just go find the tour link (which is usually below the main content on the portals) and see more! It is NOT clickable…because it is an image, but it is used to highlight the floorplan and tour link. The unbranded version is generic so it can be uploaded to the MLS and distributed along with the other photos…and the tour. So for sites that show the tour link via IDX (like Redfin), at least people can view the virtual tour (and on certain sites we even convert the tour to branded automatically). If a site does not pull in virtual tour links, then it lets that user know there is more content out there…and they will find it on other places like Zillow or Realtor.com, which can lead them back to YOU! They may even just Google for the address, and if you have our Free YouTube video, then that typically comes up on page 1 of Google search….and it has the tour link there too!
Step 2. For Zillow, login as the agent (you can get a free Zillow account and claim your listings) and upload the Branded Call2Action photo to your listing, and delete the unbranded, if it got pulled in from the MLS. Move the branded Call2Action photo to position #3 by clicking and dragging it to the right spot. While you are there, you can add our tour link if it did not get distributed to Zillow. Then Save at the bottom. This is ALL FREE to do on Zillow.
This takes maybe 1-2 minutes to do…but it can benefit you tremendously!
See it on Zillow – Click here to check out one of Linda’s listing with the Call2Action photo in spot #3.
Step 3. Other sites. If you have access to other sites like Trulia you can do the same. We also use a version of this Call2Action photo for our Craigslist ad poster (it has a /cl/ tracker in the link) and provide the marketing text in copy and paste fashion. So if you post to Craigslist this is a great way to leverage this tool, for free. See the Craigslist ad poster on the Marketing Center page as well.
If you really want to get fancy, you can use our embed code to embed the whole tour on your website, in a blog post, etc. It works just like embedding a YouTube video. Click here to read more on our embeddable content.
– Happy posting
Kris Cone
