The look on the face of the first one (who had 31 years in the business) was priceless. After composing himself he shares that he’s in the office every day at 8:30am and returns all his phone calls in a timely manner. No really, that’s what he said.

Then we asked “What is your marketing plan that will make this home stand out from all the others and give us the highest value in a reasonable time?” At that, he points to his very nice (customized and hard-bound even!) presentation package and says: “It’s in there, read it –or do you want me to read it for you?” At which point we quickly (yet politely) ended our meeting.

The second one wasn’t much better. He was quite a bit younger and more hip to technology yet he still stumbled all over the question as to why he should be chosen over anyone else. When asked about his marketing program he started rattling off his budgets for print and online advertising, yada, yada yada. When asked why he spends so much money on print when most people use the Internet he said: “I only do the print to satisfy the sellers and to promote my company, we’ve actually never received any business from it.” When we requested that he put together a comprehensive marketing plan for my mother-in-law’s home, he nods at the folder in his hand then gives it to us. Unlike the first agent, it was not customized, had only examples of mostly print advertising and no formal plan whatsoever. We’re still looking…

Granted, most consumers are not going to be quite as, well, thorough as we were. Never-the-less, if they can’t quite articulate the question, they are thinking it: “Why should we chose you over everyone else?” If you can’t answer that in a powerful and straightforward way (while avoiding the typical bromides of “I work hard!”, “I already have buyers interested in your home!”, “I have tremendous experience?”, etc.) then you are working way too hard and earning far too little.

You already have your answer if you are specializing in a niche. Otherwise, take the time to come up with a powerful response. Take it from someone who has just experienced it first hand from the consumer side, you will quickly appear to be head and shoulders above your competition within the first five minutes of any listing appointment.

Postlets.com – One Click, Many Destinations

Postlets.com is perhaps the best known listing syndication resource for the residential real estate industry that also happens to be free.  Once you set up an account you can enter in as many listings you want via user-friendly forms.  The information you enter includes descriptive text, photos and external links.  Once entered you can choose a listing Web page theme (there are 10 in the free version of Postlets) that best fits your particular listing.  Each theme will automatically enter your photo and contact information from your account settings.

Postlets helps you distribute your listings online several important ways:

1. Syndication – upon submission, your listing information will automatically be posted on twelve different online classified ad databases and search engines including GoogleBase, Trulia and Zillow.
    
2. Manual Posting on Classified Sites – Postlets creates a Web page from the listing content you entered and the theme you chose.  It allows you to easily copy and paste the HTML code from the Listing page into sites like Craigs List, eBay etc.
    
3. Widgets – these small applets can be put on your Website, blog, Facebook etc. that will allow visitors to instantly see the entire listing Web page for each listing you have uploaded into Postlets.  (NOTE: Postlets hosts each listing Webpage for free).

That’s a lot of online territory Postlets helps you cover with just a few clicks of the button.  And Postlets will even allow you to insert your Google Analytics code in the HTML code so you can track visitor statistics for each of your listings.  Postlets also offers a Pro version ($10 or less per listing depending upon the number you have) offers greater features, eliminates 3^rd party advertising from the listing Web pages and may, in some circumstances, allow automatic upload of listing info from your MLS.

So what’s the downside?  Well think about it; if you have a lot of listings it takes a lot of time to load, annotate and post them even with the help of a great tool like this.  We’ll cover how to handle this particular issue after we look at a few other syndication options…

ListingsToLeads.com – Craigslist Supercharger

Putting your listings on Craigslist can be a powerful way to generate buyer inquiries, if your posting can standout head and shoulders from the rest of the crowd.  ListingsToLeads is a service similar in approach to Postlets except that it allows you to create a richer listing template.  The templates can be customized with your brand and they provide room for more calls to actions (very important if you want the visitor to actually contact you!) and links back to your own site.  Once again however, this is technically not syndication to Craigslist because you must manually copy and paste the HTML code of the generated listing page into a Craigslist add.

Currently ListingsToLeads works only with Craigslist, however they claim that properly positioned using rich Web-based adds will greatly increase your listing to inquiries ratio over sites like Trulia and Zillow.  Pricing for ListingsToLeads is similar to the Pro version of Postlets.  However, your account does include access to live weekly training about how to leverage the subtleties of having your listings standout on Craigslist.  And, if you are a broker looking to automate the process of generating a unique Craigslist Webpage for each listing you may find that ListingsToLeads can upload all your listing data directly from your MLS.

Other Ways to Syndicate Your Listings

In addition to the methods above, there are several other methods of syndicating your listings.  For example Website template vendor Point2Agent.com provides syndication of listings manually loaded into the agent’s Point2 site.  In fact they claim to have the largest syndication network in the real estate industry with full statistical reporting of visitor traffic to each of your listings.  Not bad for a $9.95/mo Website.  Also, it appears to be a trend that some MLS’s are providing syndication services as well.  So check with yours to see if this service is available.

Getting your listings to as many points of online viewing as possible certainly doesn’t hurt.  However, this is only half the battle if you want this effort to really pay off in a higher inquiry-to-listing ratio.

How to Syndicate Listings For More Business With Less Effort

If you really want listing syndication to generate business for you then don’t bother doing it yourself.  What DOES work is hiring a VA who understands the various syndication services and how to position each listing so they stand out from the crowd and never go stale.  This means creating great copy, lots of professional looking photos and constantly paying attention to the statistical reports so your various listings can be tweaked for maximum inquiry generation.  This is not an easy job and it takes ongoing commitment and focus to really pay off.  If you try to manage the listing syndication process yourself you are only inviting frustration and the loss of revenue that could have been generated if you were out selling.

Listing syndication is a wonderful thing.  However, like everything else online, there are no silver bullets to help you stand above the crowd.  If there were, then everyone would start using it and soon no one would stand out.  The only way for your syndicated listings to really do their job of generating inquiries is to have someone constantly work to keep them fresh, eye-catching and the descriptive copy compelling.  Otherwise your listings will be just so many waves on the sea of homes available online.  There may be thousand of those waves, but they’ll all look the same.

NOTE: Mr. Internet®, RUSSER Communications, its staff and officers receive no compensation whatsoever from any third party vendors (unless he/they are directly involved with the creation and/or improvement of a vendor service or product), and make no recommendations as to the suitability of the products or services mentioned in this article. Always thoroughly investigate any product or service before trying or purchasing.