Do you want more ads or more listings
The other day I asked where are you searching for Charleston South Carolina real estate listings. Many consumers search for homes on sites that do not have all the available listings of homes for sale including Trulia and Zillow. Entering the fray is frontdoor.com from Scripps who is leveraging their HGTV and other media brands into a brand new real estate website.
It's a very pretty site with a nice selection of listings thus far, 777 for Summerville and 782 for Mount Pleasant compared with 1436 and 1676 respectively on the Charleston MLS. The most interesting aspect is they have very professionally produced content for buyers and sellers on buying, selling, moving and finance.
I'll post my listings there just like I currently post on Trulia, Zillow and other real estate websites in order to give my seller's listings the most possible online exposure no matter where real estate consumers are searching for homes. And I know that lots of real estate shoppers find these sites very easily because their webmasters understand how keywords and search engine optimization work in addition to using pay per click to drive traffic to their websites.
But they have lots of distracting ads jumping all around the page. Of course, the ads pay for the service and it seems to be the price we have to pay to use the Internet today for free. Speaking of ads and online advertising in general, another trend that I'm noticing is that a number of real estate agent's blogs (and other blogs that I consistently visit) are becoming advertising supported. I suppose that it makes sense to monetize your traffic and offer links to advertisers who might be of interest to your readers.
I would rather allow readers to get to know me through my blog by providing good information and commentary about the Charleston real estate market and hopefully get to meet potential clients who might be interested in buying or selling a home in Charleston rather than to make a couple of dollars off advertising. And I try to differ from many other real estate agents by not trying to "hard sell" on my blog.
Two questions and I'll let you go for now, when you search on Google, do you click on the sponsored results (paid by advertising) or the organic results (based on content) and do you click on very many ads when you are visiting different websites.
I hope you enjoy visiting and I'd appreciate hearing your feedback.