More ListingPress Pre-Release

After having a chance to begin playing with ListingPress, I’ve come across 2 major topics I feel I must communicate to those who are starting to get familiar with my site.  First is ‘why’ I’m blogging about ListingPress, and second is to further explain it’s benefits to those who don’t quite yet understand how it works.

First off, let me begin by saying I am pretty awesome at Wordpress!  I’m not a King Wordpres Guru programmer guy like Jason Benesch, but I have seen a lot of real estate transactions made from a blog I’ve developed and currently maintain for another agent here in Seattle.  Manipulating the look, function, and optimization for search engines has been as simple as pie!  Because I’ve seen such great results, I’m looking to take the Pepsi Challenge and duplicate what I’ve done here in Seattle for another agent farming a downtown urban market.

Secondly, as Jason Benesch has already explained on the ListingPress site (still under construction), it’s been common practice for an agent to purchase a template or custom built site, then frame a preferred IDX feed which allows all MLS listings to be displayed online.  Soon, a decade will have passed since the law of broker reciprocity has allowed the little guys to compete with the big guys.  ListingPress is one of the first new ways an agent can take advantage of MLS data driven technology since the origination of IDX to begin with.

Since the beginning of IDX, becoming successful online as a Realtor was just a matter of getting traffic to your site–as long as you had IDX should .  When I first began working with agents, the best results came to those who changed their offline marketing efforts to be centered around thier domain name and a tagline that read, “Search Virtually All Homes for Sale at www.________.com.”  Making the change from marketing a phone number to a domain name was like pulling teeth for a lot of old school agents, but today it’s certainly a no brainier.  ListingPress is that new “no brainier” that either you grasp and understand with the intent of becoming a pioneer, or you hold off and wait to see what it does for everybody else.  If that wasn’t true, believe that I wouldn’t be spending the time blogging about.

ListingPress Plugin Directory Downloads = 1 Week

With that said, here is THE major benefit that you can choose to, or choose not to take advantage of.  Superior search engine placement opportunity!  I’ll say it one  more time just in case.  Super duper search engine placement opportunity!!  Now I’m not going to go and start giving away all my secrets, but what’s important to understand is that when it comes to search engine placement, the saying is “content is king.”  Meta tags and keyword optimization is already a standard practice, and really doesn’t tell search engines if your site is actually giving your visitors the resource of information they’re looking for.  Reciprocal linking and link farming is dangerous, and have heard a few recent horror stories about Google catching on to the whole scheme of it.  After all, reciprocal linking is really quite schemish wouldn’t you agree?  So when it comes to placement, content is truly the way to go.

Now you may have an IDX feed and it may display listings on your site, but you can bet all that content for all those listings are not being indexed by Google as content.  THAT, is what ListingPress will do for your site.  If you’re already a blogger, you already know how important it is to blog regularly.  You already know that you blog regularly because that shows search engines you are an authority on your topic.  Imagine if you could blog dozens of posts of relevant content a day!

With ListingPress, listings post on your site/blog just like a traditional post or page.  I’m not saying that will alone take you to the top.  However, you compliment customized ListingPress searches along with some additional relevant content for a particular neighborhood, address, price range, etc., and you certainly will.

Contact me about getting a ListingPress based site before released to the rest of the world.  I can personally work out a search engine/lead generation  success GUARANTEE success to the first person willing to give it a shot.  I’m only looking for 1 client while I use this blog to report and develop bugs and tutorials.