Getting More From Your Web Site Through Print Media

« The Future of Linking Strategy - Part I | Home | So, You Think That Search Engines Aren’t That Important? »

Getting More From Your Web Site Through Print Media

By HHI Golf Guy | November 22, 2005

Print media will always be the backbone of real estate marketing. But the problem is that it is a prohibitive marketing medium. You have a very limited amount of space to work with, and it usually costs a small fortune to run a sizeable ad.

Your web site, on the other hand, allows you to present an almost limitless amount of information. The problem is that unless your at the top of the search engine rankings or you have a decent pay-per-click program in place you may not be receiving a lot of web site traffic.

There is a simple way to bring these two items together, but frankly most real estate agents just have not put 2+2 together. Go ahead and open up the real estate section of your local newspaper and take a look at all of the block ads placed by agents and agencies. Do they list their web site address? If they do, chances are that it is nothing more than the URL buried somewhere at the bottom of the ad.

How the heck are potential buyer and seller clients supposed to know that there is a wealth of information and tools on your web site?

The answer is simple: Your ad should lead with your web site address and a small blurb on what can be found on your web site (”Search thousands of area property listings”, “Detailed community guides”, etc.). Include your tag line in this section to “set the hook” to drive people to your web site.

It’s also best that you use a simple technique to track how many people visit your web site because of your print media advertisement. Start by creating a new page on your web site called newspaper.htm, newspaper.html, newspaper.php, or whatever type of web page you are using. It can be a copy of your home page, or you can create a new page targeting your print media demographic.

Now try this experiment: Keep the same layout that you always use, including where you position your web site address. But this time list the address as www.mysite.com/newspaper.htm. At the end of the week, check your web site logs and see how many people entered your site through the newspaper.htm file.

The next time you run your ad, lead the ad with your web site address and your tag line and blurb. Remember that your web address should be www.mysite.com/newspaper.htm. At the end of the week, check your logs again and now see how many people enetered your site through that page. I bet that there is a HUGE difference.

If you’re running print media in many different publications you should create a different landing page for each publication (i.e. magazine1.htm, magazine2.htm, etc.). Not only will this help you track web site visitors from each publication, but you can (and should) create separate landing pages based upon each customer demographic that you are targeting.

One word of SEO advice here as well - if the text content is the same or nearly identical as other pages on your site you should make sure that you exclude these pages from search engines in your robots.txt or meta tags so that the search engines do not interpret them as doorway pages.