Q: How to best spend your $200 for promotional activities? A:?

[greekhomes]

Greetings to all savvy and to-become-savvy real estate internet entrepreneurs,

Here is the thing! 3 weeks ago I opened a site promoting the sale of luxury newly-built homes in Northern Greece. I started promoting my site through several means (mentioned below) since the day I put the site up on the net. Since, I’m a internet entrepreneur and finances is an issue for me, I chose to go by the bootstrapping way and promote my site through several free-of-charge ways. Here are the methods I used:

- Metatags in website html contents
- Submission to several search engines through such programs as Add Web 8,Dynamic Submission etc.
- Manual submission to country-specific search engines
- Placing ads in country-specific classifies.
- Putting a video on Youtube and google, and link it through digg.com for generating more visitors.
- Recently I have written articles (with internet address included in the authors section at the bottom of article) and submitted them to ezines, however, haven’t yet seen them published.

Now, all the above except the last one (which I haven’t tested yet) seemed to generate a meager on average 3-10 unique visitors per day to my site in the past two weeks. I find this unsatisfactory, and would like to see 50-70 unique visitors on my site per day. I have decided that I’m willing to spend some money in my promotional activities, since I figured there is “no free lunch” after all. More precisely, I’m willing to put about $ 200 on the table for this, and I ask you guys on what should I spend this money on, and how should I allocate it for the right promotional activity?

Tell me what really works its money and what does not. Do I need all the 200 greenbacks to generate this flow of traffic, or do I need more cash. Tell me 2-3 things the money should go to: is it paid search engine submission at google? Btw, if I have missed some free-of-charge promotional activities I can do, please do tell me as Im anxious to getting visitors to my site

[BrandonSternfield]

To start off with, here is a directory... of directories. You will see quite a bit of them are free. The only problem might be, that they might be only US. I don't know about them.

http://www.directorycritic.com/reale...tory-list.html

[judyo]

There are certainly free and off-line marketing tools to get your site noticed. However, IMO, most visitors to my sites come from search engines first and other sources after that such as directories and other sites that have my links on them followed by off-line marketing (domain name on print advertising, business cards, etc.).

So how do you get top positions in directories? Google likes links coming in to your site from other sites. The e-zine articles are one way to get this. Getting links in directories has also been mentioned. However, usually the free links require a reciprocal link from you to them. One-way links are better. Reciprocal links were popular but seem to be losing their effectiveness and contextual linking is another method of trading links. But before you set out to get links you need to figure out what "anchor text" you need to optimize for. You need to start reading - start with this forum.

Your site will not magically appear at the top of search engines overnight for competitive keywords. You don't need to "submit" your site to any of the big se's. They send their spiders out to find you. If you're not linked to any other site they won't be able to find you. Even if they find you because you submitted, if you don't have any incoming links they will not consider your site worthy of their main index (Google).

Google will take site/link age into consideration so the longer these inbound links remain on your site, the more "authority" your site will earn with Google. I think most will agree that Google is the most important search engine (gives the most traffic).

While you're waiting for your site to appear in Google for your main keywords, the other way to get traffic is to pay for ppc. $200.00 will probably not go too far using that.

In the meantime, read & learn, start a blog (or two or more), join other real estate community sites.

[benmode]

Thanks guys.

That was really helpful.

I think I'm in the same boat as greekhomes is in. except the $200.

[Tina2007]

thanks greekhomes for given some information of how to start property dealing through web