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Put quite simply, most real estate agents waste their time advertising on Craigslist because their ads lack a call to action. Let me explain what I mean.

If a buyer looks at 100 houses, how many of those houses are they going to buy? Probably only one. And of these 100 houses they look at online, they might go see 10, or maybe even 15. So if they see your ad, you might have a 10% chance of them contacting you, although I think in reality the odds are actually even less than that.

You will have a lot of people looking at your ads that won’t be interested in the property that you are advertising. How can you turn more of these people in to leads? This is where the call to action comes in. You need to use every listing you post to let potential buyers that you have other properties available. After all, if you have MLS access as a real estate agent, you can show them all of the properties any other agent could show them. So now we need to ask the question: What will entice these potential buyers to contact me?

One of the easiest ways to get buyers to contact you is to have a list for them to sign up for. I’ve had great success with advertising a “foreclosure list”. All of my Craigslist ads had a link that said “click here to get email updates of all the newest foreclosures in our area”. The sign up form asked for their name, email, and phone number. After they signed up, I set up a profile for them in the MLS that would notify them every time a new REO or short sale listing was available, or every time there was a price reduction. I also set it to only email once a week. I found that if the MLS sends daily updates, people tend to unsubscribe much faster.

Now I am sure you are asking, how do I set all of this up? First, you will need a very simple web page with a sign up form. The page will simply repeat the offer that you have in your ads. Something like this: Simply fill in the form on this page, and we will start sending you instant updates for available foreclosures in our area.
There are many ways you can set up a website to do this. You can even use free services like Blogger.com to set up a basic website, which I have done in the past with great results. You will also need to find a sign up form, which I go in to detail about in some of my other articles.

 

How to get 5 times more real estate leads from Craigslist than most agents do