WHERE TO ADVERTISE YOUR RENTALS - Courtesy
of
RentalSiteRankings.com
Knowing where to advertise your rental used
to be simple. Landlords just used the local
classifieds, and they could be sure that’s
where most renters went in search of
housing.
These days, most people start online when
they look for a place to live. But there
are dozens and dozens of rental sites you
could advertise on. How do you choose?
The
best way to answer that question, in my
opinion, is to ask another question: which
of these sites get the most traffic from
prospective renters? It’s one of the
fundamentals of marketing: you want to
advertise where the maximum number of people
will see it. (That’s why Superbowl ads cost
so much, after all.) The 90/10 rule applies
here: 10% of the sites get 90% of the
traffic.
So
how do you know which sites get the most
traffic? They don’t just give that
information out. The best place to start is
to think like a renter.
Most
people don’t pay attention to rental sites
on a regular basis. They are interested once
every few years when they want to move. So
where do you start when you don’t know
what’s out there? Your favorite
search engine. For this exercise I recommend
Google because it has the largest market
share and therefore more of your target
market will be using it. But you’re welcome
to use something else like Yahoo or Bing
instead.
So
pretend you’re looking for a place to rent.
What will you search for? “Apartment for
rent”? “House rentals in Pittsburgh”? “New
York luxury condos”? Try a few of these out.
If you have a two-bedroom house in Houston
try “two bedroom house in Houston”, “houses
for rent”, “Houston rentals”, etc. See which
websites come up. It’s also important to
note what order they come up in. More people
will click on the #1 result than the #2
result, and so on down the line.
There’s a great tool at
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
which you can use to give you ideas on what
search terms to use. If you enter “apartment
for rent” it will give you a list of related
keywords to try. And here’s the really great
part: it will tell you how popular the
search terms are. (The results are most
accurate if you set the “Match Type” to
Exact). For example, virtually nobody uses
“two-bedroom house in Houston” but a fair
number use “houses for rent Houston”.
If
this sounds pretty complicated, well, it is.
There are a lot of search terms and sites to
consider, but if you try a few you can get a
rough idea of what rental websites might
work best for you. If you’d prefer to save a
few hours of your valuable time and get some
more detailed results, you might want to
check out
www.RentalSiteRankings.com. I’ve written
a software system that gathers the results
for thousands of search terms - not only on
Google, but on the other major search
engines as well. It considers how popular
each search term is, what sites come up in
the search results, and what order they are
in. It analyzes all this raw data and shows
you the sites that get the most traffic for
a particular city.
Strong marketing is a critical aspect of
real estate investing
that is often overlooked. The landlord who
complains about a $300 repair bill but lets
a unit sit vacant for two months (and loses
$1500 in potential revenue) needs to rethink
his priorities! A key component of good
marketing is knowing where to
advertise, and to know that you need to know
where your audience is. Hopefully this
article has given you a starting point to
find out.
Copyright 2011. RentalSiteRankings.com. All
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