One of the advantages of participating on local community web forums, is that you can leverage them to build up your name recognition.

One of the problems about marketing yourself as a real estate agent, is that you're largely "transparent" in the community. No one needs you, until they actually need you. Unlike a restaurant, or dry cleaner, no one notices your store front while driving down the street, if you even have a store front!

Most towns have some kind of web forum somewhere, where local residents hangout to talk about what's going on in their town. By simply participating in the discussions, and signing your name, business name, and website address, on each message you post, will "brand" your name.

The idea is that in time, other community members will remember your name, and will think about you when they actually need your services.

On top of that, signing your website address on each message gives people the opportunity to find your website. Google will actually "crawl" these messages. In rare cases, Google will actually credit these links as backlinks to your site.

Topix is a very large news aggregator, that happens to have set up a discussion forum for just about every city in the USA...
http://www.topix.com/city

Aside from Topix, there are other independent forums that offer the capability of creating "signature pics" or "sig pics". A sig pic is a photograph, or graphic, that serves as a signature. The forum will also let you create a hyperlink on the sig pic. Thus by creating your own sig pic (with your face, business name, and contact), and hyperlinking it to your website, you can drive traffic to your website.

To find some independent forums focusing on your town, do a Google search for something like, "oakland forums". Something will usually show up.

Labels: Discussion Forums