In my never-ending quest to make client web sites found by customers, I deal with dozens of corporations in hundreds of different markets. Each market consists of many different audiences and it is necessary to be highly visible in each one. The hard part is to know where on the Internet those audiences go to find the kind of products and services being offered.

If you live in a highly competitive metro area, in year 2000 you might consider budgeting your advertising the following way: spend 40% for local traditional non-web promotion (newspaper, magazine ads, fliers, door hangers, direct mail, etc.) and 60% for paid banners and links on web sites where consumers go to find homes and agents in your city or cities.

With real estate agents and area offices of brokerage firms, the task to reach target audiences grows easy because consumers seek services on a regional or city basis rather than nationwide. In other words, consumers search by-city or by-region. Which means you need presence in your local city web sites FIRST. Then you need to be in national realty sites which also offer by-city searches for agents.

Additionally, if your realty chain/independent brokerage has a web site, be SURE it contains a link to your own personal web site---not just to a page that you may have been given in the corporate site for free. Such a page by itself is virtually worthless for marketing purposes. But there are valuable places on the web where your presence can indeed bring you a sale.

The first group is the MLS home and agent search sites. You should be in as many of these as you can afford. Especially smaller ones serving your own region. Here are the big ones:

NAR's Realtor.com, Homeseekers.com, Microsoft's HomeAdvisor, Cyberhomes, HomeScout/iOwn, and ListingLink (mostly for CA, NY and HI). Prices vary, but a year's presence in one typically costs less than five hundred dollars.

Being there gives you more visibility to home searchers than agents in your city who aren't. Note that with some MLS search sites, your own contact info WON'T appear even on your home listings unless you have bought an enhancement, nor will your photo and description appear when consumers search by-city for agents.

Before you buy, be certain that your local MLS board's listings are indeed carried by the particular MLS search site. If they are, sign up. If you already have a web site, you don't need to buy one from the MLS site; just request an enhanced listing with a LINK-only direct to your site.

Next in importance for your advertising are those realty-related sites that have good presence on, or links from, major web portals (including AOL, Mindspring, Earthlink, Netscape, MSN.com and search engines or directories like Yahoo!, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Hotbot, etc.)

These realty-related sites have already paid the portals to be apparent in them, often being found just a click or two away from a portal's front-page link or banner typically called "Real Estate" or "Find a Home." Their visibility benefits you, because while YOU could not afford to pay the huge ad sums that portals demand, those ad links or banners ultimately lead to the realty-related sites that you CAN afford at rates from a hundred to a few hundred dollars a year.

Other realty-related sites I recommend for their agent-finder functions are Realty Times , which has an agent locator section . See a sample page. It costs $50 a year to be registered in up to five cities.

Consumers often search using key words that include "relocation." So consider being in VirtualRelocation where you are better off buying a year's top-of-page enhanced listing for your city rather than merely being in the long list of free listings. See how enhanced links stand out atop the Orange County, CA page. . Annual enhanced links here cost a few hundred dollars.

A relatively new, but info-packed site currently offering free (but hurry) agent links nationwide is RealEstateABC. This site wisely numerically rates the quality of sites, letting an agent with a better one "bump" other agents out of position and move up in ranking on the list for a given city. Apply for their hard-to-get award.

Another well-linked, top info site is RealEstateLibrary which offers agents small links for $59/year and enhanced ones for $119, including a title and three lines of text. These prices relate to $5 and $10/month---a pittance!

A site I love for its navigational speed in finding agents by-city is HomeNet. Under $300/year and thousands of links point to the site.

NewHomeSale.com is another busy realty site where you can stand out from other agents in your region by buying a top-of-page BOLD-face enhanced presence for a scant $50/year. Oddly, agents will take time to fill out a form to list their name on these pages for free, thereby getting lost in the scores of other freely-listed names, yet not spend the $4/month to get topmost billing. Go figure!

A big site with tons of consumer information on all kinds of realty subjects, including by-city lists of agents, is Reals.com. Pay only $60/year and your top-of-page enhanced listing (including your photo) stands out hugely against the scores of virtually useless tiny links added for free by other agents.

Houselink/Wirelink lets you add a link for only $19/year or a comprehensive enhanced link including logo/photo for $99/year.

The newly-revamped Homes.com is tied in to the found-everywhere Homes & Land Magazine and Rental Guide Magazine network. Thus, it gets heavy traffic from buyers and sellers. For a few hundred dollars a year you can get a jump on other agents in your area and be there waiting for consumers. You can also sign up for a free web page.

And yes, you should list yourself, often for free, in any of the new home auction sites that show up, such as Homebid.com. Most of these have an agent locator section if for no other reason than to appease agents who think that such sites are undermining their livelihood.

You might also pay to be in the FSBO sites, too, such as Forsalebyowner.com since most FSBO sellers ultimately turn to an agent. When they do, you'll be prominent if you're right there where the FSBO advertised his/her home.

And it pays to go to huge Internet "community" sites like Tripod and Geocities and make yourself (online, in minutes) a totally free web page including photos and links. Its focus should be solely to direct consumers who haunt these sites to your web site.

To protect myself from dozens of e-mails from sites that I left out here, please know that there are plenty of other sites that you can benefit by being in. However, these, so far as I can see in five years of studying such things, are the biggies. Likely you can be in all of these for just a few thousand dollars a year. In 2000, with 100 million consumers online, that meager amount may well prove to be the best marketing money you've ever spent.

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Published: December 2, 1999

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

Bill Koelzer is a Web marketing consultant to web-proficient agents nationwide. He is co-author, with Barbara Cox, Ph.D., of the Prentice-Hall books, Internet Marketing in Real Estate and Internet Marketing. Bill is also webmaster of Orange County Real Estate, among the most-awarded known Realtor® sites. Visit his website, Koelzer.com or e-mail him at .