If you market in a rural area, you may be luckier than your urban peers in finding ISPs offering free or nearly free links. You may be the only firm or one of very few in your industry to be listed in the entire ISP site for your city. Now that's a definite positioning advantage!

This is a web page from West Coast Internet, a medium sized regional ISP. You can see how the ISP has provided space for the names of some of the firms that they host. Each of the names above is a hyperlink that, when clicked upon, will take the visitor directly to the firm's own company web site.

Internet service providers in some rural areas often serve several small cities, each with its own city Web site. See, for example, mid-Michigan's Maple Valley Computer Center at http://www.mvcc.com. Check their home page to see all the cities they serve, then visit one, say, Portland, Michigan, at: http://www.mvcc.com/comm/portland.asp.

At this writing, links at this ISP are free for customers. Yet, notice how few firms or agents have taken advantage of the offer. How many agents? None! Therefore, if you were an agent in that area, you would be the ONLY agent listed there. Then you would get ALL the visitor inquiries from homebuyers and sellers. There are hundreds of ISPS nationwide that would be glad to give agents in their area a free ad. Sadly, no one ever asks.

Even when a small ISP charges a fee for links or ads, it is usually minimal. Besides, they might just give you a free Web page and even help you make it.

Why not take a moment to call or e-mail YOUR ISP and see. Being listed in just that one ISP site could be worth five or ten extra sales a year to you. Isn't that worth the few minutes of effort to find out?

Published: February 12, 2002

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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 .