How to Promote a Real Estate Tool

Question

I am looking for advice on how to promote a Home Inspector search tool.
The tool is a small amount of code that places a small home inspector search by zip box.

Our goal is to have the tool placed on Real Estate websites. It is free for users to be able to search for home inspectors by zip code.

Any advice on how to promote this?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Thomas Muttwill · Answer

Spread the word on forums, create a group on Facebook and MySpace to spread the word, maybe make it into a google application, network with people in professions who could use this tool. Can this be only run on your website? If not I would maybe consider a scaled down version other people could put on their site and then backlink to you.

Willow Bellotti · Answer

you should send me more information too - my website may find this useful.

Account Closed · Answer

Promoting a real estate tool is similar to publishing real estate related articles.  You have countless ways to market your real estate tool, including articles, back links, and bookmarking.  If preferred, an outsourced SEO expert could be hired.  Remember, the people who would be most interested in your real estate tool are extremely busy so they do not have time to read a lengthy article.  In this case, you could supplement an article with a video uploaded to your main website or use YouTube.com, which many primary search engines such as Google.com love.  That way, people can simply subscribe to your page and find all the information about your product.

Lani Anglin-Rosales · Answer

The fastest way is to advertise on the bigger sites that attract agents.  That said, by having someone dedicated to being the "face" person of your company and spending time connecting personally with agents (via Twitter, Facebook, etc), you can become part of the social stream and use of your product is a natural part of those connections especially because it is free.  There are thousands upon thousands of agent blogs that are active and I believe that an effective way to garner business is through trust (achieved through using social media) and personalization of your brand.

Peter Kolat · Answer

How are you benefiting from that tool?

The reason why I ask is if you gain some monetary benefits from it, you could contact website owner/webmasters and offer to split profits with them to put your tool on their site.

You can also submit your tool to many software download sites.  For instance, did you try submitting it to Cnet download area?  
Also, do a search on google for software download/ freeware sites and submit it there.

I hope this helps.

Peter

Dane Whales · Answer

submit it to any free submission site,, even if it has PR0, eventually the site will gain PR.

Dane Whales · Answer

submit it everywhere,,, people here are great,, letting you and hopefully me advertise here....

Joshua D. · Answer

Perhaps you could advertise it here on BiggerPockets?  Get in touch.

Dave Mason · Answer

I might be interested in putting it on my site.  Contact me with the information.

Sarah King · Answer

the forum at realestatewebmasters dot com would be useful too, as would the forum at digitalpoint dot com (once you qualify you can promote it in the Freebies section).

Yours is the kind of tool that will take time to get going but will hopefully promote itself once you reach a "critical mass".

Oh, and a DMOZ listing wouldn't hurt either (submit and forget).