1) Long single page - CLICK HERE
2) Mini-website - CLICK HERE
Thanks for taking the time to help me! John
[Bumped]
ADDED: Everyone, thanks for voting! I appreciate it.
It used to be conventional wisdom that website visitors don’t like to scroll down. The internet is different now. Many people have high speed internet access and mouse wheels that make scrolling easy.
In this sample at least, people preferred scrolling down one long web page to jumping around a mini-website. The preference was not very great but the long single page ad wins!
We have a great sample with 137 voters as I write this. Of those, 58% voted for the long single page ad while 42% preferred the mini-website.
Why I did this experiment
I used to create a long single page ad in this blog to promote each of my listings. The pages were not very attractive, in my opinion.
I searched a great deal for a better alternative and found postlets.com which I’m happy with. I put all my listings on postlets.com.
The problem, er, I mean “opportunity” arrived about a week ago when I checked the stats on Google Analytics and found out that those old “not very attractive” listing ads, when I had them, were some of the most popular pages on this entire blog!
But now I was sending all of those visitors to postlets.com!
I would prefer to keep those visitors on this blog to help search engines recognize that this blog is a great source of information about Arizona homes for sale.
Further, when a home buyer searches for homes online, Google might send them to a long single page ad on this blog but it won’t send them to the mini-website ad.
The question was, “Could I create an ad that was as attractive as the postlets.com ad?”
The voting shows that I can.
It won’t be easy. The long single page ad took a lot more time to create than the postlets ads, at least at this point in my learning curve.
And I would miss the postlets.com mini-ads, called “minis,” that are great for putting in the sidebar. In addition, postlets.com “syndicates” (submits) my listings to several other large websites, for example, Trulia.com and Google Base.
So tonight, I’m thinking of doing both. I’ll create a custom ad for promoting my listings on Arizona Real Estate Notebook, Home Sale News e-newletters and on my yard signs, print ads and other promotional materials.
I’m now familiar with postlets.com so I could also create a mini-website to take advantage of the syndication of my listings to many major websites.
Recent home buyers were asked how they first found out about the home they bought. The top two ways were, 1) a real estate agent showed it to them, or 2) they found it themselves online.
Creating both the long page and the mini-website will add a lot of complexity to promoting my listings online which is already very complex.
It’s worth it, however, to be where the buyers are. The buyers are online.
