Following up on this week’s earlier post regarding print advertising’s demise …
The only print ad I have done this year was in The HooK, for their Green issue.
Print is useful when it transcends advertising, when it’s not advertising. Take today’s example – a third-party, independent review of one of the properties I’m marketing. I didn’t pay for it, but this is a trusted column in a local print publication. The authors write about local properties every week with unbiased, un-varnished point of view.
As noted earlier this year, the big companies are beginning to understand that print is a waste of resources.
I’ve chosen to not advertise in the local real estate publication, the Real Estate Weekly, for at least two reasons. First because I don’t want to spend the money branding myself and I haven’t heard of any success stories (or leads) from other agents. Second, they now print in Georgia and drive it up to Charlottesville every week – this is incongruent with my evolving green philosophies (gotta ‘walk the walk’).
If only Realtors would learn to advertise their Open Houses in the Charlottesville MLS, we might not need to advertise in the Sunday Daily Progress.
Next week I’m going to run this site’s first-ever local “get subscribers” drive – courtesy of a banner ad to be run at cVillain, a highly-trafficked local gossip/discussion/news/etc/ blog. The results of a poll they ran a few weeks ago led me to give them a shot –
  * less than $10,000
   6% of all votes  * $10,000 to $24,999
   13% of all votes  * $25,000 to $49,999
   47% of all votes  * $50,000 to $74,999
   16% of all votes
  * $75,000 to $99,999
   10% of all votes
  * more than $100,000 i.e. lucky bastard
   25% of all votes
Buyers and sellers are looking online. Go where the business is, or where it’s expected to be. Sort of like the concept in soccer, of running to space, I’m trying to get into that real estate space.
We’ll see what happens after next week. If you don’t try, you can’t fail or learn.
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