How to use RSS to drive more traffic to your site, getting you more leads and more business
November 29, 2007
By: Kurtis Holsapple
Author's Website: http://www.plugmylisting.com
Do you know what a stealth site is? Putting it simply, this is an unbranded, simple web page that you use to draw traffic to your site, or to generate leads. Many agents have multiple stealth sites that they maintain on a regular basis. I am here to show you how you can do this easily, with nothing but your blog, godaddy.com and any hosting provider.
First choose a couple of domain names. Since I am from the Portland, OR area, I will choose a couple of different neighborhood names and register those (*note, I don’t own these domains, these are just examples). Lets pick www.portland-area-real-estate.com, www.beavertonRE.com, www.tigardhomesforsale.com , www.lakeoswegoneighborhoods.com. As you can see, I have specific neighborhoods in mind for these sites, and all the content on these sites should be neighborhood specific. Using your blog, you can set up categories for each of these neighborhoods (one for Portland, one for Beaverton, one for Tigard, etc.) and then each one of these categories should have an RSS feed. Don’t know what an RSS feed is? Don’t worry about it, all you need to know is the address of that feed.
Next stop, novafeed.com. Put the location of your feed in the first box (upper left) and then just stylize it to look like your new stealth site. After you are done, copy and paste the code into your stealth site and… PRESTO! You have just completed your first auto-fed stealth site! Include some links to your main website in your blog posts or in the stealth site and watch the traffic come in. Do this for every category on your blog and you will have many more web pages expanding your online presence. Need some help getting all this set up? Look for a free lance web designer on craigslist and show them this post. It should be pretty simple for any web designer to set this up for you in under a couple hours. Don’t want to use novafeed.com? Hire out for an XML Parser. Then you would have complete control over how your posts are displayed.
- Stumble it!
- Categories: Lead Acquisition, Marketing, Websites
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Comments
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Jay Thompson on November 29, 2007 3:45 pm
Just a word of caution regarding “stealth sites”.
Don’t make them so stealthy that they violate rules and regulations on things like brokerage disclosure/notification. Rules may vary by state.
It’s likely that a completely unbranded site would be in violation.
Ron Ares on November 29, 2007 4:18 pm
It’s been awhile since I looked into this, but aren’t there Google penalties for repurposing the same exact content on other sites (akin to splogging)?
Kurtis Holsapple on November 29, 2007 4:43 pm
In reply to Jay:
Here in Oregon, you need to put your brokerage info on the page. This was mostly a post on how to get content. Agents would still need to know their rules and regs.
In reply to Ron:
As far as I know, using nova feed and other javascript widgets won’t get you the Google penalties. It doesn’t put your content in the code, just the javascript so you won’t be flooding the search engines with your repeat data. Just a way for more humans to find your site.
Chris Dowell on December 4, 2007 8:18 pm
I have been using stealth sites for a few years. Our real estate comission is now requiring brokerage information. My inquiries from the stealth site was higher than my website. I used a different domain to not penalize my main site.
Jason Brown on December 13, 2007 5:44 am
You do need to be careful of flooding the search engines with repeat data.
DamionKutaeff on March 22, 2008 5:34 pm
Hello everybody, my name is Damion, and I’m glad to join your conmunity,
and wish to assit as far as possible.