Making a 'seller' sale without the site being officially open

[Chaslie +]

This is a good story.

An elderly neighbour of ours put his 'property for sale' up on our site that has still not officially opened.

Previous to this, he had it listed with a number of Real Estate agents and no sale. He then withdrew it from all agents and decided to sell it via the web.

Anyway, he called me tonight to say a buyer had found it via Google. It had not been added to the Internet on any other site other than ours. It has been on our site for about 6 weeks and has had about 48 views.

He is extremely happy because he has a sale (pending the buying obtaining finance) and has saved himself $12,000 in agent fees.

So how did this happen? Possibly for these reasons:
1. The GoToDetails URL is included in our signature at the 68 forums
2. We have placed links at some of our other sites pointing to the GoToDetails site
3. Have a number of RSS feeds at other sites coming from GoToDetails as well.

For a site that has not officially opened, not a bad (surprising) result. Hope all of you 'marketers' can gain some inspiration and ideas from this story.

BTW, here is the Google entry: http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=e...G=Search&meta=

It's the 3rd and 4th Google entry.

[Eric Barnes]

That is awesome. You need to tell him you want the commison.


I started the oceanlakes classifieds a few months back to list rental homes for my family and I didn't have any links from any sites other than 68 Classifieds. After about 3-4 weeks they started getting phone calls from people wanting to rent it. This internet thing is pretty amazing and also you customer base is huge.

[Chaslie +]

That is awesome. You need to tell him you want the commison.

Initially, he hinted at some type of commission or similar when he first wanted to list the property with us for no fee.

I said 'no' - just wanted to help him out.

Tonight, he sort of brought it up again .... but we will see what pans out. I have no expectations and am just happy (1) he sold his property and (2) that we helped him do that.

[sleepy +]

Dont forget to ask him for a testimonial (i.e., a paragraph or two).

sleepy

Oh and the link on your logo is not working ....
Warning: main(FILESYSTEM_PATHincludes/init.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/xxx/domains/gotodetails.com/public_html/home.php on line 26

[Chaslie +]

Oh and the link on your logo is not working ....
Warning: main(FILESYSTEM_PATHincludes/init.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/xxx/domains/gotodetails.com/public_html/home.php on line 26

Thanks Sleepy - forgot about that link. Much appreciated.

Dont forget to ask him for a testimonial (i.e., a paragraph or two).

Yes - have that already.

[calaf6 +]

Thats great, I had links in to mine while I was building it, and managed a Google PR of 1 before it was even ready, ok its only a low one, but it did get some ads in once it was almost ready just via the links in sigs.

I have just started putting links in sigs for the one thats virtually finished, which have already got me a few hits, and am doing 'invisible' ones for the part built one for the search engines to pick up, so when its live they will be crawling the site and should pick up ads fairly quickly, the 'invisible' link gets me around the 'no advertising policy of several forums, especially if I remove the underline!!!!