How To Sell Your Property Without Paying Massive Fees To An Agent.

There is normally a moment that one arrives at during some part of your life, a defining moment that grabs you and says 'hey, I do not want to live here any more'. When that moment comes, it has to be acted on or your life will just get worse and worse with each passing week living in a house that you do not want to be in.

After that the other problems soon start to kick in and you have to begin organising yourself for each stage of the game. Where will you go, stay in town of get out of town? Stay within reach of the office, the school, your favourite dentist or pub?

Boy there is a lot to consider, but once you know the answers to these first questions you can start to concentrate on deciding who will be best placed to market the property. In these tough selling conditions that we find ourselves in, 2011 is going to be a difficult year to sell a property at a good price.
Most agents and representatives will be only too pleased to inform you of this and then go on to put their case for a low price to encourage a sale.

Well that's just dandy if you can afford to take a drop, sometimes a large one, as well as the commission to the agent which of course will remain at the same percentage. But what if you can't afford to lose that much. Perhaps you can discount it a little to a more realistic price.
But the agent will still take his or her percentage whatever happens. You are in a lose-lose situation.

So what is the alternative?

Say Goodbye to the Estate Agent.
Yes, don't use one. Go it alone. Follow some easy steps to market your house and pocket the fees you would normally have to fork out to pay the commissions.
Decide on the minimum price you want to sell for and then add a few thousand to allow for offers. Then do all of the following:

1: Do some keyword research to find three key phrases that have a nice volume of traffic and are not impossible to rank for. I use Google Keyword Tool and Keyword Blueprint2 to accomplish that.

2: Take some quality photographs of the outside and inside of the property. If you do not have a decent digital camera then borrow one.

3: Sign up with Wordpress for a blog. You can buy a .com domain name to use on it if you want, or just choose a name on wordpress.com that includes at least one of your keywords.

4: Write some imaginative content to fill your pages. There only needs to be 3 pages. The home page, a contact form, a features of the region page and anything else you think might be relevant.

5: Choose a nice theme to make the site look more appealing. The default theme is fine but lacks a little sparkle. I like the Weaver theme. It is so easy to customise but on wordpress.com it is not available. You can only use it if you host Wordpress on your own hosting account. (an investment of between 50 and 100€)

6: Install a plugin called NextGenGallery and activate it. Uplosd all your images into a gallery in NextGenGallery. You need to create a gallery first. Go to the admin panel and at the bottom you will see on the left, an item called 'Gallery'. click on 'add gallery'. It automatically creates thumbnails from all the images you upload, and you can use them in your home page or in the sidebar. Copy and paste all your other content into the other pages.

7: Install another plugin called Contact Form 7 and activate it. This will create an easy way for people to contact you.

8: Go to the admin panel and on the left click on settings, then click on permlinks. Change the default url structure to http://www.yoursite.com/sample-post/
This will make you urls readable and they can always include your keywords.

9: Designate your home page. Go to admin panel»settings»reading. Set your preferred home page here.

10: Now install another plugin 'All In one SEO'. Activate it and go to the settings page. Make sure you tick the enabled box. Now fill in the best keywords into the boxes at the bottom and also fill in the description and keywords boxes using the keywords that you discovered earlier. These meta tags will apply only to your designated home page.

11: All your other pages can now be given titles, descriptions and keywords in the boxes at the bottom of the page. Make them all unique. Use the keywords that you uncovered in the first stage.

12: Try to ensure that the urls contain your keywords. if they do not then open up the posts or pages and click 'edit' near the top on the 'permalink' line.

Now, if you are happy with the look and feel, just go through everything one more time and see if there are any places on any of the pages where you can insert your keywords. Replace other text or create new text, but use them wherever you can. Do not write any content in a spammy style...like over-using keywords or other words being repeated too often.

Then you can start to build backlinks. If you do not do this your website may never get found. I do not mean chasing other webmasters for reciprocal links, they are a waste of time. You need oneway backlinks pointing to your homepage and where ever else you have keywords. This article is not a tutorial on backlink construction, there are plenty of those on the web already.

This is when you might sind the job too much, and remember you are trying to save yourself a massive commission payout. Perhaps it's time to call in an expert and spend a few hundred euros on getting the job done quickly and effectively.
Getting your website onto the first page of the search results is important because that is where most of the clicks are to be got. It is worth the investment and if you have done your keyword research right in the first place you will probably see plenty of interest in your property.
It is very worthwhile employing the guy who does your backlinks to do the keyword research too, right at the start of the project. It could be that the expert eyes will spot something special with greater traffic and potential buyers.