90 Day Challenge – Day 9 – Tools You Can Use – Where to put those pictures?

I hope by now that you have completed your homework from Day 3 and you now have some good property pictures on your listings.  Today we are going to focus on what to do with those pictures now that you have them.

Let’s start with the basics:

1. How many pictures should I upload? The answer is simple – as many good ones as you have.  For the purposes of the ewm.com site and the sites we feed, I would recommend at least 8 pictures and never less than 5 if you want the pictures to be picked up on all of the other sites.
2. Should I just include pictures of the property? No, I think it is a great idea to also put up common area or community pictures.
3. Why can’t I just upload them to the MLS and forget about it? Once your photos are uploaded to the MLS two significant things happen.  First, they are resized – made smaller for storage purposes – which makes them virtually unusable for anything else.  Second, and maybe even more importantly, once you upload those photos to the MLS, they belong to the MLS.  So, because we want high quality photos that we are free to distribute anywhere, we ask you to upload them twice- once to the MLS and once to ewmrealtors.com.

Here are two videos to help you out – at a minimum you need to make sure you have at least 5 photos on MLS and ewmrealtors.com. Special thanks to Karen Ross who created these tutorials.

Upload to MLS

Uploading to ewmrealtors.com

Now – let’s look at some advanced steps. Layering is an important concept in internet marketing.  The idea of adding some additional uploads will add to your SEO on every listing.

• is a photography site where you can upload photos.  Many people use it just to share photos with friends and family – but like many of the new tools – there is a great business application for using Flickr – it indexes well with the search engines.  Each picture can be tagged with  search terms like the address, mls number, the neighborhood or the building.  Another great benefit – it is online storage for your photos.  Once you upload the picture – flickr will store them forever.  Ever have someone ask you for one of your phots only to find it gets rejected by the size of the email?  Flickr automatically resizes your photos into small, medium and large so that anyone can download them- just send a link.

• is the Google equivalent of Flickr – with an added bonus of a photo editor.  Picasa will also create a movie slide show of your photos that can be uploaded in YouTube – yet another layer.  Not to mention that once you have the slide show you can put it on your website or embed it in a blog post, pretty cool, right?

Got that smart phone?  Flickr and Picasa both offer mobile phone apps. 🙂 Try the links for more info or to download.  Try Shozu – an application available for iPhone and Blackberry which offers one application to work all of the photo sites.

Homework: Check all of your listings in the MLS and ewm.com – see if all of your photos are appearing.  Do have have at least 5 photos on each listing?  If you have pictures on ewm.com but the main photo box is empty – you need to go back into ewmrealtors.com and Select the main photo.

Extra Credit – sign up for flickr and picasa – upload photos for every listing, tag them.  Upload neighborhood or building photos and tag them,  do a slide show – upload to Youtube.

Look at how much you have already learned, and we are only on Day 9.  Keep up the good work!