There’s always something to howl about.

Following a trail of breadcrumbs from an internet-enabled cell phone

I’ve written about our breadcrumbs philosophy before. Cliff’s Notes: If we build a single property web site for a listing — or a previewing site for buyers featuring dozens of houseswe never delete worthwhile work product from our file server:

We leave the pages and sites on our file server forever. If there were anything confidential in the pages, we would excise it. But there never is — because the web is not secure. So the pages live on forever, each one a detailed chronicle of a particular house at a particular moment in time.

This Sunday just past, a potential buyer was sitting outside 14179 West Shaw Butte Drive in Surprise, AZ. From her phone, she Googled the address. Guess who she found?

I’m not the lister on that house — and it had sold before she called me. But I stand a fair chance of selling her something else, with my client-acquisition cost being pretty close to $0.00.

Leaving breadcrumbs on the trail is not a strategy, not even a tactic. It’s a side-effect. We’re building the content for other purposes. But we sometimes get extra business simply by not killing those pages. This has always been good for us, going back years, but it promises to get better and better. First, we’re always building new pages, which increases our long-tail exposure. And second, there are more and more web-enabled mobile phones out there every day.

There’s more: I think it’s important to “triangulate” on pages like this from a weblog, this so Google finds the new content in a sprightly fashion. I talked about triangulation at Unchained in Phoenix, and I’ll be addressing it again in Orlando. (And if you buttonhole Brian Brady, he might reveal to you what I’m doing in this post as a side-effect of having written it.)

Bur even though this is all just a side-effect of other efforts, we still have a complicated, scientific name for this phenomenon: We call it free money.

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