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Real Estate Toolbar Configuration Guide

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Real Estate Toolbar

The RealBird real estate toolbar components are extensions to Conduit's browser toolbar service. With RealBird, you can turn your Conduit community toolbar into a real estate listing marketing, home search, real estate lead generation and client productivity tool. This tutorial explains step-by-step how to set up an effective community toolbar specialized for your own real estate market. While Conduit provides hundreds of different add-on modules for the toolbar, this tutorial focuses on the RealBird components and other must-have modules for a real estate application. The examples below are courtesy of Janie Coffey of Papillon Real Estate in Coral Gables, FL.

Please note that these RealBird toolbar modules are provided for RealBird PRO members only.

Overview

The following toolbar example shows a best-practices setup. You will be able to add hundreds of different modules if you wish, but we found the following configuration to be ideal:

RealBird Toolbar module example
  1. Your logo and link to your primary website or blog
  2. Co-branded, custom Google search
  3. RealBird Homes for Sale module - your users will be able to search for homes with your private labeled search engine
  4. RealBird Featured Listings module - one click access to your featured listings on RealBird, and also to your RealBird "Solds" inventory
  5. RealBird Property Inquiry module - your users will be able to request information and showing for ANY property found on ANY websites. This is a novel, powerful and unique feature that, for the first time, allows your clients to contact you regarding a property no matter on which website they've found it. When they do so, you will receive an email notification with their contact information and the subject property, and the request will also be saved in the RealBird Message Archive in your member area
  6. List of community RSS feeds, automatically updated. Add your own blogs and feeds and other community feeds (e.g. local newspaper feeds etc.) to make the toolbar even more useful
  7. Your Twitter updates - you can add multiple Twitter accounts
  8. Facebook notification component - your users will be able to get their Facebook notifications via your toolbar
  9. Local weather - updated automatically for your users' locations
  10. Messaging component - you will be able to broadcast messages to all of your toolbar users. Very powerful, but make sure you only announce important events so that your users do not feel spammed

Steps

  1. Set up a free Conduit toolbar account
  2. Add your logo and link to your primary website
  3. Add the RealBird Homes for Sale module
  4. Add the RealBird Featured Listings module
  5. Add the RealBird Property Inquiry module - an industry first!
  6. Add community RSS feeds, Twitter accounts, local weather and Messaging module
  7. Market your toolbar for maximum exposure

Set up a free Conduit toolbar account

To set up your toolbar account for free:
  1. Visit Conduit.com
  2. Click "Get Started Now"
  3. On the signup form (as pictured below) fill out with your information. Make sure that you select a meaningful name for your toolbar. The name will be your login and part of your toolbar's download URL and will also be used as your brand at many places: 
Setting up the real estate toolbar

Add your logo and link of your primary website to the toolbar

Your logo and link to your website

Here is a short video demonstration on how to add your logo and website link to your toolbar:

Add the RealBird Homes for Sale module to the toolbar

Now it's getting exciting. The second module to add is your RealBird Homes for Sale module:
  1. Get your link from your RealBird member area. You may want to log into RealBird in a separate window so that you can easily copy and paste the links between RealBird and Conduit. Click the Toolbar's main navigation item in the member area and copy the related link from there.
    Note: this service is available only for RealBird PRO subscribers
  2. Click the "Add Gadget" on the Conduit toolbar editor page (See below)
  3. Paste the Url that you copied from RealBird into the Gadget configuration form (See below)
Adding the RealBird Homes For Sale module

The following Gadget configuration screen shows all the configuration fields that you will need to set.
The first URL field is the one that you copied from RealBird. Set the width to 500 and height to 540 and
pick the appropriate icon and tooltip text. Make sure you click "Save" when you are done.

Add the RealBird Featured Listings module to the toolbar

Next step is to add your own RealBird Featured listings and sold inventory to the toolbar. The steps for this are similar to the previous one
  1. Get your link from the RealBird member area. You may want to log into RealBird in a separate window so that you can easily copy and paste the links between RealBird and Conduit. Click the Toolbar main navigation item in the member area and copy the related link from there.
    Note: this service is available only for RealBird PRO subscribers
  2. Click the "Add Gadget" on the Conduit toolbar editor page 
  3. Paste the Url that you copied from RealBird into the Gadget configuration form (See below)
The first Url field is the one that you copied from RealBird. Set the width to 500 and height to 540 and 
pick the appropriate icon and tooltip text. Make sure you click "Save" when you are done.

Add the RealBird Property Inquiry module to the toolbar - an industry first, cross-websitea lead capture tool

What is this:  This feature allows a user of your toolbar to go to any website, find a listing they like, and with a few clicks send you an inquiry about that property.  You get the leads while your client is surfing any websites (Trulia, Zillow, Craigslist, any agent or brokerage site).
Again the steps to set this up are similar to the two other modules above.
  1. Get your link from the RealBird member area. You may want to log into RealBird in a separate window so that you can easily copy and paste the links between RealBird and Conduit. Click the Toolbar main navigation item in the member area and copy the related link from there. 
    Note: this service is available only for RealBird PRO subscribers
  2. Click the "Add Gadget" on the Conduit toolbar editor page 
  3. Paste the Url that you copied from RealBird into the Gadget configuration form (See below)
  4. Important Step: Change the privacy settings of your toolbar account (See below)
The first Url field is the one that you copied from RealBird. Set the width to 500 and height to 540 and 
pick the appropriate icon and tooltip text. Make sure you click "Save" when you are done.


Important: You will have to change the privacy settings of your Toolbar account as follows:
On the Settings page (see arrow below) under the Toolbar section and Advanced Privacy subsection, check the "Enable detection of URLs visited by community toolbar users" and click Save.

Add community RSS feeds, Twitter accounts, local weather and Messaging module to the toolbar

To add even more value to your toolbar, we suggest to include local RSS feeds including your own blogs, your Twitter updates (you can also add other, influential local people's Twitter accounts), local weather and the Messaging module. The screenshot below shows which components to use for these features:

Adding your RSS feeds:

 

  1. Select the icon
  2. Use "Add RSS feed" to add a new feed to the list
  3. Move them up and down based on how valuable you think they are for your users
  4. Make sure you click "Save" after each update

 

Adding your Twitter accounts follows similar steps. Add one or several accounts and save the configuration.

Market your real estate toolbar for maximum exposure and engagement

Once you have your components configured, you will have to promote your toolbar so that it is actually downloaded and used by users. We are sure that you will come up with many interesting ways to do so, but here are some ideas:
  1. Your Toolbar has a dedicated landing page. You can upload your own logo, add description, change the color scheme and more on the Settings page as shown below.
  2. Add the link of your Toolbar download page to your email footer
  3. Use one or more of the many ready-to-use banners provided under the "Banners" section
  4. Add these banners to your blog sidebar, to your website and share them also via social media
  5. In short, promote your private labeled community toolbar everywhere you promote your blog and website addresses

System requirements

Your toolbar will work seamlessly on Windows and Mac for Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox browsers. 

Example

Setting up your real estate toolbar takes approximately 10-30 minutes including the instant upgrade to the RealBird PRO service if you are currently a free RealBird member. However, if you prefer to see a live toolbar you can download Janie Coffey's The Miami Story community toolbar from her toolbar page, install it in a few seconds and see what you can also do for your own market. You can always uninstall the toolbar later if you decide to do so.





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