Real estate agents are repeat business and once they are sold, they'll almost always continue to buy our photos and they'll tell their agent friends and we'll get more business. There is nothing like repeat business. Agents abide by a specific code of ethics and can be reported to state authorities for certain actions and risk losing their license. They really are good clients.

That's the long answer. The short answer is that we provide an outstanding value to the real estate agents by creating this regional Web site for consumers and drawing in the buyers to look at the property. We do all the work to help the real estate agents match up the buyers and sellers. And we keep our expenses low.

David: How do you find visitors for the site?

Kelly: David, that is another one of the great things about this business. Would you like to be in a business where other people pay your advertising bill every month? This is it! You can get the realtors to purchase yard signs with your URL. They'll stick 'em in the yard. They'll advertise your URL in their print advertising in all the real estate magazines.

I show the agents and office staff how to make links to our listings and they link all their Web sites. I set up custom subdomains for free for each agency and sometimes agents. All this drives buyers to our site to look at all the photos. SIHomeTours routinely serves over 500,000 page views in a month to 70,000 visitors. Our sister site HouseviewOnline.com serves something like five times that amount.

You can take it a step further and advertise yourself. I like s simple cheap three line classified ad in the newspaper but those are getting expensive. Billboards and other traditional advertising usually works well. What do you want to spend and how fast do you want to grow?

Links are important and a part of our strategy from day one. We don't link out. We're like a culdesac on the Internet. It's a little arrogant but I feel there is no reason to visit any other Web site if you are looking to purchase real estate in our region. We have more photos and they are always better. If a listing is not at SIHomeTours.com, it's not seriously for sale. Other sites are nowhere as content rich as ours so there is no point in linking to them. Especially when they are more than willing to link to us.

David: That's the opposite of our strategy here at ZATZ. We constantly give link love to thousands of other sites (like yours, this week) and it always seems to work. I've always felt there's more than enough link love to go around.

Kelly: The cool part of links is that the realtors will create links at their Web site to their listings. They'll create links at their corporate sites like http://www.century21.com and http://www.coldwellbanker.com to my site. We've now a Realtor.com authorized virtual tour provider and we can add links to listings seen at http://www.realtor.com. And of course, agents will put links in their MLS database so that other agents can tour their listings online.