October 2011 IDX Broker Agent Newsletter

This month's newsletter includes training on how to set up custom city, county, and zip code lists for your IDX search pages, how to prevent spam leads using Captcha, and how to build custom, area-based listing showcases that you can add to any page on your website.

Best regards,
The IDX Team
@idxbroker

Customize Your City, County & Zip Code Lists

Your IDX search pages will display all cities, counties, and zip codes for all active listings in your MLS. If your territory includes a small segment of Cities within your MLS, then you may only want to encourage your site visitors to search listings within those cities. You can accomplish this in IDX Broker using Custom Search Lists.

Set up your Custom Search Lists by going to My Preferences -> Custom Search Lists. Use the small links under the header text to choose to customize your cities, counties, or zip codes.


The box on the left will display all of the cities, counties, and zip codes provided by your current MLS data, and the box on the right will display any items you currently have in your custom list. Simply choose the items you would like to add to your custom list from the box on the left, and click Add Selected Cities To List to move them to your custom list on the right. Use the red circle icons or checkboxes to remove items from your custom list.


You can also add cities, counties, and zip codes that are NOT included in your MLS's data to your custom list by using the state lists in the dropdown menu.


Use the Custom List Settings at the bottom of the screen to activate your custom lists on your basic search, advanced search, or both and save your changes. Once these settings are saved, your custom lists will automatically display on all of your IDX search pages!

Prevent Spam Leads - Turn On Captcha

It's exciting to see leads come into your IDX Broker account, but it can be discouraging to see that some of those leads may be submitted by spam bots. While we can't prevent spam bots from filling out your contact forms, we can help you prevent them from successfully submitting their false information to your IDX account by using Captcha. This feature will require new leads to enter in a string of text from a provided image. If the lead cannot enter in this text correctly, they will not be able to submit their information.

To enable CAPTCHA on your IDX account, go to Lead Management -> Lead Registration Preferences. Under Lead Registration Options, toggle the Use Captcha Verification preference to Yes and save your changes.


View any of your IDX contact pages on your website, and you will see the Captcha image and text box displayed right above the submit button at the bottom of the form.


Reducing the amount of spam leads you receive will allow you to focus on real buyers interested in working with you!

Building Custom Showcases

One of the most popular and effective ways to showcase real estate on your website is to create separate, dedicated community or neighborhood pages for your market area. A community or neighborhood page will have a description of the area, photos of the area, demographic or school information, and a preview of listings for sale in that area. Add a few area-based listings to your neighborhood pages using IDX Broker's Custom Showcases.

To create a Custom Showcase, login to IDX Broker and go to Widgets -> Custom Showcases. Start by choosing a search method from the small menu under the header text. You can create the same results set that you would get by using standard IDX search forms. To create neighborhood showcases based on a field like Subdivision or Area, use the Advanced Search.

Simply name your showcase and choose your search criteria. Then, specify the number of rows and columns you would like to display in your showcase. The row and column numbers will determine the number of listings displayed in your showcase.


Click the Generate Code button at the top of the screen. The code for your showcase will appear in red. Simply copy and paste this code snippet into the HTML for your neighborhood page, into your WordPress HTML/Text Widget, or on any other web authoring tool that allows you to display Javascript Widgets.


View the neighborhood page on your website to see your new Custom Showcase displayed. Listings in this showcase will automatically update to show the latest MLS listings. You can find more information about all of the features associated with Custom Showcases here in our Knowledge Base.


Custom Showcases make a nice addition to your neighborhood page content, sidebar, and website. Use this Widget to create custom landing pages that you control!


We hope you enjoyed your Agent Training Newsletter!