Co-brand your clients’ Zillow experience

Many real estate professionals and publications have links from their websites to pages on Zillow.com. If you link to Zillow we now have a great way to show you just how grateful we are that you do! Any website that links to any page on Zillow.com can virtually follow their site’s visitors to Zillow.com and co-brand their experience on the site. And co-branding includes a handy link back to your website.

So what does this mean for web publishers, exactly? When someone clicks on a Zillow link on your Web site or blog they will see your branding at the top of each page they visit on Zillow.com. Co-branding includes your profile photo, contact information and a link to your Web site. There are 2 main requirements for co-branding your links — you must have an active Zillow profile and the link you co-brand must reference your Zillow profile name.

Here are four ways a web publisher can participate in the co-branding program;

• Any link to Zillow can be co-branded. Simply add the code “#{scrnnm=zillowscreenname}” to any links to a page on Zillow.com. You will need to substitute your Zillow account screen name for “zillowscreenname.” If you are a blogger, any link on your blog can now generate a co-branded experience. [And a hint to PHP developers out there; a WordPress plugin to automatically add Zillowscreen name to any blogged Zillow links would be super-cool!]
• Mortgage rate widgets are co-branded by default. Our brand new mortgage rate widgets provide great content for a real estate website or blog. Anyone who clicks on the rate widget on your site will see your co-branding when they arrive in the Zillow Mortgage Marketplace.
• Profile badges are co-branded by default. Also brand new today are profile badges that bloggers and others can use to link to their profiles on Zillow. To see what badges are available to you, simply check out your profile page for more details.
• Zillow API partners can co-brand their API links to Zillow. If you use any of Zillow’s API’s to publish Zestimates, property records or local information on your site, we encourage you to co-brand those links.

Successful web publishers inevitably refer their visitors to other sites for additional information. Whether you send them to Zillow for detailed mortgage rate information, home values, local data and photos of neighborhoods and cities, a look at Zillow’s quarterly home value reports, or just to get remodeling ideas – you will now remain top of mind with your photo or logo along with a link back to your Web site on top of every page during their current session.

Happy linking!