How To Enhance Your Real Estate Blog Part 2

July 31, 2009

In the first part of this article I discussed ways you can enhance your blog’s appeal and effectiveness, thereby building your real estate business.  Here are some additional ways of doing that:

Adding Property Listings

It’s a very good idea to have your property listings within your blog as well as on your website.  Blogs usually allow people to subscribe to receive your content via RSS feeds.  RSS feeds are miniature news wires like the Associated Press or Reuters where people can sign up to receive only your content.  When people sign up for your RSS feed they can either have your blog updates emailed to them or have the update’s content incorporated into their website automatically.

Readers often prefer subscribing via RSS rather than signing up for your mailing list because they don’t have to give you their email address.  People are often worried about giving out their email address to people they don’t know for fear of winding up on other mailing lists and getting spam.  So having your listings available via RSS feed can definitely boost the rate at which people are signing up for your mailing list.

Having your listings available via RSS feed allows any buyer reps in your area to easily display your listings on their website.  There is software available specifically designed for posting your listings with the WordPress blog and making it available via RSS feed.

Plugins

These are programs that work with your blog for enhancing it in certain ways.  They can really add some spice to your listings and get more people signing up for your mailing list via RSS feed.  For instance, there’s a plugin called Feed Wrangler.  It enables you to have your listings automatically sent to various websites such as major real estate listing portals like Zillow and Trulia.  Zillow is like an international MLS.  It currently has data on 92 million homes and gets nearly 9 million unique visitors a month.  This can be especially useful for helping property investors from foreign countries find your listings.

Website Analytics

I have a saying: “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”.  Of course there is a lot of technological wizardry you can put on your website today, and content galore ready made for your blog.  But if you don’t know how well your website and blog are being received by your target audience, you may be investing a lot of time, money and energy into enhancing your website in ways that simply don’t interest your target audience.  So your website should definitely have robust reporting.  Many website providers provide this for free or at a low cost.  I recommend Google Analytics for this purpose.

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Filed under: Networking Tips,Realtor Websites - Best Practices,SEO For Realtor Websites

Tags: blog, blogging, email newsletter, email prospects, Feed Wrangler, real estate blog, real estate blogging, real estate education, real estate educators, realtor email newlsetter, Search Engine Optimization, search engine training, search engine workshops, SEO, website training tips, Zillow