Real Estate Blogging Best Practices Part 2
August 31, 2009
Be Yourself
The reason blogs have so much value is they’re not marketing materials per se. People always want to know the reality of a business’s products or services, and they don’t trust a business’ own say-so about how great they are at what they do for obvious reasons. A blog allows people to peel back the professional image and see you for who you really are. So be yourself whenever you write your blog. Don’t try to live up to what you think people want to see or censor yourself over concerns of what’s professional because people will see through all of that and you’ll come across as phony. Let your personality shine through in your blog. Give people what they want: solid, timely, thorough, easily understood information on the local real estate market.
Don’t Make Your Blog An Island
Social networking is about dialogue, not monologue. Many real estate professionals make the mistake of only writing on their blog and no where else. Doing that is like being on a deserted island, writing a few journal pages, putting them in a bottle, and throwing it out to sea. It will take a long time for your message to get read because you have to wait for search engines to index it, and that can take weeks (if not months), depending on how often you update your blog.
Blogs offer interactivity – on my blog, anyone is free to make comments on any of the articles. Those comments are posted for all to see, and I often reply to them. By making comments on other blogs, you’ve got an opportunity for drawing people to your blog.
You need to understand a crucial fact about how search engines rank your website. There are two primary means they rank you: by back links (IE having your links on other web pages) and keywords on your web pages. However, 80% of how search engines rank your website is from back links and only 20% is from your site’s keywords. So making comments on blogs with similar content to yours and posting your website’s link with your comments is among the very best ways to build up back links. Find out the most popular blogs on topics related to your local real estate and post comments to them first. Enticing and diverting traffic from more established blogs to yours is a great way of getting traffic sooner rather than later.
Filed under: Marketing Tips,Networking Tips,Realtor Websites - Best Practices,SEO For Realtor Websites
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