Gabrielle Jeans’s Weblog

I recently read about a Phoenix based real estate professional who writes a blog with exemplary practices and it’s getting him great results.  He devotes about two hours a day, four days a week, to blogging which includes visiting other blogs and making comments. His blog had 380,000 visitors and 1.4 million page views in the first half of 2009.  That’s nearly 2100 visitors a day!

Reading blogs related to yours is among the best ways of learning about real estate best practices, your local market, and getting ideas for writing new articles for your blog.  

Emphasize Your RSS Feed

The best way to ensure your blog visitors are reading your blog content regularly and not just that one time they visited your website is by urging them to sign for your RSS feed.  An RSS feed is like a mini news wire like Reuters or the Associated Press, except it’s only your blog content.  When people sign up for your RSS feed, they automatically get emailed your articles every time you update your blog.  People are more inclined to sign up for your RSS feed than by joining your personal email database because with RSS you never actually get their email address, only the feed does.  Many people are wary about giving our their email address for fear of winding up on spammer’s lists, so offering an RSS feed is a guaranteed way of proving to them you’ll never divulge their email address because you never got it in the first place!

Email adds a new dimension to social networking because your RSS subscribers can forward your messages to whomever they like.  Isn’t it great when you have other people promoting your knowledge (and therefore promoting your business)?

Don’t Wait For Results Before Taking Blogging Seriously

Many real estate professionals approach blogging like bathers who dip their toe into the pool to see how the water is.  They make a miniscule effort to understand social networking, blogging, SEO, etc., so they only make a modest effort with any of it with a “Try Before You Buy” mentality.  So if their efforts fail to yield results, they give up rather than trying to understand where they went wrong with their approach, fixing it, and pressing onward.

The most successful real estate professionals never approach anything in their business this way.  They go to great lengths to understand something that reportedly can help their business, assess it’s potential for helping them, and either adopt and pursue it relentlessly or reject it altogether.

Take it from me if this article hasn’t already convinced you: blogging is well worth the effort for your real estate business.  But just as important is getting your website high ranking in search engines.  Learn how to get this yourself (or how to hire someone to do it) by taking my course Building Your Ecommerce Business.  This course has been approved by the Registrar, REBBA 2002 to qualify for 6 credits.