Blogs have gained enormous popularity on the web. Many people used to believe that blogging is always very personal and basically meant for young generation.

People previously used to express their feeling, thoughts, daily ramblings via a blog, but not so anymore. Blogs are now widely used for everything from niche sites, news, journals to a standard online corporate media.  Having a blog together with your regular Real Estate Business website gives you a lot of benefits. We will be looking at some of them below:

1.    Blogs allow you to build relationship with your customer: A regular website is no different than your daily newspaper – Its static, you give out information to your customer and you hope that they will ‘take’ action. But on the other hand blogs are by default very ‘interactive’ in nature and allows you to have a ‘two-way conversation’. Thus, when you put up something in your company blog, your customer can come and read it and also respond to your message via a comment. So basically blogs gives you a platform to have a direct conversation with your customers and the customer gets a feel of a real ‘human-being’ behind your shiny corporate logo.

2.    Blogs helps you to build your reputation: Customers always prefer to do business with companies they feel they know. Your Real Estate business may have a shiny new website, but does it send the right message about your company to your customers? Does your real estate site makes your visitors think that you are out of their leash? You may be helping hundreds of people to find their dream home, but does your new customers know that by seeing your website? Even though you may have a couple of testimonials up, sometimes its just not enough to convince a new customer. Because unless you are a big brand, you simply have no reputation when it comes to your new prospective clients. Your blog can help you to build that reputation. For example, you can probably blog about some of the issues & problems that every new home owner faces during their buying cycle (you may also refer to some of your ‘real’ past clients) and then you can give away your expert tips to solve some of the issues. So by blogging about things that new customers can benefit  from – you are not only just helping them for free but at the same time you are discreetly building a reputation for yourself and your business.

3.    Blogs gives you free Publicity: Blogs are a great way to gain free publicity for your business. When you write a blog post that has useful information, you will notice that, often people will send it to their friends via different social networking & bookmarking sites.  Thus your reach automatically broadens and your content goes viral to a more diversified group of people without any serious effort from your part. So your business automatically gets some free publicity and you can also expect a decent number of traffic from there.

4.    Blogs has obvious Search Engine Ranking Advantage: Search engines love Fresh content because they want to provide users a better search experience. Blogs are usually more frequently updated compared to a traditional website. So a search engine like Google & Yahoo gives a lot of importance to content that are hosted in a blog. A small business website won’t consist of more than 30 pages or so, however when you add a blog in your website – it practically opens up a huge opportunity. You can quickly add in new information, news, articles, reviews, promotions etc and constantly keep on adding more and more content to your site via the blog. Thus your site is always up-to-date as far as the search engines are concerned and because of the frequent addition of new content your whole site will be crawled by the engines more frequently, and your blog will naturally generate links from other blogs & sites that will help you in your organic search engine ranking.

5.    Blogs help you to drive traffic to your Business Website: Ultimately every business owner wants to have more visitors to their website. But ask yourself – Do you ever randomly go to a business site and ‘read’ their marketing massage? I bet you don’t! So how can you expect to get visitors when your website has nothing that a normal visitor might be interested in? Unless a person is really interested to buy/sell a house for instance, he won’t be interested in what your business does and so on. However, if your traditional website has a blog attached to it with lots of interesting posts that are somehow related to your industry, it will naturally attract a lot of traffic via the search engines, social media etc. If you are lucky, some of them might even go to your main business website to see what your business does. So blogs are a great way to get indirect traffic & leads to your business site.

So does your real estate business have a blog? What do you blog about? Share in comments!

Tags: Blog, business blogging