Starting a blog is quite easy to do, given the robust and easy to use sites like Blogger.com and WordPress.com. These sites allow you to set up a free real estate blog. If you want to take it one step further, consider starting your own blog with a domain name and a hosting service.

Making an Online Impact

In order to make it in today’s real estate industry you must do what you can to make a great impact online. Let’s face it: everyone is on the Internet today, and if you want a competitive edge in the industry you must make an online presence; and one of the most effective ways of accomplishing this is through blogs.

The Process of Creating a Blog

Blogs are quite easy to create: simply create interesting, educational or entertaining information related to the real estate industry or you real estate business and add links that take readers back to your website. Your blogs should be current, relevant and uploaded on a frequent basis to your blog. If you have a current blog, it is quite easy to create a new post, and the entire process is accomplished in the time it takes to write new information.

One of the most important points about writing a blog is to make sure it is filled with interesting information that people want to read. This is not the time to sell yourself or your real estate business, and it should never be filled with any information that could be perceived as a sales pitch; otherwise you can be sure to lose your readers before they even finish reading the blog. You can certainly talk about topics that are relevant to your business; just don’t try to sell yourself.

Directing Traffic to your Blog

You will need to get traffic to your blog, and to do that you will need to promote your blog and let people know each time your blog is updated. You can also submit your blog articles on free article directories that will guide readers back to your blog through internal links. It may take some time to start generating traffic to your website through a blog, but it can be done!

However, this does not mean that it happens to all the SEO techniques. Even today good number of old SEO techniques work well. Amongst such techniques, you can list link request to build links for your real estate website. By making other websites and blogs to link to your website or blog, your ranking will be boosted even today.

One of the drawbacks here is that not many real estate webmasters know how to make proper link requests. Their faulty approach makes their request mails dumped into the spam mail folder. With a little bit of finesse in their approach, you can get links that will speak volumes for your search engine rankings. Here are some tips that will help you get better results.

Building Relationships – Try to avoid requesting for a link in your first email, first phone call or first meeting. Your intention should be to build a relationship with the webmaster from which you intend to get a link. If you have a blog, it will be much easier to establish relationship with other blog owners by leaving good feedbacks and comments in other blogs. You will also be able to interact with the other bloggers through chat and email. This should help you create a network of online friends. Once you have befriended them, they would not mind linking to your blog or website.

Subject line of your link request – If you make mistakes here, your mails are sure to enter the spam mail folder. So avoid subject lines such as “Link to my site”, “Visit my website” etc. This step is all the more crucial if you are contacting someone for the first time. Subject lines like, “About your blog, “name of the blog” will elicit the interest of the recipient.

Personal Greetings – Make sure to use the name of the person that you are contacting. Do not use a generalized mail with greetings such as Dear Webmaster or Dear Blogger, etc. It will work out well by personalizing the mail to the individual person that you are contacting. You should also give them enough information about yourself so that your mail will look genuine. Introduce yourself properly and give them the necessary contact information including email address, website address and phone number.

This includes introducing yourself (if you have not had previous contact) and providing multiple contact details (website URL, phone number, etc).

Highlight the Benefits – No webmaster is obliged to respond to your request in a positive way. You must give them something in return for linking to you. So list all the benefits of linking to your blog or website. Just to ask for free links without offering them anything in return will make you sound too rude. If your website or blog does not have anything in particular to offer them as benefits, then you can create some impressive content that will be of use to their visitors in some way and inform them of presence of such content in your website which they can link to and benefit. If they see by linking to your website or to your blog their website visitors will benefit in a positive way then they will be more inclined to consider your request.

For instance, if you come across a blog post that poses questions on a certain topic, then you can provide the required solution that are supported by facts in your blog and request the blog to link to your website or blog which provides a solution to the problem raised by their blog.

Blogs has 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 have 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 or 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!

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!

Lucky for us blog readers, most blogs are just a diary style “here’s what I did today…”.  These are easy to spot and easy to click away from.  Only blogs that have something meaningful to say, offering value to the reader, will achieve a volume of high traffic and keep them coming back for more.

If you want a real estate blog with the goal of obtaining new and returning readers, you will need to post something of value for them on a regular basis.  Become an expert that they can go to for advice.  Be the authority on a real estate topic.  Popular blogs only get that way when readers like the content and believe that the blogger is an authority.

So how do you become an “authority” on a real estate topic?

Books

Have a library full of real estate books.  You can have reference to hundreds of topics about real estate agency, real estate finance, closing house sales, etc.   Use your books as a regular reference.

Internet research

There is plenty of real estate information on the internet.  Perform searches and research what topics are blogged about frequently.  Then blog about something else!  You want to find a niche that has not already oversaturated the blogosphere.

Ask an expert

Interview other real estate experts and professionals that you know.  Especially if they do not have a blog themselves.  You can post quality information from people who offer great real estate advice on your own blog and become the go-to expert who knows where to get the best information.

However, to maintain your rankings and readership, you’ll need to update your sites content as often as possible. The more insightful and interesting your websites content is, the more successful it will be.

For a limited time we are offering FREE content to any real estate related website. For complete details, visit our Free Real Estate Content Page.

What is a dofollow blog? When a webmaster adds a DoFollow Plugin (which will remove the NoFollow tag) the comments you leave with your website link will be counted by the Search Engines as a back link.