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!

Blog posts do not need to be long, and do not need to be filled with awe inspiring content every time.  A blog post on your real estate website may be just a few lines long with a link to an interesting real estate web article.  Or it could be a short review and link to one of your own outstanding articles elsewhere on the site.

When you do write a blog post for your real estate website, you should always consider which keyword should be optimized within the article body of the post.  Keywords play an integral part in getting your blog post noticed by search engines.

Post frequently

Blog every day if you can.  Web search engine algorithms pick up more on websites that are updated frequently.  The more frequently you post and update your real estate website the better chance you can get new traffic from search engines.

Comments

Your blog posts can stimulate discussion and motivate your readers to post comments on your blog.  Comments are also a good way to keep your real estate website updated and show new readers that others read your blog as well.  Encourage comments from your readers.  Ask questions or take a poll in your blog posts.  Comment on other real estate blogs.  Usually they will reciprocate and comment on yours as well.  Your real estate website blog can be an interesting discussion hub for your readers.

The benefits of blogging for your real estate website are great.  Don’t neglect a blog on your website just because you think it is time consuming.  A simple blog updated frequently takes little time and brings big rewards for your real estate internet marketing traffic.

Below are a few of my favorite real estate blogs:

Austin real estate blog

Atlanta real estate blog

Dallas real estate blog

Las Vegas real estate blog

Real Estate Blog Lab

Sellsius real estate blog

Keywords can be a single word, or a short phrase that would be searched frequently on search engines like Google.  Before you ever begin your real estate article or blog post consider what your topic will be.  Broad keywords such as “real estate” are not narrow enough in scope to set your article apart.  But you can focus a topic on a more specific keyword such as “real estate calculator” that would more likely appear in a search list.

Keywords benefit your real estate website when they benefit your readers. Whether your readers come from a search engine result, or a link from a social networking site, or even a return visitor, they will read what catches their eye and interests them.  In that case, then, it is important to choose real estate keywords and topics that will keep your traffic coming back.

To determine a good keyword for your real estate website consider a few and run them through a keyword analyzing tool such as Google AdWords, or SEOTools.  Many sites like these can be used for free, but others you must pay a subscription fee.  If you want to write a lot of content and drive traffic to your real estate website the small fee may be worth the cost.

With the help of these tools you review the results of how often a keyword is searched, and receive suggestions for alternate keywords for your real estate topic.

When you have the right keywords for your real estate article or blog post, you will have the right focus and strategy to make the most and best use of that posting.

But free advertising and real estate link building doesn’t come without effort.  You have to do some work placing your link on other websites.  But when you know where to go to strategically place your real estate website link the process becomes easier and faster.

Here are some easy ways you can get your real estate website link in many places:

Social Media

Create numerous accounts in many social networking websites and put your link there frequently.  Some common popular social websites are Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Del.icio.us, and the ever popular Facebook.  When you sign up for an account you can begin interacting in the social community by submitting your real estate website link and engaging in discussions.  The more you participate the more your real estate website link will show up.

Blogging and Commenting

A frequently updated real estate website helps with search engine rankings. But in addition to your regular blogging, you should read other real estate website blogs and make frequent comments.  It does not need to be much, just a line or two.  But when you do you commonly have the option to leave your name and web link.  Frequent blog comments can drive a lot of traffic to your website.

Article directory submissions

There are also many article submission websites such as EzineArticles, and GoArticles.If you can spare a moment or two every now & then, write and submit a good, short article with great content that contains links to your real estate website.  These article sites have many readers so they could potentially drive significant new traffic to your real estate website.

These are just a few examples, but link building is an important step for generating new and on-going traffic to your websites.  Get out there and create some links!

Update by Cedar City

I didn’t forget, just didn’t cover them on this article , but forums and directories are another great resource to obtain one-way links. While there are 1000s of free directories, as with life the best ones you’ll need to pay for.

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.