Now you can! Here at the community site on RealtyRankings we provide a community blog where members can write a blog on just about any topic and post it for all other members to read. As a registered member you, too, can have the privilege of submitting blog posts and short articles.

Why would you want to be a guest blogger? Here are a few good reasons:

• Build Your ‘Expert’ Status – Your online marketing efforts may include a strategy to establish yourself as an expert in your real estate niche. Posting a guest blog on RealtyRankings can help you gain extra publicity and acclaim as an individual who is knowledgeable and experienced.

• Spark Discussion – Real estate professionals all have an opinion. You can be a catalyst to a discussion on a hot topic or a subject that is important to everyone. Whether it be a controversial topic, recent news, or just asking the question no one else wants to raise, you will find that our members speak up and join the conversation.

• Link Building to Your Website – Within your guest article or blog post you can provide a link back to your own website. This is sound SEO practice and can help build and improve your own SEO presence for search engines.

• Get Referrals and Leads – There is no telling when someone might read your guest blog post and contact you for further information. Or your blog may be important enough to pass along to another contact. Either way, you have a great place to gain leads and potentially new clients with timely and informative blog posts.

These are just a few good reasons to write guest blogs on our community section. If you haven’t already, register for free to become a member, and start posting today!

Or if you need free real estate content let us know and we’ll be happy to become guest bloggers on your site too.

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!

You need not be a Realtor/Brokerage company that publishes content but if you want to fight the stiff online competition, you must start looking at prudent ways of populating your website with keyword rich content. You will be able get good content from your users through number of ways. It can be through blogs or feedback. You can also think of forums or set up a social media platform. It is totally up to you to choose something that will match your website and your needs. The success of the method that you choose will depend on a number of factors such as user participation level, need for participation, ability of the users to make use of the online content updation tools, effectiveness of the strategies used, etc.

Here are some important factors that will help you make use of the user generated content as part of your SEO efforts

1. Patience: It will take a considerable amount of time before you can get your website users to participate in your content creation efforts. Not all users will be ready to jump into it immediately. However, once the ball starts rolling you will be able to see other users joining in more easily.

2. Age Factor: The age group of your target audience has a lot to say about the success of your efforts here. It has been reported that over 50% of the contribution to user generated content is from the Y Gens and about 46% of the contribution comes from the Generation X. Younger generation is yet to get their feet wet in this area. Your website should encourage all age groups to participate by providing the necessary baits. There are no hard and fast rules regarding what has to be used and what should not be used. It is totally up to you to choose.

3. Redefining your idea of user generated content: If you limit the avenues through which the users can participate to feedback, testimonial, blog comments and forum posts, you will not be able to tap the potential of user-generated content fully. Allow other formats including audio and video formats.

4. Choose what works for you: Not all forms of content generation will be suitable for all sites. Pick a method that works for your niche and your website in particular. It can be anything between online polls to an extravagant contest.

5. User generated content has high search engine value: When your users generate the content, it will be relevant to your website and they will automatically use targeted keywords, categories or tags.
This will make the content best-optimized content for your website.

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!

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