All Entries Tagged With: "content"
Consistent Daily Blogging Still Works
In a forum the other day I had an interesting conversation with a couple of marketers. They believe somehow that content isn’t king. In fact, one of them went so far as to say that links are king. But if you try to build links to a web page with no content then Google is going to have a hey-day with you. My view is that links are just another form of content – off-page content.
Links are important, but on-page content should always be your starting point. Some people think that quantity of content is what makes or breaks your site or blog. Not true. Quality of content is far more important. But quantity does help. Especially on a blog.
Google will only rank one page on a website for a particular key phrase. Which blog post do you want that to be? Preferably, it will be your blog’s index page. But you won’t get your index page ranked highly on Google for popular key phrases without targeting that key phrase consistently over time. We’ve proven that you can do this. Yes, it takes time. And the more competition you have for your key phrase, the longer it will take.
At Blog Content Provider, we don’t discourage alternate ways of driving traffic and making money. But we do encourage using the search engines to take advantage of the natural, free ways you can rank your pages. Consistent daily blogging is one of those ways. We’ve done it time and time again, and we’ll keep doing it as long as it works.
Types Of Real Estate Blogs That Have Been Used Effectively
Here’s an excellent article for real estate professionals on the different types of blog that you can start for your local real estate market to help you market your business:
Real Blogging – 3 Creative Ways to Use a Real Estate Blog
Blogs are a simple and efficient way to publish information onto the Web. Blogging programs are flexible, versatile, easy to set up and even easier to use. Because of these benefits, people from many different industries are using blogs in creative ways to support their business.
Real estate agents have also found many effective uses for the blog. This is the industry I am most familiar with, so I would like to contribute a few ideas of my own. Here are five ways real estate agents can use blogging to support their business.
The author actually only introduces three types of real estate blog, but I’ll provide the other two. We have had many clients succeed with their real estate blogs and I know we can help you too.
1. Relocation Advice and Support
A savvy agent could create a blog catering to people who plan to relocate to the agent’s city. This would be a great way to keep these folks informed on local real estate issues. It’s also a good way for the agent to connect with future clients who are moving to the area. Blogging programs are easy to set up, so an agent could create one specifically for this purpose.
This strategy is perfect for areas with a high rate of buyer influx and population growth. For example, here in the Austin area where I live, there are a lot of folks relocating from California. If I were a local real estate professional, I would launch a blog that catered to these people. It would be a great way to generate new business, so it would be a worthwhile venture.
Relocation advice is one of the most popular types of real estate blog. Not only can you share information about relocating to your particular area, but you can also provide general relocation tips like this moving company does. In fact, why not partner with a moving company in your area to write a combined blog dealing with relocation advice? You can market both of your companies and share the expense.
2. Local Real Estate News Source
An enterprising and web-savvy agent could also manage a blog like a real estate news website. It could be hosted under its own domain with its own web address, separate from the agent’s main website. That way the blog could be named something appropriate, like the “Raleigh Realty Weekly” (or whatever is applicable to the agent’s locality and specialty).
This publishing strategy would benefit the publisher in several ways. First of all, the agent gains another source of Internet traffic, which can be valuable in terms of business growth. Theoretically, two websites could mean twice the traffic … and twice the leads.
This is also a great way to network with professionals in related industries, such as home inspectors, mortgage brokers, home stagers and more. These folks could even be invited to contribute information to the site.
A news blog would also help the agent establish a level of authority. For example, few agents would be able to say something like: “Jane is also the publisher of the Dallas Real Estate Review…”
Excellent advice. One well-written mortgage and real estate news blog is the Mortgage and Real Estate Blog. This is a blog that covers the mortgage, banking, and real estate industries. It also sometimes promotes real estate and mortgage blogs that use the Blog Content Provider services or that choose to sponsor the blog (contact BCP).
When it comes to blogging, the real estate industry probably has the most natural creative outlets for meeting the needs of its customer base. Why not use them?
3. Timely Market Updates
Blogging is easy, even for people with little or no web-publishing experience. As a result, blogs are ideally suited for updating an audience about timely topics. This is why a lot of realty professionals use blogging programs in the first place. They realize that their audience (home buyers and sellers) wants current information about the local housing market. So these Internet-savvy agents use their blogs to share information about local sales trends, housing prices, new homes for sale, new neighborhoods being developed, etc.
Blogging seems easy, but it really isn’t. You have to understand how to get attention for your blog and many self bloggers stumble through it without ever achieving any level of success with it. But blogging about your local real estate market is probably the easiest way for real estate self bloggers to get in on the action. Doing it this way will demonstrate your level of knowledge on your market, but it will also mean you are just like everyone else. You have to do something to set yourself apart from other real estate bloggers like Adrienne Francis has done.
Conclusion
These are just a few of the ways you can use a real estate professional can use a blog to grow his or her business. There are plenty of other creative strategies as well. The point of this article is merely to open your eyes to the possibilities of blogging. Not all of these ideas will be right for you, but one of them could be. So do some experimentation and see what you can come up with. Use the ideas I’ve listed above to get your creative juices flowing. Good luck.
Brandon Cornett publishes a number of websites related to real estate marketing, mortgage web site strategies and more. For more marketing tips, visit the author online at http://www.smartmortgagemarketing.com.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Brandon_Cornett
This is a great article by Brandon Corbett, but as he said at the end, there are other ways you can make a real estate blog work for you. One other type of real estate blog that you can write is a community blog. Instead of focusing entirely on real estate, you can make your blog’s focus the entire community that you serve. You can lead people to the parks and rec department of your city, discuss neighborhood improvement, community service projects, or anything of service to your community. This type of blog will make you a pillar of the community and not just a real estate agent.
Another type of blog that you can write is a local listing blog. Why not make each blog post highlight a listing in your portfolio? This is relatively simple and can be done through RSS feeds or simply by copying and pasting the descriptions of homes in your portfolio listings to your blog. There will be a high degree of duplicate content with this type of blog, which may cause it to not do so well in the search engines, but because it is a blog and not a static website, you can reach your market through ping lists that are off limits to static web pages where real estate listings usually appear. You can essentially use this type of blog to target a market demographic that you can’t reach through normal organic search marketing.
There are other types of real estate blogs that you can put to good use as well:
- Hybrid – Combine one or more of these types of blogs into one.
- Specialty – Write a green real estate blog or target another specialized market segment.
- Use your imagination – There is no limit to what you can achieve through a real estate blog. Have an idea? Let us know. Blog Content Provider is ready when you are to do what they say can’t be done.
3 Things Your Blog Needs To Succeed
When it comes to business blogging, or commercial blogging, it’s not the same thing as personal blogging or blogging to make money. You are blogging to make money, but you are not trying to squeeze out revenue from your blog. You are using your blog as a marketing tool to lead people to your website so that you can close the sale and make money on your products and services. Your blog is the lead generator; your website is the salesman.
So what does your lead generation blog need in order to do its job well? Here are the three absolutely essential ingredients to make sure your company blog stands out and drives traffic to your website:
- Quality, original content – Every day. We’re not talking about private label rights or recycled eye candy. Graphics are nice, but content is better. Eat a meal and not just a snack! Take your company talking points and turn them into a blog by getting into a real conversation with your customers about their needs and your desire to fill a niche within the marketplace. It all starts with quality, original content.
- Links – You need to link to your website. Not just the home page either. I’m talking about real links to every page that is important on your website. And your links need to be in the body of your blog posts as well as in your sidebar blogroll. Take your important keywords and turn them into anchor text and link to each page on your website using the appropriate anchor text.
- The right template – It can be custom-made, but it doesn’t have to be. An off-the-shelf template works just as well as long as it is SEOd properly. Your blog template needs to be crawlable so making sure that the code in your template makes it easy for the search engines to find what they need is absolutely essential. Your blog template must be able to attract a reader’s eye quickly and not drive them away, so attractiveness is important but even an ugly template with the right SEO will get you the traffic you are looking for. When it comes to getting ranked in the search engines, SEO is far more important than being pretty.
These are the three most essential elements to a successful company blog. Other things are nice, but without these three things going for you, you might as well hang it up. Everything else is gravy.
Does Your Blog Have Original Content
I see blogs every day that simply copy posts from other blogs and link back to them. Some blogs are just lists of links to other blogs and that’s it. Do these blogs do well in the search engines? Generally, no. There’s no original content.
These blogs mostly rely on traffic from other, more popular, blogs in the form of trackback links. They copy your posts and link back to it as a trackback hoping that you’ll approve their comment and your readers will click the comment link and visit their blog. They then sell advertising using traffic numbers gained from these trackbacks. Sometimes they slap AdSense ads on the blogs and hope to scrape a few bucks that way. Is this ethical?
Probably not, but even more important than the ethical issue is the business model. If the company can make more than $10 on AdSense or ad revenues then they’ve run a profitable business. Many of them do. That’s why they do it. But all they really do is scrape a few dollars over the course of a year. Imagine selling a $50 ad to a handful of businesses over the course of a single year. Payout = $10; income = $100 or more. Not much, but if you do that enough times then you’ll have a decent income just from scraping other people’s content. And you can do that with no rankings.
But why would you? If you’re lazy, OK, it’s a lazy way to steady income. But don’t count on anyone ever really doing business with you if you are trying to run a legitimate business. If you use these lazy tactics and word gets out about it then your customers will not want to do business with you. Short term gains = long term credibility issues.
Legitimate businesses trying to run legitimate blogs need to have original content in their blog posts. Write about important issues facing your industry. Attract real traffic within your niche. Don’t play games with other people’s content.
