All Entries Tagged With: "Lead Generation"
Do Real Estate Agents Need Blogs?
We had a real estate agent as a client who was getting more leads from our daily blog posting on her blog than she’d ever received before. She stopped using our service because she said she wasn’t closing any sales. Hey, agent! That’s not my job. It’s your job. But if I can drive traffic to your website and make people pick up the phone to call you from your real estate blog then it’s the best marketing tool you can have.
This article explains it very well:
Do You Need a Real Estate Blog?
Every real estate agent should have his (or her) own website and with web hosting fees and domain registrations so affordable, there’s no reason not to “get with the times”. Websites are more than business cards or lead generators, they’re customer relation tools. By adding “search listings” or “featured listings” to your website, it becomes a dynamic tool that allows your customers to know firsthand what’s available on the market. And with the advanced technology of blogs, you can keep your customers informed without pestering them.
Blogs are social networks that work for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They never close for holidays, vacations, or sick leave. And if it’s good enough, there will always be someone recommending you via a link exchange, a reference post, a forwarding email, and even word-of-mouth.
Realtors® are probably the slowest group of individuals to embrace the idea of blogging to generate leads, and who can blame them. We’ve all been taught to “get out there and sell”, “you’re not making money if you’re sitting behind your desk”, and finally, “person to person networking gains more leads than any other type of advertising and/or marketing method”. But times are changing and you need to change with them. People are growing more and more accustomed to “trusting” people they’ve only met on the Internet-which makes blogging a great lead generating tool!
And if that’s not enough to convince you to give blogging a try, think about this: People turn to the Internet before they open their telephone books, before they call 4-1-1, before they read their daily newspaper, and before they hit the bookstores.
Don’t you want to be the first person they see when they type in “your city, your state, real estate agent”? Don’t you want to earn their trust and gain their business?
Alyice Edrich is the author of Tid-Bits For Making Money With E-books. Learn how you can earn $10,000 a year or more selling information you already possess-from the comfort of your own home. Visit http://thedabblingmumpress.com to order a copy today!
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Alyice_Edrich
Seriously, a blog can drive traffic to your real estate blog and increase your business. A blog isn’t used to close sales. It’s used to generate leads and communicate with the market place. Why not look into ways that you can use a real estate blog today, and join the ranks of the dozen real estate professionals we have as clients.
Use Your Blog To Generate Leads
Sometimes it helps to have someone else say it. I recently found a great article on blogging and use your blog to generate leads. This coincides with an earlier blog post I wrote on the same subject.
This is an article by David Hugh that confirms our own philosophy regarding blogging and sales:
How to Use Blogs – Blogging to Generate Leads For Your Home Business – Network Marketing?
By David Hugh
Blogs can be a terrific source for leads for your home business &/or mlm business. Here is how you could do that. First of all, you can add a sign up form on the side bar of your blog to collect the name and email address of your blog visitor. You could offer a free report or ebook or something of value in exchange for their contact information. Maybe your upline or the company you are an mlm distributor for has something for you to give away also.
The key point is you are trying to collect names for further follow-up and you can use your blog as a way to accomplish that. You would need an autoresponder too. This gives you a chance to deliver the free information you promised.
It also gives you the opportunity to follow up and present more useful information. This is called relationship building and is an essential part of building a successful mlm business and converting some of your subscribers into distributors. It has been said a person has to hear about something up to 11 times before they act on it.
So now you have the basics down about how you do it. Let’s go back and talk some more about blogging. You can successfully use your blog to talk about your home business &/or mlm business as well as other topics related to MLM as an industry, internet marketing, and other things related to home business and work at home.
Incorporating a strategy of offering free training and information is a great way to generate leads from your blog and the traffic you get to it. This is a very soft sell approach to giving first and receiving later.
Getting traffic to a blog is for another training article, but suffice it to say that you will need traffic. That means promoting your blog with every free, nearly free, and paid advertising method you can come up with and afford.
Generally setting up a Blogger.com is the fastest and easiest way to get a blog up and running. It is owned by Google and is very user friendly. For a little more comprehensive blogging platform look at setting up a hosting account and using WordPress. It offers many plugins that are very search engine friendly and make adding social bookmarking to your articles easy as well.
Because of the many benefits of blogging you should get one started and use it to generate leads and to build a mailing list for future new distributors as well. In addition, you may want to obtain an Autoresponder to automate your business via email marketing to bring your business to greater heights.
David Hugh is an expert internet marketer and writes on various topics of work from home business & home-based business. To get your secrets & tips for work from home business, visit: http://www.workfromhomessecret.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Hugh
Blogging is a good form of lead generation because it’s about building relationships. You don’t have to make every single blog post a knock-down world-changing event. The idea is to use it to build relationships with your target market and customers. Effective bloggers are consistent with their message and provide a place for people to go to build community and learn about a particular subject they are interested in. If you don’t have the time to write your blog yourself, you can always hire a ghostwriter. But it’s essential that you have a tool that helps you generate leads.
Your Blog As A Lead Generation Tool
Much has been said about using a blog as a marketing tool but most people writing about this subject don’t really get into specifics. I think it’s necessary to define the purpose for your blog before you begin. Is it going to be a traffic tool where you send traffic to your website then close the sale? Is it going to be a way that you draw people to subscribe to your e-zine? Are you trying to sell through the blog? It’s important to define what you want it to do before you begin.
One of the legitimate purposes for a blog is to use it as a lead generation tool. There are several ways to do that, but they all involve writing compelling content that draws people to read. Then, every blog post you write needs to focus on helping you obtain that overall goal.
Two aspects of blogging that you will use to draw traffic to your blog are SEO and social media marketing. The SEO part is the use of keywords and links to get your blog posts to rank in the search engines for words that you think people will use to find you. If you do that part successfully then you’ll draw more traffic to your blog from organic search rankings. But just because you appear in the SERPs doesn’t mean they’ll click on your link.
Your blog post title will go a long way to getting people to click the link. You want it to be compelling. It must contain your primary keyword and it must get people to click your link in the SERPs to read your blog post. Then your blog post must contain some great content that gets people to take the next course of action: Opt in to your e-zine, visit your website, etc. Make sure that you pick one thing for each blog post that is the goal for that blog post. What do you want people to do? Define the action you want readers of that blog post to take then write the blog post toward that end. This is lead generation. You are leading your readers to a specific course of action.
