All Entries Tagged With: "real estate"

Does Your Blog Ghostwriter Spam?

While Blog Content Provider paved the way into business blog ghostwriting, there are other services up and coming. We welcome them. It keeps us on our toes. But we’ve also noticed that most of these companies charge more than we do. Recently, a competitor engaged in a spam tactic that I think you all should know about.

Trackbacking is a legitimate practice that involves linking to another blog and the post from which you link appears as a comment on that other blog. Examples of this practice abound. But there are ways to game trackbacking and scam unsuspecting bloggers into approving an illegitimate trackback that is nothing more than spam.

It happened this way for us: On our Mortgage and Real Estate Blog I recently found a trackback that needed an admin approval (I highly recommend that you set your blog settings to require approval before all comments go live). You should also visit every site by a commenter or trackbacker to ensure the site is good. If the site itself doesn’t meet your approval then don’t approve the comment or trackback. I always do this.

When I visited the trackbacking site by clicking on the URL provided, I perused the blog post of the company feigning a legitimate trackback. The problem was that there was no link in the blog post leading back to our blog. In other words, they programmed their blog software to make it appear as if they were trackbacking to our blog, but the link wasn’t there. It was hidden. That way, the search engines see it, but human visitors do not, cutting off all traffic from their blog to ours. If I’d approved the trackback then the relationship between their blog and ours would have been one sided. They would have benefited from our traffic, but we would not have benefited from theirs.

This is called cloaking. It’s a practice that all of the search engines frown upon. It’s also a widespread practice by devious webmasters who try to gain an advantage in ways that are unfair. If your blogging company engages in this practice then I highly recommend that you drop them immediately and use a company that engages in legitimate and search engine approved tactics.

This trackbacker operating under the veneer of legitimate practices was a blog ghostwriting competitor trying to target real estate agents with their services. Beware of these types of spamming operations. They will hurt your business more than help it.

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?

By Alyice Edrich

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.

Realtor Blogs: Good News and Bad News

Since we at Blog Content Provider ghostwrite a large collection of real estate blogs, I thought I’d share a guest article on real estate blogging that I found at EzineArticles:

Realtor Blogs, Good News and Bad News
By Tara Jacobsen

About 6 months ago I started to see information about real estate blogging everywhere! It was in the National Association of Realtors Magazine the same month that it was featured in the Florida Realtor Magazine. It was in the Agent Direct News and the Broker Agent News. I read an article that said that one of the big brokerages was giving a blog to every one of their agents. Somehow blogging became a HOT HOT HOT topic and realtors around the country could not get enough.

Let me state for the record that I think real estate blogging is a fabulous thing! It gives agents a forum to show their expertise and allows the public to put a personality on the agent photo. It allows groups of agents and associated vendors like mortgage bankers and title people to get information out the public that is not common knowledge. I think that every agent (make that every human) who has something to say and who will say it several times a week should have a blog!

Some of my favorite stand alone blogs are Bloodhound Blog – a compilation of over 20 industry experts who have great conversations about all things real estate related. I also like local blogger Kris Berg of the San Diego Home Blog who mixes humor with practical information about her local market. I have also proudly been a part of launching The Tara And Sheila Show Blog which is a mix of real estate and marketing information. The main thing these blogs have are interested authors who are committed to provided quality content. They also have very different looks but still all are obviously maintained by professional people.

Active Rain is also a great spot for realtors. According to their site “ActiveRain is a Bellevue, WA based technology/media company hybrid that operates the largest and most active social network in the real estate space. ” They are showing that they have 78,412 active members today. This is a super easy interface to use that lets realtors communicate with each other and which answers civilian reader questions all in one place. The top 2 realtors are Sharon Simms and Randy L. Prothero and they are obviously very active in this blogging community. Sharon is a hometown girl, working in St. Petersburg Florida, right in my backyard!

That having been said there are MANY blogs with one or no posts. I was not going to call anyone out but this blog has so little information that there will not be any harm to the innocent! Also, do not begin your blog with a post that starts with “this is my new real estate blog”! Start it with a great post and carry that on throughout your entire blogging career!

Visit http://www.marketingartfully.com for information how to pick your niche and market your business!

Realtors and mortgage bankers/brokers, please feel free to use this article provided this reference is included and all links remain active.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tara_Jacobsen

While real estate communities like ActiveRain can be great places to network with others within your profession, I would still encourage real estate professionals to have their own domain name. You can put a blog on your existing real estate blog for no additional expense or purchase a domain name separate from your existing website and set up a blog there for $10 per year. Having your blog on a domain that you control is the best way to build a brandable business blog. And there’s nothing that says you can’t have all three types of blog:

• Company blog on your website
• Promotional blog on a separate domain name
• Networking blog on ActiveRain or other real estate network

But you should have a blog to remain competitive. If you can’t write, don’t want to write, or don’t have the time to write your blog yourself then hire a ghostwriter.