PHOTO BY TSCHNIZLEIN

How to Maximize your Blog Traffic
 
 
 
 
Why Your Real Estate Blog Sucks
 
By: Ryan Birdsell
Founder, AgentsBuddy
 
The Net-- Oct 10, 2008  Before writing this article, I thought to myself, “This is probably not the smartest way to market a service.” However, I’m a very realistic kind of person, and love to get straight to the point. Truth be told, your entire Real Estate Web Site may not be working like you expected. Your Real Estate Marketing Strategy could be perfectly thought out in your own eyes. But, let’s look at a couple things before you lose interest and click the close button. This article is by no means to bash your Real Estate web site or Blog, it’s to inform you about a couple things you may or may not already know.
 
Reasons why it might suck:
 
  1. You keep pasting listings, pricing, and street addresses instead of filling it with useable/searchable content.
 
  1. You only have one Real Estate blog on your own Real Estate website.
  
  1. You frequently write about things that are not going to rank or get hit because there are so many other people already writing about these topics.
 
  1. You have no incoming links whatsoever to your blog, only on your Home Navigation bar.
  
  1. You have a social bookmarking button, but don’t know the first thing about how Technorati, Digg, StumbleUpon, and other Social Media Marketing (SMM) actually work.
 
  1. You rarely update your blog.
  
  1. You do not understand SEO and figure people will just show up at your website.
 
  1. Real Estate this, Real Estate that, everything is Real Estate in your Blog.  
 
 
8 reasons are suffice for this discussion. I won’t fluff this article. (Fluffing is an article without true advice and direction). I have a lot of contacts in India; more or less these are hardcore bloggers and have traffic stats that can compare to lots of mainstream sites. How do I know? Because before I pay them for advertising, I look and make sure they are getting the high traffic stats they say. This way, I can actually get some traffic from their blogs and sites. I will share with you some of the things I have learned about Blogs.
 
How you can make it better:
 
  1. Be patient and don’t lose your devotion. It could take a year before you see any sort of turnaround on your content within your blog.
 
  1. Stick with something that has to do with the Home and become a subject matter expert. Yes, it’s true you’re not officially supposed to be giving advice outside or Real Estate. But by offering something like Moving tips and listing local moving companies can get you readers. If the people are moving, they could be interested in a what? A house! Ding Ding…
 
 
  1. Do not use some network of blogs that do not share a niche like Real Estate. You’re really just another face in the crowd. It more than likely isn’t designed to pull any sort of traffic from people interested in buying or selling a home.
 
  1. You need some back links to your Blog and your web site. Figure out how to get your links out there.
 
 
  1. Team up with people so that you can at least appear to have some readers. Do a RSS feed for subscribers; it should show how many people are subscribed. Get your families and friends to subscribe.
 
  1. Updating 2-3 times a week is good enough. If you prefer, people actually get paid to write. You can always outsource this.
 
 
  1. Stop using the terms Real Estate and Real Estate Agent “Your Name “. This doesn’t get you ranked, and Google and other Search Engines will think its Spam. Concentrate on the content and using a good choice of not so competitive keywords.
 
  1. Your blog needs some photos and graphics. How excited are you about reading People magazine with no photos of the stars? Enough said, if you want readers, you need to add some photos. Use this link to get some cool pictures. Photos for Blogs . Yeah- you may need to pay, it’s what professional photographers do, sell pictures for money. You ever sell a house for free?
 
 
  1. Spend some money on link development, advertising, and so forth. If you expect all this to just happen for next to nothing, you are sadly mistaken. I have a budget for my web site; you should have one for your blog and web site. Monthly. If you need some help, join our Real Estate Discussion Forum, and folks from the Web world can explain a lot about the different services they can offer you and allow you to ask questions. You can get them to quote you too.
 
  1. Lastly, put some Google ad sense on your blog or some advertising. Make it appear that you have some contacts, and it will pay you money. If you are going to do this, at least make some of your money back. You should have some contact links; use them for folks to contact you for advertising too. Any local business would be thrilled to get internet advertising for exchange of say 100 business cards and a little display on their counter.
 
 
  1. Do not post double content all over the place. One article (Unique) is what you post. Do not throw the same blog post around the entire internet. Double content is bad. Never allow someone else to post your blog entries.
 
    
 
 
I hope some of this has opened your eyes. Don’t get discouraged, concentrating on expanding in every direction will cause you to expand in every direction. You want to establish a niche and go with that niche. Real Estate is very competitive on the net; these tips will give you an edge. I see a lot of people pasting listing data in their blogs. By the time your blog gets crawled by a search engine, the house will probably be sold. What good did that do? A text listing is not really valid content either. If you are going to do something like this, write about the sub division’s name and the houses for sale in it (at the time). Not 3bdr 218,000 1213 Moose Dr. 98722. 2300sqft. Real Estate SEO and how to blog properly is very important to your marketing campaign.
 
Agents Buddy is happy to help you with the promotion of your blog or website, write an article describing your niche and we will gladly post it on our site. Just make it Home or Home Buying/Selling Related. Contact Promotions by clicking here Contact US . We also do web site review articles. This is where we will professionally write an article, index it, and then submit it for you to 100+ different web sites. This will link your site and also the contact link within the article to 1000’s of readers on the net.


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