Real Estate Blogging for Market Domination

What's new about real estate blogging? Well, real estate blogging isn't new anymore, so why bother with yet another article or post about why it is valuable? Let's just start out agreeing about why blogging is a valuable asset to a real estate professionals' online marketing presence with quick bullet points:

• Frequent additions to a site keep Google's attention.
• Allows great static content to retain its SEO score while allowing you to add new content that's timely and of local current interest.
• Gives you the opportunity to add current content and point to existing website pages that generate leads.
• Positions you as an active local real estate expert.

OK, that's done, so now let's assume you believe it's important and get to the ways to make it highly effective as a business building tool. These are the "best practices" for real estate blogging.

Best Practice #1: Post Regularly and Frequently

Don't get nervous, as "frequently" has to be balanced with what you're capable of doing with quality post content. Three times a week with uninteresting content is worse than once every other week with a super interesting post.

Keep an Editorial Calendar

One of the reasons we hear from infrequent bloggers is that new ideas for posts are hard to come by. If you wait until you really need to write a post to decide what it is going to be about, it's too late. Set up a calendar and come up with ideas and tentative titles a couple of months or more in the future. Then it's far less hassle to just fire up the computer and write to what you already planned as a topic. If you have ideas along the way before a post is due, jump into the calendar and make a note.

Best Practice #2: Make Your Blog a Community Resource

It is far easier to come up with interesting real estate blogging posts if you widen your focus a bit. Real estate isn't just about contracts, houses, and business stuff. People live in those houses, and those people live, entertain, shop and recreate in the local community. They are just as interested—in fact more interested most of the time—in what's going on around them that influences their way of life.

Ask for input or guest posts.

There are people out there who would love to share information, often because it promotes their agenda, but that isn't necessarily a negative. Invite businesses and people to email you with announcements or even send along guest post content. One real estate broker found a gold mine in local homeowner associations and municipal government. There are government offices and homeowner associations that publish regular email newsletters for their members or interested parties. They often do not put that same content on their websites. A simple request to put it on yours will usually be appreciated. You get the free content that's original and local for the search engines.

Best Practice #3: Provide Teaser Reports for Interests and Leads

Blog posts when market changes occur and data are current are going to draw traffic. Every month, you can do a short post that gives a major data point about sales. This draws the reader, but then you bring them in with an offer for the full market sold properties report. You'll build a loyal regular audience.

Use Reports to Educate and Build Referrals

There is no better way to position yourself as a local market expert than to provide current market data reports, but you should also add your expert commentary. Keep track so that when you post about sales the previous month, you can relate back to the same month a year ago and add any thoughts you may have about major differences or similarities.

Put these best practices into play and stick to them and you'll see an increase in your trips to the closing table, and you may even find that you look forward to your next blog post.

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.