15 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic For Real Estate Marketing

After endlessly searching the amazingly useful site of SEOMoz.com, stumbling upon the blog written by Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz, was a delightful find. Jam-packed with highly important information to know when trying to gain traffic flow to your blog, it seemed as though Fishkin’s helpful insight needed to be shared further.

With the intention of being useful for all bloggers alike, here are some useful tidbits from Fishkin’s post modified in a way to best serve real estate agents. However, when

dealing with a blog and increasing traffic flow, it should be known that not every tactic will specifically work for everyone, but the following should be applicable or at least useful to many and spun to properly suite their own blog’s needs.

1. Target Your Content to an Audience Likely to Share

First and foremost, know who you’re writing for. For most of you that will be homebuyers, be aware of how your targeted audience can possibly help to spread the word. By creating unique and enticing content, your audience will most likely share it with others.

2. Actively Participate in Communities That Your Audience Already Uses

Take advantage of social media forums that you know your audience is most likely already using. Generally, this is the easy part since you are probably well aware of a few blogs or sites similar to yours. Once you have established such communities where your readers gather, take part in discussions or posts within these forums. Even our own RealtyLightPost is an excellent source to connect with other professionals and even homebuyers. Do your best to actively stay involved and continue to engage in such online interactions.  However, link-drop, spam or troll (this is the online version of heckling) and you’ll get quickly removed from the group. In that, be sure to participate in comments or possible discussion left on your own blog by others. This will also create interaction with your audience causing them to likely visit your site.

3. Create SEO-Friendly Blog Content

Your best source of traffic is through search engines so knowing how to best use SEO tools will produce the best results.  In that, don’t be discouraged if you know little about this. Play around and research more on how your blog forum offers the use of SEO.  Becoming well acquainted with this will help pay off in the long run.

4. Actively use Social Media Like, Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to Share Your Posts and Find New Connections

With the increasing number of users each minute on such social media forums, it’s time to take full advantage of their capabilities and how they can create traffic to your blog.  However, that is not to say using them is a simple task as it does require some research to trends or changes by such sites.

When using the powers of social media, be sure to fill out the sites profile page as much as possible. Next, connect with users on such sites whom you may already have a connection with. Continue to share content and interact with others, this will drive traffic by those within your network. Finally, when doing this, remember to make a positive impact by continuing to stay active. For many bloggers, social media is the largest source of driving traffic.

5. Install Analytics and Pay Attention to the Results

A smart decision for all bloggers is to install Google Analytics (which is free), and pay close attention to where your site visits originate. This will help you determine which source drives quality traffic thus helping you to determine which source to focus your attention on or involvement with the most.

6. Include Graphics, Photos and Illustration (with link-back licensing)

By including such materials, with the proper licensing and credits, you are creating another traffic source via Image Search along with increasing audience engagement. In that, if the images are originally yours, it is recommended to include at the bottom of the page, a notice indicating that re-using is fine, but that those who do should link back to this post, much like a terms of use notice.

7. Frequently Reference Your Own Posts and Those of Others

Readers truly appreciate links and providing such creates interaction. Referencing your own work can be extremely helpful for keeping a reader engaged but just remember to do so in a non-manipulative way. In that, providing links to other pages/blogs can also prove to be helpful to your own site, keeping in mind, “give and ye shall receive.” Often, many bloggers will receive an alert if traffic is being sent their way from another outside source. They can then revert back to your blog and possibly repay you by creating a link back to your page, giving back traffic flow.

8. Participate in Guest Blogging

Although at first, it may be more difficult to either participate in being a guest blogger to other sites, or ask a blogger to be a guest on your own site, guest blogging is an excellent way to drive new traffic to your site. The best advice for either asking to be a guest blogger on someone’s site or having a guest blogger on your own site is to find a blog with a relative audience similar to yours.  Don’t’ get discouraged if at first you neither get asked to be a guest blogger, or have others turning down your request to be a guest blogger.

9. Incorporate a great Blog Design/Setup

By having a visually pleasing design, a viewer is most likely to stay engaged in your page and therefore stay involved on the site. If you can afford it, this is one area where budgeting for the expense of paying a professional to design your blog layout will pay off in the long run. Just like how someone judges something in person within the first three seconds of viewing it, your site will ultimately receive the same quick judgment by others. Having a well designed page will help keep viewers visiting longer and/or returning.

10. Enable Subscription via Feed + Email

If a visitor to your site has a good experience, they may want to come back again to check out more posts. However, not to discourage you, but more likely than not, they won’t be back. A great way to ensure their return is to apply a visible button on the sidebar inviting your audience to continue to follow you via e-mail, news feed or even through other social media forums.

11. Get Involved, In Person

Although the opportunity may not always be present, if you know of blogger gatherings or event that attracts bloggers related to your topic, join them, or even host an event of your own. As far as the web can get you, it actually does help to have such in person interactions that can possibly lead to guest blogging, blog rolls or even links to your blog. Joining forces with a fellow blogger within the same topic group as your blog can prove to drive a large amount of traffic to your site.

12. Use Your Email Connections To Promote Your Blog

Applying a signature to bottom of your email that includes your blog URL can also drive traffic to your site.  The result may not be huge but by doing so can increase the likelihood of your connections passing on your link to others.

13. Survey Your Readers

Involve your audience with questions or surveys. This will not only create involvement and interaction but can also create future content for your blog that you already know will be relevant to your readers.

14. Connect Your Web Profiles to Your Blog

Any account such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Google+ or any other social media or web profile program within your blogs niche can help drive traffic. For example, many social media forums provide pre-made links or “buttons” to include on the sidebar to allow your audience to then click on them and follow you on other forums. Send out a tweet and include a link to your blog along with listing your blog URL on your profile page. The same can be said with any profile on the web. Be sure to provide a link to your blog on any social profile platform that best relates to your blogs topic.

15. Be Consistent and Don’t Give Up

At times when receiving a low traffic inflow it is easy to get discouraged, but don’t. Rather, take the information you are receiving and find other ways to market your blog and drive traffic. If you are putting a great amount of effort into a specific forum that is not producing traffic, perhaps it is time to move on to a new platform. In that, traffic flow does rely greatly on the updating of content. Keeping up to date and consistently posting content is the best thing you can do for your blog.

And with that, take such concepts and apply them to your blog. As stated, they may not all apply to you and your site, but incorporating just a few of them will prove to be useful tools when trying to gain real estate traffic. Wishing you the best of luck, get out there and increase your sites traffic flow.

To view the original article, visit the Dynamic Page Solutions blog.