10 Reasons to Start Blogging

There are articles and blog posts all over the Web about blogging for real estate. Most of the "experts" agree that blogging can be very effective if done properly.

So how can blogging be beneficial to your real estate business? A Blog is about creating a relationship with your potential prospects and clients. It can and should be one of the tools in your marketing toolbox. By creating a real estate blog about your area, happenings and commentary, you can begin to position yourself as an "expert" on the area and real estate trends there. Readers of your blog can then "subscribe", like in a magazine subscription, and have your real estate blog comments and articles delivered to them daily in their "news reader".

10 Reasons You Should Be Blogging If You're In Real Estate

1. It's a great way to build a brand and grow an audience. Lots of real estate agents have built a name for themselves by creating a real estate blog. Focus on writing relevant and useful blog content over the long-term and soon enough, you'll be known as the "go to" agent for real estate in your area.

2. A blog is much more than just an online journal, it's a cost-effective way to market your business and attract a steady stream of buyer and seller clients. If you focus on creating community and real estate content that appeals to the interests of buyers and sellers, a real estate blog will easily help you sell more houses.

3. It's a great way of establishing yourself as a credible expert by consistently publishing articles that share your knowledge over the buying and selling process. The key is to write content that directly addresses the type of client you want to work with. In other words, if you want to work with buyers, write helpful articles that help explain everything there is to know about the buying process.

4. It's a great way to showcase your expertise and stand out from the competition. What makes you different than every other real estate agent out there? With a blog, you really have an opportunity to show people that you know real estate better than anyone else in the area. Then, by developing your writing voice and injecting your personality into your content, you'll really let people come to know, like and trust you.

5. It helps keep your content up-to-date and relevant. Instead of having a static website, you'll be able to publish fresh new content to help readers stay current with the latest market statistics, new listings, financing information, videos and more. By staying current with your content, you're giving site visitors a reason to come back!

6. It's a great way to improve your search engine rankings. Every time you write something new, you're creating another link that gets indexed in search results. Your goal should be to optimize your post titles and post content so that they match the search phrases your target customers are searching for on the web. Then, the more consistent you are in terms of posting, the more likely you are to rank for those terms.

7. It will make you both a better writer and a better communicator. Writing forces you to think about how you can break a complicated process down into simpler, understandable terms. The better you get at this, the better you'll get at communicating with clients as well.

8. It's the source of great content to share on various social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Log onto any social network and you'll consistently see people sharing articles that they find useful and interesting on a variety of topics. By creating highly relevant and useful content, you'll have content that you can turn around and share on those social networks and you'll be giving others relevant content that they may be interested in sharing as well. You'll be creating content rather than curating content.

9. It's a great home-base for all of the content that you create and share on-line. In other words, it's great that you're engaging on Twitter and sharing photos and other content on Facebook. But where do you drive all of that traffic? Where do you convert that traffic? The answer is most likely going to be your website. So while sharing and engaging on social networks is great, your end goal should be to drive people back to your website, and ultimately to contact you about buying or selling real estate.

10. It's a great way to stay top-of-mind with both new prospects and past clients. You should be writing about more than just real estate. In other words, write about the local community and truly establish yourself as the community expert. Establish yourself as the "Go To" guy/gal for everything real estate, things to do in the area, and more. Writing about those things will help you stay top of mind with both new prospects and past clients.

Ultimately, a real estate blog is a smart, cost-effective way to establish yourself as the go to expert in your market area. The more you write, the more people will engage with your content. The more people engage with your content, the more time they'll have to consider what you have to offer — hiring you as they're real estate agent!

How to get started: There are a number of free blogging platforms such as:

• Blogger.com
• Wordpress.com
• Blog.com
• Typepad.com starting at $8.95 a month

To view the original article, visit the RealBiz Media blog.