Have Blog, Will Read? Top 4 Ways To Gain Readership
You have now successfully created your own self-hosted blog and are ready to post away… but just like a website, just because it is written, doesn’t mean it will be read.
There are many ways to gain significant traffic to your real estate blog. Here are our top 4 ways to gain readers, and subsequent leads:
1. Social Networking
This is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects of gaining really significant traffic to your real estate blog. By setting up your social networking sites, such as Facebook Fan Page (NOT Profile!), Twitter, LinkedIN, Plaxo, Foursquare, etc., and linking them to your blog (through free plugins), you will see some amazing results. The key is to tie all the pieces of the puzzle together so that when you post a new blog, the new post will automatically upload to all your social networking sites without you haveing to do anything. One great example of this would be the free ping.fm plugin available through WordPress.org.
2. Social Bookmarking
Backlinking is another very important step to take when creating new posts and obtaining readership. By placing links on top sites such as delicious, digg, stumbleupon and reddit, you will not only see additional traffic hitting your site but your real estate blog will also be receiving additional backlinks which in the eyes of the search engines is a major plus. Once these bookmarking sites are set up, it takes very little time and effort to add the links to the bookmarking sites.
3. Leaving Comments
By leaving well written comments on highly regarded sites (again, in the eyes of search engines) that they themselves receive thousands (or millions) of hits a day, and including a link to your website, you will again be getting some great exposure and backlinks to your site. Now, this doesn’t mean that you should go to Mashable and leave a comment like, “wow, that was amazing“, but leave a comment that actually has purpose and draws interest. By simply leaving such comments on a couple of sites per week, you’ll increase your backlinks by over a hundred in a year! (This can also be said for the social bookmarking linking mentioned in #2 above.) *** Remember, you can also do this on our very own Forum – by contributing answers to questions asked (or visa versa), you will gain another backlink to your site!
4. Online Advertising
There are many ways to advertise your real estate blog online and gain additional traffic (and leads). One way to do this is to add your RSS feed (which can be easily set up via Feedburner) to your social networking sites; add your RSS feed on your Facebook Fan Page, to your real estate website (if you still have one!), or your email signature. Strategically promote your blog and they will come. Bonus about RSS feeds, you’ll also gain new leads.
By simply applying these strategies to your real estate blogging efforts, you can gain some amazing results. I would challenge you to put these to the test for one month and (with the help of your google analytics) see the difference in your traffic to your real estate blog! Keep us posted as to how your results turn out!
There are 11 responses to this post! Join in...
SEO is the best way to get your blog into the general public’s view. Long tail hyper local blogging.
Adding to the commenting paragraph is to be consistent in commenting to a blogger they will usually return the favor.
Find an experieced blogger. Email them and ask them if they would read your blog and critique you.
Hey John I bet a lot of our readers don’t know what long tail is would you care to share a bit more? Thanks!
Excellent tips! Just be careful with some of the social bookmarking sites. You’ll want to bookmark more than just your own posts. My account got banned from Reddit because they said I was using their site just to generate backlinks. So I set up a different account, and make sure to bookmark others there as well.
OK…I just bookmaked this post there! Hopefully this will help keep me out of trouble!
My strategy is to create really good content, the type of content that people want to bookmark, share, or link back to.
I read somewhere on techsavvy that we (agents) are consistently generating good content in our email respones to clients. Imagine all of the emails that you answer other people’s questions. Some of those emails could easily be turned into great blog posts.
I agree with John. SEO is key, but keep in mind that people read stuff that they find useful.
SO. . ., agents, put on your thinking caps and try to be useful. lol
Blogging or learning how to blog on a consistent basis is a process within itself. First, getting into the habit of creating good content means having some form of discipline for reading, writing, speaking, thinking and setting time aside to research stuff that would add your to blog entry’s quality.
It also means having a higher command of tech savvy tools that make it easier to blog.
Ok so here’s my list of how to get your blogs notice:
1. Create really good content (look at the type of questions you answer on a regular basis).
2. Create really good content with facts, figures, diagrams, video, or images that make it easier for people to understand concepts. Research and get the stats you need to support your ideas.
3. Tag it. Make sure you have title, meta description under 160 characters, keywords. . .the same words you would use if you had to tell a client to look for the content on your blog.
Ex: Search closing costs on my Blog.
4. Link within your blog entry to another article/post within your blog. Use anchor text descriptions that reference the same keywords you were targeting.
5. Ok, so now follow the above steps.
Hope that helps!
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Involver.com has great tools you can use to place your RSS feed, and other things, on your Facebook Fan Page. I have found it very simple to use because there is no coding needed!
Great post!
Great ideas! I will put them into use today. Thanks!
Chris, thanks for the great information – my frustration/question is….if I’ve just transitioned over from personal page to fan page and only 25% of my friends came over, should I “double post” on FB about my blog post?
These are all great ways to get traffic however having outstanding content and an understanding of SEO will trump all of the suggestions above. Search engines are still going to beat social media sites at this point in time.