8/10/07

Blogs - 5 Reasons Why All Real Estate Agents Must Blog

Here are five reasons why all Real Estate Agents must blog:

Search engine optimization

Blogging helps your Real Estate website achieve a higher ranking on search engines. The key to search engine ranking is information-rich content. Blogging is the ideal format for publishing information on the Internet, and it’s really easy to update a blog. It’s just like writing an email only it’s to the whole world. Every Blog you post becomes its own web page adding yet another page of content on the web. The more content you have on your Real Estate website, the more you look like an information-rich website to the search engines.

Credibility

A blog helps to brand you as an expert in Real Estate. Blogs are the perfect place to talk about what you know, market updates, and Real Estate news and cost you practically nothing to post them. When you share your knowledge in a blog, you build the kind of trust that turns leads into clients for life. After a while, you will build up a huge inventory of postings which will be impressive, especially to the Generation X and Y home buyers.

Relationship Building

Blogs put a personal face on your Real Estate business. The personal nature of blogs makes them a powerful tool for building relationships with your clients and potential clients. There’s a lot of competition online and in Real Estate; a blog is one of the best ways to separate your business from the competition. Staying in front of these potential future clients is critical in staying in their hearts and minds when they are selling or purchasing a home.

Feedback

Your blog makes instant feedback possible. A blog is an ideal format for getting feedback from clients. Visitors can respond to your comments and link to your blog posts from their own websites and blogs. Hot topics can create a thread that engages dozens—or hundreds—of readers to post their replies. The replies will tell you a lot about what your customers want.

Up-to-date information

Blogs put information that is new and that helps you in a couple ways. First, it will give your clients and potential clients reason to come back to your site again and again. Also, the “spiders” that Google uses to crawl your site will reward you for the fresh and frequently updated content by giving you higher Search Engine rankings. Every time Google comes back to see “how you’re doing” and discovers that you and your site aren’t going to roll over and play dead after putting up your initial 8 page website, they will take note and give you an advantage over the other complacent website owners. Google is drawn to new content as a cat is drawn to catnip. Give Google all the catnip you can and reap the benefits!

Blogging helps you build the quality of relationships that can turn leads into clients for life. If you don’t have a blog, make launching your own blog one of your top priorities.