Tired of blogging? No Time?

Recently I came across this forum post by a beleaguered, blogging Realtor.

“when i first began blogging i was very excited i found out a way to reach the world and express my thoughts.My Real Estate blog began to be filled with content and awesome articles. As i continue to blog and expand my audience and continue to grow my business i have found myself exhausted and overwhelmed. I am exhausted every article requires time and thought something that i really dont have. i recently began looking for a ghost blogger but guess what i haven’t found one yet. Does any one have any suggestions?”

As the season gets busier for Realtors, a common issue is finding time to sit down and write a well written blog post with good content. It is wiser to keep a consistent output rather than flurries of activity, so if you only blog once a month that is preferable to a high frequency of blogs and then nothing at all for long periods. Readers will check in at regular intervals but if there is nothing there for ages you run the risk of losing them completely as they think the blog is dormant. Rather than leave your blog dormant until you find the time and energy to jump back in, consider this:

Microblogging

For example, Twitter. You only have to come up with a maximum of 140 characters and it’s becoming more and more popular. This is a great way to keep feeding new information while you formulate a more content-rich and keyword-focused blog. For double the benefit, set up an RSS feed of your “tweets” to your site so that your site gains a regular infusion of content.

Short posts that link out and keep your brand lively can be just as useful as ones that take an hour to write, so don’t damage your brand with poor, lazy posts just because you feel you have to crank something out. Just keep it short (literally a paragraph!) and link to something of interest in the local or national media or on a local web site that is of interest to your market. It could be a reminder of an upcoming “Green Up” day, beach cleanup, community-wide rummage sale, shred-fest, important school board meeting, music festival, property tax due date, you name it. Anything that is relevant to living in your community will take only a moment to write, can be keyword rich, and useful to your readers.

Ghost/Guest Blogging

This avenue is an acceptable route for SEO purposes as it can guarantee good content and add a fresh voice to your brand and blog. It also will provide great support for you in the busy season enabling you to focus on lead generation and getting out to meet your clients. Just make sure that the writer knows your business and your community. Hiring someone on another continent, therefore, would not help extend your brand or accurately represent your expertise in your local market.

Listen to your Analytics

If you are wondering how much effect your blog is having on traffic to your site and brand awareness then use Google Analytics to see if your efforts are furthering your business goals. You might discover what is working for you and help you to either trim the fat with certain content or provide motivation to expand more on ideas that are gaining traction.

Looking for Ideas?

Check out some of our Real Estate client’s blogs that perform well and have great content:

Bryan Bomba – Chicago
Brad Dinsmore – New Hampshire
Lomenzo Properties – Cape Cod
Wright Realty – New Hampshire

In addition here are some great tips at ProBlogger.com

I receive daily emails from ActiveRain, these cover all kinds of topics. Usually I don’t have a lot of time to read through them; so I skim over the newsletter titles and see if anything catches my eye. Well today one did: “Survey Says… REALTORS Suck”. Wow! I certainly clicked on that one.

The first thing that struck me was that this is a great example of an attention grabbing blog title. It will get your readers to click and read. It is controversial, and let’s face it, people love controversy. As a former real estate agent and the daughter and sibling of two REALTORS I couldn’t resist reading on.

I found the article interesting. I think it is a good reminder to ANY agent, new, old or otherwise, about what your consumer is looking for and what is important to them.  A professional in any field should always be keeping up on the needs of their clients.

Two of the most interesting points for me where:

1. That the most important thing to the consumer is lowest commission and knowledge is the least. My reaction to that was, “No wonder you think REALTORS suck.” In my experience the lower the commission, the less attention paid to the client.

Maybe that’s not true in all cases, but I have a feeling it doesn’t help! So how does the average REALTOR put this information to use? Should they all be slashing their commissions?  Well it turns out that 95% of consumers are still using Agents. Even though the consumer feels they can get just as much knowledge by doing their own legwork, they are still relaying on real estate professionals when all is said and done.

I don’t think this is a free pass and should be counted on, especially in this market. I think it’s important to be the best at what you do and the most knowledgeable about technology, your area, the state of the market, etc. Those are the agents that will get the business and keep it.

2. The example photos Jeff Corbett uses, got me giggling. He could not be more dead on with this point. If all you can fit in the bathroom shot is the toilet, leave it off the listing! Nobody needs to see the toilet. Okay, so the owner did a great job redoing the bathroom, but it is too small to photograph. How about taking close-up shots of some of the details? BUT, please spare us the toilet shot.

The other one that always gets me is the tiny bedroom, that just shows the bed or maybe a corner of the bed and a window. In those cases, how about a video of the property? We can help guide you through this process and you’ll be better off for it!

Just to hammer the point home, here are a few examples of photos you should skip!

Are they selling the bed or the house?

Ahh the lovely toilet… So homey!

Overall its a great article so give it a read! “Survey Says… Realtors Suck!” By Jeff Corbett, Active Rain Staff Writer. You’ll probably find one or two take aways.

• On the human side of things blogs, offer a way for a business to show their clientele a more personal side with minimal time commitment. When writing copy for a business website, the author needs to think about maintaining professional voice and assuring that the piece that they are writing is consistent with the subject of the page they are posting it. The beauty of a blog is that by their very nature people expect blogs to be more informal and cover a variety of subjects. On a blog you can have two posts one after the other about completely opposite subjects and it is completely acceptable.
• As with everything on the Internet, you are writing for two audiences: people and search engines. There is lots of fancy language involved in Search Engine Optimization, but the keystone of SEO is “the keyword”. If, as you blog, you do so with an eye to your site’s primary keywords, you can turn your blog into a treasure trove of unique, keyword-rich content for search engines. The SEO value of blogs does not stop there, however. Because of the nature of blog software, every time you write a post, the software notifies Google that it has new content and the blog is re-indexed. The more frequently the site is indexed the better your placement in Google will be.

These are pretty standard, as long as you blog frequently on you own domain you will reap these benefits. Quality of writing and pertinence of subject also can provide their own benefits. Take for example our client, Brad Dinsmore, a Southern New Hampshire Realtor. Brad had us build him an on-site blog a few months ago and started blogging about subjects effecting his market area in and around Windham, NH. He was doing a great job, titling his posts with keyword rich language, blogging frequently and linking to the rest of his site. Because of this, he was receiving the benefits listed in the bullet points above. Because of the quality and originality of his posts, a reporter from a local paper called the Eagle Tribune came into his office last week with a copy of one of his blog posts titled Southern NH Home Sales: 1st Quarter 2009 the reporter wanted to write a feature article for the Sunday Edition based on Brad’s post. The end result of this was that on the front page of the Sunday edition of the Eagle Tribune were two large color photos of one of his office’s agents Debbie St Jean and two, first time-home buyers as part of an article entitled First-time buyers a ray of sunshine in dismal N.H. housing market. This is publicity that you cannot buy and a perfect example that when you put your expertise out there you will reap the benefits. If you know your market better than anyone else then let people know. Add content to your site and blog regularly. You may not get a featured article out of it but you will start to gain the recognition that you deserve.

Sometimes news breaks that is very interesting to your target audience (usually something that has an impact on their wallet). When the news breaks, there may be a lot of stories and reports about the topic in general but often there is very little useful reporting on how that bit of news effects your local market or how people can make the best use of the information.

Adding local context and use to a time-sensitive news event is different from writing about a seasonal or recurring event (4th of July Fireworks, for example, happen every year). With a time-sensitive news event you want to publish quickly and get right to the point with your useful, localized tidbits; all the big news brands will handle the general context for you.

What makes for a good time-sensitive blog topic?

Writing a post about a time-sensitive topic means you have to stop what you’re doing, understand the issue and then figure out how your audience can use the information about that topic. Since it isn’t a recurring event, the post may have limited long-term value. So you want to pick the right time-sensitive topics to blog about. Here are some characteristics to look for:

• There’s something in the topic that has a direct impact on the lives of your audience
• Other news outlets are providing the general overview information (so you can focus on how your audience can use the information)
• You can afford to take the time to write your post before the news cools down

Once you have your topic, pound away on the keyboard and get your post out there.

An Example: February 2009 Stimulus Package

As I write this blog post, there’s a new stimulus package going through Congress. This stimulus package will likely have some impact on housing markets across the nation. If you are marketing real estate, I bet there’s something in that bill that will be of interest to your audience. Here is the search data from Google Insights about the stimulus bill:

Looks like a rising trend, something you can perhaps use for your internet marketing.

Since stimulus bill is a national topic other news organizations are doing the heavy lifting for explaining what’s happening:

• Michigan Business Review is rehashing an AP story
• Forbes is running Reuters’ story on Obama’s support of the bill
• The New York Times is discussing how the bill got smaller before passing

There’s probably more, those are just the ones that I found at 3pm on the day the news is breaking. Somewhere in that bill is likely some information that real estate agents could find that might be helpful for home buyers or home sellers.

If you can find that information and, ideally, put it together with actionable local resources for readers, then you’d have a blog post to help insert your name and brand into the national conversation about real estate and the stimulus bill.

So go write your post and be sure to do the following:

1. Insert local context wherever possible
2. Include some step-by-step ways to make use of the information wherever possible
3. Get the post live as quickly as possible

Guess which post I wrote, in order to capitalize on the current time-sensitive topic of the housing stimulus?

You’ve probably seen the little orange icons and “subscribe to my feed” buttons on sites you’ve visited (you can see some over to the left of this blog post, in fact). You might even have read articles where people argue about things like RSS and Atom and so on. Maybe you’ve heard of things like Google Reader. This is an article written to help you start using RSS feeds to help your online marketing efforts.

What’s an RSS Feed anyway?

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. It’s simple for web geeks. Don’t feel bad if it doesn’t sound simple to you. Here’s how it works:

Contemporary websites hold all of their text and other content in a database. When a program called a web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari, for example) goes to a web page address the website software (sometimes referred to as a Content Management System or CMS) takes that text out of the database and formats the text into a web page.

There’s content: the information in the database. And there’s presentation: the formatting and design that shows the content, font choices, colors and so on. Sort of like the separation of church and state.

RSS feeds just give you access to the content without the presentation formatting. An RSS feed is just a way to get at the content without all the formatting and design. Keep your church and pick any state (or keep your state and pick any church, if you prefer).

So why would you want just the content, without the formatting?

There are a couple reasons why you’d want to have access to the content of a website without all the formatting. Here are a few:

• Display a list of headlines from another site on your site
• Access the content from something that isn’t a web browser (like an iPhone app)
• View content from your favorite websites from one place without having to surf to each website individually

To start with, it’s the last item on the list that matters most: view content from your favorite websites in one place. If you are staying up to date on the topics that matter to you via online resources, then you probably have three or more websites that you visit every day. A piece of software called a “feed reader” will load all of the content you choose into one interface.

Without a feed reader, you have to load up each page (along with the images, ads and other things which slow down the page loading time) then find the new articles and then maybe read some of the new articles. With a feed reader, you open the feed reader and all the headlines and articles are in one place for easy reading. It even lets you know if you’ve read it before.

Ok, you know everything you need to know about feed readers. Let’s use RSS to improve your internet marketing.

Internet Marketing Basics: Use a Feed Reader to Listen

Listening is probably the easiest and most important marketing activity you can perform online. You can listen to potential clients, your industry peers, critics, competitors anyone who publishes online. Let’s go step-by-step and set up a feed reader.

1. Go to the Google Reader page (http://reader.google.com) (yeah, there are other feed readers and you could try them all out, but today let’s just get started).
2. Log in if you already have a Google Account. If not, follow instructions to sign up.
3. Awesome, you have a feed reader. Bookmark the page your feed reader is on.

Now you need to put something in the reader. Go to three of your favorite sites and click on the add to reader buttons. Don’t forget to add the Internet Marketing for Real Estate Feed. Have you added a couple sites to your feed reader? Now go check what it looks like. You’ll see the headlines and if you click the headline, the article expands.

Internet Marketing Basics: Use a feed reader to participate

It’s good to participate in conversations surrounding the topics related to your business. It helps people become familiar with you and your company. More importantly, if you are commenting on stories and articles that your audience would find useful, the readers who find you are pre-qualified in that they have already exhibited interest in your topic.

Do one of the following at least a couple times a week, to help increase your participation:

• Leave a thoughtful, useful and on-topic comment on a blog post you find via your feed reader
• Add at least one more site to your feed reader
• Find three different articles on different sites about a related topic, mention them on your own blog or site

Using a Feed Reader to improve your internet marketing

If you’ve made it this far, you have a feed reader bookmarked and you’re using it to make meaningful connections online. There’s a lot more you can do, but you’ve gotten started and that’s what matters.

Image via Wikipedia

Blogs are great for sharing information that is relevant to your business. Fresh content, added at a regular basis, keeps readers coming back and keeps the search engine spiders coming back to index your new content.

However, sometimes good posts get forgotten over time. The content of the blog post may still be relevant, but the post itself is somewhere at the end of a several pages of archives. Those forgotten pages can still serve as landing pages since search engines will display them. However, all your new readers may not get around to digging into your archives to find that good information.

If you want to increase engagement with your new blog readers and also make use of that great content you’ve already posted, here are two tips:

Put your best content in the sidebar

Determine your “required” reading for the sidebar based on posts that are most read, most emailed or when people spend a lot of time on them. That gives you your readers’ input. Then think about pages you think are important and maybe put some of those in there as well. So you’re balancing what you think is important with what your audience thinks is important.

If you’re using your blog for online marketing, it’s important to keep your best and most important content visible at all times. This would information that helps you qualify a lead, or increases engagement to the point of getting a customer to contact you or buy your product/service.

Make a “forgotten in the archives” post

Look through your blog and find good articles on page 2 or 3 of a category archive. Those are good candidates to revive with a “forgotten in the archives” post. Remember that the marketing goal of this kind of post is to help new readers find the good stuff they missed when you were first starting to blog.

It’s even better if you can tie the “forgotten” posts together under a theme or topic and run it with a headline like “4 great blog posts about marketing real estate online” or whatever is relevant to your business. This helps create the foundation for a content cluster (I’ll blog more about that later, but if you look at our Twitter for Business post you’ll get the idea of content clusters).

Another advantage of this type of post is that it doesn’t take a lot of time but provides a lot of value to your newer blog readers. I’ll make an example “forgotten” post tomorrow or later this week to give you a sense of what one might look like.

Here’s a nerdy statement to sum it all up: Fully exploit your intellectual property assets by re-packaging existing content to engage new site visitors and increase marketing value of prior efforts.

Image via Wikipedia

Every now and them when I’m giving a real estate blog training to a client I’m asked how it’s possible to keep coming up with posts. I think we all face a certain amount of fatigue now and then. Luckily for real estate bloggers, local events are completely fair game and in the realm of usefulness.

So, in the spirit of my “why blog about the fourth of July” post… here are some real  estate themed Halloween blog post ideas. Try one or two of them out before, during and after Halloween. Get your real estate bloggin’ ideas after the break.

• Coolest decorated house in the neighborhood. Don’t forget photos.
• Best street to get awesome candy. Don’t forget photos.
• Where to park when you go to attend any Halloween events (like Halloween parades and so on).
• Any actual haunted houses in your locality? Do an interview with someone about it. Maybe with video or audio.
• Any fun Halloween craft events for kids in the neighborhood? Again, video and photos are awesome here.
• Neighborhoods with the most police calls/vandalism on Halloween.
• Neighborhoods with the least police calls/vandalism on Halloween.
• Any local traditions around Halloween (Cabbage Night anyone?).

So there you go. Remember that the idea is that people will find these posts via search next year too. This is why having pictures or video is great. So if you’re writing about something that is going to happen, take pictures when you’re there and update your blog post after the event. So people searching next year can see what fun it is (or isn’t).

Image by riekus via Flickr

Ever been to a blog and seen page after page of pure unadulterated text? You know, a giant wall of words pummeling your eyeballs? Since you’re here at the Internet Marketing for Real Estate blog I would guess that the answer is: Yes. But what about your own blog? When was the last time you put up a picture or a link to some relevant articles that are outside of your usual feedreader favorites?

Hopefully you’ve noticed that posts here have gotten a little more picturesque lately. And that is due almost entirely to a tool called Zemanta.

Adding pictures makes your blog better

When I’m talking to Union Street Media clients about blogging or content strategies I always encourage them to take pictures. Provide words and images that your readership will find useful or entertaining (or ideally, both). Everyone nods their head and agrees but when I check back in, it’s often a wall of words. Here are some of the reasons why people avoid adding images to their blog posts:

• “Taking pictures might be fun, but uploading and managing them is not fun and takes time.”
• “I’m not any good at taking pictures.”
• “I don’t have a digital camera.”
• “It’s a real chore to add pictures via the blog interface.”

So yeah, I love taking pictures and I love playing with technology. But that’s a part of what I get paid to do. You might get paid to do something else, like sell real estate. So I’ve been keeping my ear out for a way to make it less painful to add pictures to your blog.

Zemanta: Quick and painless pictures for your blog

I can’t remember where I first heard about Zemanta. It was either Chris Brogan via Danial Rothamel or maybe it was Jay Thompson. So hat tips to all those fine guys. Zemanta watches what you write in your Wordpress blog and comes up with some public, creative commons licensed images that you can use in your blog posts.

Now let’s get down to business and get some pictures on your blog. Here’s what you need to do (sorry that there is a little technical stuff up front):

1. If you don’t already use Firefox as your browser when editing your blog, start today.
2. Install the Zemanta Firefox plugin.
3. Log in to your blog and start a new post.
4. You’ll notice over on the side, there’s a new section for Zemanta.
5. Hover over one of the pictures and see if you like it.
6. If you like the picture, click it.
7. You’re done, the picture is now in your blog post.
8. Go back to step 3 and repeat.

Other than the installation the whole process takes about zero time. If you want to refine your options, there’s a tool to help filter down the images it shows (example: for my posts about business and Twitter, I filter by “bird” and then put a picture of a bird in).

If you want a little more control and are willing to do more work, I recommend checking out Mike Mueller’s post about how to use Flickr to find images people want you to share.

So there you go. I don’t want to see any more blog posts without a picture.

Presidential candidates travel the country to gain exposure and voice their platforms; your business should be traveling the Internet to spread the name and message of your business. In the political world we hear speeches, in the online world we read blogs. Just as your neighbor has an Obama ‘08 bumper sticker on his Subaru, a client of yours may link to your site on their Facebook page.

In the end the candidate with the most relevant policies, best speeches and most bumper stickers will usually take the White House. The website with the most inbound links and popular blog posts will rocket to the top of a Google search result page.

Step 1: Make sure campaign headquarters is staffed and ready. You want to promote a site that is appealing, useful, promotes your business objectives, and is full of good content. This is about the functionality of the site. It doesn’t matter how many people go to your site if it doesn’t convert them, a bad site with good visibility will promote your brand as “the guy everyone knows but no one uses.”

Step 2: Hit the campaign trail. Not only should you host a blog and post often but respond to comments. Be an authority! Be friendly! Be helpful! It is important to gain presence “on the road”; be sure to comment on related blogs, this will give you presence and help you start developing inbound links. As we all hear, inbound links are crucial to your internet marketing.

Step 3: Diversify, Web 2.0 style. Besides blogging there is a whole country full of social media voters. Get to know and use Facebook, Twitter, Localism, YouTube etc. All these keep your audience in tune with you and all provide inbound links as well. This is huge because as the demographic of social media users grows and ages more and more of your audience will be using social media tools. For some insightful tips on blogging as related to social media, check out Chris Brogan’s blog.

Online visibility is a cornerstone of your internet marketing, without it your website will fail to reach the critical mass required to make you President. Or whatever it is you’re after.

Let’s combine two ideas: Current Events and Local

Blogging about current events is always a good idea. It lets people know you’re listening and can add some context or value to the conversations that are occurring every day. When those events repeat on a regular basis this gives us some added incentive to write about them because there’s a predictable pattern to the number of people giving attention to the topic. Today I’m going to use the Olympics as an example.

Being “local” could mean the obvious: write about your nearby geographic zone. But it could mean your special niche or directly relevant topic. Today I’m writing mostly for my real estate readers so I’m going to be using the geographic kind of local.

And let’s also make it relevant

There are lots of ways we could try to stuff the word “Olympics” into an article. Then we’d get a lot of traffic looking for generic Olympics information and those visitors wouldn’t be happy and then they’d go away. Not much point in that. Let’s make articles that are Olympic-themed but also provide value for the people you most want to serve. In today’s example I’m using real estate buyers/sellers/watchers. But I bet you can synthesize this into your own industry.

Olympic-themed blog post ideas for Real Estate “Local”

• Any Olympic athletes grow up, live or train in your neighborhood?
• Any Olympic training facilities in or near your neighborhood?
• If someone wanted to train for the Olympics in your neighborhood, how would they get started?
• Any team leaders, coaches or trainers for the Olympics active in your neighborhood?
• How about Olympic gear and equipment manufacture or purchasing options? I can tell you from experience that getting a properly set-up biathlon rifle is not something you can do anywhere.

Notice how all of these ideas involve connecting a current event back to your area and gives some insight, context and value to someone who is truly interested in the Olympics. Also notice how it will help you position your neighborhood in relation to the Olympics and athletic competition. You might get a long tail conversion, but at the very least you will be adding good content about your neighborhood to the web. Search engines like this very much.

The strategy here, as you might guess, is to get the attention of readers both now (current event) and in the future (people who will make decisions based on how your neighborhood relates to the current event). This is an example of a content-planning strategy that makes use of the long tail marketing concept.

Examples of good Olympic blog posts:

Zillow, making use of it’s position as an aggregator of information, tells us about the state with the most Olympians in the 2008 Olympics. Talking about the state and cities brings us some local aspects, talking about the Olympians inserts their brand into the current events conversation. They even provide some additional value by linking out to the source that identifies the home of all the Olympians.

Feeding a small tidbit of news/gossip, The Real Estate Bloggers, lets us know about Olympic hero Michael Phelps’ recent condo purchase. Olympic content? Check. Local information? Check.

Perhaps taking a tip from Zillow, Lynne Pope further segments that California list down to the athletes that are in her market area.

Might be time to get ready for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

This blog post is dedicated to my colleague Scott Nellé who wanted to skip work today so he could watch the basketball game.