Don’t think that blogging or having a website is the magic pill that will turn your business around. But do expect if done well to work for you in terms of exposure and credibility. This is the 21st Century. We have to realise what is now. And we are in an online revolution. The Fact is for any Generation Y person the internet is joined to us at the hip, to Gen X its widely used and is increasingly used by Baby Boomers. We have connection in our homes, our offices, in our cars and on our cell phones. Heck you can even go to MacDonald’s and go online.
There are many ways of participating on the internet. You can be a reader which absorbs the mass amounts of information available. You can have a stagnant website that promotes your business or you can have an active social platform that is constantly updated with new content that the reader absorbs and possibly comments on.
With these varying means of participation on the web what will give you the best results that you want. Well having a website is a great start. But what’s the purpose of it? Most websites for Real Estate Agents are just promoting themselves and their material and has little content that is updated. From time to time you may change the look of the properties order but in essence they stay the same. SO by themselves are fairly useless for delivering traffic of viewers. Unless you’re doing a vigorous marketing campaign with promoting the link to your website through online articles, Blog and forum posts the only time you’re likely to get someone visit your website is a current client and you have asked them to take a look at your stuff. Don’t get me wrong this in itself is still a very powerful tool as an agent. But for building new business it’s probably very limited.
So we move onto the next things that you can do on the internet and this is blogging and forums. I am mainly going to focus on blogging as your blog is yours and you control it, on a forum you don’t control it. Now don’t get me wrong but just having a blog will not mean you get success for the sake of having one. It actually does take a little effort. But the great thing about it being on the internet is that once it is there it will stay and the more you grow it the easier it becomes.
Blogs. Firstly what are they. Well it’s like a journal. The big aspect to these fore being seen on the internet is that the search engines love them. They are easy to read and the content is updated regularly(when the owner posts a new post). But how do you use them to the best of their ability.
Well your blog should help you in your business and accommodate your website. Linking is the key here but I’ll talk about that soon. The key is that you need to update your blog often. Keep the content relevant and new. The first step is to start one. So you have done this what next. Well get writing. Actually it’s not that simple but you do need to put content on there. But this can be hard. The need for content is to get traffic. The visitors are what is going to in the future bring you enquiry. If you like me you get excited about the thought of people reading the things you write. And the thought of more traffic is thrilling. To get this traffic you need to use the search engines to see them and the content. Now if you do start a blog and add 2 or 3 posts a week your on the right track. But if after a month you start to notice that there is very little search engine traffic coming your way don’t get disappointed. At this point you may start finding yourself wanting to give up, or slowing down in your posts. But PLEASE don’t give up. Just keep plodding on with relevant and rich content and you will be noticed.
Google – which is the biggest search engine and the one I focus on indexes websites every three months. This means if you have a new blog it may take up to three months before its recognised. But when it comes to indexing time if you have a rich content filled blog that’s looks to be updated frequently Google will index it higher than one that isn’t the above. Once it is indexed and ranked you will then probably start to receive more and more traffic from the search engines. And with more content you deliver and more searches made the more frequent the search engines will rank your sites keywords and the more traffic you will receive. When someone searches say for example for my blog “New Plymouth Real Estate” and from the search engine click on my blog that search engine regards my site as linked to this key word or phrase. And the more it gets clicked for this phrase that’s typed in the search engine “bots” think it’s more important and up the scale you go.
When you start to run out of things to write which will happen. There are a number of things you can do to get you thinking. Here are a few hints and tips: One of the things I do is I have “Google alerts” set for key phrases like Real Estate New Zealand, Real Estate Market, New Plymouth etc. What this does is every time something is posted on the internet with those keywords you get an alert to the email address you assign to them. A great way to keep in the loop with what’s going on. You can then create articles relating to the stories, put your spin on it. This also means your content is up to date and in the medias eye, so of public interest, which will generate traffic for you.
The other way which will quickly turn you into a perceived expert is use forums and site such as yahoo answers to find questions that people are asking in real time. When you find a question or a topic you know something about write up an article and put it on your blog. What you then do is go back to the place where the question was asked and post a link to your blog there. But also attempt to answer the question so your seen to be adding value so that the reader trusts your link. This will help the people asking the question. You will get targeted traffic from the link and the search engines will love you for it.
WOW! A lot to take in isn’t there. But this is the bread and butter stuff to creating a powerful blog that works for you. Now to get it really working for you there are some other things that you can do. Above I mentioned about linking to your website if you have one. Now that your blog is giving you great search engine response and you have regular visits every day you can start to use this traffic to the highly visible blog to the less visible website. What you can do is put links on each of your pages to go to your website. So when a visitor is on your blog reading through it and come to a word with a link and they click this they will be taken straight to your website. Now this has two great effects for your website. The first is that you will get traffic from your blog going to your website. Going from a content rich site that makes you look as an expert to your maybe promotional website about you. This is very powerful if done right. The second is the links to your website from your highly raked blog make it look to the search engine that your website is also important. Because your important blog is linking out it gives your website great exposure and credibility. How good is that!
There is a lot to take in here and to get the results you do first need to put the effort in. I think that if you do these you will be on the right track to having a great blog. To help your business you will become more exposed to the general public. Even if you get to 100 unique views per day you could have up to 700 people viewing your blog each and every week.
Blogging is still a relatively new concept in New Zealand so the participation is a little on the sad side in terms of numbers. But don’t be worried on this. People will be reading it. They will know it’s from you and if you keep doing it when they do have a question on the topic of some of your blog posts they will ask you. And this is when the rewards come. This means they respect your opinion and want your advice.
I wish you all the best with your blogging. If you do have any questions on this stuff please contact me.
Deon Swiggs
Property Profits
13 thoughts on “How Can Blogging Help Your Business”
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If you are considering starting a blog take note, Deon was “Blogger of the Month” recently so knows what he is talking about.
I think the biggest deterent for people starting is ‘what will I write about’. Breaking the process into steps makes it less daunting:
Step 1: Write every day for about 20 minutes and make sure you do it for 30 days straight, write anything and everything, just get something down. If you get to day 29 and you miss out on writing for whatever reason start again, Day 1 until you have completed the 30 days straight. You are forming a habit.
Step 2: Post articles every 2 or 3 days
Step 3: Capture two ideas for articles every day, keep a notebook handy so you can write them down immediately.
You won’t post everything you write, some of it will be of very poor quality. The point is to develop the habit of writing regularly. Keep everything you write as later you’ll go back to it and edit and eventually come up with something good. Just start writing, regular time and regular place, one word at a time.
And I motion to say trust what Sharron Says She was the second Blogger of the month for the month of september. Well done to her. She knows what she is talking about.
One thing I stress is though that do not make writing a chore. The best information you can give should come naturally. If it doesnt the tips and ways I mentioned above in the post will help spark your mind and let you find what people are looking for.
Be an information giver.
I forgot to mention that most people when going to a blog or a forum will look at when the last comment or post was made. If the last was older then 4 days old the chances are high that they will discount it and not read further unfortunately.
Deon
The phrase “be an information giver” really resonates with me.
Naturally I am a strong advocate of blogging – it may not be for everyone in the real estate industry, and the facts speak for themselves with over 60% of all blogs being “abandoned” after 6 months (or earlier), but for those that stick with it – and Sharon’s advice is huge!
This industry is changing and a key part of the change is about engendering within the general public a greater sense of openness / authenticity by the industry at large and with it a genuine desire to be an information giver – so if collectively we can assist through blogging to facilitate this transformation then we can be well pleased with our individual contribution – and on the way become more successful individually!
Alistair.
I never realised that the figures of abandonment were so high.
can you explain the 700 people it takes to get 100 unique users, surely 100 people from different computers are 100 uniques
Pete,
Yes 100 people from different computers will be 100 unique visitors. These visitors may read several pages or come back to your site a number of times which will then add to the number page hits you get But I know for that day the same person will not add to the unique count twice.
RSS is different again.
I am not sure how long the voices platform logs unique visitors in so that there isn’t a double up over the week on unique visitors.
This is a snap shot of the last week.
Day Unique Hits+RSS
Today, 01 Oct 2008 76 195+20
Tue, 30 Sep 2008 144 435+54
Mon, 29 Sep 2008 110 273+28
Sun, 28 Sep 2008 126 360+24
Sat, 27 Sep 2008 123 279+45
Fri, 26 Sep 2008 134 288+43
Thu, 25 Sep 2008 88 360+46
Wed, 24 Sep 2008 165 513+65
Great Blog again Deon.. do you ever sleep though!! Thanks Amanda
Haha Amanda, of course I sleep 🙂 But I am a gen Yer and live connected to the net. phone, laptop, desktop its all on. When I cant sleep i write. (I dont like reading)
Thanks for your comment.
D
As a baby boomer rather than a generation yer this is a learning curve for me but however I take your point about the movement of traffic from blog to website and all that stuff. Seems to me as an outsider, how do you generate a community in a field as large as real estate in the whole of New Zealand as the people reading the blogs will maybe have only local interest rather than general interest and the community seems to be the real estate agents – but hey that’s maybe not so bad.
Interesting questions nicola.
I hear loud and clear what your saying abut the community being mainly of real estate agents. this is true unfortunately. the ones reading these are the ones that know about the system and we bounce ideas off each other redilly.
I get my local and other interest from google, the only way really to get google response is by just sticking at it. and eventually you will get there. and then you get outside influence. But real estate is funy, people are worried about their identity when asking questions, as if they feel compelled to do something if their identity is uncovered.
But I publicly promote my blog to my area in every flyer or letter i send out. I have set up variuos competitions to try and get people interested and read but unfortunately the general public are still just getting the relivance and the power of the immense information thats avaliable here. There is so much here for a seller and buyer.
To generate a field of a community you need to post regular and targeted material. Sharron James in her blog has done a good job branding herself as a business broker, its a little harder for real estate as the neiche is huge. I only realised this a few months ago and am in the process of trying to figure out what line i want to go down. But having my name as New Plymouth is neiche in itself. Its very targeted so if people search new plymouth i come up.
It takes time. find a neiche and bomb it so to speak. The community that happens will follow. Keep a track of the rss feeds you get per day. this will show you the amount of subscribers your getting revisiting your site each day. this is a good measure of how big the community you have.
Unlike the likes of social networking site you cant tell who is subscribing to you. but trust me they will be there. and if your continuing to deliver content you will be notcied.
Your doing a good job so far. if you have any further questions please ask because you wont be the only person that has questions like this. and they are good questions and i hope i have answered them.
regards
deon
Deon,
This has been incredibly helpful. Even though I’m not a businessman, I’m a filmmaker, you’ve phrased your advice so it appeals to every blogger.
Thank You.
Thanks for your comments Lewis.