Easy Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Real Estate Blog

So, you’ve just finished that killer blog post. Since you’ve taken the time to slave over the content, it’s now time to bring eyeballs to your blog. After all, there’s not much point in creating content if no one reads it. That’s where blog promotion comes in. Promoting your blog allows you to not only bring more readers to your site, but also allows you to receive the most mileage out of your blog post.

Automated Blog Promotion

Everyone loves the Ron Popeil – “Set it and forget it” approach. After all, being able to setup tools to automatically promote your blog is attractive. Once you setup these automated channels, you don’t have to worry about them any more. The only problem is that these automated channels typically do not drive a ton of traffic your way. Why? Because publishers abuse these channels and therefore people quickly begin to see this as noise.

But, that’s not to say that automation doesn’t have its place. Choosing the right forms of automation can be advantageous.

Recommended Blog Automation Channels

Feedburner – Giving people the ability to “subscribe” to your blog and receive blog posts directly in their email inbox is a great way to stay connected with people. Once you set this up, they simply enter their email address and every time you blog, it is delivered as an email. For example, if you haven’t already subscribed, why not see how Feedburner works by subscribing to the dakno blog!  🙂

RSS Feeds – RSS feeds give you the ability to place your blog content almost anywhere on the web. And the best part is, because RSS is a dynamic feed, it’s always up-to-date. If you have an AgentBackdoor site, you can easily add RSS feeds to your site using short codes. This is a great way to keep pages fresh that wouldn’t otherwise be updated very often. For example, a condo  page can include an RSS feed of the latest blog content tagged with that condo name.

Twitter – Depending upon your market (and how active people are on Twitter in your area), you may want to manually submit your blog post to Twitter. Using a plugin like TwitterTools allows you to automatically send a tweet when you publish new blog content.

Outside.in – This hyperlocal news site automatically pulls in your blog content and thanks to their relationship with CNN.com, your content can even appear on the home page of CNN. All by simply spending a few minutes adding your blog to their site.

There are a number of other ways to automatically promote your blog but this should give you an idea.

Recommended Manual Channels

While automated channels are convenient because they require no day to day work, there are times when manually promoting your blog content can have much more of an impact. Below are a few places where you can manually promote your blog.

Facebook – There are applications that allow you to automate your promotion to Facebook. However, taking a few minutes to manually submit can produce much better results. This is because you have the ability to customize the message.

Teaser Post – There are numerous places on the web that allow you to submit blog content.  Most people make the mistake of simply copying and pasting their original blog post to these sites. While you are not going to be penalized for duplicate content, you won’t get any benefit from a search engine perspective. Additionally, if a user can read the entire blog post on the other site, there is no need for them to click to your site. Writing teaser posts on these sites allows you to not only pull traffic, but also helps build search engine credibility. With this in mind, let’s look at what makes a well formatted teaser post.

• Original Content – Make sure your teaser post is a summary rewrite of your original blog post. Don’t simply pull in the first paragraph. You want to give Google something fresh to spider.
• Tease Them – If you’re blog post contains 7 ways to… then list two of the seven in your teaser post. In other words, give them a reason to click over to your site.
• Link, Link, Link – The two main reasons for the teaser post is to drive people to your site and to build credibility with search engines. Linking accomplishes both.

Now that you have the structure down, here are a few places to tease your blog.

• Trulia Blogs – Here is a great example of a teaser post.
• Topix – Becoming an editor in your geographic area allows you to add content to the 3rd largest newspaper site on the internet.
• ActiveRain – If you are “grandfathered in” or have a paid account, ActiveRain can be another great place to tease your blog post.
• BusinessWeek – Getting links and traffic from popular sites like BusinessWeek is easy by teasing your blog post on their business exchange social network.
• These are just a few places. Chances are, your geographic area has many more places to tease your blog.

Taking just a few minutes to follow these steps can dramatically increase the traffic to your site!