For those of you who have accepted our AllAccess 60 Day Blog Challenge, welcome aboard! In future AllAccess sessions Brad and I will be reviewing your blogs to ensure you are complying to the conditions of the challenge and to the best practices of blogging. If you are relatively new to real estate blogging or maybe you’re approaching blogging burnout, below are a few tips to help you avoid making several blogging mistakes. By the end of the post we trust you will even gain a new appreciation for blogging (for results).
Be Inspired – Read Other Real Estate Blogs
If you’re new to blogging or maybe you need to be inspired try reading other real estate blogs. Some of these I list below are agent blogs and some are tech blogs. Here are a few blogs you might want to check out:
- Living on the Hudson Condo Blog
- AgentGenius
- Bloodhound Blog
- Mashable
- Future of Real Estate Marketing
- The South Beach Real Estate Blog
- Ann Arbor Real Estate Blog
- Agent Applause
- My Tech Opinion
- The Tech Byte
- The Phoenix Real Estate Guy
The Ying and Yang of Real Estate Blogging
Before you write it is recommended you read! That’s what I call the Ying and Yang of blogging. By reading other blogs you gain a sense of the bloggers voice and his/her true personalty. That’s a great benefit to blogging. Your readers can actually get to know you – if you will allow your personalty to pour out on the pages of your blog.
Comment on Other Blogs
Before writing your first post, try your hand at leaving comments on other blogs. Many times your comments will morph into a full blown post you can use for your own blog.
Know Your Audience
Who are you are writing for? As a real estate blogger your blog content should speak to your past clients, potential clients, other bloggers and the news media. Don’t forget that your blog content should be hyper-local oriented! That way your blog “reaches” local readers and appeals to the search engines.
Who Cares About Your Content?
Before you push the publish button on a post make sure your post answers these questions:
- Who cares about this information?
- Does this information empower my reader?
- Does my post create value and benefits. Remember, benefits are typically defined as helping someone make money, save them money, save them time, help make them more productive, help the reader feel better about themselves and give them peace of mind. Of course, every post you write may fall short of that objective but at least give it a try.
- Does my blog help establish me as an area expert?
Notice that the first bullet points focus on your reader while the last focuses on you. That means strive to write high-value content. Starting to get the picture?
Establish Attainable Blogging Goals!
You can avoid blogging fatigue and even burnout if you will set attainable writing goals in your Outlook or Google calendar. It is suggested you be disciplined when you should write on your blog and when to promote your blog. In fact, we suggest you actually blog less and promote more. More on blog promotion in a future post!
Maximize Your Blogging Habits
Pay attention to the details and use these best practices. When blogging strive for these details:
- create a unique perma link
- write keyword-rich sub headlines and tag those sub heads with h3 tags
- use the Headspace plugin for enhanced SEO
- use tags
- have a max of 8 categories so you are forced to write content that is thematic (about your real estate market)
- deep link to your website pages and past posts from your post for SEO (I seldom see this! Plus, it’s another reason to have a website and a blog-more on that later.)
- make the post easy to scan by incorporating bullets
- add complimentary images to make the post more interesting and get the reader some time for their eyes to rest
- use the read more tag. This helps organize your blog homepage plus it’s great for SEO.
- encourage social reaction with Twitter and Facebook integration
Own Where You Blog
Unless you are cool with simply being a content generator on a portal you don’t actually own, it is in your best interest (in most cases) to actually own the platform you write on. The means you really should have a self hosted blog with your own domain name (preferably, a sub domain of your primary website URL). Here is an example of what I mean: https://blog.tylertxhomesearch.com/
Solicit a Reaction!
Before you conclude your post do you solicit a comment with a strong call to action? If you don’t ask for a comment chances are you won’t get one. One of the best examples of a blog that consistently ask for a comment is the Mashable blog. In case you didn’t know, the latest changes introduced with Google’s Caffeine, encouragement of reaction to your content is another measurement component to search engine optimization ranking.
Can a Guy Get a “Tweet”?
If you “like” this post, simply click the Tweet button. You can even leave a comment and tell me what best practice you use when writing your blog. I’m all ears!!
Happy blogging,
Bobby
Great post. I think that it is important to reevaluate why you are blogging, and how you do it, from time to time. Blogging as evolved so much, glad you are going back to the basics!
I am going to have to print this post and go through it. Really, this post is a two day workshop of self/blogger discovery. Close to “What color is my Parachute”.
Thanks for taking a look at my blog recently on AllAccess… your SEO comment is keeping me on my toes!
Thanks Home Mortgage for reading our blog and leaving the comment.
Doug, Brad and I see weekly improvements in you adhering to the best practices we espouse in AllAccess. By paying attention to the details, your blog posts are sure to gain better rankings subsequently, more traffic and establish your blog (and you) as the area resource!
Bobby, thanks for the post. It’s definitely valuable info for bloggers, yet advice which is often neglected (and I must admit I am guilty of a couple of these points). I’ll print it out and use it as a guide for my future blogging efforts.
Bobby you are a main source of information for me and my site and blog. I have recently moved and changed markets. A real scary thing for me since I was well established in my previous market for ten years.
Using the technology tools I have been able to begin to re-establish myself but this means getting back to basics. It is not easy for one start over. I appreciate your reminders.
I am curious, you mention on here that you should be asking for blog comments at the end of your blog. I ended up turning off our blog comments because I was getting mainly spam. Do you think its ok to ask for blog comments, but then make the blog comments have to be approved? I use wordpress for our real estate blog
very helpfull , thanks for sharing
First of all, thank you for such a post. This will act as a knowledgeable guide for new investors. As you said it is safe to allocate a certain amount of money for future unknown expenses. Great tips