It should first be disclosed that WAV Group offers consulting services to Real Estate Blog Sites – we really like them and their product 🙂 which can be purchased from Real Estate Blog Sites or from Homes Magazine in Northern California and Lake Tahoe Markets.
Why get a blog.
In my view, blogs serve a variety of great benefits to brokers.
 They allow you to publish information to your website without contacting your website manager.
- Provide excellent search engine optimization.
- Replace Pay Per Click Campaigns
- Allow you to publish to third party websites like Zillow, Trulia, Edgeio and others that accept XML or RSS feeds from other websites.
- Allow you to view the number of visitors to your blog and the articles that were most popular
Not all blogs are created equal. Make sure to ask your blog provider about the items above. If they do not serve all of these goals, do not buy it.
Blogs that are hosted at a URL other than the broker URL are a waste. Your blog should always be integrated into your website and be listed at the c level of your domain. If you do not understand this, not to fear – your website administrator will know exactly what this is and it only takes a few minutes to add the blog. When implemented correctly, your blog address should be blog.yourdomainname.com like our blog – http://blog.wavgroup.com. This will allow search engine spiders to reflect the postings on your blog as part of your website.
When purchasing a blog, you need to think in terms of Channels – a blog channel is a metaphor for a topic. Pricing goes up for additional channels.
Most brokers choose channels that correspond to their offices. That allows each office to have a voice about listings that they have, specific local real estate news, etc.
Another strategy is to set channels to topics that are important to buyers and sellers in your area – schools, market updates, listings, agent musings, etc. Be specific and use great key words like Lake Tahoe School Report, Lake Tahoe Real Estate Report, etc.
I do not have a preference for either strategy but here is an important factor – make sure to title your blog channels in a way that corresponds with competitive key words that people use on search engines – for example, if you are in Lake Tahoe, you would want to name your blog Lake Tahoe Real Estate, then name the channels Lake Tahoe Homes for Sale, Truckee Real Estate, Lake Tahoe Real Estate Market Reports, etc.
To understand the importance of this, think in terms of Google. When someone goes to http://www.google.com and enters a key word, google’s goal is to provide the consumer with the most relevant and current information. If you look at the web statistics for your broker website, focus on the search engine report and the key word phrases that drive the most amount of traffic to your website. When you look at these, you will see that most visitors that go to your website are looking for you! By their very nature, blogs are always the most relevant and current information – so they dominate the search results.
Once your blog is set up, the real work begins. The blog is useless unless you publish to it! Professional bloggers can be hired at $25 per blog entry. College students will usually do it for $5.
The more you blog, the more visibility you will get on search engines.
Blogs in the long run –
This technology will soon dominate the real estate technology industry for one key reason – RSS will replace e-mail marketing.
Why? E-Mail marketing is all SPAM. Very few people want very many daily, weekly or monthly newsletters. Most business people get more than 100 e-mails a day – e-mail is totally out of control and most of it is a waste of time. SPAM filters are also getting very good at blocking e-mail marketing. If you are doing much e-mail marketing, your domain is likely to already be blacklisted by yahoo, aol, hotmail and other popular free mail programs.
RSS is now integrated into everyone’s browser and will become the tool that people use to get the information that they want. The information will be delivered to the browser rather than to your e-mail “in box.”
WAV Group will be happy to discuss Broker Blogging with you by phone anytime. Call Victor Lund at 805-473-9119
