Dear Kalena…
I have just discovered your site and have read your article on Blogging. I am a realtor in Whistler, BC Canada and my question is: Do you think blogging is a good thing for a realtor, and if so what do you think the topics should be? Please note, I have just discovered your site, and a friend built my site, but he can’t do it any more so I have turned to SEO101 to find out what on earth I need to do. Thanks for your time and I look forward to hearing from you.
Marion
Dear Marion,
Maintaining a blog for almost any site is usually a good thing. However, it takes consistency, time, and of course, commitment. There are several benefits to having a blog on your site.
Blogs provide rich content that the search engines just love. They are usually updated on a regular basis which also helps to keep the search engine spiders coming back for more. For your purpose, you need to focus your blog to attract whomever you are looking to get to your site.
Assuming your goal is to bring in folks looking to buy real estate in Whistler, BC, I would write about Whistler! You could blog about great restaurants, interesting places to visit, or happenings in the town. Whatever news and information you think your visitors would find helpful.
Try not to talk about your own business, but rather offer information that is useful and unbiased, so your visitors will keep coming back, and also see you as a trusted source of information.
Lastly, research and build a list of important keywords that you need to optimize your site for. Use those keywords to link to your main site where appropriate. That will all help to pass the relevance of your blog onto your business site.
Oh, one last tip. If you’re going to start a blog it is worth the time and effort to install and host the blog on your domain instead of using a hosted version from a third party. WordPress is easy to install and administer.
Good luck! Nick
www.TheSmallMerchant.com
Hello Kalena,
Thank you for posting this question and sharing your insight. I agree with all you said. I started my blog less than a year ago and it’s been a great experience. One thing I haven’t figured out yet, is how do you add and manage advertisement on a blog… I’m using WordPress.com so far and don’t see any features for ads, is that why you host your own blog?
I wish I could find the post but a few months ago we were advising a real estate client on his blog and while researching found an interesting idea specific to a real estate blog. It seems this real estate site was doing the usual blogging about the market, how to get your house ready for sale and the like and had a bit of traction. When they started to include news about the community – juicy stuff – the pick up was tremendous and ended up driving quite a bit more traffic to the site as well.
Thanks for your continued blogging.
Hello,
Hosting your own blog is a good idea because it gives you much more control over the layout and design, and gives you that SEO advantage I spoke about in my response above.
Adding ads is easy. The most popular type is Adsense ads (Google). You can go to Adsense and sign up for an account, then it will give you a bit of HTML code to add to your blog layout. I believe there are also WordPress add-ons that manage ads, if you want to sell ads yourself.
Good luck, Nick
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