Spring Cleaning, Screaming Me, and Other Special Offers

Spring has hit my city!  The palo verde are in bloom, the weather is warm - which all means it's time for a thorough house cleaning to clear out the winter dust and clutter.

It also reminds me to do the same with my blog.

I've been working on some course materials for a new social media designation, a group I'm honored to be part of.  It's all based around the concept of leveraging these tools to engage with real people.  So every once in a while, I like to go back to my site and my blog and make sure that's what I'm doing.

I was peeking around AR today as well - I went to eleven of the top ranked agent blogs for eleven random states here at AR to check out their blogs.  And would you believe, out of those 11 blogs, only one had any kind of call to action, any kind of offer in their sidebar that might entice a client to explore further, to stay and click around in some information that pertains to that site visitor, or to go look at homes?

Oh there were plenty of "come see me over here" type links - which sort of scream "hey you - come learn about me!"  But is that really engaging others?  I don't think so.

So if we're trying to attract clients to our blog given the various content that we write, what kind of calls to action, what kind of offers should we be making in our sidebars?

People generally want two things: information and listings.  And yet not one blog I went to today here on AR had a prominent link to their listings search anywhere where I didn't have to scroll to see it, or where I didn't have to look through a huge list of text links down near the bottom.

If we know people want information and listings, why not give them huge, obvious opportunity to look at those things?  Why not make a nice button and put it in your sidebar up at the top, something a user can click to look at homes.  Or another button that links to all of your buyer or seller or city articles by using your tag links?

Make it easy for people to get to the information they want - engage them by offering them what they want, not by blasting them with more information about yourself.  Give them what they want on their terms - take care of them, and they'll take care of you.  So what can you add or rearrange in your sidebar that would better address a visitor's potential needs?  What offer can you make that would be helpful, what information do you have that you can group together for them?