Widget Wednesday~ Tips to enhance your Outside Blog

Today I am starting another new series that will run for the next several weeks about the great widgets that are currently available for your ActiveBlog (outside blog).  We will dive into the details of how to maximize the functionality of these widgets as well as some of the benefits of running them on your blog.  I will be using my outside blog http://myrtlebeachhomesblog.com as the the example over the next few weeks.  So, keep checking back to see the transformations and changes.

For this first post, we are going to discuss the Local Posts Widget.  While this widget seemed kind of trivial and boring when I started studying it, I found out that it can actually be a very productive and beneficial widget. 

This widget will take all of your local content/Localism posts and categorizes them into various groups.  For agents that work in more than one state, it will break things down into the separate state level. Or, say you work different counties & cities, these will be grouped together. It will categorize things all the way down to the neighborhood level. 

As you can see from my local posts widget, I wrote about many different communities, in a few different cities.  You can also quickly identify which communities I farm and focused my business on.  For a consumer this is a great way for them to find more information about an area.

Remember, unless a consumer is subscribed to your blog or are a regular reader of your material, the main way that most people who land on your blog are coming through a search on google on a particular subject. So, someone may land on my blog by searching for information about a community, and then after viewing the community, they want to see what else you have on it.  So, they click on the link on the local posts widget to find you have more articles including information about the amenities in the community, your listings in the community, and even market reports! 

You have instantly become the local expert on the neighborhood with this buyer/seller and chances of winning their business has just increased exponentially.

Now, lets shift gears a moment and talk SEO.  The other major benefit of having this widget running is that it creates individual pages for each and every area that you write and categorize on your outside blog.  This means more links on your blog.  Which means google will pick up more things on your blog making you a greater authority on that subject.  To see what I mean, simply scroll over any of the links in the local posts section of my blog and you will see each and every one is it's very own individual page for just that community.  How cool is that?

So, if you have not set up your Local Posts widget on your Outside Blog yet, go get to it now!  If you are not sure how do this, as usual, Brad has written a tutorial here.

You may wish to Subscribe to my Blog to keep up with this series.  And remember to check back tomorrow for New Theme Thursday!