A study conducted over the course of 20 years followed Harvard grad incomes and found that while 90% of grads made $X annually ($X was not defined) after 20 years, the other 10% made 10 times $X.  What separated the 90% from the selected 10% was that the 10% wrote down their goals, made specific plans to reach them and checked in with those goals each year.  So, what separated the millionaires from the average Joes was their ability to set and track their goals.  The same thing holds true for your blog.  You must set goals and track your progress in order to reach your blogging potential.

Baseline:

When you start your blog, you are starting form a baseline of 0. You probably don’t have any backlinks, have a page rank of 0, don’t have a single visitor and can’t find your self on a search engine with two hands, a flashlight, a compass and a map.  And, honestly, that’s good.  You know where you are at.  So, let’s look at what types of goals you should be setting, how to plan to achieve them and how to track your progress.

GOAL 1: Establish credibility and create a voice for your service.  Put a face to your business.  The first truth of the real estate industry and blogging is that you, as a Realtor, are selling the same product to the same audience at the same price as you Joe Blow Realtor down the street.  You should use a blog to somehow differentiate yourself from the other Realtors in your farm area. People have relationships with people not organizations.  Blogging can give you a face and voice into your marketplace- it is a powerful tool that allows to connect with your audience.

Here are some other articles I wrote that can help you develop your “personal voice” 

Learn to blog for local traffic

Humanizing a blog: how blogging is like bodybuilding

Blog Writing 101

GOAL 2: Blog frequently to drive RSS subscriptions and traffic.  While most bloggers say the minimum post frequency should be 6 articles per week at no less than 250 words, that isn’t always feasible for a Realtor.  I feel a more reasonable minimum is 3 articles per week (350-500 words).  Just make sure that those articles are indeed information packed and useful.  If you don’t have the time for quantity- go for quality.

Add a minimum of 3, 350-500 word posts per week or 6, 250 word posts per week

GOAL 3: Build backlinks to build credibility with search engines.  Backlinks (those links form other sites back to  yours) are essential for building credibility with engines. However, you need to grow them slowly to get the most out of them.  A reasonable goal for backlinks to add around 10-20 per day.  That results in a natural growth of 1200-2400 over the course of 6 months.  I am writing an article on backlink building right now, so stay tuned for an Ultimate Guide to Backlink Strategies.

Add between 10-20 new backlinks each day for 6 months. (directories and blog commenting are the easiest ways to do that)

GOAL 4: Track your traffic so you know if your are reaching your goals.  Most of you have a back-end tool to your website that allows you to track hits, unique visitors, Robot crawls and XML feed usage.  Use the tools your webmasters so graciously provided.  Check in with them weekly and track your progress.  If you have to plot the progress on a spreadsheet, do that.  You want to see your traffic increasing.  If you don’t it is an indication that either your content isn’t written well enough or there is a serious SEO issue with your site.  There could be other problems but those are two most common.

Track your traffic weekly to ensure that it is climbing.  Adjust your strategy if it is not.

GOAL 5: Comment on other blogs to drive traffic and backlinks. Make a commitment to yourself to make at least one useful, education-packed comment on another real estate or local blog at least once a day.  Those will help drive your backlinks and traffic.

Comment on at least one other local or real estate blog each day to drive traffic and backlinks