Why You Might Want to Get An Outside Blog
So you've been on Active Rain a bit. You've cut your blogging teeth and have got the basics down. You've practiced with your peers, know the key dos and don'ts, but you're still hidden behind the Members Only curtain! You can impress your real estate buddies, maybe develop enough relationships to get an agent to agent referral! But unless a bunch of consumers in your area JOIN Active Rain, you're invisible to your true market.
So first, you need to be a Rainmaker! Now you've got major Google Juice with your Active Rain posting, and if you pay attention and learn the rules of SEO, you just may find yourself kicking serious butt on Google Page 1 for your market! Those long time area veterans are now vulnerable to your superior blogging skills and Internet clout!
But at this point, you've still got some vulnerability. The public may find your posts, but because it's still under the www.ActiveRain.com domain, they can wander off to your blogging brethren that serve your area! Not cool, right?
Well there's a way to minimize that chance! Get yourself an Outside Blog! Get yourself a custom web address and promote THIS blog site. This breaks the tie to Active Rain for the consumer, so once they find that blog post, they're all yours if you can keep their attention. We've got one primary Outside Blog LizSpearTeamNews.com that we use for all our consumer oriented posts.
And you can take it one step further and create a specialized Outside Blog. Yes, it does cost you extra monthly fees (click on Start New Outside Blog at the bottom left of your My Home page for details), but the cost is negligible in terms of how much we spend on our overall marketing efforts. Face it, we've all spent a LOT more for a lot LESS return.
We've decided to go after a niche market, Warren County Patio Homes. We have the domain WarrenCountyPatioHomes.com assigned to this niche blog site. We ONLY post items specific to Patio Homes there. There's no trying to sort through almost 600 blog posts looking for the pertinent items. It's concise to the topic. So far, we've only added three posts, have some video in edit mode and will be adding more posts over the next few weeks/months, along with periodic market reports specific to patio homes.
And guess what, with that small combination of posts and the specific domain name, we've captured all but the top spot on the first entries on Google Page 1 for "Warren County Patio Homes". The highlighted post is from this morning and see we posted to our main blog AND the outside blog, the AR Google Juice was stronger! Pretty quick though!
Obviously your results will vary according to the niche you're after, but the signs are good so far! Google Analytics shows consumers are finding us. Maybe not in overwhelming numbers, but considering that this it a totally organic approach so far, with no direct mail marketing or other promotion for the blog site, we're satisfied that we're heading in the right direction. We'll marry it up with You Tube videos of the developments to kick it up a notch.
We'll keep you posted on how the niche marketing works!
Keep on Blogging!
Liz and Bill aka BLiz
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