Happily Married Online: Blog and Website

Real Estate professional's online strategies vary, but one rule remains constant: If you only offer a blog and/or social media websites, your online credibility suffers.  

Branding yourself as an individual is important, and offering valuable information to viewers helps, but the final step in gaining a true follower is directing visitors from your blog to your professional website, where there's valuable professional information they are searching for and web tools they want to use. 

Don't get me wrong, your blog, glimpses of your personal life, and pics of you with your family are important parts of the equation, but in the end, online searchers want to trust that you are THE true professional they should choose to handle one of their largest purchases of their lifetime. 

Let's say Vicky and Roy are first time home buyers. They are savvy online, so their first step is to Google for professionals in their area. They type in: "Sacramento Homes" start looking for their dream home and decide it's time to find their Real Estate professional or their loan officer. They will most likely type into their search engine "Sacramento Realtor" , "Sacramento mortgage company", well you get the picture. If you're lucky, they search your name and find your Facebook and ActiveRain. They feel like they've researched you pretty well, but where to go from here? Surely there's a professional website to go to and apply online, complete a form about what they're interested in, perhaps see today's interest rates, or see what homes you have listed...

Onto the best case scenario: They've found you online, visited your ActiveRain, read some of your blogs, saw some of your Facebook posts and photos of you at the lake with your family and oh what a cute dog that is~! They see that your blog and social sites link to your professional website, so they're directed there. The light bulb goes off. They feel confident that they've done their due diligence in researching you and deciding you are the one who can pull off the biggest purchase of their life. Boom! Phone call, email, application, whatever it is, they've decided together in their family room, it's you.

Marry your blog, social media and professional website together, link them up because the combination is much stronger than any one by itself. The combination is what gains you ultimate online credibility!

PS The more links TO your website, the better it will show up in searches.