Have you jumped onto the blogging bandwagon? Have you incorporated blogging into your business plan? It shouldn't matter if you are busy or slow, because blogging should be a part of your 2008 business plan. The NAR says that 80% of the people first shop online for information when it comes to real estate and mortgages.
Blogging can be very therapeutic in so many ways. It can also be a great way to brand yourself online in which I talked about in Part 1 : How to Market yourself in 2008 -- Marketing & Branding -- Part 1 of 3 I am not an expert in blogging as I am in mortgages, but I wanted to share with you what I have learned in the last 16 months because of Active Rain and a few other people that I have networked with. Some of these people are experts in the blogging field.
Now, for an opening introduction. I wanted to quote Mary McKnight who told several of us in a webinar that Active Rain is probably the best place to start blogging and learning how to blog. They have a very easy blogging platform and Google loves them. Also, for some excellent tips and expert advice, please venture over to Mary McKnight's profile and blogs. I am not hear to promote Mary's business, but she certainly knows what she is doing. I have learned so much from Mary.
Now, I will make this statement without pointing fingers. Don't believe or follow every tip that you read on the internet and even read on Active Rain. There are actually members here on AR who would vouch for that statement, because a few of them went down in page rank because they followed someone else's advice.
Do you need to be an expert writer? No, not at all. Quality content relating to your profession should be your prime focus. Keep in mind that the average daily newspaper is only of 4th to 6th grade reading. Remember Dennis Miller on Monday Football? You sometimes needed a dictionary and thesaurus with you to understand some of his commentary while watching football. You do not want to lose your reader, nor bore your reader.
- Your title of your blog :
-- Aren't we always attracted to something that catches our attention? Makes us want to read what is in front of us? Sure, catchy titles work on AR, if you want 100's of comments. Yes, it's nice, I'll admit that. But the general public searches for you online by certain keywords and not a catchy title. The title to your blog can be extremely important.
-- You need to pay attention to your title, making sure that you put some of your keywords in that title. Active Rain uses your first 4 words of your title to be picked up in its searches. Other sites use 6 to 10, depending on that particular site. Knowing what keywords are searched are extremely important. You want to make both your title and blog keyword rich. And you don't want to use more than 15 words or more than 85 characters in your title.
** Blog Titles: Making them Effective by Toby Barnett
Keyword Tools : How to find your best keywords
** https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
** http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/
** Improve search engine placement with keywords
-- I have heard from some people that they aren't getting much business from their blogs. Concentrate on local content, specific content, and informational content. Keep writing about real estate and/or mortgages. Nobody wants to hear about your new dog that you just got or your new car.
-- I believe in sharing a few things about yourself, making some of your blogs touchy/feely. Showing your personalty. But this will usually show in most things that you write about. The best advice that I can give? Content, content, and content. People are looking for not only advice, but information. It all comes down to what you want out of blogging. I talk more about this in here : Free Beer for comments on all blogs posted this weekend!!! (ignore the title)
-- Key Note : Patience... results don't happen over night. I didn't start to see true results until 10 months later. Do you want to know about how successful blogging has been for many of us? Please join this group by Brian Block : Active Rain Block Party
-- The normal attention span of someone is not much at all. When it comes to blogging, they say between 300 to 650 words is adequate. But you also don't want to leave too much important information out of your blog. I truly think 750 or less is a good barometer when writing. If you find that your blog might be too long, then make it into a short series. Here is a great tool for counting your words within your blog : Word_Counter Tool This blog? 915 words.
-- For more on this topic, please read : Do you like them short or long?
-- Google doesn't really care as much if you copy your own blog and post it on two other sites that you have. They care about spammers. For more information on this, please read : Duplicate content -- Myth or Truth -- What does it all mean when blogging....
Marketing yourself in 2008 series :
Disclaimer : For those that have said that you can't read my blog because it doesn't fit on one page, it's because I write everything in Firefox, not Internet Explorer. I like some of the features that Firefox offers. It not only has a built in spell check, but it saves your work if your system crashed or if AR went down.
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