Blogging - Make the Best Use of Your Time

In my experience blogs provide great value to readers, which is important, but they don't urge a reader to make contact so they don't convert leads well. Blogs are hard to organize so readers end up reading across many bloggers' content.

Web sites, on the other hand, can also provide that content value for a reader AND they are (should be) designed to capture a user's attention and eventually convert leads. They convert better because they are (again, should be) structured and provide features that urge a contact (i.e. contact forms, promotional bugs, etc.)

Blogs, in my mind, are multipurposed: provide the reader with valuable content now and drive their traffic to some lead conversion system (i.e. web site).

Tom: Personally, it depends on the topic. If I am writing for localism then I write the page for my web site and then blog about it on A|R and my other blogs and I link to the web site page to drive traffic to it.

If I am writing about Realtor stuff then I will write for my blog and may or may not add the article to my site. For example, all of these AWD posts are being placed on a "agent web site design tips" web site because I can organize the content easier. However, I am writing for A|R members and not necessarily for the site. In fact, not all of the A|R posts are on the site and I am not linking out from A|R to those pages.

If my post is about my area of service and about my personal/team business my strategy has been to drive traffic to my site so I can convert leads. I have heard of people getting leads from blogs but I am sure the conversion rate is much lower than the conversion rate of a well designed site. So, I write the content for my site and then blog about it.

Marchel: I am still experimenting with this and certainly not the expert. I have tried a couple of things to get the best use of my content writing time. I have written pages for my site and then talked ABOUT the page on my blog. I have written pages and copied the first few paragraphs and then linked to the rest of the article from the blog - sort of like an intro. I have also copied the whole content from a page into the blog and linked back to that page. I'm not sure which is best. I do know that duplicate content is often frowned upon by search engines so I am testing this out. I would say the best way to do it would be to write the article for your site and then blog about that article so the content is somewhat original in both places.

Ryan: The direction you link depends on which resource you want to do your lead conversion. If you convert better on A|R then link from your site to your blogs and visa versa.

If I'm not mistaken I believe there are two reasons we blog and create web sites. We want to help out others in our industry and we want to improve our exposure to grow our business. I believe we can accomplish both at the same time in many cases. A|R benefits greatly from our success in both objectives. If our blogs have great content then their overall ranking improves. If our sites are successful and we all link to them then their overall ranking improves. It's all about great content and inbound links.

Happy writing! Happy linking!