Free Valuable Tips for Real Estate Marketing So You Can Relax, Vacation, and Spend More Time With Friends and Family

What's the hardest thing for blogging for you?  Finding content?  Knowing what to write about?  Staying focused?  Perhaps you are looking for some Google love and search engine optimization or wrapping your mind around social media and community engagement as a real estate marketing strategy? Or maybe you want to know about specifically ethical seo?

I've tried to include some outside of the box and non-traditional ways to increase search engine rankings for real estate agents and bloggers.

First, write when you are most inspired and block off a set amount of time.  Block off 45 minutes to an hour and a half to write some quality content about your city.  Yahoo Local or your local newspaper could be be a great jumping off point for ideas.  If you don't have something good to say about the neighborhoods, why are you living there?  And why are you selling houses there?  

Soon blogging and content creation will become a natural part of your work flow as a real estate agent.  

Second, set priorities and boundaries.  Its very easy to let blogging trade off with family life.  Its very important that you establish boundaries and of course follow through on your promises to yourself.  This bloggers guide to seo will help make that transition easy.

Third, you have to develop patience with your SEO campaign.  Realize getting ranked on the first page of Google may take a while, especially for very competitive search phrases.  And it will take even longer if you don't take your SEO seriously and you just blog about gas prices, what you ate for lunch, and your cat.

Its important that whenever you start a blog that you take time to update it.  Generally this means updating it two to fives times a week with new listings, which only takes a total of about 45 minutes once you get in the swing of things.  Staying dedicated to updating content can be hard if you're not passionate and you don't see it as a long term strategy.

Fourth, consider outsourcing content for search engine optimization.  Consider hiring a freelancer to blog or write some of your content for you.  As long as you credit them on the blog as a guest poster, you maintain the authenticity of your blog.  In sharp contrast, you want to avoid the tactic that Walmart used called astro turfing where they pulled a bait and switch on readers.  The backlash was the shot heard round the bloggosphere. You can outsource content from an affordable freelancer who are passionate about your topic and have more time to devote to writing, editing, and content creation.  As you create content, you will also want to consider this tips for writing for the web.

Fifth, consider outsourcing the creation of resources and link bait for seo.  You can outsource the creation of several real estate tip sheets that serve as resources for your customers.   You want to create real real estate resources for potential home sellars and home buyers.  One tactic that drives link building, one of the cornerstones of white hat seo , is the creation of resources.  As a real estate agent and having a family you may not want to spend your time writing.  You can opt for someone else do create the fundamental aspects of the writing and add your tips and suggestions in the editing process.

Six, consider going audio for search engine optimization.  Consider speaking your content onto your laptop or voice recorder and getting it both transcribed and edited.  This would allow you to save a ton of time and do your blogging from almost anywhere.  You can even turn you ipod into a recorder for about $40 and voice recorders run about $40-80 bucks.  I just got a Sony voice recorder for this very purpose.  You should be able to get it transcribed for relatively inexpensive from a site like elance.  However, you may want to look into transcription prices before jumping head first into the audio space.  Or if you are already doing real estate podcasting, you can pay to have those too.

Seventh, kick the extra point and go the extra mile for SEO Marketing Results.  Once you have your content in place, you want the content to have a multiplier effect on your efforts.  So its important to invest a little time and money into promoting the content.  Consider an affordable online public relations firm or you can pick a great white hat search engine optimization firm to integrate your strategy.  If you don't you may just end up being the proverbial tree that falls in the forest and no one is there to hear them.

Eighth, community engagement builds an audience (Its perfect real estate marketing).  Ask your audience questions.  Answer their problems.  Tell your story.  Build a crowd and community.  Check out the free service Ning for creating your own social network.  Or build a community around a podcast.  Before getting started however, you will want to see what communities are already out there both offline and online.

Ninth, optimize for the Real World.  Bring your online search engine optimization strategy into the real world  Integrate your online and offline strategies.  Moving pixels around won't sell property.  You have to build trust, and relationships.  Using your SEOed site to then help develop a community of people who genuinely care about an issue whether thats with Meetup, Yahoo Incoming, or an already scheduled real world event.  You might want to check out this hybrid strategy for real estate social media marketing from Innate 2008

Bottom line for all Successful SEO Strategies:  Invest in quality unique content that will help and delight your customers.  Invest in developing and maintaining relationships.  Invest in marketing.

If you plan on putting 100 to 200 hours in one year into blogging and online content creation you want it to really count.  Otherwise the true return on investment for your efforts may be rather skimpy.

Nathan Ketsdever is an ethical search engine optimization specialist who provides search engine optimization training and social media marketing services to startups, entrepreneurs, and real estate agents.