I joined Active Rain and started blogging in 2006. I had no idea what search engine optimization was and I 
would just blog here and there in an attempt to obtain mortgage clients for my Brokerage. Reading blogs was more important to me back then. I gained knowledge from others on Active Rain and I am so happy I joined for that reason alone. Getting my Real Estate Sales license in 2009 was where I really started to pick up my blogging and in the last 2 years blogging for me has become my 7am task 5 days a week. I do not always blog on Active Rain. I have 2 other sites that I blog on to drink in a big glass of that ever intoxicating Google Juice with a Bing back. I will post the content on AR as a fresh post after is was on another site.
This one is for the people who think blogging is a waste of time. My inbound calls generally start off with one of three statements. Either they say "so and so referred me to you" or " I found you on the internet and had a question" or "I have read some of your blogs and have a question for you". My two main sites for blogging are Active Rain and Blogger. Here is what I am noticing. On Active Rain you gain google juice and SEO power for general internet searches providing you use the proper long tail key words. I honestly have not had any customer in the past 6 years say they read my blog on Active Rain. They have read the blogs that were shared out to other sites, but not read directly from the AR site. On Blogger you gain SEO and Google Juice but you have the ability to share the blog directly to Google+ as a public post. That puts your blog in front of more non mets than lets say...facebook. Since blogging on Blogger those people who say "I read a few of your blogs" have increased. I received 5 calls this week alone from blogging and 2 converted into listings.
I think of it as my SEO Round Robbin. I was teaching my Technology Class at my current office this week and we got into a discussion on Blogging etc.. and someone asked "where do you blog?" so I told them how I do it then the next question was "how long does all that take?" my answer was this... I blog once a day early in the morning then I share a previous post on multiple sites with a few clicks and I'm done. I think the key is to stick with it and do it every day just like any lead generation task.
Here is a great tip...do not include your Brokerage logo or broker branded images in your blogs. There may come a day when you have to sit down and edit them out of 5 or 6 years of blogs.
How is Blogging Affected Your SEO? I'd love to lean more ways to improve what I am doing.
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