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Advanced Summary – This article educates real estate professionals on the effective use of a real estate blog for marketing purposes.

It’s a fact of Internet marketing that website usability direct affects website success in general. And the same fact applies to real estate blogs.

If your blog is easy for people to use (read, navigate, search, etc.), then you’ll have better success with reader interaction and lead generation.
On the other hand, if your blog is difficult to use, you will severely undercut your chances for real estate blogging success.

Real Estate Blogs and Clutter

When you first set up your blog, it will be straightforward and easy to use. Most blogging programs are designed this way “out of the box.” But the more you learn about blogging, you more tempted you will be to clutter up your blog with all those nifty (but often unnecessary) plug-ins, add-ons, and bells and whistles.

My recommendations are three-fold:

1. First, don’t add anything to your blog that does not (A) improve the user’s experience, (B) support your primary marketing goal, or (C) a combination of the two. If you start adding junk to your blog just because you can, you will do grave injury to your blog’s usability.

2. Secondly, have a friend or colleague check out your blog and ask their honest opinion about things like neatness, organization, usability and purpose.

3. Lastly, don’t assume people are going to hunt for the things you want them to find. If there is an item (or items) that you really want people to find, such as listing info, then give it prominence on your real estate blog and demote everything else.

Remember, your online audience is highly skilled at hopping from one website to another while gathering information. You want to create the kind of real estate blog that they land on and stay for a while … not the kind of blog that they quickly hop away from. Quality of content is a big part of this, but blog usability is just as important.

When choosing to create a real estate blog for the purpose of generating leads & passive income, you must focus on a niche. In order to identify a niche, you need to ask yourself what everybody is talking about nowadays. In this article, I am going to focus on creating a short sale blog and generating short sale leads while generating income helping this particular segment of the population.

Let me first start off by stating that most blogs are a waste of time, money and “prehistoric” when it comes to online marketing.

While real estate agents specialize in physical real estate, most of them need a lesson or two on how to take over “online real estate,” which is the best way to think of online marketing. In order to be successful online, you need to learn how to take over “online real estate.”

Generally, most real estate agent blogs all look the exact same: They have links to a few old listings, mortgage calculators & the same general real estate news one could find on a million other websites.

This is why most real agents end up joining large blogging networks like Active Rain or Trulia, in an attempt to gain a competitive edge over their peers. While Active Rain and Trulia helps the average real estate agent have a “better than average” online presence, agents still find themselves stuck among a sea of other Realtors with no real “point of differentiation” to really help them stand out. They end up being another “profile picture” on these networks and their online presence is thus limited in both power & influence.

In order to stand out, you must focus on a niche and create an individual blog that is self branded. For example focusing on short sales will enable you to do other things such as adding partner services like credit repair, loan modifications, debt settlement, etc which is the key to passive income online, especially if you’re simply marketing other companies.

Imagine blogging about short sales and making money off your “blog partners” in your sleep!

You see, online marketers have been branding themselves as “industry experts” and making money off their blogs for YEARS.

Yet real estate agents still haven’t fully embraced the opportunity of doing business online since they are, by trade, “industry experts.” If real estate agents were to apply online marketing techniques to their own websites & begin upselling different services to a target market, they too could be generating passive income while generating more leads for their business then they every dreamed possible.

I personally generate, on average, hundreds of leads per day, a few listings a week & multiple streams of income online ALL through my blog, and I very well might be one of the only Realtors doing this.

Blogging is just one of the common methods being used today by many real estate agents to market their business on the World Wide Web. In fact, the use of blogs to advertise their own real estate business on the Web is being practiced by many business-minded entrepreneurs today.

But setting up a real estate blog does not necessarily generate success overnight. In fact, you need to continuously work on it to be able to maximize its capability as an Internet marketing strategy for your real estate business on the Web; and giving you the profit and success that you solely deserve.

Blog Site Creation

The first step to a successful real estate blog is to make sure that the content will reflect your theme. The physical attribute of your site will be one of the factors that will keep the interests of your visitors solely on your venture.

Keep well in mind that you need to provide your potential clients and customers with an online page that caters to their needs — making sure that the features of your site are made accessible to them, and organized in a professional manner that speaks of a good business. Choose carefully the color, design, layout, and background of your real estate blog, keeping up an effort to make it all fit for the success of your business.

Powerful Content

After creating a blog site following the precepts of Internet marketing, you need to make sure that you provide only informative and quality posts to your visitors. You need to keep in mind that not all of these Web surfers are planning to purchase a property from you; in fact, most of them will just be checking your site for relevant information they need to satisfy their curiosity or to answer their inquiries about the real estate market.

Such is the case; you need to avoid putting up content that reeks of direct selling, since this will practically scare your potential clients and customers away without even giving it a second thought. Also, your content will improve your reputation as a credible real estate agent knowledgeable in the business, or as a desperate individual hell-bent on making a sale without even taking the consideration of the needs of their clients.

Also, the posts on your real estate blog can be given a comment by its readers. You might want to make use of this handy feature as a means of communicating directly with them — even if the comment is a negative one. Make sure that you are polite and professional with your replies to increase your reputation as a real estate agent rendering quality service on the World Wide Web.

A real estate blog is quite useless to its owner if it doesn’t generate enough traffic during its operation. It is true that the World Wide Web offers millions of potential clients and customers to any business venture, but making your site accessible is the most important factor to consider when setting one up.

If your blog site generates a good amount of traffic in a certain period of time, then that would only suggest that a lot of people find your real estate blog interesting enough to come back for more; and the more visitors you have, the bigger the possibility to generate a tidy profit for both you and your venture.

Market Your Blog

The first step is to spread the word around of your real estate blog. You can do so by optimizing your site with search engine optimization. Since search engines are considered as a primary tool in looking up information on the World Wide Web, then it would be best to apply SEO methods so that you can expand your search engine coverage.

One method of search engine optimization is to customize your blog site with keywords so that it can be picked up by searches performed by search engines. The more keywords you have, the wider your coverage would be.

Another way to market your site is to propagate your blog’s address to various areas on the Internet. You can build links with other real estate blogs or sites that has the same venture as you do. Web directories are also useful when you plan to spread your site address around the Internet.

You may also want to advertise your real estate blog in your profile in forums, chat rooms, and so on. The more people who are aware about your blog site, the better your traffic would be.

Tickle The Interest Of Your Visitors

Once you have implemented all the Internet marketing strategies to promote your real estate blog on the World Wide Web, all you to do is to make sure that your visitors will find your site interesting.

Aside from posting your complete profile and business info, you might to want to incorporate interesting content that will grab the attention of your readers. For starters, avoid putting up hard-sell information regarding different properties under your banner; but instead, stick with informative topics that will slowly interest these visitors and turn them into potential profits.

You can posts real estate information, such as market status, property acquisition tips, sellers guide, seminars regarding real estate, and so on. Also, you might want to communicate directly with your visitors by constantly checking on the comments of each posts and answering back as politely as possible.

Speaking of communication, you might want to include chat rooms, forums, and guest books into your real estate blog so that your visitors will have a place to state their comments regarding your business or simply a place to inquire about real estate in general.

Blogging these days has livened up the world of real estate. Most property market blogs these days address the importance of local real estate content, and discusses more specific, wide-ranging and more interesting content and stories, and not just give out cold facts or figures.

Blogs Produce Higher Search-Engine Results

It’s a fact that it makes all the difference to a real estate Web site to be located on the front page of search engines like Google when a keyword query is performed, both in terms of the traffic it receives and in the amount of leads and business acquired as a result.

In today’s Internet marketing realm, search engines hold premium value, as most studies have indicated that up to 70% of all traffic to a particular Web site comes through search engines and that 77% of home shoppers use the Internet during their home search. In order to build an effective Internet marketing strategy, focus on using methodologies and techniques that will attract the attention of search engines, particularly Google.

And though search engines have been around quite a long time already most real estate brokers and agents have yet fully optimizing their Web sites sufficiently in order to be ranked highly in primary search results for major search engines like Google, Yahoo!,MSN and others. A blog is a wonderful tool to produce high search-engine results. Blogging helps property market professionals acquire the most value for money when it comes to search engines.

Blogs Could Serve As Effective Link-Builders

In the Web, a Hyperlink can be a real estate agent’s potent weapon for getting better search engine rankings, as the more links you get, the better your site would be . The more relevant the link, the more importance that link has for search engine results. An inbound link from another Web site or blog would symbolize a vote of confidence in your Web site and its content. It’s like someone putting up a sign saying “go to this site, it’s worth it.”

Blogs are viewed by most to naturally generate inbound links, because in the world of blogging, it’s the thing to do. You should be aware that today’s bloggers are a part of a larger community, and linking to other worthwhile content would be a normal part of participating in the larger “blogosphere.” Good-quality content is found by others in the world of blogs and linked to on a regular basis, therefore creating top-quality and interesting content will get you much better inbound links.

Blogs Can Be Keyword-Optimized

Real estate professionals need to take note of the effectiveness that blogs can be, as these can be naturally keyword-optimized to allow for much greater appeal to search engines. Keywords are search terms that Internet surfers use when searching for information or Web sites. For instance, the phrase “real estate” is one of the most frequently-searched term in the industry.

However, its unfortunate that the chances of your site, or even a blog, for getting ranked higher in the search engines are quite remote, as today there is too much competition from firms and agents who have deeper pockets and area spending millions in order get much higher rankings for this general term. You have a substantially better chance of attaining targeted traffic to your Web site by focusing your keywords on more local and much specific geographic areas.