How to Blog to Build Your Real Estate Business

We’ve talked before about why you need a business blog, but let’s walk through the process of creating your blog and using it to gain followers and drive clients to your business.

The term blog comes from “web log” and that is what a blog is– it’s a log of information you put out on the web.

The first step is to define your niche, or the scope of your blog. That’s easy: your real estate business.

Second is to pick a platform on which to build your blog. There are several. We use WordPress, one of the oldest and biggest blogging platforms.

Setting up your blog on WordPress is free. Check out this article, which walks you through the process.

If you already have your own business website, your blog can be linked to your website as an external page link. Don't have your own website? No problem! You will need to purchase a domain name in order to give your blog an address on the internet. If your name is not available, add something that identifies what you do or where your market is:

The other component that you pay for is hosting, which is paying a service to put your blog/website on the web.

How does a blog promote your business?

Each time you add a new post to your blog, you are creating another virtual page on your website/blog. Each page is content that increases your presence on the internet. There is a saying that “content is king;” the more content you have the more you show up in searches.

You may have heard terms such as SEO strategy, keyword research related to blog content. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is merely the practice of planning web content to optimize its “searchability,” or to show up in more searches and higher up in searches. Ideally, you want your page to show up on the first page of Google results in searches. SEO strategy is designed to achieve that goal.

Keyword research is one of the steps in SEO.

It refers to using terminology that your clientele relates to and would use in searching for information.

For example, a post titled “Home Sale Trends in Valley High School District, Rosetown” will get a lot more hits than a post titled “Neighborhood Market Trends.”

Don’t forget that while you know where you live and work, your information is out there on the world wide web, fighting to be seen. With that said, you don’t need to be too concerned with writing to SEO or keywords. Just write in a casual, friendly voice, using descriptive phrases, in a language that anyone can understand.

Here are a few more ways blogging helps build your business.

• Blogging gives you the opportunity to steer clients using internal links. We’ve done that here with this link back to our Home Page. The first sentence in this post also includes an internal link back to a previous post about business blogging.

• Blogging helps build your email list if you include an invitation to subscribe to your blog.

• You can get feedback from readers by allowing them to comment on your blog posts. This is usually a feature you can turn on or off for each post.

• Blogging gives you additional social media content. Each time you post to your blog, you will want to promote the post on all of your social media accounts: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Let us know if you enjoyed this post and if you have additional suggestions for blogging to build your business. (That’s a call to action, BTW, one more strategy tip!)