Look Over The Fence – Check Other Real Estate Blogs!

As a real estate professional with some experience with your own real estate blog and a great deal of experience with home buyers, sellers, real estate loan officers, appraisers and title companies, you have a lot of qualified insight to offer. Expand your visibility by offering your insights on other real estate blogs. As the saying goes, “the tide raises all boats”, by commenting at another’s blog, your address is attached to your comment allowing blog visitors to jump to your site.

Conversely, if you quote another blog to add heft to one of your entries, provide a link to that blog. The creation of more inbound and outbound links to your real estate site serve as tremendous boosters for your ranking with search engines. An inbound link is read by the search engine algorithm as “someone in the world thinks this site has good information”. Think of a link as a testimonial in computer code.

Word to the wise: Make sure your comments are informative and helpful to any blogging conversation that you join or you may be seen as “comment spamming”, which hurts your image as an expert and a person worth talking with.

Blogging 101: Educate yourself.

You can also go to blogging about blogging sites to learn more about blogging and leave comments about your experiences. Your comments may bring warm sales leads, but this is a very wide market. Some of the most educational blogging sites are:

www.bloggingpro.com: A site for blogging software & applications news, plug-ins and themes.

Blogwild!: A Guide for Small Business Blogging author Andy Wibbels covers small business’ blogging points.

Blogging for Business: Author Ted Demopoulos goes over the whys and wherefores of blogging and podcasting for businesses.

Expand Your Real Estate Presence

More to your market, real estate blogs you can interact with are: The Inman Report is one of the biggest in the industry and regularly appears on Google’s first page results for the key phrase “real estate blogs”.

Active Rain is “free online community for real estate professionals designed to help them promote and grow their business”. Once you join, you can post a bio of you and your company. Read a few interchanges and see if it is something you want to join.

Also, commenting on real estate website blogs that are out of your market area, especially an area that consistently sends buyers such as snowbirds or retirees to your real estate market, is a way to build links, traffic and a growing stream of sales leads.

Start Getting Listed in Directories…Wisely

Also, once you have some entries – hopefully interesting, informative and possibly scintilatingly witty – get your real estate blog listed in web directories, especially the real estate blog directories. A real estate directory that shows up high in Google’s rating is Real Estate Blogs.

General directories that Google “respects” are DMOZ Open Directory Project, Yahoo Directory and Business.com. DMOZ is free and takes a while as they check your site. Business.com is a paid listing directory.

Warning: You don’t want to go and try and get listed in any and all listing directories on the web. This can backfire on two fronts: one Google lowers your ranking if the directories are not in your industry or viewed as fake directories. Fake directories can also lead to more spam hitting your inbox and some even list your site, but if you check the HTML code they have a “nofollow” tag or some other instructions blocking the link from connecting to your site.

Blogging is the growing communication tool of the 21st century. So, look over the fence, check out what the real estate blogs are doing in your internet neighborhood. Comment, exchange information, read, and get listed in directories. Wait, this sounds like things you already do in other areas!