Blog Building Basics
So you want to build your own Real Estate or Mortgage Blog? Great! This section of Blog Fiesta is going to get you started with the basics, show you some simple strategies, and open your eyes to what other RE blogging mentors are saying.
Three easy blog solutions
One of the big problems facing most prospective bloggers is putting the blog online in the first place. There are thousands of options, and no single solution fits everyone the best. Based on my trial and error experience, I’m going to recommend three options.
Option 1 - blogger.com - Free - Basic - Simple
lenderama, my first blog, started out as a simple blogger.com template. If you wish to get up and running very fast, and you want to do it for free, this is a good option. It’s very simple. Go to blogger.com, sign up for a new account, and start blogging! So what’s the downside? Well, you’ll find blogger is difficult to customize. Yoiu are also at the mercy of a free web hosting service. If the site goes down, you can’t exactly ask for your money back. blogger.com would be an ideal service to use if you wish to publish an anonymous blog. Property Grunt is an excellent example of an anonymous blogger.com blog.
2. Word Press - Flexable - Powerful - Can be free - Recommended
This blog runs on Word Press. If I had it to do all over again, lenderama would have been a word press blog as well. The software itself is free. It’s also possible to get free hosting for your blog at wordpress.com. However, I recommend paying for web hosting. The best part about paid hosting is that you can choose your domain name.
What’s the downside? Customizing your blog is going to require a commitment to learning word press. there are tutorials on the Word Press site, and plenty of people who will help you for free, but if you want a custom blog, you’ll have a fair bit of learning in front of you.
3. Pay an expert and get on with it. - Simple- Customizable - Not free, but what is your time worth?
Do you want to be an expert on Real Estate, or HTML? If you don’t know what HTML is, that alone might answer that question. Fear not, there’s a growing list of companies interested in building a mortgage or real estate focused blog for you. Tomato Blogs, Bring The Blog, RSS Pieces, and Incredible Agent are all working to provide industy specific blogging solutions.
As you may have noticed, Realivent has advertising on this blog. I like their solution quite a bit, and not just because I get paid to refer them. Realivent builds Word Press based blogs that allow you to easily integrate your listings, create single property blogs, and publish fliers from the same data. Their “Agent” package cost $200 to set up, and $30 a month for hosting. Many agents may feel this package is powerful enough to satisfy all of their online marketing needs. This is a powerful solution that offers professional setup, no long term commitments, and a very affordable upfront investment.
What are you going to write about?
Now that you have idea of the basics involved in the infrastructure of a blog, let’s take about content. They way I see it, real estate and mortgage bloggers face a hurdle rarely seen in blogging. Most of the time, people don’t care about our related issues. It’s important when they buy a house or renovate, but otherwise, the average joe doesn’t even know that Alan Greenspan is no longer running the fed. They probably don’t know who he is at all. Because of this, bloggers need to decide if they will be blogging to daily readers, or laying an information foundation for Google driven readers at a later date.Blogging mostly about mortgages and real estate means you need to be focused on the long haul. It’s going to take some time before you start building real traffic. Your goal should be to regularly post content about different aspects of the the industry in a timeless manner. The action window of a reader looking for this information means that many readers won’t find your posts for years. You want it to be as relevant then as today. It’s still fine to comment about timely issues, just do it in separate posts.
If you are looking for everyday readers, consider blogging about something else besides (or in addition to) our industry. You can focus on any real estate issue, or mix in local events and news. Here’s the crazy thing, you really don’t need to blog about mortgages or real estate at all. Hanin Levin, of Grow-A-Brain, runs the most popular real estate blog on the Internet. But, if he didn’t tell you it was a real estate blog, you might not ever know. Really though, what’s the difference? If thousands of people come to your site every day for a laugh instead of a market update, you’re still going to reap the benefits.
One idea I had for a blog was to cover car shows. I love hot rods, but you can think about one of your own passions here and substitute. My idea is to tote along the digital camera and take pics. I’d also try to “interview” the owners about their cars. Put the results up on the blog after every show. Then post information about upcoming shows, car clubs, and maybe even throw in some local commentary on emissions laws, or other related news. Okay, this has nothing to do with mortgages, but it has everything to do with networking. The people you meet at the shows become your marketers when they email all their friends because their car is being featured on your site. Even the search engines find you because you are now blogging about a subject with considerably less competition in key words than mortgage related content.
No matter what you focus on, the one thing I’d be careful of is to try to avoid alienating your potential readership by talking about hot button issues like Abortion, Iraq, or who should be the next President. Or, if you really feel the need to express yourself in this manner, go full out and make it the predominate subject of your blog. If you are going to alienate half of the potential client base, make sure you are truly endearing the other half.
Writing comments on other people’s blogs
How would you like draw the attention of readers from the most popular blogs in the industry to your brand new blog without spending a nickel? This is one of the most effective, and least utilized strategies employed by new bloggers. All you have to do is leave comments on either people’s blogs.
When most bloggers publish a post, the software they employ allows their readers to give feedback concerning that post. At the bottom of this very post, you have the same opportunity. Just click on the “Comments” link, read what other people have to say, and click “Post A Comment” to leave your own opinion.
Bloggers want people to comment, you’re more than welcome, so don’t be shy. So long as you are polite, you could use the comment section to retort everything the blogger is saying, agree with them whole heartedly, or even express a different perspective. You can also comment on other people’s comments. All of it is a benefit to the blogger because it builds a community of readers that will visit the blog more often and increase the their traffic. In addition, every word published is just a little more content for Google to consume. I’ll explain this in more detail in a later post. For now, Google loves lots of content, and everyone want Google to love them.
One thing most bloggers don’t want is Comment Spam. These are comments made only for the expressed purpose of trying to get the reader to visit the commenter’s blog. A typical comment spam goes something like,
”Nice post, for more information like this check out lenderama.com…”
Comments like these add nothing to the conversation. Most likely, the blogger will delete this type of a post. The key to getting your post published is to avoid mentioning your site, and focus on the subject of the post. Some commenters try to leave a signature at the bottom of their posted comment with their name and linked web site. That’s a good way to get your comment mistaken for spam. Turn your marketing brain off, and just leave a good post about the subject.
At this point, some of you are probably thinking, “so what’s in it for me?”. Well I said you wouldn’t have to pay a nickel, but I didn’t see it was free. It takes time and effort on your part to read these posts, and then come up a worthy comment. But that hard work is rewarded in a couple different ways.
First, even though you’re careful not to promote your own blog, the blog you are commenting on will do it for you. When you leave a comment, the software asks for your name, email, and-or web site. When you leave a comment, your name is attached to it, and your web site is linked to anyone who clicks on your name. Google will see it, but more importantly readers of the blog and the bloggers themselves will see it. If you have something interesting to say, readers will think,”who’s this guy?” and click on your name to find out.
Congratulations, you have just attracted complete strangers to your blog! The best part is that these readers are likely to be interested in your blog since they were just reading a similar one. More importantly, many of these readers are bloggers themselves. As you write your own good content, bloggers are likely to link to it as a subject for their own blog. Now you’re getting some real attention!
Besides all of the link love, you are also building online relationships with the people who are swapping all of these posts and comments. Think of it in the same way as those monthly luncheons for the state chapter of NAMB or MBA. It’s a way to get perspectives from your piers and express you own.
The final reason is that in order to comment on these blogs, you need to read them. This keeps you up to date on what’s happening in the industry, and can inspire a subject to blog about on your own blog.
The best part is, compared to blogs about politics or pop culture, real estate and mortgage blogs get relatively little participation from their readers to date. That means your comment will stand out even more for now.
I set aside about 20-40 minutes a day to reading and commenting. Sometimes it leads to more if I find something interesting. I use my bookmarks tool to breeze through my favorite blogs. I also use REMBEX to find out what other bloggers are saying about a particular subject. Another way to explore blogs is to check out the blogroll of recommended blogs linked on many blogger’s sites. We’ll discuss how to get your blog linked into these rolls in my next installment to this series.Labels:
Blogstagnation
Ok, I just made that word up. My recent medical tribulations have exposed the weakest link in my own blog. I am a one man show. Usually, that’s not a problem, but when I don’t post, my blog gets stagnate. There’s many reasons why this can happen; vacation, health, even writers block. Unfortunately, a blog that never changes does little to encourage readers to come back. Here are some ways to fight blogstagnation.
Beyond the blog - Blogs are good, but it never hurts to have some additional tools that keep attract reliable readership. I made a page of links that I knew other LO’s would see value in. Later, I even made it into a search engine. I also arranged to publish a daily, updated market report from Myers Internet. On the retail side, starting a local directory of business and entertainment resources might work. Traditional tools like calculators, FAQ’s and daily rates are all good content and can be provided by many mortgage web solution companies like Myers. I also think a local calendar of events application would have value, or even an Internet forum. Most of this is going to take a bit of computer skills, but you could also farm out the work, or just learn how to do it yourself. I’m a salesman that built lenderama without any technical education. It just takes patience.
Team blogs - The best way to keep your blog current is to have more than one contributor. Obviously, this helps you overcome vacation and health related issues, but I think it would also be a great why to fight writers block. By having another blogger to add content, you can feed off of their ideas and vice versa.
RSS Harvesting - I bring this idea up, only to shoot it down. One way some blogger’s keep there blog fresh is to harvest RSS feeds from other bloggers. I’m not going to explain the details on how this works other than to say, don’t do this. You’re not fooling your readership, and in many cases, you are committing copyright infringement.
A final note, it’s always a good idea to let your readership know if you are not going to be blogging for a while. It let’s them know not to purge you from their RSS reader, thinking you just lost interest and gave up.
Linkation
The absolute best way to drive traffic to your blog is through link building. Your primary goal is to attract readers from other related blogs. Your secondary goal is to increase your standing with Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. We’ll cover both goals here as the strategy is the same for both.
First, a short primer on Google. All search engines work in a similar fashion, but it was Google who revolutionized the way these engines assign importance to one web page over another. In the earlier days of the net, search engines like Yahoo (who now uses the Google model) assigned importance based on an algorithm of key words, meta tags, and the whims of the search engine staff. It was pretty easy to boost your ranking through some simple tricks. Soon, the best tricksters were getting ranked over the best sites. Google changed everything by building a model that based a web page’s importance on how many other web sites linked to it, and the importance of those linked pages. Basically, if lots of web sites link to a page, it’s ranking goes up. If lots of well ranked pages link to a web page, the rank of that page goes up even more. Since ranking now depends so much on a web pages popularity among it’s linked piers, it makes it very difficult to cheat. So obviously, the best way to increase your prominence with search engines is to get other web sites to link to you.
Luckily, the culture of blogging makes this significantly easier than with traditional web sites. If you have been reading blogs for any length of time, you have likely noticed that bloggers hand out links like cheese to the poor. One way bloggers give links is through a blogroll. This is a list of other blogs that the blogger recommends. My blogroll is near the bottom of the right column. The other way bloggers link to other sites is embedded in the posts they are writing. So for instance, if I were to find a good post about linking, and wanted my readers to see it, I’d post the link here. the key to getting linked in both places is to build a blog worth linking to. Here are some basic steps to take in link building.
1. Start blogging. Nobody wants to link to an empty blog. Blog for at least a few weeks before you start asking other blogs to link to you.
2. Build your own blogroll first. As you find blogs that you think will be of value to your readers, add them to your blog. I use a simple and free tool from bloggrolling to quickly add blogs to my roll. I recommend just adding them until your blog has a few weeks worth of content. One mistake that I think most retail level bloggers make is to linke to other real estate and mortgage bloggers. Do your readers really care about a real estate market 1000 miles away? Instead, try to network at the community level.
3. Link to other blogs in your posts. If you see an article that you think will be of value to your readers, link to it in a post, then add the blog to your blogroll.
4. Once you have a head of steam, now it’s time to ask other bloggers to link to you. It’s important to remember that you have more to gain by trading links than they do. Their higher ranking in Google will benefit you much more than your almost non-existent rating will help them. Because of this, you want to make it simple for them. Don’t ask if they want to trade links. Link to them first, tell them you already linked and provide the URL. Tell them politely that you would really appreciate a reciprocal link.
5. Write good posts. Your dedication to providing relevant information will be rewarded by other bloggers, new and old, through “check this out” linking from their blogs.
As your blog grows, there are a couple ways you can measure links to your blog. One way is to simply Google the name of your blog. One reason I choose a crazy name for my blog was that I know anyone who mentions the term “lenderama“, is talking about me. Another way to to measure linking is to use Googl’e “link:” function. Add the term before the url of your blog into Google’s search box like so link:blog.mariah.com. For more timely results, use Google’s Blog Search Engine. Enter the same link:blog.mariah.com query. Technorati has several good tools as well.
Now that I’ve shown you these tools, I’m betting you just took a second to see who was linking to you. Whether it’s curiosity or vanity, pretty much all bloggers want to know. This is why I encouraged you to start linking right away, even if your blog is brand new. You may find that bloggers will link back well before you are ready to ask them. They key once again is to write something worth reading.
