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Blogging your way to more clients
Blogging is one of the biggest tech buzzwords around. Now your XSite makes it easy to get a blog up and attracting more site traffic.
A blog is a section of your website where you regularly summarize news, offer your opinion and generally comment about topics in which both you and your prospective site visitors are interested. Brokers and mortgage originators everywhere are catching on to the blogging craze and many are seeing higher search engine rankings, more traffic, and more leads as a result.
But there’s more to a successful blog than tossing out your opinion on global warming. Here are a few tips that will make your blog an important part of your XSite and your online success.
- Write about what you know. The real estate market in your area, perhaps. Property development, property values, even property rights issues. Mortgage trends, mortgage laws, even mortgage rates, are topics that are interesting to your readers and can be keyword rich for search engines. It's easy to fall into the trap of making your blog about everything. Pick one topic or area and focus on being the expert.
- Make it relevant. You may be keenly interested in, and know tons about, political issues, impressionist art, Pfaltzgraff dinnerware, the Houston Astros or tarpon fishing, but visitors to your site aren't looking for your insight into those issues. They’re looking for a loan, or maybe still a house. Adding irrelevant information may cause them to pass you by.
- Write for the people you want to find your site. You're writing for people who are shopping for homes in your area, or have picked one and they're thinking about financing it. Write about what they want to read about. Local events, happenings, culture -- things like this will attract their interest and also give them information relevant to their goal.
- Express your opinion. Dry, objective blog posts about the housing economy may help your search engine rank some, but a more human, opinionated blog "personality" will keep your actual site visitors more interested. Strike a balance between topics that you know people are interested in and keeping keyword rich general information that will boost your search engine ranking.
- Write for Web readers. Visitors to your site aren't looking for in-depth essays. Web surfers scan Web pages to pick out relevance, they generally don't read beginning to end. You can cater to your visitors by using bulleted or numbered lists, bold and italics, and subheadings for longer posts. Also try to limit yourself to a single idea per post and don’t wander off.
- Fill the screen if you can, but stay above the fold. Short posts may not have much content of interest to a new visitor, and aren't likely to help with your search engine visibility, either. But if you make your posts too long -- say, as a rule of thumb, more than one screen -- you'll lose your readers' attention. Find a point somewhere in the middle for the best results.
- Commit yourself. A blog is a powerful marketing tool because search engines love fresh, relevant content, and visitors will find something new each time they stop by. But it's almost better not to have a blog than to have one that is updated infrequently. If a visitor sees your last entry was posted months or even weeks ago, they’ll assume your site is out of date, or that you don't maintain it consistently. You don't need to post every day, but you do need to make an effort to do it regularly.
- Keep it positive. It’s not uncommon for things to turn negative whenever people start expressing their opinions. But remember, your blog is a reflection of you and your business. Being negative probably doesn’t attract the kind of clients you’re looking for.
You can activate your blog now by logging in, clicking the XSites icon at the top of My Office, and then clicking the Blogging icon. |
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