Promote Your Real Estate Blog With Self-Promoting Content

In today’s lesson, I’m going to offer some tips that will help you promote your real estate blog more effectively. You’ll also learn the most important concept of blogging success, which is how to create self-promoting content. But first, I want to explain what it means to promote a blog.

Blog Promotion — Promoting your real estate blog means putting it in front of your ideal audience. Sure, you want to increase the total amount of traffic to your blog. But general traffic is not good enough. You need to attract the kinds of people who are most likely to use your services.

Two Techniques That Don’t Work Anymore

We will get to the effective blog-promotion strategies in just a moment. But first, I want to talk about some techniques that are probably just a waste of your time.

Blog directories are one of these outdated techniques. A directory is basically an online catalog of blogs, organized by topic and subtopic. In the past, you could submit your real estate blog to a bunch of these directories and enjoy a nice boost in traffic and search engine visibility. They were a reasonably effective way to promote your blog. But those days are over. These days, search engines don’t give much credence to links that come from web directories. And human readers certainly don’t frequent them anymore. So they’re a waste of time and money for the most part. There are much more effective ways to promote your real estate blog, as you will soon see.

Blog announcement services are another waste of time and money. These are websites that charge a fee to “announce” new blogs that have come online. The problem here is that the audience is entirely too general. We talked about the importance of promoting your real estate blog to a very specific audience. These announcement services just give a shout out to the whole world. You might see an incremental bump in website traffic after your blog gets announced. But it will quickly fade. Again, the problem is that most of the people who see the announcement are not your ideal readers.

Those are some ineffective ways to promote your real estate blog. Let’s move on to talk about how to do it effectively.

The Single Best Way to Promote Your Blog

If you only absorb one thing from this entire lesson, make it this:

The best way to promote your blog is by creating unique and useful content. I refer to this as self-promoting content, and you’ll hear me use that phrase again.

You can shout about your real estate blog all day long. But it won’t matter if your content is lacking. People won’t stick around long enough for you to accomplish any of your marketing goals. On the other hand, if you work hard to create excellent content, your blog will eventually begin to promote itself. Here’s how it happens…

Somebody visits your real estate blog and finds all of the high-quality, useful content you’ve been publishing. They find it so useful that they want to share it with others. Maybe this person is a blogger as well. So she links to your site from her own blog, in order to share it with her readers. This may seem like a small and isolated act. But it’s not. By linking to your real estate blog, this person has given you a form of endorsement. You can receive direct traffic from this new link, as well as a boost in your search engine rankings.

Search engines view “link popularity” — the quantity and quality of links pointing to your website from other sites — as a measure of overall quality. So by increasing your link popularity, you will also improve your search engine rankings over time. How does this help you promote your real estate blog? It gives you more search engine visibility, more traffic, and a larger base of readers.

This tends to have a snowball effect over time. As more bloggers and publishers link to your quality content, your search engine rankings and direct traffic will both improve. This brings even more readers to your blog, some of whom will link to it. Over time, this can have a tremendously positive impact on your blogging success.

But again, it all starts with your content. If you want to promote your blog effectively, you need to create self-promoting content. You need to work hard to ensure the information you are putting out is useful, interesting and unique — to a specific audience.

Specific Marketing Strategies

Here are some ways to create self-promoting content on your real estate blog:

• Conduct your own independent research and publish the results. Hint: you’ll get more links if you include original charts or graphs to support the research.
• Conduct a survey that is relevant to your local housing market. Publish the results on your blog. Hint: use a numerical percentage in the headline of your blog posts to increase readership (e.g., 84% of homeowners feel that …).
• Create a useful list that is relevant to your industry. Work hard to make it as comprehensive and helpful as possible. Internet publishers love to link to these kinds of lists. Readers find them useful as well, so you’re getting a check in both of these boxes. (Example: The 25 Best U.S. Cities for Families)
• Publish real estate news that is relevant to your local market. If you can stay ahead of recent developments in your field, people will be more inclined to visit (and link to) your blog. Related article: How to think like a publisher.
• Publish new information on a regular basis. Earlier, I said that content quality was the best way to promote your real estate blog. It is. But quantity is important as well. This is the whole point of blogging in the first place. Blogging programs make it easy to publish content frequently. This makes your site more useful for visitors and more “rank worthy” with search engines.

Promoting Your Real Estate Content

If you’ve worked hard to create useful and unique content on your real estate blog, you should be proactive in promoting it. By this, I mean you should tell others about it. Sure, many people will find your blog on their own, through search engines and all of those inbound links you’ve been acquiring. But it helps to give yourself a plug once in a while.

Are there any professional journals or magazines that cover your local housing market? If so, they probably have a blog or website online. Send the editors an e-mail to tell them about your blog. To get the most out of this strategy, you should focus on a specific piece of content. For example, if you have published some original research on your real estate blog, those journals and magazines would probably want to know about it. Send it to them in press release format, or just email them a quick note.

You can see how all of this comes together. Before you promote your blog, you need to create something worth reading. Once you have accomplished that goal, you can promote the content passively and actively. The passive side is when people find your real estate blog on their own. The active side is when you go out and promote it to specific editors and publishers.

Do You Need Some Help with Any of This?

Do you have questions about any of the topics discussed in this article? If so, you might be interested in our consultation services. We can help you develop an effective strategy to promote your real estate blog. We can even help you create some of the content, if necessary. Just shoot us an e-mail with any questions you have.