Copyright 2005 Tinu AbayomiPaulEarlier this month, Realtor Magazine announced that they
would be featuring an article about Tampa Bay Realtor John
Mudd and the success he has been having in attracting
prospects and media attention with his blog on real estate.=20
Since then, many others in the Real Estate market have been
curious about how to implement similar strategies to
capture leads in their areas.
This article is part of a series that provides insight to
the unique ways that the strategy of blogging and the use
of RSS and/or Atom feeds can be applied as part of your web
promotion strategy.
1. Capture better search engine positioning for your local
market with a blog.
By now it's apparent that blogs with unique content can
bring you better search engine rankings. This advantage is
strengthened when you use a blog software tool that enables
you to publish posts on your own server, which we'll go
over in more detail in part two of this article series.
RSS and Blogs bring you special web promotional
opportunities that can help your blog and the site where it
resides rank higher in search engines, due in part to the
way they are organized. Particularly for narrow local
markets, this can both widen and deepen your audience
within 3 - 8 weeks with proper implementation.
By far, this is not the only benefit of blogging or RSS -
though if you're looking for better organic search engine
ranking across a multitude of keyword phrases, this just
may be the answer for you.
2. Dominate your local niche by becoming a resource for
information for home buyers and sellers in your area
The ease of publishing content to a blog, coupled with one
of the easier ways to implement RSS, its accompanying feed,
gives you the ability to provide fresh and relevant
information, often at the same rate of time it would take
to write a short email.
With the proper blog publishing system, the speed at which
you can now provide information means that you can publish
updates more often, drawing more attention to your web site
from search engines and visitors alike.
After landing in your blog, links to other relevant parts
of your site can draw visitors to the areas you most want
them to pay attention to, such as your updated listings -
which can also be made available via RSS if you so choose.
Why RSS?
It can mean 100% delivery of your message to your
prospects, in a fashion that they choose to have pulled to
them. Rather than attempting to digest all the information
at your blog in one visit, they can skim your headlines,
read a summary or post, and then click through to your site
upon finding information that draws them in.
You can supplement this with email for users who are more
comfortable with receiving your information the traditional
way.
While promotion and updates via email are not necessarily
to be discounted, the use of RSS and other feed formats
lend themselves to additional promotional possibilities.
3. Have yet another reason to remind prospects to return to
your site - and shorten the sales cycle using a multiple
feed strategy
With the combined power of blogging and RSS, you can
construct multiple outlets for information that are each
hyper-targeted to several segments of your market. Instead
of attempting to force your static web site to capture home
buyers and home sellers for your area, as well as provide
the statistical information on your locale, you can build
several focus areas and promote them side by side.
For example, if your local area is Frederick, Maryland, you
can dedicate one blog and its accompanying feed to recent
Frederick listings, and then have a separate feed that
automatically provides updates on area schools, crime
rates, cost of living and other statistical information
home buyers consider when making purchasing decisions.
Separate blogs and feeds on the same site could focus on
the needs of home sellers in the area
The possibilities are truly as endless as the number of
markets you wish to capture.
It is often said that it may take up to seven times for a
prospect who comes across a marketing message to buy.
Therefore, the faster the opportunity arises for you to
contact your potential client, the closer they may be to a
buying decision. If you are able to provide them with the
information they need to make that decision with updates
from your site, the likelihood that they may ultimately
make that purchase decision through you increases.
Updates to blogs and RSS feeds can give you the power to
make this transition happen at a faster pace, as the
production cycle of the content takes only the time you
would need to publish that information.
Rather than contacting your web content management
department, forwarding content, and waiting for the page to
be published, then picked up by search engines, with a
blog, you simply log into your administration area, type
and publish.
These pages can also get picked up by search engines faster
through the power of syndication - those already following
your feed receive your update instantly.
There are more ways that you can use RSS to draw more
qualified prospects to your business which will be covered
in part two of this series.
----------------------------------------------------
Read part two of this series at
http://rssapplied.com/rss-real-estate/ . This will also
give you access to a free guide to using RSS and Blogging
to target prospects.
