That’s not to say that this isn’t possible. Usually the problem is either lame content and not being consistent with your content. Don’t forget, it takes more than the bare minimum of just throwing content once a week up on your blog: you are competing for your readers – and potential customers – online attention. And if we know anything about browsing the web, the online reader isn’t a patient one.

Here are some top mistakes that we see non-real estate SEO clients make every day, and some tips on how you can think about blogging differently to overcome them.

1.) No content strategy goals

You either don’t have a goal, or are all over the place. Take a minute to think about where you are trying to go with your blog and what statement you want to make. Are you writing to build a brand, build influence, or increase your leads? Your goals will shape your blogging strategy, and you need to make sure this message is conveyed accurately internally.

2.) Internal resources aren’t organized

Who writes your content and manages your social media profiles? My guess is, you’ve got one person for your company that you hope is blogging at least once a week. Identify who this person or team will be, whether its a requirement of all your agents to post once a day, or you and an intern writing once a week. If you don’t have a blog yet, start small and test-run a Sequoia real estate website with blog feature for 6 months to see how your business benefits. Create a solid team, and compile data to have a common ownership of the blog within your company.

3.) Real Estate niche is undefined

As with businesses in general, its so much better to have a specialized niche. The same applies to your blog: the less your posts are all over the place, the less targeted your message and your audience will be. Think about your target market and what they want – now how can you solve their problems? What are they concerned about?

4.) Not listening to your audience or clients

We tell clients that blogging is the best way to assert yourself as an expert in your field of real estate. But how can you position your company as an educator if you don’t know what your clients’ problems are? There are great “listening” tools like Google Alerts or Radian6 that you can employ to be on top of the latest news and issues of your market. From here, you can generate blog material in reaction to what you read.

5.)  Your blog is boring

Here is where we have to be honest. Many real estate agents and brokers are not really writers, and the content your blog pushes out reflects that. It may be worth bringing in some fresh perspective with younger interns or agents that have expressed interest in writing to help stimulate interesting blog ideas to give you different angles to pursue.

Try and be the journalist that attracts your readers’ attention. Stories are everywhere, from interacting with clients to your kid’s dentist appointments. You can also tie in a recent news event or real estate market development: and the faster you are with these, the better. Have a defined, committed point of view – and finish it off with a great headline, like a “How-To” post or “Are You Paying Too Much To Sell Your Home?”

6.) Lack of authentic material

People don’t care about press releases. Sorry. They want to talk and leave comments for actual people, not droning company robots. Here’s where speaking about your personal experiences really comes into play – “I just met with this seller, and ran screaming from the house…” These are memorable, and make people connect to what you are writing about. And, clients prefer to work with “real” people.

7.) No publishing system

We emphasize constantly that consistent blogging is horribly important. However, there is a system that should be put into place. It starts by monitoring relevant and trending topics, aggregating the “noise” into relevant topics, creative writing and editing, and ends with measurement with Google Analytics. You need to have this process in a calendar to make sure you meet deadlines consistently, and over time you will become more efficient as blogging becomes part of you or your team’s routine.

8.) No “BOOM!” Ending

Remember in high school when your teacher told you to write a captivating conclusion that leaves the reader in reflection of what they just wrote? Don’t leave your readers hanging. Pull it all together, and throw some punch in there. Also don’t forget to continue the momentum with a strong call-to-action.

So go forth and make your blog the best it can be. Social media sites move quickly, and every reader that bounces of your blog is another opportunity lost. Don’t be overwhelmed by this list: tackle one issue at a time, and over the upcoming weeks your blog will be back on track.

Contact Boston Logic today to inquire about our real estate SEO services, and to learn more about how you can optimize your website, blog, and social media profiles for success!

Source: 7 Reasons Your Blog Sucks (and What to Do About It)

So you’ve been blogging once  a week since your site has launched. Things are going good. But when is the optimal time or day of the week for your blog post to be published? When will it be most likely to capture the most readers? Be more likely to be shared on Facebook or Twitter? Unfortunately, there are just as many answers as there are businesses. Each business has a different customers: so how do you go about finding out what works best for you?

1) Experiment. As David Friedman mentioned in his “What is an Online Marketer?” article, it’s all about tracking, making educated changes, and then measuring for success. If you have Google Analytics installed in your website, (which you should!) tracking is easy.

If you blog 0nce per week, take the next few weeks to conduct an experiment: try publishing on each weekday to see which generates the most interest or traffic. For example, blog next Monday. Then write a blog the next week on Tuesday. Keep going until you have a full week days’ worth of posting so you can measure your results. You’ll always have variables such as high-traffic topics, but it’s a good place to start.

Finding the day your blog is most trafficked is a good start – a more advanced experiment, and ideal for those who blog every day, would be to find out what time of day would be best for you to be blogging. If you’ve found the best week day already in the previous experiment, start the process over again by blogging once during each time of day and measuring the results.

2) Tips and Data. Experimenting to find out what’s best for your personal blog is the best way for you to get the most accurate results. However, there have been studies conducted to help point you in the right direction when it comes to days and times to blog. Thanks to our good friends at Hubspot,  we have some great findings to help point you in the right direction:

• The best time of day to get shared on Facebook: 9am

• The best day of the week to get shared on Facebook: Saturday

• The best time to get your blog read: Morning

Also, take a look at this great image Hubspot created. Based on this data, we can see that most blog post views activity (people reading your blog) seems to take place in the late morning every day – Hubspot reported in a “When Do You Read Blogs?” survey that 80% of people who read blogs answered in the mornings. This also seems to be true for links to your blog and blogger comments.

Another interesting visual is that the most heavy commenting activity seems to take place on the weekend, and a bit on Mondays.

Click to enlarge

If you take these tips as a starting point and then experiment to find out what works best for you, you will be able to improve your own real estate online marketing presence. Don’t have time to worry about blogging or real estate SEO for your website? Contact Boston Logic today to find out what we can do for you!

We break down the basics of publishing a post here:

1) From your WordPress Dashboard, select “Posts” from the far left sidebar, then “Add New”

2) Write Your Content. This is where you will write all of your content. It’s important for your to take your keywords that you’ve researched (or that Boston Logic has given you!) and use them in your title, and as bold and links to relevant pages on your website in your content.

3) Add and Image. Once you’ve written your blog content, it’s optimal to break up your content for readers with an image: optimizing images are also a great opportunity for optimization, as well!

Right above where you write the body of your content you’ll see “Upload / Insert”. To upload an image, click the 1st rectangle shape. From here, a box will pop up where you click the “Select” button to choose an image to upload from your computer. Once it’s uploaded, you can optimize your image by adding Alt. Text and a Description that contain your keywords that are descriptive of your text – it also helps to have keywords in your Image Title.

You can also add a URL so that when a user clicks the image, they will land on a page of your website. If you are doing a featured listing and have an image of the apartment located in Boston, you can place the URL of the listing here so they can click to read more.

4) Tag and Categorize your post. Now that you’ve got the body of your post written, time to Tag and Categorize it. You can find both the Categories and Post Tags section on the far right of your “Edit Post” dashboard.

Your categories should be based on your SEO keywords that you’d like to rank for – select the checkbox next to the appropriate categories that your blog post fits into. These are more broad, and you should only add another category when you have a whole new topic with multiple blog posts.

Tagging allows you to be a bit more descriptive with your posts. Here, you can take the level of detail to describe your post to the next level. For real estate SEO for example, let’s say that you’ve written a Featured Blog on one of your properties in Back Bay, Boston. Check off the “Back Bay Apartments”, “Back Bay 2 Bedrooms”, etc. Your “Post Tags” are located right beneath your “Categories”.

5) Fill out the SEO pack. Depending on what version of WordPress you have, the All in One SEO Pack may be available. This is a great SEO tool that WordPress uses for you to describe your own content: add a Title, Description, and Keywords – and be sure to include yout SEO keywords that you want to rank for in all three sections.

Blogging is an important aspect of your real estate online marketing strategy, and takes a lot of work. Sign up for Boston Logic’s real estate SEO services today to help you blog consistently for website success!

As you can see from the graph below, the numbers are quite impressive – those who blog daily receive 89% more leads than those who only blog once a month (49% customer acquisition). These numbers also happen to back up what we always tell our real estate SEO clients: blog consistently and regularly! It can sometimes be difficult to get clients to blog at least once a week, but when you blog once a month, not only does it not impress the visitors that come to your site, but you will also get less leads. And we know that leads for real estate brokers and agents is extremely important.

This also begs the question, “But HOW can we blog multiple times per day?” It’s really a matter of getting into routine and a mindset. Make a time commitment to blog as soon as you wake up, or to blog when you get home from work – and make it fun. You’re the expert: blog about what you think your clients want to read about while assuring your expertise as a real estate agent or brokerage.

Blogs also don’t have to be lengthy books of content and text: in fact, users prefer smaller blogs which contain helpful information for them. Being in real estate, consider the amount of questions you get from buyers and sellers: if these are in email form, you can literally copy and paste their question and response into your blog – done!

Blogging and real estate SEO are as easy as ever with our Sequoia real estate websites and integrated WordPress blogging system. If you are interested in a new real estate website or wish to inquire about our SEO services for your real estate website or blog, contact Boston Logic today!

Good Luck!

Graph Source: The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing, Hubspot

In doing this, the client wanted to pass along information on blogging without overwhelming the agents. She was wondering if there was some sort of “blogging format” to follow while writing, and I composed one for her and thought it made great content for a blog post of our own!

Blogging is easy to do, but if you are not experienced with it, it can be helpful to have some sort of simple structure to follow as you get started. I’ve made this outline that you can reference for the next time you blog for your company: and for you veteran bloggers, it may be helpful to check this out and make sure you are following these blogging best-practices!

Simple Blog Post Format

1. Title of Blog Post. This should be accurately reflecting the text to follow, and you should try to use one of your SEO keywords if possible.

2. Intro Paragraph. This is where you introduce the topic of your post. If you are writing about an article you’ve read, cite the reference here, write the reason you are writing the post, or why the content is relevant to your expertise or market.

3. Blog Content: 2-3 Paragraphs. This is the meat of your blog post. Here is where you elaborate more about the topic that you’ve introduced with your blog title and intro paragraph. Optimize the content with your  SEO keywords wherever possible, create internal links to other places on your website, and include relevant information and facts to assert yourself an expert in your field of real estate. Also include links if your reader needs to go somewhere else to read more information, such as an MLS listing on your website to read more.

Important: DO NOT copy and paste anything from the internet! Google punishes duplicate content on websites – you must re-purpose the content to make it unique in your blog post. Wikipedia articles are not your friend.

4. Add an image to break up your text. All blog posts should contain at least one image to help break up your text content and make it appealing to readers. Pull an image related to your text: for example, if you are writing about a featured property, pull an attractive picture from its MLS listing. It is also great for SEO to optimize your images: place keywords in the image title, alt text, and description of your image – bonus points if you can make the image a clickable link to a relevant page on your website.

5.    Conclusion. Here is where you add a personal note of conclusion to the content you have written. Here is a great place to write your opinion on your topic…why did you write this blog post? What does the reader have to learn from it? How does this content relate back to you and your business?

6.    Call-To-Action. Now that you have written this great blog post and have credited yourself as an expert in your field, give yourself the credit and include your contact information. Back to the featured property blog post example, a sample call to action would be: “Interested in finding your next home in Boston, Massachusetts? Contact John Smith of Boston Logic Realty today!” Here you can include a link to your direct email address so that potential leads may contact you.

And that’s it!

Ready for a sample call-to-action?

As a real estate web design and online internet marketing company, Boston Logic can assist you in all aspects of running and maintaining your real estate business. Contact Boston Logic today to find out how to make the most out of your online presence with our real estate SEO services and cutting-edge real estate website technology.

We are asking readers to please join us in daily voting from now until November 24th for the Warren Residential blog. Anyone can vote once per day by clicking this link: Best Real Estate Blog in Boston!

If Warren Residential wins the title, the Warren Residential website will be linked from Zillow’s Boston home values page. In addition, they will also receive a badge for their blog’s website indicating that Warren Residential is Boston’s best real estate blogger, as voted by the people!

Once again, here is the Zillow link to please click and vote every day until November 24th.

We wish Warren Residential the best of luck in the next few days of voting!

The quickest way to establish yourself as an authority in your industry and to increase the sales of your products and
services fast is through the power of blogging!

If you are not using blogs as a key component in your marketing strategies, you are losing sales and working way
harder than you need to be.

And if you are using blogs in your marketing efforts, are you getting the
results you deserve?

I really couldn’t have said be better myself.

Even more interesting is this graph by the folks at Hubspot. It shows that through blogging, B2C businesses (yes, that means real estate) see an 88% increase in leads vs those do don’t blog. Do you need any more motivation than that?

Blogging increases your lead count dramatically!

I know the graph is a little fuzzy. Click to see it in full size!

Ok, we talk about blogging on this blog all the time. Most often, we’re talking about real estate blogging, but this graph isn’t just about real estate. It’s derived from data from many industries, including real estate. The data is just too strong to ignore. If you blog, you can position yourself as the expert. The blogging will in tern bring you more leads. It’s up to you to convert those leads into deals. We know you can do that!

HOW TO START:

You want each blog post (or web page) to focus on one subject or topic.  Your topic should be fairly focused because you want to keep your readers engaged and make sure you leave yourself topics to cover in future blogs, too!  This will also help you determine which keywords each blog post should try to incorporate.

Much like writing a research paper in school, you should develop an ‘Introduction’, ‘Body’, and a ‘Conclusion’ or ‘Call to Action’ to get the reader to engage in your site further, and become a Lead.

Read our blog on developing subjects to blog about if you’re stumped on what to write about.

KEYWORD STRATEGY:

If you want to optimize your blog, you’re most likely also optimizing your website as well, and you are using your blog as a way to increase traffic to your website and get new leads.  When developing your website/ blog optimization strategy, you need to determine your list of ‘keywords’ (or phrases) that you will focus your optimization campaign around.

Your keywords will be terms you think potential clients you’d like to reach would type into a search engine while looking for your services.  For example, if you are a broker focusing on student apartments in the Fenway neighborhood, you might choose a keyword like ‘Fenway apartments’ or ‘Fenway student apartments’.

There are a variety of free online tools you can use to learn about the popularity of the terms you are considering using and also to get suggestions for new terms.  You can also view the presentation from our Logic Classroom about Long Tail Keywords and Keyword Strategy to learn more.

I’VE GOT MY KEYWORD LIST, NOW WHAT?

It’s important to try to keep these terms in mind when writing your blogs, and develop blog topics that incorporate these words to help improve your site’s organic search engine ranking for them.  As a result, more visitors interested in what you’re selling (Fenway student apartments) will find your blog, and therefore your services, more easily.

You want to use your keywords in as many places as possible, such as in the URL of the page, in the Title of the Page, in the Header, etc. without being ‘spammy.’  If you want to learn more about keyword placement on your website, please read this blog about optimizing your website with keywords.

PRACTICAL TIPS FROM THE PROS:

Meta Titles:  It’s always good to add your company name to the end of your Meta Titles, such as ‘Extremely Relevant Meta Title Here | My Company Name’ to help increase your brand awareness.  You always want the Meta Title to be in ‘Title Case’ (instead of all lower case) so it looks good to a reader because they do see your Meta Titles in search engine results and at the top of the page in the browser tab.  Search Engines typically only index the first 65-70 characters or so (including spaces) of your title, so make sure the important keywords are towards the beginning.

Meta Descriptions should also include your keywords.  Your descriptions should be a brief summary (approx. 160 characters) of what your blog post or page is about.  You should write it using proper punctuation and grammar because the descriptions are seen by visitors using search engines and by search engines to understand what your page is about.  Here is an example of a description I might use for this blog post:

“Learn how to optimize your blog using these helpful tips on keyword strategy, meta data, and more to help increase your website traffic and capture more leads.”

Links: When you add a Hyperlink leading to another page from your blog, especially in the beginning or middle of your blog post, I prefer to have the link open a new window or tab in the visitor’s browser instead of replacing the page they are on (your extremely interesting and informative blog).  This is easy to do with a Boston Logic Sequoia real estate website.

When you create your hyperlink, be sure to click onto the ‘Target’ tab when you are entering the Link information in the Link popup window.  This tab will allow you to choose if you want the link to appear in a new window, and also provides the opportunity to name the link- which is great for SEO.  I’ve attached screen shots to help walk you through it.  Making the links bold is a good idea, too, because search engines know to considered words in bold to be highly relevant to the content of the page.  Just don’t go making everything bold or it will lose its effectiveness (and annoy readers).

It is better for your SEO (and human visitors) if the links are using relevant keywords, not just ‘click here’, and if the link leads to a page that has those words or something similar in the URL and page title.  For example, if you were writing a blog about the amenities of the Fenway neighborhood you could mention ‘ living in an apartment in Fenway’ and make ‘apartment in Fenway’ an internal link to your ‘Fenway Apartments’ Town Page.

Categories: Blog categories are not as important to SEO as some of the other elements mentioned, but they are VERY important to your visitor’s experience.  If you have relevant blog categories that are well-organized (you can have ‘parent’ and ‘sub’ categories) and make it easy for readers to find what they are looking for, they will be more likely to read several of your blog posts and return for more information in the future.

You want to make sure you make a category for each of your keywords, and that you are putting blog posts into every category they are related to.  Visitors will see and use these categories when searching your blog, so don’t just add your posts to categories for the sake of trying to increase ranking on certain keywords because it will actually hurt your SEO if visitors are regularly bouncing from your blog when they find that it’s unrelated to the keywords they typed into their search engine.

Meta Tags, again, are not as important to SEO as the content, Titles, Descriptions, and Links, but they are still worth putting effort into.  You want to make sure you’re not wasting your meta tag space with extremely broad, single word keywords such as ‘luxury’ or ‘Boston’, however, because they will not help your SEO.  Instead, try to be creative and use more targeted keywords, such as ‘Boston luxury apartment’.  You want to make your tags as specific and relevant to the post/ page as possible.

Also, be careful with where you place the commas in your list of meta keywords.  For example, if you entered ‘Mandarin, Oriental’ into your keyword list, that’s actually telling the search engines that you are using the two words separately ‘mandarin’ and ‘oriental’.  Instead, you should keep the name of a building as one key-phrase by not putting a comma between the words you want to be seen as together, like ‘Mandarin Oriental’.

Calls to Action: One final suggestion is to leave the reader with some sort of internal link and a call to action to keep them engaged.  Each blog should strive to do this in some way, even just ‘Contact a trusted advisor for more information’ with a link to the blogger’s email or a link to the Contact Page.

IN CONCLUSION:

Having a blog is a great way to add fresh and informative content to your website to help potential clients find your website and see that you are a knowledgeable leader in your industry.  You need to create a list of relevant keywords (or phrases) to help you focus and organize your blogging strategy and bring you the type of readers you are hoping to find and convert to leads.

If you take the effort and time to optimize your blog, and consistently blog at least twice each week, you will begin to see an increase in your search engine ranking and site traffic as a result.

If you have any questions regarding optimizing your website and blog, or wish to learn more about the services we provide, please feel free to contact the Boston Logic Marketing Department.

Here are a few tips to help you navigate, protect, and capitalize on social media:

Facebook

Don’t accept every person who friend-requests you. It is with it to do some digging around and try to identify the person if you don’t immediately recognize them. While your online networks are not always exclusive, they should still be monitored regularly. Facebook also has an option to create lists to help you further organize your growing number of “friends”, and you can even publish certain content to certain audiences.  (To learn how to do this, check out our previous LogicClassroom slides on Leveraging Facebook for Your Business.)

Additionally, Facebook is becoming more than just a social network — it can be a search engine too. According to some recent statistics, it is the #2 most visited site after Google, and some days even surpasses Google in total searches. By creating special interest pages on this social network, you can increase hits to your business’ profile or Web site. For example, Williams King created a “365 Road Warrior Marketing and Technology Tips” page, which now has more than 200 fans.

Which Social Media Site is Right For Me?

Well, take a look at your personality and what your strengths are. Are you a great writer? You should write engaging real estate blogs and witty tweets. Enjoy being photographed (and don’t we all)? Maybe you could give YouTube a try.

Now You’ve Got a Presence. How Do You Protect It?

(Click here for some resources on Social Media Liabilities by NAR.)

Consider how you’ll monitor your social media sites. Who gets access to them? How will you handle negative postings? It gets tricky when deciding whether to delete these comments or address them online.  What will you do?

Sometimes a personal phone call to the party to discuss why they are upset can really help smooth things over . It can even motivate them to post something positive about your follow-up outreach.

Ready to Take the Plunge?

After all this data and through the online buzz about social media, and you still don’t think you need an online presence, you may want to reconsider. Social media will be one of the primary search tools for the next generation of real estate buyers and sellers. And if you want to get started and don’t know how, you can always ask a younger agent for some help, or contact us on how you can get started on some real estate SEO help and services offered. We’ll be happy to give you some guidance!

Source Article: The Right Way to Get Started in Social Media

We’ve all been there. We get a new website, new blog, and get inspired with new business growth and possibilities that we cannot contain our blogging excitement.

Then a month goes by. Then six. And we can get disenchanted with the idea of consistent blogging.

It’s okay.

To get back on track, here are some blogging ideas to get re-inspired and to keep blogging on a regular basis again – which will lead to fresh content, optimized pages, search-engine friendly pages and ultimately more leads to your website. Which is exciting.

1. Talk about the future of real estate by commenting on current developments within the industry.
2. Explain why it’s important for everyone to care about real estate.
3. List online resources for fellow real estate agents.
4. Make a list of the top myths about buying or renting a home through an agency and debunk them.
5. Attend real estate conventions or networking events and report on them.
6. Do real estate market comparisons for your area, the national market, and abroad.
7. Occasionally go off topic and link an issue from your life back to your business, i.e.“10 Reasons Real Estate is like A Box of Chocolates”.
8. Pose this question to your followers: “What would you like to change in [insert your product or service here]?”
9. Speak with other leaders in real estate and guest blog for each other.
10. Write a book review dealing with your topic that depicts thinking about real estate in an outside-of-the-box way.
11. Create short video to change things up – this can be fun, or you speaking about your business.
12. Take a common issue many people care about and explain how it relates to your business.
13. See which blog post received a lot of hits or attention and write a follow-up.
14. Look into social media sites (if you haven’t already) like Digg, StumbleUpon or Technorati and find out what’s trending right now and put a property-spin to it.
15. Tweet a question and blog about your favorite answers.

Blog away!

Source article and more ideas here.