RSS and Blog Marketing for Real Estate

by: Tinu AbayomiPaul
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. 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 areaThe 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 strategyWith 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 areaThe 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.