Blog To Last!

Increase traffic to your website by getting into the blogosphere.
Written for REM

The Internet has an immense power of reaching individuals of various special interests. Unlike traditional media forms, the Internet has provided an avenue for grassroots participation for various marginal groups and individuals. You can’t succeed online if you don’t connect with people. The internet is driven by people like you and I, and the more contacts we have, the better is for our business. These people around the web are our readers, advertisers, promoters, prospects, and customers. To us Realtors, networking on the web is as important as networking elsewhere.

First, let’s get the fundamentals out of the way. A weblog, better known by the verb blog, is a type of website, maintained by you with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. You can write on as many subjects as you’d like, and your entries can be indexed, archived, and displayed in any order. Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. The writing possibilities are endless. Your website can be your blog, or you can have a blog on your website. Most sites developed for Realtors now days also offer a blogging tool.

Now, your blog is immortal and nothing dies on the internet. If you wrote something, it’ll be indexed on search engines such as Google, and people will keep coming to your blog forever. Yes, if you build it, they will come. For us Realtors, blogging is just one of the many elements of an Internet marketing strategy that we should implement. However, the ecosystem of blogging is more important than the content being generated. You need to write often, and to publish your posts to a wide audience and get them to come back to your blog to read more.

In order to connect with other bloggers and blog readers, you need to be in the blogosphere. The blogosphere is a collective term encompassing all blogs and their interconnections. It is the perception that blogs exist together as a connected community, or as a collection of connected communities, or as a social network. Sites such as Technorati, BlogPulse, Tailrank, Digg, and BlogScope track the interconnections between bloggers. Taking advantage of hypertext links which act as markers for the subjects the bloggers are discussing, these sites can follow a piece of conversation as it moves from blog to blog. You job is to ensure your posts are properly tagged so that the blogosphere can properly index your posts. A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information. This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. For example, if I am writing a blog about my open house on Sunday, I can tag it as Open House, Selling, Richmond Hill, or any other tag my heart desires. Once again all up-to-date blogging tools offer tagging features that you can take advantage of, and if doesn’t, request it.

An interesting fact is that the size of the blogosphere has doubled every five to six months. Over this time, blogs have gone from being a word that sounded insulting to an online trend embraced by prime ministers, and senator running for president.

Implement a blog into your Internet marketing strategy, get into the blogosphere, and you will see the advantages social media can offer your business or organization. Many of us are already part of the social media phenomenon; others still need to implement blogs into their Internet marketing strategy. It’s a give-and-take conversation, much more so than e-mail marketing. Good luck and happy blogging.