These days, everyone has some sort of online presence. This could mean that you’ve created a Facebook profile or business page, LinkedIn profile or your own blog. However, you leave it at just that—you aren’t posting updates, responding to clients or optimizing your blog so that potential clients can find you. You might be asking yourself, am I doing online marketing right? We’ve broken online marketing down to a few key tips to get your business on track.
Finding and posting content.
Take advantage of your social profiles to educate home buyers and sellers on your business. When it comes to the type of content you should be posting, think about what key things you would like a potential home buyer or seller to know before approaching a real estate transaction. What information could you share with your clients that would add value to your business?
Where to find this information? Take the time to research real estate blogs and online journals using search terms for the type of information you’re looking for. For example, “Home buyer misconceptions, ” “Home inspections 101,” or “First time home buyer education.” Once you find a great blog or online journal you like, subscribe to it! You’ll receive updates via email that you can easily share on your social profiles. Or, create your own blog and write articles based on your expertise. And remember, managing a blog doesn’t have to be scary; one to three short paragraphs are standard for a blog post.
Get the right technology: Are you using a smart phone?
Consumers want information in real time and will look to other places (i.e. other real estate professionals) if they aren’t being communicated to almost immediately after submitting an inquiry. Providing a direct online experience has significant value to a consumer and increases your ability to convert leads, which is why using a smart phone to help manage your business is a great asset. Whether it’s through text, phone call, email or social media, a smart phone allows you to connect with your clients the way in which they prefer to communicate.
Optimizing your blog.
A blog can be a powerful tool that can help generate leads, but only if someone can find it through searching online. To optimize your blog, start by making a list of keywords that you would want a potential customer to search that would lead them to your article. When it’s time to write, go down your list and ensure that you’re including these words throughout your article. Important places for these keywords to appear are: title, subheadings, intro sentence, concluding paragraph and meta descriptions. Most blogs, such as WordPress, also give you the opportunity to add tags to your blog posts, which lets a user search your posts for that particular topic.
Images are a great way to add visual interest to your blog post and can be optimized as well. When you upload a photo, be sure to include keywords in the description and the alternate text field (if the image doesn’t load properly on a user’s browser, this text will show in its place).
Give users the opportunity to subscribe to your blog. Subscribing to a blog means that an email notification will be sent to the subscriber every time an article is posted. This option will be available in your blog’s account settings.
And lastly, if you’re writing blogs posts, you’re creating content… so share it!
