Thought I would share with everyone a recent (like in the last 3 days) development with my website.

I have always operated on the premise that what is going to generate traffic is the content being timely and updated regularly.

This theory has been proven dramatically correct in the last 48 hours.

I recently wrote an article on on my site that apparently got someones attention. It started off a couple of days ago with a site linking to the story. My site allows me to see where all visitors are coming from when they visit. For that first day, the referrers were all this one site. Suddenly, I am seeing referrers from all the big email folks (gmail, yahoo,aol, etc.) so folks are obviously emailing the link to each other. In addition, 4 more sites are apparently linking to the story.

In short, I have gone from getting about 100 unique visitors per day to my site to over 300 on the first day and the final numbers are not in for the second day, but it is looking like it will break 400.

I assume this will peak out at some point, so now it is just a question of writing something new that will keep them coming back.

So if you are trying to build traffic to your site.... keep up with the original content. I am only now seeing it paying off, but it definately seems to be doing so.

Thanks,
R

Just to update. Ended up breaking 500 unique vistors (actual number of hits is now in the thousands).

For today, it looks like I am likely to get twice that number of unique views. Its kind of amazing to watch the referrers mushroom from 1 site... then several... then see a link to the article obviously being emailed all around, then seeing a series of new sites referring ....

It's all very cool.

R

awesome stuff, if your story was that much of a hit you should submit it to www.digg.com . if you get put up on that site you will get thousands and thousands of uniques to your site...granted it might not do so well but you might as well try to take advantage of the craze that is diggnation.

best,
alex

Thanks for the tip... I will do that.

Just to bring everyone up to speed, the day of my last post to this thread, my unique visitor counter hit 1477. It has been declining since then, but has left behind a much higher average per day number of visitors and I am starting to get emails from folks via my website asking questions about real estate. So, it definately kick started my site.

R

Good job. Keep it going.

Tip: If you want to take a break from the writing yourself, you may want to look into using a freelance writer. Or you can join one of the slew of PLR sites out there that send you dozens of real estate articles each month, that you can copy and use however you like.

PLR means Private Label Rights.

If you don't mind, what was your article? I can understand if you don't want to share, but I am sure we would all love to read it if you don't mind... for ideas:)

Raymond

I was going to ask the same thing as FSBO! I would like to start a blog for my company and am really unsure about what kinds of topics to write about that would be interesting to our target audience without being ho-hum, more of the same old same old...but I really wonder if they'd be interested much in local current events like the HoeDown Hayride in Harrington Park...LOL

My idea is to have the blog feature one or two properties from the website, to draw more visitors to the site.

PepperJack,

There is certainly always this question of "how do I create exciting content". Ofcourse it's an issue. But don't get stiffled by thinking that you have to create this amazing content that is going to appeal to the widest audience possible on the internet. Excitement is in the eye of the beholder in this case...

If your clients are planning on moving to Harrington Park then YES they DEFINITELY want to hear about the hoedown hayride (I understand this may be a euphemism) but if those are the attractions of the area and that's where they want to live that's what exciting to them.

You want your personality to come out in your blog and you want to attract customers that are interested in you, in your product and in your residential area. So just don't worry about what you think people are going to think is exciting or not...there's one person for every home.

Yes I agree writing articles is one of the best things you can do. This takes a lot of time though which most people may not have. I offer services for those people who do not have too much time to write articles or wish to spend their time doing other things.

I have no problem with sharing the article. It is actually listed at the top of the most popular on my site. It is calle "When re-listing makes numbers lie". Get directly to it here:

http://www.soldbyrobert.com/content/view/40/2/

And as for how hard it is to write articles, it's actually not a big drain of time at all.

I do three regular articles a month and including creating graphics, an online video presentation for and the article itself, we are probably talking 3.5 hours a month. Very managable. As for having someone else do it, I actually like writing the things. I find that by doing the work, it really keeps me up to date on market numbers, etc. I ran into another American here in the UK last night who lives in the town north of my home town and I ended up being able to rattle off all kinds of info because of the articles I have written. The practice can really serve to reinforce you market knowledge.

In addition I will usually write an article on something timely relating to real estate or the community I focus on.

R

That's a great testament to the power of good content, Robert. Thanks for sharing.

You can project your articles outward too, by syndicating them through article distribution sites, submitting them to high-traffic websites, etc. It's another great way to generate a lot of qualified traffic to your site.

Good luck with your future writing endeavors.

-Brandon

I have a great article on why Content is important for your real estate website. Hope it's applicable to this thread.

http://www.the-marketing-shop.com/web-content.php

I can not figure out how to creat a new post however I have a internet domain for sale if you guys know anybody looking.

OHIOLAND.NET

Please e-mail me at domains@pcwanted.com
or send a message to me here

Thanks

I think you have it right Rebel broker.

There is so little original content. Most web page people or designers seem to think that the designs sells. I have been reading a few advertising books and the conclusion I have from the ad exp is content is king. I think your article on re listing is very well writen and I am going to ad a link from my site to it.

Cheers
Scott
www.escapetosaltspring.com

Island Agent....totally agree.

Way back I had a site that was one of the usual boilerplate "Real Estate" sites hosted by a company that specialized in that.

I subscribed to a content provider that provided articles that were updated weekly.

The bottom line is that the site netted me next to nothing. It did not create any business I am aware of but it did allow me to support my existing clients better.

Now that I have taken control of the site, create all the content myself and can turn on a dime when it comes to what I want the site to do (Deciding to host podcasts and having one up and hosted within 3 days as an example), I am getting much better results.

The amazing thing is that this is happening while I am on sabbatical! I have gotten a couple of referral deals out of the site and I have 1 buyer who I am helping with searches. She will not have some other items lined up to buy till after July, so she is just waiting for me to return then.

So when I return to the states in July of 2007, I will have 1 buyer all ready to go. Pretty amazing for being 8000 miles away from my home town right now.

Plus, there is no telling what other opportunities I will have on the burner by the time I come back - thanks to my website.

R

If your not good at writing can you copy and paste articles as long as you give credit to the original author?

Would it be better to link other agents blogs on your site?

It is definitely a copyright violation to copy an article, no matter how you credit the author. And it's getting easier and less expensive all the time to catch this on the web with services that search for your content in other sites.

Small clips out of larger works are OK sometimes under the "fair use" exemption . But it is limited and absolutely would not cover copying an entire article or blog post.

Jim is correct.

Webmaster and agent alert! - Who Owns the Material on Your Web Site?
(Copyright management - is there intellectual material theft on your web site?)

http://www.carolyne.com/bramptonhomes/websitetheft.html
Carolyne ~ moderator

www.carolyne.com
www.ePowerOrganizeIT.com

Aftermath,

If authors have given you permission, you can certainly republish their content. Similarly, if an author publishes an article through an article distribution website (such as EzineArticles.com), you can republish the work. Just be sure you follow the "guidelines for publishers" found at this particular website.

However, if you stumble across an article online and it does not have any reprint instructions, you'll have to contact the author to get permission. You can't just grab content from any website, but you can reprint it from sources that are designed for content distribution (like EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, etc.).

And before anybody says "You'll get banned from Google is you use reprint content" ... let me refer you to this post:
http://www.agentsonline.net/forum/ultimatebb.php/topic/9/424.html

Hope that helps.

~Brandon

Brandon:

You are correct. Sometimes I forget that it is best to state the obvious, as it's not obvious to all. With permission, reprinting content is fine. It's the huge amount of "no permission" copying that's a problem and against the law. Thanks for the clarification.

I use CopyScape.com to do weekly checks of the web for copies of my blog content. It allows setting a minimum amount of content, so that the excerpts of posts are not caught as infringements.

Agents....Stop and think....and hang onto your wallet!

The "content is king" concept is a potential money and time pit for your and your site. You are a REAL ESTATE AGENT. You are not a community newspaper or a patron of the literary arts!

Content IS important, but not for the reasons usually cited by the SEO gurus. Your content needs to address your prospective client needs, and your own needs.

If and when people come to your website, they do not want to wade through articles about how pretty the flowers are down at the town park, or who founded your town, or details about the local fruit festival. They can already get all of that somewhere else, in far more detail, if they want it.

If they are searching for "Your Town ST Real Estate", then that means that they either want to buy some, or sell some. Period. Get to it.

As an agent you need to convey to them IMMEDIATLY that YOU are the person who can satisfy their need for an agent. You need to convey they you know your local housing market, and that you have the experience to handle their pending transaction!!!

If you attract someone to your site and then you force them to read some quaint babble about your town, they will CLICK AWAY and find a competitor of yours who is NOT WASTING THEIR TIME!

Yes, content is important, but chasing off-topic content, in the hope of garnering search traffic, or attracting links, is not really productive. In the real world, nobody cares about that.

Focus your content on your business, not on tangential matters. Optimize it to attract search traffic. Get it linked. In real estate, that usually means simple reciprocation.

As a real estate agent, imagining that people are out there ready and willing to link to your site based on some kind of marvelous content is a fantasy. By and large, they don't. Occasionally, it does happen, under very special circumstances. Get past the fantasy. You could also play the lottery, for better odds!

Yes, you can hire outside copy writers to help with your content effort. But be very careful about using your own time and money to develop mindless content about your community that nobody cares about reading anyhow. That kind of skewed thinking and strategy is rampant in the SEO world.

Focus on your business aspects FIRST. Do you ave an optimized page for every comunity that you serve? Every county? Every sub-division? If you ever get finished with that content development project (very unlikley!), then you can develop the frivolous stuff.

Here's a multi-page document that was specifically written for real estate professionals, using real estate examples:


Search Engine Optimization Basics For Real Estate-Related Websites

I hope it helps.

Great post, LS. I couldn't agree more. I've many times found myself writing irrelevant content - need to focus more on on-page conversion. Now I'm off to the gym to listen to RE podcasts!

LinkStrategy:

Upon reading your post, I'm not sure where we might agree or disagree. Though my previous comments in this thread were addressed only to the subject of copying content, your post leads me to clarify my belief that "content is king".

In this recent blog post , I give actual site visitor page view statistics that show which portions of my real estate site are visited the most. Note that, though prominently represented via navigation button, the About Me page is 45th down the popularity list.

My "content is king" statement refers to content about my area, real estate in the area, maps, property sold stats and such. The blog portion of the site is popular with some, and there I place a bit more topical material and personal viewpoints and area commentary.

I hear frequently from clients that they utilized me because they found freely-offered relevant area information on the site. The implication being that they could determine from the site information that I know my area and have the expertise to help them with the sale or purchase of real property. I look at it as "showing" rather than "telling". A client last week told me that she chose the B&B to stay in on her visit because of my blog post on it. Not a big deal, and it wasn't real estate related, but I'm showing them $600k+ properties and cannot be sure just which content on my site she valued the most.

I do agree that search engines should always be in your mind when writing for the web, but I write for my visitors first, with unobtrusive attention to keywords and SEO. Long-term, I believe that WWOM (Web Word of Mouth) will bring traffic to my site via one-way links from satisfied readers and clients to my blog and information. Again, I don't know that we're in disagreement, but I couldn't tell from your post what types of content you believe to be unneccesary and wasteful of time and money.

Jim,

Read my post closely. If a site owner has time to write extraneous content, and can find a justification for it, then they should do it. But only after the more critical, core content has been established.

Making your site personable with a blog, as you have done, is not the same as building frivolous content for SEO purposes. Even then, the time needed for a good blog is a luxury for a busy, struggling agent. Many people have limited writing skills and do not feel confident with that kind of public presentation of it.

Many agents in here are looking for advice, and they do not have spare time. They need to get it done, and quickly.

Some people in the SEO world, when you read them closely, seem to be advocating the "visit the annual fruit festival" form of content for a real estate agent's site. I say that's total bunk.

I was recently over in WebmasterWorld, the biggie forum for SEO. I asked a specific question: "Just exactly what content about Phoenix that an agent might create will make hundreds of other sites magically link to it, gratuitoulsy?" That was not a facetious question. I really wanted answers, from the people who claim to know. The big time gurus. But I did suspect what I would get back. Most said that if I don't know, then I am just a dumb bumpkin. That is a typical response from that world, where the posturing as genius is common.

But one self-appointed expert there, who had obviously never worked on a realty site, was speculating that one form of "excellent content" for an agent site was to list current lumber and building product prices, and keep it updated. Or list historical mortgage rates, over the last ten years.

He then claimed that contractors and other people in the building industry would find those lumber prices and miraculously place links to it on their sites. That might happen. Anyone want to take odds? The moon could turn blue tonight, as well. Obviously that "expert" thinks it's a good bet. But it's not their money, though. It's the agents time and money at risk.

That kind of ridiculous "content is king" advice pervades the big SEO boards. Anyone who comes forward and doubts that it would work is excoriated, publicly. "Content is king" is a religion on those boards, and I see evidence that some people are bringing that exact kind of convoluted thinking over here.

Advising people to write "fruit festival" content, and other tangential content, instead of focusing on content directly realted to their real estate business, is just a huge gamble. Anecdotal evidence that it possibly worked here and there only adds to the confusion.

Agents need to address their SEO basics first. Those basics are competing for "Your Town ST Real Estate" and other high traffic terms. Or something similar. And on that optimized page, if they do attract a real visitor from a search, they had damn well better convey some meaty content about their real estate capabilities, and how that will serve that visitor.

Sure, there are other ways to approach it. They could optimize for "Your Town Fruit Festival", and they will likely get some traffic. I am not sure how they'll make any money consistently on that, unless they also sell jelly.

But, I am a no bull kind of person who is very aware that most of the high-ranking, successful real estate sites do what I am describing, and they do not chase after "fruit festival" traffic.

Optimize for the traffic-generating realty terms related to you market, build content that addresses those terms for real visitors, and put a link foundation under you site with home and real estate-related reciprocation. That is a duplicable strategy that has proven to work, again and again.

But then, what I am describing is far too simple and unsophisticated for the experts in the SEO world, where complication and complexity is the preferred way. They'll send you on a wild goose chase, at your expense. Again, it's a religion thing to them. In the end, it's your money and time, not theirs that is being wasted.

You should definitely not be writing about just anything.

In my case, I have three regular articles I write a month (which at this moment I am behind on - trip to Scotland, totally worth it ;-) ). I write one on a small submarket(basically my farm of 549 homes), one on the city in which I live and one on the county that city is in. Each covers all the data from the previous month. So you get all your raw data from doing a search on the MLS or using one of the reports generated by your MLS. Then you just look at the data, maybe graph it to make it more easy to visualize what the market is doing, form some opinions on what your looking at and your done.

What you end up with is something for your website, newsletter and/or podcast. So by just writing that article, you have given yourself material for a number of mediums and what you produce is totally unique to you.

Now, in addition to the regular articles I mention above, I read my local paper, business week, national review and a few others. When I read something in those that sparks a thought, I will write an article about it, credit the sources (with links to them when practical) and post those as well.

It is all really quite easy once you get going. I probably don't spend more than 6 hours a month on my articles. That does not count my weekly podcast which probably adds another 4 hours a month.

And hell... my podcast has taken things to an all new level for me. I am getting lots of email from listeners and my podcast recently made it into "New and Notable" section on iTunes. Once I got to that level, my number of subscribers jumped from about 10 new subscribers a day to nearly 40 - and still rising as of today.

Finally, doing all this just makes you a better real estate professional. It makes you really analyze the data for your area and put into writing some thoughts about it. That is only going to make you sound that much better in every interaction you have with clients and potential clients.

R

RebelBroker is creating content that does have value in his local market. That is not a waste of time. Especially if he can promote it and get it linked, etc.

I am talking about extraneous content development that is just goofy, and that nobody else really cares about either. Words for the sake of words. That's a waste of time and money. But that is what a lot of SEO gurus advise these days. Especially if they can get you to pony up the cost of them writing it!

And, secondly, until an agent ahs develped specific content that adresses the search terms that are particular to their local market, then they haven't covered the basics. That is, pages optimized for local search terms like "YourTown Real Estate", and "NextTownOver homes for sale" etc. For most agents, that should be at least 20 to 50 optimized pages.

Anyone serious about free search rankings and traffic needs to to the basics first. Here's a multi-page document that was specifically written for real estate professionals, using real estate examples:

Search Engine Optimization Basics For Real Estate-Related Websites

I hope it helps.

Robert, what software do you use to generate the podcast feed?

I like your reports and graphs but I find them very hard to read, the print is very small, and I have good eyes, I don't wear glasses. I think it might get read even more if the font size were bigger.
Thanks for the idea, I have been doing some similar reports but not as in depth and regular.

Drew, I use Garageband on a Mac to do the podcast. Fantastic program. I am using a dated old PowerMac G4. I plan to update to a new intel based mac and if my friends at Apple are right (I worked at Apple for a few years), I will be able to run windows apps on it without having to install windows using a special tool. If your looking to get into podcasting, give it a try with a program called "Audacity" on windows. It's free and you can be up and running pretty quick - you cannot do "enhanced" podcasts with it tho (IE: no images and chapters).

Michael, I apologize for the readability issue. I noticed that myself. I have been trying to transition all my work back onto the macintosh lately and frankly, it has disrupted my mojo!

Normally, you would get a smaller image that you would then be able to click on and get a much bigger image that was very readable.

The graphs in my latest market analysis were created in Keynote on the mac. Keynote simply looks way better than powerpoint - at least if you can see it in its full glory it is. The downside is that I cannot get the animated flash output I normally get with powerpoint and a cool add on I got for it.

Take a look at some of my older market analysis work to see what I mean. The ones that have a "Video Presentation Available" button with it connect to the flash presentation thing I am talking about. If I could get that going on the Mac side, I would be all over it.

When you say font size, do you mean the whole article or are you just referring to the images of the graphs, etc.?

Thanks for taking the time to look at my stuff.

R

I write articles out the wazoo on topics related to US Real Estate, web marketing, you name it. It's impossible to be successful on the web without extraordinary writing skills. Time to sharpen your er uh, fingers.