This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):
How do you get visitors to come to your home’s custom weblog? Shoe leather works well. Search engines? Not so much…
Okay, so you’ve built a custom weblog to help sell your home, and you’ve dressed it up with photos, a map, a floorplan — every bit of content you could think of. Now what?
Your home now has a twenty-four-hour salesperson on the internet. How do you go about getting potential buyers to visit your blog?
Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is not search engines. For one thing, your site is brand new. The search engines don’t even know it exists. Even if you manage to get indexed, you won’t have the kind of popularity to bring you to the top of search results for your keywords.
But there is an even more compelling reason why search engines won’t be much help to you: Visitors brought in by search engines are very loosely motivated. Many will have been looking for something else entirely, so they will bounce right back off your site in seconds flat.
Your objective in promoting your weblog is to target people who are motivated to buy your home — or who know someone who is motivated to buy your home. Your job is not to broadcast your appeal to everyone but to narrowcast to just those people who can do you the most good.
You’ll put notices about your weblog anywhere online that you can — Zillow.com, Trulia.com, CraigsList.com, local weblogs supporting nearby schools, little league teams, etc. But your primary promotional strategy is going to be offline — person to person.
We print business card-sized promotional pieces to advertise our open houses. These are distributed to every house in the neighborhood, since the neighbors may know someone who wants to live nearby.
During the school day, there will be more than 100 cars in the school parking lot, most of them driven there from out of the neighborhood. Some of those folks are sick of commuting.
Most local retailers will have some kind of bulletin board. Your cards belong there.
Your buyers probably won’t find your home on a search engine. But if you manage your promotion right, your house will be sold long before that matters.
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New York says:
All those ideas you listed are great, but i have a few to add. Submitting your weblog to bookmarking websites can bring in alot of traffic. You’ll be surprised the amount of people who look for real estate sites on online bookmarking sites.
Another way to get visitors is by commenting on real estate and financial blogs and forums. You never know who might be looking for a home in your area.
June 5, 2008 — 7:36 am