The most powerful marketing Idea I’ve heard lately is to create a separate blog for listings. I’m in the process of giving area information, one area at a time on my home buyer’s website/blog with plenty of links to pertinent information.
But the idea of creating a blog for each listing is something that didn’t dawn on me. To tell the story of the listing. The 455 50th Street Blog! My provider allows categories, so I can create as many blogs as I want to create and delete them when it sells.
The possibilities are many – you could even have the owners write a guest post, you could fully explain the area surrounding the listing, you can place powerful photos highlighting the strong points; you can have one post that gives demographics, one post that gives comparables, and if it’s an older home like many in Savannah, one post that gives the history. You can highlight in one post all the improvements, in one post talk about its energy efficiency, on and on.
It’s a lot of work but it would be powerful and sellers would love it. Talk about rich content and Google love! It would distinguish the home and it would place it in a great position to compete in a tough market.
I have two new listings coming up and I’m going to try this. There may be objections I haven’t thought of, but I believe it would be worth the effort.
Scott says:
I would worry about diluting traffic with multiple blogs. But if you are not trying to gain high traffic or page rank and just link folks from your main site its an interesting idea.
February 27, 2008 — 9:18 am
Greg Swann says:
If you plan to list that home or in that neighborhood again, don’t kill them.
I’ll write this in detail before — and for — Unchained, but the gift of single-property websites/weblogs never stops giving.
If cost is an issue, create them as subdomains on your main domain: 123_Mulberry_Street/MikeFarmerRealty.com
But don’t kill them. They’ll pay you again and again if you keep them.
February 27, 2008 — 9:31 am
Greg Swann says:
Amending myself: That one idea, Mike — and I’ll elaborate it fully shortly, just to make sure I haven’t left anything out — is worth thousands of dollars a year to working Realtors.
The best way to market yourself as a lister is to list strong. I’m not the most successful Realtor on the planet — to the contrary — but we have developed more tools and ideas for listing strong than anyone, anywhere, ever. There is gold in BloodhoundBlog’s archives.
February 27, 2008 — 9:41 am
Mike Farmer says:
Yes, it would make sense to not kill them. Just end the story with the last post about how smoothly the closing went and everybody is living happily ever after.
hell, maybe even a followup post about something after closing — my brain is in overdrive.
February 27, 2008 — 10:03 am
Janet Burns says:
That sounds like a really slick idea!
I too plan on highlighting area neighborhoods in my blog, and using the blog as a Real Estate and community resource.
I’m a little confused though. I read your post to say that you would add a category on your main blog for your listings – not create an entirely new blog for each listing- correct? It sounds to me like an easy, subtle way to showcase your listings.
February 27, 2008 — 10:14 am
Greg Swann says:
We like to say “Sold in four days!” It has a certain enduring impact.
February 27, 2008 — 10:56 am
Mike Farmer says:
Janet,
No, I meant a separate blog, I just said it wrong, probably — they call it “journals” on Squarespace, and I can create separate “journals” for listings.
February 27, 2008 — 11:30 am
Todd Carpenter says:
I’ve said this before, butI don’t know why agents wait to get a listing to build single property blogs. I’d build one for every home in my marketing farm.
Step two is to sell the home. Step one is to get the listing in the first place. Build them all ahead of time and you have blogs that are gaining Google trust for months and years before the owner of that property even finds it. What better proof that you understand web marketing than to own the search results for the property in question?
When the new buyer moves in, offer to make them an author on the blog. Let them show off pictures, or document how they have fixed it up. Encourage active bloggers to link to each other and you’ve created your own social network.
If you took the extra time to learn how to use WordPress MU, you could add new blogs in just a couple minutes.
Yea, it would be lot’s of work, but it’s more likely to garner business than spending hours on twiter. Something many agents appearently have time for.
February 27, 2008 — 4:35 pm
Chris says:
Also, it can help your firm’s pagerank to be linked from these blogs. It’s better if they’re hosted from different IP’s, so even just leave it as a blogger or blogspot blog.
February 27, 2008 — 7:10 pm
Bob in San Diego says:
Mike,
This is a great idea and it doesn’t have to very much either. A possible follow-up post could be updating neighborhood prices or a short post that mentions you have another listing in the neighborhood with a link to that homes blog :).
February 27, 2008 — 9:37 pm
Ken Smith says:
If you are creating actual individual blogs why not just give the current owners access to use it after the closing. Let them know that while they own the house they can use the blog to post pictures, garage sales, and any other local information they might have an interest in sharing.
Naturally you would want to keep a footer link to your site and maintain full ownership of the site.
February 28, 2008 — 12:21 am
Mike Dammann says:
Don´t delete the blog when it sold, just update the post and add a link to the other properties that are still for sale. Why send traffic into a dead end street? redirect it 🙂
– Mike
February 28, 2008 — 5:17 am
Kevin Warmath - Alpharetta Real Estate says:
Has anyone developed a WP template for a single property blog. That would be helpful and make it more cookie-cutter to deploy for each new listing.
Figuring out your hosting strategy / doname naming strategy is a bit of a puzzle. I’d be curious to others’ thoughts on this because you definitely want to use different IP addresses if possible. However, i do like the idea of having a naming pattern that looks like:
.yourblogdomain.com.
Thoughts?
February 29, 2008 — 2:57 pm
Kevin Warmath - Alpharetta Real Estate says:
that should be “DOMAIN naming stragegy” if i could type.
Also, the proposed url structure would be:
streetaddress.yourblogdomain.com
thx, k.
February 29, 2008 — 3:01 pm
Mike Dammann says:
Kevin, great idea, will see if I can get someone to do it.
February 29, 2008 — 3:07 pm
Sharon Simms says:
I’d be interested in the template Kevin suggested, too.
March 4, 2008 — 6:49 am
Kevin Warmath - Alpharetta Real Estate says:
Yes, let’s please not let this idea die on the vine…it has too much potential. If i were a good graphics and layout guy, I’d create the template myself, but that is not my expertise…i would be willing to have a converstation with someone about what i think the requirements are for the design.
thx,k.
March 4, 2008 — 8:29 am
Ken Smith says:
This can be done with subdomains, but I think it would require wordpress MU (multi user). You can set it to automatically assign the domains based on the address. The bad thing is you can’t run MU on a inexpensive server as you need root access, so no shared hosting plans that most agents are used to.
The other option if this is purely for advertising is to set up a blog post with all the information. Then create the subdomain and 301 redirect it to the blog post. This can all be done by an average person with very little technical skills.
If a couple people are really interested in this option I would be willing to create a simple step by step guide for the process. Would also be willing to work with a programmer to set up a simple platform for adding the listings to your WP blog. I know this is one of the worst parts of using WP for most agents.
Post here and let me know what the interest level would be.
March 4, 2008 — 1:19 pm