3 Ways To Improve And Get More From Your Real Estate Blog

As a StomperAgent you’re always looking for ways to squeeze more out of your blog’s performance.

Now, I get a lot of questions from folks about how to better leverage their blog in their real estate marketing so I’m going to share with you 3 ways to improve your blog’s performance.

Implement these easy upgrades and your blog will transform from a mere place to collect words to an optimized marketing tool that attracts, converts, and nurtures more traffic.

Improvement #1: Maximize Traffic With A High-End Theme

It’s easy to fall into the false belief that all blog themes are the same. They just change the way a blog looks, right?

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

I’ve worked with countless themes over the past several years, both my own and my clients. And let me tell you: not all blog themes are created equal.

Some blog themes are difficult to work with requiring a good deal of changes to core files to get them “just right”. Some have no support, so if you ever have a problem or question, you’re stuck.

Two of the biggest problems found in most themes are lack of internal SEO and poor reader usability.

This is not the case with Thesis.

Thesis is a fully SEO-optmized theme for your Wordpress blog. In fact, you can ditch most all of your SEO plugins that you’re running because Thesis handles it all internally. You can optimize on a post-by-post basis for the type of traffic you want to attract.

• Custom title tags
• Meta descriptions
• Meta keywords
• Image ALT tags

The other thing that Thesis handles masterfully is usability. See, a key to getting your content read is having a layout that promotes consumption of your content.

Thesis is designed to deliver your content at the optimal width for reading online. Plus, with typography that makes it easy on the reader’s eyes you have a layout designed to get your content read.

Not to mention all of the internal hooks, custom functions, and stylesheet upgrades that Thesis offers you’re dealing with the last blog theme you will ever need.

So, whether you get Thesis or another theme (now you know what to look for) the addition of a high-end theme will enhance the performance of your blog in a number of areas.

Improvement #2: Convert Visitors Into Leads With OptinPop

One thing to keep in mind is that you are not a blogger. Blogging is not your business. You are a Realtor, a StomperAgent no less, that uses a blog to drive your real estate business.

With that in mind, it’s important to not get trapped by tactics used by bloggers. Namely, driving visitors to become RSS subscribers. If you’re going to drive visitors to become anything it should be email subscribers.

A list of qualified email subscribers is one of the strongest assets you can build online and this free plugin builds you a list of subscribers easy-peasy like.

Now, I have to admit I’ve resisted using pop-ups even though I’ve seen plenty of compelling evidence that they typically have a high conversion rate.

Frankly, I wish I’d started using them earlier.

Using the free OptinPop plugin (I’ve seen similar sell for as much as $47) I’ve become an advocate of giving them a shot on your blog. I can tell you this about OptinPop: it converts visitors into subscribers very well.

The plugin is super-simple to install and it works with most email providers, including Aweber.

So, through an optimized high-end theme you can attract more traffic then use a pop-up to convert more of your traffic into email subscriber leads.

Improvement #3: Automatically Follow-Up With Visitors With An Email System

While this improvement isn’t a direct add-on to your real estate blog it does build upon and strengthen the previous two additions.

Because you’re a StomperAgent you’re using some sort of drip email autoresponder campaign to follow-up and nurture your leads. However, if you’re going to be increasing the amount of leads you generate then you might want to step up to a more powerful email service provider.

Use Aweber and see an increase in email deliverability due to their proactive relationship with most all ISPs. Hey, if you’re going to be sending an email to your subscribers you want to know it’s going to get through the spam filters, right?

Now, relating to your blog, Aweber has a very cool feature called “blog broadcast” where they grab your blog’s RSS feed and convert it into an email newsletter format. Your blog newsletter can be scheduled to mail with a number of different options and…

This is a great way to deliver content to your real estate leads and bring them back to your blog.

Of course, Aweber gives you heavyweight email marketing features along with the standard drip follow-up.

• Advanced list management features
• Email split-testing (test subject lines, content, design, etc.)
• Form split-testing (see which form converts best)
• Email analytics and tracking

This is the pro way of nurturing all the leads you’ve attracted and converted into email subscribers.

So, there you have it – 3 ways to improve and get more from your real estate blog. Now, the key is to take action. Pick at least one of these three suggestions and implement it right now.

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