We’re building semi-custom blogs for each of the agents with us at Automated Homefinder and last night, one of my agents asked me how people will find her blog. Rather than giving her a fish, I thought I’d try giving her a fishing pole instead. (I haven’t been blogging for long, and by no means am I claiming to be a “guru”, but I’ve seen great success rates because of what I learned from many blogging veterans, and am just trying to share “the essence” of what they’ve taught me.) MV - this post is for you.

Don’t write so people find you… Write for the sole purpose of helping your existing readers (even if it’s only one reader.) I see so many blogs that are written with a little bit of oh-so-mediocre content thrown in between the oh-so-spammy content, or that are written solely for the purpose of “selling” the author’s audience something.  That philosophy might get you to the first page of Google for a short while, but it won’t work for long because your readers will almost immediately abandon your site.  Blog readers can smell a sales pitch from farther away than a shark smells blood in the water.  How quickly visitors leave your site is called a “bounce rate”.  Search engines monitor website bounce rates, and even if you were ranking well at first, it won’t last long if you’ve got a high bounce rate.

It’s a little bit like dating. When you’re single, dating can be fun if you’re just meeting people at bars or singles events. However, it always seems that you find a true long-term relationship worth pursuing when you’re doing the things you enjoy, interacting with people who share similar interests, and not even worrying about finding someone to date.  Blogging is the exact same thing: Writing solely for the purpose of getting found on the search engines will get you some “dates with prospects”, but it won’t be nearly as effective as writing for the purpose of helping your audience, and building relationships with clients for life.

For my AHF readers: As Automated Homefinder agents, you have an average of 1000 to 2000 prospects in your database.  The fact that you can advertise your blog to those 1000+ readers gives you a distinct advantage over your competitors.  When you write your posts for the benefit of helping the prospects in your existing database, you will win over more of those prospects than if you wrote solely for the purpose of “getting found” on the search engines.

If you write it from the heart, they will come. Eventually, after writing solely for the benefit of educating your audience on both general real estate topics as well as hyper-local issues, the traffic will come.

• Not only will you find that you’re getting free traffic from the search engines, but you might also start to get exposure in the local newspaper.
• You never know which blog post will get you an interview on the local TV station.
• You never know when an HR representative (or other “tribe leader”) of a 100 person company relocating from another state will stumble across one of your posts, and add you to their list of preferred Realtors.
• But beware, the local media and tribe leaders can smell a sales pitch from even farther away than a buyer or seller can - so a journalistic approach is that much more important when writing in your blog.

Don’t get me wrong… Anyone who knows me knows that I’m all about getting traffic.  However, writing a spammy blog post isn’t the way to do it.  There are ways you can promote your blog without compromising your integrity with sloppy “keyword density” tactics, or generic “now is the time to buy” statements. (Hint - those methods are what I call “the other 90% of SEO” — and they have almost nothing to do with what you write on your blog itself.

Be yourself, and let the law of attraction take its course.