Guest Blogging: Selling Real Estate One Post At a Time

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This is part four in our five-part series, “Online Real Estate Lead Generation Strategies that Actually Work.”

Within one year of launching his website, Park City real estate sales associate Ben Fisher saw his website traffic skyrocket from 0 to 1,500 monthly targeted visitors. This was no accident. Ben sticks to a handful of content marketing techniques — and not one of them costs him a dime.

The muscle behind his plan is writing and publishing a wide range of content on his own site and on other sites. By doing so, his target audiences has a higher chance of finding him at the precise moment they are searching for the solutions he offers.

Many assume that once their website is complete, the job of content creation comes to an end. However, it’s when the website creation is complete that content marketing truly begins. Ben didn’t stop creating content after filling his website with highly optimized community specific information. Instead, he began publishing content all over the Internet to expand his reach and visibility. He does this mainly by writing guest posts on other blogs and writing and submitting articles to article directories, and local business outreach. The most effective of these he says, is guest blogging.

What Is Guest Blogging and Why Is It So Effective?

Guest blogging is the process of contributing valuable content for free to a blog in a related but non-competing industry. Ideally, blogs that your target audience are already frequenting. For a real estate professional, related but non-competing blogs might include:

• Local area info blogs
• Title insurance company blogs
• Home loan agent blogs
• Local travel websites
• Property management websites

In addition to the additional exposure generated through guest blogging, there’s another value as well — inbound links. Having links from other high authority sites to your website is a heavily weighted factor in how high your site will rank in the search engines for your keywords.

In essence, guest blogging is a win-win-win situation.

• Bloggers and their readers get access to high quality authority content
• You gain exposure in front of new audiences
• Your website benefits from the inbound links in the guest post

Ben’s Top Tips for Guest Blogging

1. Contribute High Quality Content. Bloggers are doing you a service by allowing you to speak to the audience that they have painstakingly built. Abusing that gratitude by not respecting their audience may not only cause your guest post to be rejected, but will likely stop the business relationship dead in its tracks. “Contribute quality articles not just random text to fill in space and get a link. Not spammy posts loaded with keywords. There is no need to keyword stuff and abuse anchor text links anymore,” he says.

2. Change Up Your Anchor Text Links. When including links in your guest posts, always include them in anchor text that you want your site to rank for. However, as Ben mentions, you’ll want to change up the keywords that your links are anchored in rather than use the same keywords every time. Following this advice is more important than ever after Google’s recent Panda update. “I try to change up the anchor text links as much as possible between each guest post and contribute to high PR (Page Rank) sites. I try not to bother with getting links from newer, less authoritative domains. Quality over quantity!,” he says.

3. Establish a relationship with people before reaching out for a guest blogging opportunity. Just like with money, it makes sense to earn a friendship before you need to make a withdrawal. There are more ways than ever to connect with like-minded people in your industry. Set time aside each week to connect with new people and to nurture existing relationships. “Creating relationships with other professionals in the real estate industry has been invaluable as these lead to numerous guest blogging opportunities. Social media groups and forums are a great way to meet people that you can reach out to,” he says.

Have you written a guest blog post and have tips to share? If not, set a goal to reach out to three people next week and present the opportunity.

About our Guest Contributor
Christine O’Kelly is a the founder of the SEO copywriting firm SEO Content Solutions and Cofounder of the online press release distribution service, Online PR Media. Christine teaches marketers, advertisers, and business owners how to gain more online visibility and publicity for their businesses through content marketing and online publicity marketing.

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