Creating and managing a blog website is a vital tool in your online communications repertoire. With decent graphic design elements and some how-to on writing compelling blog posts, anyone with valuable knowledge and opinions can become a great blog writer and visitors will love the website.
You can not only increase your chances of achieving high search results rankings with your blog, but even more importantly, you can become that recognized and followed information resource for your local online community. Once you attain this goal, you will find you have a consistent audience base and a great web tool via the blog with which to interact and communicate.
Getting your audience to participate in your blog will build online friendships, ensure their trust and acceptance of your services, and by extension hopefully funnel sales inquiries into your inbox. This means getting visitors commenting on posts, filling out contact forms, taking polls, becoming active participants in this online forum you’ve created with your blog.
Here are five ways to encourage your real estate blog visitors to participate with your real estate blog:
1). Ask Them – Make sure to have call-to-action cues asking visitors to add a comment and continue the discussion. Simply inviting them to participate might be all it takes.
2). Make Commenting Easy – Once you’ve asked them to comment, make that process as easy and painless as possible. Allow for ‘anonymous’ comments (so long as your blog platform doesn’t get spammed to death – in that case enabling some simple form of CAPCHA technology to minimize the hassle for your visitors and your spam comment folder). Also, provide tools like ShareThis that give visitors connections to pass around the content online.
3). Offer Bribes / Contests – If asking for people’s feedback in your comments isn’t enough, create incentives for that participation – “Question of the Month” as an example. Offer an affordable prize that you would want! You might find that paying $50 for a gift card every month and using that to stimulate communication on your blog is an affordable form of viral marketing. Just make sure you get the word out to as many people as possible if you are going to run a prize promotion; you can do this through your email list, social media profiles (like Facebook), and through your print materials.
4). Provide Personal Profiles – Personalization is a great way to get people to interact and participate with the blog, and user profiles are great. Visitors that can add a unique persona might be compelled to join the discussion. Pick a blog platform that let’s them customize their presence on your site.
5).Create a “Top Commentators” List – Continuing with the above, contributors will love to see their name/profile acknowledged on the website and as a navigation path to their best comments. You can also tie this into prize promotions.
These are all fairly simple, yet effective ways to start blogging to the highest degree. The technical work is all fairly minor, and if you have a WordPress-based blog, the programming many of these items can be accomplished through plugins that are widely and freely available. Happy blogging to you! Please let us know anything you’ve done that has worked by contributing through our comments section below this post.
