Attracting a readership is a tough thing to do. At times, it might seem like no one is reading, and you’ll want to give up. Or, it might feel like you’re not growing your audience fast enough.
Here’s a few reasons why you might not be getting the amount of traction you’re looking for (and what to do about it)…
1. You don’t post often enough.
If you’re not posting new content often enough, you’re really giving people a reason to stick around. This is especially important in real estate, where the market is always changing. You want to make sure that you’re updating your blog with fresh, new content on a weekly basis.
2. You’re writing isn’t helpful.
First, start by defining what type of client you want to work with: Buyers or Sellers?
Then, write content that educates and informs them on the buying and selling process. The more helpful the content, the better. They’ll start to read your work regularly, and they’re more likely to engage and ask questions.
This is different than writing those “now is the time to buy” type of posts. Sure, they’re an easy way to update your readers on the latest listings in an area, but they aren’t very helpful and thereby, not very useful to your reader.
3. Your posts are long, dry and boring.
Here’s the thing, your post might be well written and useful, but it needs to read and flow well for your reader. If all they see is a long block of text, with no paragraph breaks, no images, they’re not going to be very interested in reading it.
Here are a couple of ways to format your posts so they read and flow better:
- Always include an image in your posts. A great image complements your post well and helps pull the reader in.
- Write shorter paragraphs. This helps break up your content better so that it’s easier to read.
- Use bullet lists (like this one) whenever you can. Let’s face it, people have a short attention span. By using a bullet list, you’re making it easier for them to scan and read your content.
The more often you apply each of these, the more likely people will be to read your content.
How did you get traction when you were first starting out?
What did you do to grow your audience? Was it easy or difficult? Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
Photo Credit: futureshape
What’s your recommendation for posting frequency?
What’s your recommendation for posting frequency?
RB,
Good post. The problem is, nobody really reads real estate blogs.The only real estate blogs that are successful are real estate blogs designed for other real estate agents: Agent Genius, Phoenix Real Estate Guy, etc. Agents are more than happy to blab with each other all day long online.
You will rarely find leads/prospects/customers/clients involved on these blogs. This is expected, normal and ok.
Agents should write short and helpful articles on their sites, primarily based on all the questions they are answering all day long for clients. If prospects read them and like them, maybe you will get lucky and score one as a client.
Otherwise, Agents should concentrate on driving traffic to their sites. It’s purely a numbers game.
If your site is a good one and you can drive 500 people to you site per day, you might capture 1-3% of these, so 5-15 registrants per day.
Of these, if they are put in a database and handled properly (a whole other topic), you can expect to convert 1/2-1% of these to customers.
So, it does Agents no good to have a really active blog, since it will be primarily Agent to Agent activity.
Designing a helpful site and driving traffic to it are key. And both of those are also topics of their own.
Lol!
Thanks for the great post. It is true Real Estate blogs has no readers. For real estate web designers whose sites has no readers, this can be very helpful for them.
Sorry if this is wrong place BUT how do I get support to answer my questions and fix a bug in your plug in ?