Your real estate blog entry is your fastest, most cost-effective way to get your real estate message out to as many of your clients as quickly as possible. If your blog has RSS feed subscribers, they receive notice of your blog entry very quickly. With this tremendous communication tool at your fingertips, remember these blog basics for making the most of your real estate blog entries.

Put your expertise into your writings. As an experienced real estate professional, you are in the best position to educate the home buying and selling public. By using your blog as an educational device, you position yourself both as an expert and as a thought leader. Real estate expert status is quickly translated into boosting your trustworthiness with people who are virtually introduced to you through your real estate website.

Your real estate blog creates a history of all your teaching lessons. With the ability to sort and archive your entries by topic, build your “knowledge Base” library to educate your current and future clients. Many companies, such as Microsoft, have found their websites’ searchable “knowledge base” to be the best way to provide their customers answers around the clock. Your real estate website’s visitors will benefit from your blog’s knowledge base.

For cost effectiveness, a blog utilizes space already included with your current website and your real estate web design consultant has templates available. Your main investment is your time. Fifteen minutes a day or a few days a week helps you consistently keep your brand active on the Internet. Your thoughts and insight uploaded on your site will instantaneously be available to the people searching to buy their next home in your market.

Best of all, you are your own boss! You can set the amount of time and when you want to unleash your real estate writing muse. You can address topics that arise that day in the real estate market news or typical home buying or selling concerns of clients. The conversational format makes it natural to bounce around between different real estate or mortgage topics.

If you have not added a blog to your real estate website, now is no better time to increase the benefit your clients’ receive from using your website. Once your website company sets you up, it is no harder than sending an email. Only you are sending it to the world.

When providing material for your real estate website, beware of two copywriting traps that diminish the effectiveness of your website content.

Trap #1: Writing for other real estate agents.
Every profession develops shorthand words, initials or acronyms for part of their daily process or products. Keep in mind that your new home buyers, which may be 40% of the traffic your real estate website receives, are novices. They do not necessarily understand real estate acronyms that are second nature to real estate agents. Writing over someone’s head leaves them feeling like they need to use another agent who is used to talking on an introductory level. Especially do not write as if your material is going in a classified ad where everything has been broken down into a type of classified ad shorthand.

On the other hand, if you are real estate website targeting practiced commercial and investment buyers, you can use a certain level of market specific language to prequalify your potential clients.

Trap #2: Writing page content as if it is a blog entry.
Blog entries can be written in a more conversational style. When writing content for a webpage, make sure you are using a descriptive adjectives and keyword nouns instead of pronouns. Actually, keeping this in the back of your mind will help you write better blog entries.

When reviewing client testimonials, tweak their quotes to add punch (keeping it in their style of talking/writing, of course) and get them to approve of the changes. A positive testimonial such as “He was a great guy to work with and we are very happy with our new house,” can be tweaked for the search engines with minor edits. A better testimonial would read “Seymour Lystings was a great real estate agent to work with and we are very happy with our lovely new Denver home in the Cherry Creek neighborhood.” This adds your name and three keywords: “real estate agent”, “Denver home” and “Cherry Creek neighborhood”. Hopefully your testimonials are a little longer also!

With these copywriting traps out of the way, the real estate information on your website should appeal to first time buyers as well as seasoned home buyers. Don’t worry about getting your explanations too simple, your seasoned buyers will skim over that text to find what they need.

Writing a successful call to action in your real estate blog entry largely depends upon the angle from which you approach your subject. Advertising studies have shown that people react more strongly to the idea of losing something, than to the idea of gaining something. Especially if that something is money. Their money.

In the blog title, set the pace and capture your real estate website visitor’s attention by stating what people may be losing or missing by not answering your call to action. People respond far more to a title telling them what they are losing. People respond about 60% less to titles posing the same idea phrased as what can gain from taking those same steps.

For example, if alerting homeowners to falling mortgage rates, the least effective title would be “Ways to Save on Your Mortgage Payments”. More effective is “Are you losing 2 days of income with your high mortgage?”.

Even more effective is to quote an authority figure telling them they are losing money. Just like testimonials, a third party expert creates even more interest.

An example of a title that would get the greatest response might be “Dean of Stanford Business School Reports Most Americans Lose A Month’s Salary to High Mortgage Rates”.

With a good title, your real estate blog entry then becomes an exercise in fleshing out the details of what your website visitor may be losing. The call to action becomes how you, with your real estate or mortgage brokering expertise, are able to help them not lose money (or an real estate opportunity) in today’s market.

An easy way to add the uniqueness to your blog entry is to tell a story from your real estate experience. Adding a quote as a punch line to the story helps to make it memorable, just like in a good joke.

Of course, not every real estate blog entry should be written from the “what are you losing” perspective, but it is the most effective perspective to use when issuing a call to action.

Writing entries for your real estate blog or neighborhood news articles for your website can remind you of writing papers for school. The similarity is not far off, since the same keys that applied to writing a good paper apply to your entries and articles.

Outlines are a key tool to your blog writing for several reasons. Outlining your real estate blog:

• Keeps your entries from trying to cover too much ground (and sometimes losing the point),
• Creates a road map for several articles in a row, and
• Shows you when you’re initial subject is evolving into a second or third.

The trick of using outlines effectively is to trust that you can always write more on a real estate subject than you think you can. Take any real estate topic you can write about and write down three headings of areas to cover. Then take each of those headings and create three subheadings. Each of these subheadings can be turned into a real estate blog entry or article on your website.

Effective real estate blog entries convey one thought to your website readers. Have you ever noticed what happens when you ask someone more than one question in an email? Personal research has shown, that no matter how brilliant your email recipient is, 92.36% of the time, they will only answer the first question. Similarly, on a blog entry, keep in mind that once you present your great idea, concept or insight, your reader’s eyes may continue to travel down the text, but their mind stepped away to chew on your idea.

The blog writing guidelines of being informative, on topic, unique and keyword rich always apply, but the hardest task is staying focused and creating bite sized pieces of information. Since the nature of real estate blog writing is that you sit down, let loose with stream of consciousness writing, and capture your thoughts as they come. This is excellent for getting the creative juices going.

Once all your thoughts are out, tighten them up, check that the verb tenses all match and that you aren’t switching between first and second person. Then, even mentally, outline the entry. You may have two or three entries. Once you do your outline, you can see if there are areas to flesh out better, get background data on, or to add a story to illustrate a point.

A little school-like discipline in your blog writing should reward you with increased traffic to your real estate website due to higher search engine ranking.

Don’t let all your real estate research and wisdom get ignored because of ho-hum blog entry titles. As a real estate agent, when you are face to face with a client, you demand their attention. It is hard to ignore you. Unfortunately for your hard writing effort, it is not impolite to ignore your real estate blog entry.

People ignore a good percentage of periodicals they pay to receive. Your free real estate information must maximize use of best attention capturing tool – your blog title or headline. Spending time on your title is well worth the investment. By using the following rules, you can craft that great blog title faster.

Rule #1: Write your title to appeal to the self-interest of a specific [real estate] market. Don’t try to write a title that interests everyone. That title has yet to be found.

Rule #2: Never bait and switch with a title. This turns people away from your real estate website for extended periods of time (i.e. eternity). Always have the title relate to the article.

Rule #3: Appeal to peoples’ “news junkie” habit. Titles starting with:

• How to, or Advice To;
• Truth About, Important Development or Announcing; and
• Revolutionary, Remarkable, Miracle, or Sensational are used again and again because they work. People can’t help their innate curiosity.

Rule #4: Give an idea of the real estate information you are offering. People are drawn into reading informative headlines of 6 to 12 words. Put the benefit you are providing your reader in the title.

Rule #5: Arouse curiosity. Asking a question or stating a fact that causes people to pause are tried and true methods to induce readers to read the body of your blog entry. An entry on what services to expect from a real estate agent could read “Are you getting the best service available?” In order to answer, they must see what services are available.

Rule #6: Avoid using negatives in titles. Just like the subconscious mind, people scanning headlines most often are left with the impression of the blog title without the negative word in there.

Keep these rules to writing a riveting real estate blog title in mind. They all work together, especially Rules 3 and 4. A curiosity arouser without a benefit isn’t effective. And as with any marketing step, ask your clients which titles they really liked. Getting feedback is the best way to hone your real estate blog writing skills.

The real estate markets across America will see different scenarios in new housing starts. Location of property and past three years new housing start trends are two major determinants. The best marketing for real estate websites is to ignore the national figures and address the local trends.

The National Association of Home Builders, in tracking new home starts, found that the drop from the 1.8 billion housing units in 2006 to the 1.36 billion in 2007 was less than the drop between 2005 and 2006. Even though 2008 is still feeling the housing slowdown, with expectations of 1.2 billion starts, the curve looks like it is bottoming out. The recovery will start slow, but 2008 looks like the turnaround year. Bernard Markstein, NAHB director of forecasting and senior economist expects “housing starts to bottom in the second quarter and turn up in the third quarter”.

The fractured nature of the real estate market continues to be a reason for real estate websites to identify and focus on the active markets. In the Denver metro area alone, neighborhoods such as Cherry Creek continue to be a desired destination, whereas other neighborhoods are selling in the 85 – 95% of asking price range. With recent changes in the FHA lending practices, if appraisers can show that neighborhoods are in areas people want to move in to, the loan to value ratio changes from 90% to 95%.

The Colorado Springs real estate market has been a little slower to recover from the current real estate climate. But with the military slated to move thousands of troops into the area in the next few years, the buyers market will be turning into a sellers market as early as this year. Real estate websites and real estate blogs focusing on the military population are already positioned to receive this wave when it arrives.

The Salt Lake City real estate market has weathered the housing slowdown storm the best. In the second quarter of 2007, the average home price rose the most of anywhere in the country. States such as Wyoming, partially driven by the oil economy, have also seen gains in home values.

The Florida real estate market is still one of the tougher markets, but the devalued dollar has spurred European investment. European countries were 7% of the real estate sales, mostly in the condominium and apartment markets along the East Coast waterfront. Recent immigrants purchasing their first homes in the United States have had a strong effect in helping the California, New York, and New Jersey markets as well as the Florida market. Some real estate websites in these areas are positioned to sell to the immigration market with bilingual websites. Yes, the keywords “casa en venta” for major cities brings up real estate sites on Google.

In any market, real estate agents should use their real estate websites, and especially their real estate blogs, to respond to market demands. As soon as you can see where the trends starts to go or can be foreseen to go, that is the time to add content to your site. The sooner the better you address the emerging markets on your site, the better you will be positioned to attract those buyers and sellers.

Your real estate blog can benefit your search engine visibility, but there are several aspects of your blog to keep in mind.

Utilize your one of your real estate blogs key features: fast and easy to write and upload. You don’t need to be a master of HTML to use your blog. You can write in the template, proof-read your entry for grammar and use of keywords, maybe add a small graphic and upload. Choose topics of interest to your clients and add your expert

Be consistent with your real estate blog entries by creating them daily or several times a week. This consistency is what trains the search engines to crawl your site at more frequent intervals and more quickly affect your search engine ranking.

Make your keywords work for your site. The drawback of free blogs is that they are not integrated into your site. All your good writing and keyword usage is not building up your website with the search engines. Make all your real estate musings work to attract the search engines to your blog and your website. Your website designer can show you how to integrate a blog into your real estate website.

The three bywords of your real estate blog are: relevant, recent and rememberable. OK, so rememberable isn’t a word, but it is memorable and so makes the point.