Add a “neighborhood news” area to your real estate website to educate your Internet visitors, boost your search engine ranking and increase your knowledge of these niche markets. The neighborhood news tool allows you to post articles on your website about your target market neighborhoods. It is an opportunity to add eye-catching titles, keyword-rich content and facts to educate your visitors on the benefits of each neighborhood.

The “news” aspect means that this tool is most effective when it is kept fresh - a mix of neighborhood background information and news. This is news on the neighborhood level, such as PTA meetings, high school plays, and zoning hearings. Get to know the neighborhoods where you want to increase your real estate marketing presence. Talk to local store owners and business people and include their insights in your articles.

Don’t be shy about quoting neighborhood and community leaders or mentioning the stars of the local high school play. The first rule in advertising is that people love to read about themselves. Become a name dropper and frequently update your real estate website’s neighborhood information as part of your long-term strategy to gain clients. As people begin to bookmark and regularly check your real estate website, you become more of an expert in their life and a greater candidate for them to naturally choose when they decide to buy or sell their homes.

Another topic to be sure to cover is any neighborhood traditions - July 4th block parties, Cinco de Mayo celebrations, neighborhood seasonal garage sales, or Thanksgiving dinners or firehouse breakfast fundraisers at the community center. A side benefit is that your contact person on these events can also become a source of referrals!

On a more general side, topics such as the local job scene - new companies coming into town or businesses that are increasing/decreasing their work force - and public works projects (usually road improvements) can be of interest or affect several neighborhoods.

Have a game plan on your neighborhood articles. List the neighborhoods you are going to cover and then outline groups or areas that affect the neighborhood: homeowners associations, active civic and youth groups, all the different schools and churches, and the local businesses and services. Start to attach names and phone numbers with each group. You can see how a little networking can build referrals and provide plenty of material for your neighborhood news tool.

How does your real estate website serve your customers? Sure, your website exists to bring in hot home buyer or seller leads. But your visitor is there to get information. The real estate website tools that your offer gratis are a key ingredient to keeping visitors on your site.

Why offer your tools and information for free? Simple. Buyers and sellers hate to feel uninformed (i.e. stupid). By offering tools and information, your visitor can anonymously educate themselves on the market, what parts of town they may like the most, and what the changes in their monthly budgets will be. As you educate the visitors, they begin to view you, through your website, as a knowledgeable expert who knows what real estate clients need. Review your website tools and real estate information with the thought “What question am I answering?” in mind.

How much house can I buy? Home buyers will check out your home listings, but first, with a calculator on your website, they can get an idea of what monthly payments will be on that great looking Craftsman home across town. A basic mortgage calculator allows your client to pre-screen your real estate listings and find their market niche without first divulging their annual income.

What is that neighborhood like? As more buyers rely on the internet to quickly screen real estate listings, the idea of visiting neighborhoods with a knowledgeable real estate agent may appear as a time consuming luxury. Don’t waste all your knowledge! Use a neighborhood news tool on your real estate website. Add articles on different neighborhoods showing their benefits, notes on the local schools, and items that make that neighborhood an attractive place to live. Continually add articles to keep the news fresh (and excite the search engines to visit your site more often).

Is this the right time to buy/sell in the current real estate market? The answer should always be “Yes”, but go in depth on your answer with your real estate blog. Have your website designer set your site up with a blog and make it your real estate diary. The beauty of a blog is that it is conversational writing, short entries, and covers one point on each entry. The above question can be revisited on a continual basis using different reasons and benefits every time you address it.

How can I improve the value of my house for minimum investment? Or how can I best evaluate a house for sale? Articles, buyers and sellers guides and moving checklists for buyers and sellers are a goldmine of great information for your visitors. Dedicate a web page to each real estate topic. These pages can also host links to people you trade links with, such as home cleaners, home maintenance companies, etc.

Use this list to review your real estate website and see where you can improve your offering to your website visitors. By helping your visitors, you also help your website, since new keyword-rich articles and pages help improve your search engine ranking.

Writing your real estate blog can be as easy as talking about your real estate business or the concerns of a first time home buyer. Unfortunately, translating your verbal skills into writing skills is often blocked by how schools have taught us to write. Accept the following rules on writing fro your real estate blog and you will find that writer’s block is not a problem and unleashing your creativity is a lot easier and more fun.

Rule #1: Be brutally honest. Forget what you were taught about writing impersonally in the third person - anything you write is unavoidably autobiographical. Use this to your advantage. You become more real, believable and authoritative to your reader by writing about what you know. Interestingly, by writing and answering questions your real estate clients ask, you get to know yourself better.

Rule #2. Find the common ground. By speaking to your reader using the second person present tense, you bring them into your one-way conversation. We are not as isolated as we think. You have worked with enough clients to know the stress everyone feels when they are buying or selling their house. We may all handle this stress differently, but we all feel it. A real estate blog entry addressing handling this stress may not address real estate directly, but it will help your clients deal with their real estate concerns better. Plus you position yourself as someone who really does understand real estate transactions.

Rule #3. Keep it brief. Writing tends to create run-on sentences. These are OK to get your thoughts out, but go back and shorten them. A good key is watching for the “and” in the sentence. It is probably a good place to separate two thoughts with a period.

Rule #4. Use subtitles on long blog entries. Let your reader skim the article and get the gist of it. This also creates an outline that helps you tie the end of the entry to the beginning.

Rule #5. Sell yourself wisely. Offer the juicy tidbit of information first, then write about your skills or knowledge in that area. Be subtle in blowing your own horn.

As a double check when you start writing - run your real estate blog posts by a teenager. They tend to have no problem unmasking unauthentic writing. And after offering you their juicy tidbit, they’ll sell you on the idea that their unmasking skills are worth a financial reward.

Your real estate blog provides you with a foundational part of your solid sales strategy - building relationships. Your real estate blog creates the direct connection necessary to building your sales relationships. This direct connection between buyer and seller disappeared in layers of marketers, designers, pollsters and managers that is a part of mass production markets. Though items are more available and cheaper, production costs replaced customer needs as a market driver. Blog entries addressing customer needs customizes your real estate website to the current market drivers.

The Harvard Business Review has dedicated several articles to “one to one marketing” and “mass customization”. All buzz words that say manufacturers are relearning “listen to your customer and sell them what they want”. Maybe the spirits of Silk Road merchants are rolling their eyes at this new understanding. Blogs make this interchange happen time and again for your benefit.

By giving your real estate website visitors both current information and the reasons behind your real estate insights, you build trust. Since the real estate market is based on customers looking for their desired home from among available homes created for other people’s likes, the real estate agent’s expertise is funneling the search to a particular target market. With the stature of an expert, your insights and knowledge of the market will be trusted more. The blog is another doorway to lead people to your website’s online listing search and your services.

Show your customers you care. By introducing a recent concern of a customer as a subject in your blog, you are quickly conveying to your readers how well you respond to customers. Your blog entries are 50% what you say and 50% how you say it. By connecting directly with customer concerns and writing in a conversational way, you improve the “how”. When readers email you feedback to your entries, use some of their responses to get your creative juices going on the next entry and reinforce your caring and responsive personal brand.

The content of your real estate blog entries (”what” you say) is aimed at both your readership and the search engines that index and point to your website. Make sure that your articles include the keywords or key phrases that are pertinent to both your blog entry and the markets targeted by your real estate website.

Expand your influence further by sending journalists who cover your real estate market a link to your blog. Journalists and reporters are always looking for an expert to quote and with your blog you become an easily quotable expert. Blog entries on current legislation or trends affecting the real estate or mortgage markets are great targets for this market.

Your real estate blog entries following these guidelines create a solid foundation for reaching potential sales leads, search engines and journalists.

With computers and the Internet, real estate technology has an amazing array of tools for real estate agents. Real estate websites are the primary tool, but contact software and the ease of making audio and video clips has multiplied the avenues to finding real estate sales leads.

A real estate web site usually contains the means of capturing contact information, automatically sending reply emails, offering content-rich pages of buyer and seller guides and checklists, area relocation information and links, and the ability to see an agent’s listings. With the spread of high speed internet connections as the norm, broadcasting audio and video clips has entered the mainstream.

The ability to send video images is used by real estate agents in several ways:

• Offer video tours of homes for sale,
• Film short self-introductory clips, and
• Attract attention by posting videos to heavily trafficked websites like YouTube.

The YouTube technology can also be used to inexpensively add video clips to your PowerPoint presentations and Blogs:

MP3 players and iPods have helped create the podcast technology. By creating short audio recordings for broadcast on the internet as podcasts, a real estate agent can create an audio blog. A potential real estate sales lead can download and listen to your podcast at any time.

Real estate blogs can be added to your real estate website. By combining the blog with the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) technology, the content of your blog entries can be automatically sent to your subscribers. Yahoo has created a tool called Yahoo Pipes that lets you combine your blog entries with other sources (news or other real estate blogs) and send that information out to subscribers.

Software has greatly improved real estate agents productivity (except for Tetris). Contact management software allows agents to keep track of emails, contact information and set contact reminders so hard won sales leads don’t fall through the cracks. There is even software that scans in business cards to a virtual Rolodex-type file.

The fax machine has largely been replaced with email and Adobe’s Acrobat software. With Acrobat, an agent can quickly scan legal documents into the computer or save a Microsoft Word document as a PDF document. A PDF document can be attached to an email and sent to clients for review or signature. Since a PDF is platform independent, anyone with a PC or Mac computer that has the free Adobe Reader software can download and open your real estate documents.

Last, but not least, the cell phone and the laptop computer with a wireless interface allows real estate agents to take their real estate technology on the road. Emails can be checked and replied to from airports with wifi connections, internet cafes allow meetings with clients to turn into PowerPoint presentations or an instant review of your listings, and you can also keep tabs on what your competition is doing on their website! Add to this the ability to receive faxes on your computer, real estate agents can now be on the move and not lose touch with the office - they can take the office with them.

Real estate web sites have discovered that adding a real estate blog to their web sites is an effective tool to attract more sales leads. For several years, blogs (web logs) have been getting information onto the web quickly and easily. Often, blogs break stories with first person reporting on the internet before the traditional news sources know a story is developing. Blogs have two strong points for real estate agents: they can post up-to-date relevant real estate market news for potential clients and they keep the search engines interested in your real estate web site’s content.

As a key sales tool in your internet marketing strategy, real estate web sites with blogs position you in your clients mind as not just a real estate agent, but an expert in the business. Your blog educates your client with useful portions of your real estate know-how before you ever meet them. When someone is making a decision on the buying or selling of their home - probably their biggest asset, your credibility and trustworthiness is one of your greatest personal branding assets. Your real estate blog can firmly establish you as the go-to real estate agent in their near future.

Adding to your blog is easy - just put down your thoughts on the current market, real estate market trends in your area and potential invenstment areas for the commercial real estate buyer. Potential blog entries come from answering common questions you get from clients or address a topic that is in the news. Conversational writing is the way to go - simple, informal and to the point! Your entry can be one paragraph or several paragraphs, whatever it takes to convey your thoughts - so don’t worry about writer’s block.

Your postings are a great way to customize your real estate website and build a personal presence with your internet sales leads. Your experience with customers is your hard won asset - tap it and use your conversations as inspiration for your entries. Log on to your website and make entries from home or at work, where ever an inspiration strikes you. Log in for a few minutes from vacation if you are feeling guilty about not being at work!

Once you have gained some experience writing to your real estate blogs, expand your internet presence my making guest entries on other real estate blogs. The back link to your site improves your search engine standing and your thoughts only add to your real estate expert standing!