Jul
23
Build your own online community with a property forum
Filed Under Online Marketing, Social Networking | 1 Comment
Imagine having a part of your real estate website that people visit again and again to interact with other property buyers and sellers - asking questions, giving advice and sharing experiences. Your staff of real estate experts would participate in the discussions, helping people out, bolstering your estate agency’s image and even winning clients over. And all the while, you are accumulating pages upon pages of text, full of property-related keywords for the search engines to index, so you get still more visitors.
That, in a nutshell, is what you can achieve by starting your own online property forum as part of your website. (Just in case you don’t know what an online forum is, you can see an example here.)
Now before you start thinking that all these benefits of having your own property forum seem too good to be true, there is something you should know. You see, getting a successful real estate forum off the ground is pretty much like kicking off a great party - people will only visit your forum if the other people visiting it make it worthwhile. This means that you will have to put in some extra effort at the beginning, to get the ‘party’ started until your forum grows in popularity.
How to set up an online property forum
Setting up and hosting your forum is quite straightforward for your web designer to do, and there is even free forum software that you can use. Contact us and we’ll be happy to help you get started.
On the other hand, you will have to give some thought to how broad or focused you want your forum to be - something that will depend on the market you are trying to capture. Most likely, you will want to have your property forum revolving around the geographical area you operate in, of course, so that it attracts visitors who are also your potential clients.
Another thing is to organise the forum into categories such as ‘Legal Questions’, ‘Holiday Homes’, ‘Property Investing’, and so on. Get some ideas from other property forums you like and then come up with your own categories that you think will appeal to your audience. Be sure to include an ‘Off Topic’ section, where people can socialise and discuss things that have nothing to do with property at all.
Getting people to join in
While we’ve already said that this is the tricky bit, there are a number of things you can do to get the ball rolling.
1) Get staff, family and friends to participate. Pretty much everyone is involved in property in some way or another, be it buying, selling or renting, so it should be easy for them to come up with some questions and have a good discussion.
2) When clients ask questions that are not of a private nature, you could try and persuade them to use your real estate forum. Failing that, you can reword the questions and get your friends to post them for you to answer and discuss in forum style.
3) If you have a strong blog readership, you try posting about controversial topics like interest rates, property bubbles, and so on and provoke your readers into a forum discussion.
4) Visit other property forums and make friends with the most prolific users and invite tehm to participate on your forum too.
5) As a last-ditch solution, if you have the pocket for it, you could even consider paying people to participate in your property forum, until it gets off the ground. Remember, you don’t need to spend a lot on expert writers for this one, and anyone willing to talk about their property experiences will do.
Of course, if you could push a button and have a thriving community of people interested in property visiting your property forum, every estate agent and his brother would have one. But if you are able to take the lead and keep working at it, you should see your forum gradually begin to thrive and turn into a great source of new business as well as a way for people to find your real estate website by landing on your forum pages from the search engines.
Go for it! And good luck!
Jul
18
Well done to Isabelle and the Team at Second Home Tenerife for their Real Estate Blog on Tenerife Real Estate. We look forward to the, much anticipated and as yet unnamed, new development project. Its great to see that a leading Tenerife Estate Agent is still investing in large projects here in Tenerife and is certainly welcome news for the overall investment in Tenerife. Keep up the good work guys!
Jul
12
How to get more links to your real estate website
Filed Under Online Marketing, SEO | Leave a Comment
Why you really need links to your real estate website
Publishing interesting content on your property blog and website won’t count for much unless people get to see it. And an essential part of driving traffic to your real estate web pages is to obtain a growing amount of links from other sites.
Of course, these links will themselves direct people to your website, but they also serve a very important function when it comes to boosting your rankings in the search engines. You see, one way the search engines determine how relevant and important your web pages are is by examining the links to those pages. In a nutshell, a link is like a vote of confidence - the more incoming links a webpage has, and the more important the sites that link to the webpage are, the more important the web page is considered to be.
This is why you should set a long-term goal of getting as many incoming links as possible pointing to your website and blog. Of course, this is not something that will happen overnight and you should start accumulating links as soon as your new website is up, so that with time you will benefit from better search engine rankings.
How to network your way to link success
We’ve already discussed using Social Media Marketing to get your property website out there, and now we add some more tips on how to network with other websites to get more links to your own:
1) Make sure you have content that’s really worth linking to. We’ve probably said this a hundred times and we’ll say it again.
2) Find out who is linking to your real estate competitors and approach them about a possibly exchanging links with you too. This is easy to do - in Google, search for ‘linkto: domain.com’, (without the quotes) ,replacing domain.com with the address of the website you are examining.
3) Look for free Internet directories that are either specifically about real estate or about businesses in your area and add your website to them. A good way to start if you are, say, in the Canary Islands would be to search Google for ‘Canary Islands directory’ or ‘Canary islands businesses’, and of course ‘real estate directory’.
4) Exchanging links with estate agents in other areas is another great way to build your inbound links, and at the same time potentially win some traffic from people visiting other real estate websites that are not in competition with yours.
5) Let other bloggers know about any company news or blog posts that might interest their readers (be very picky here - don’t just send them any old thing). Also, get to know which general blogs write about your area, or neighbourhood, and which real estate bloggers could be interested in the topics you cover, and build a relationship with them. Then, when you have something newsworthy to share or you have written a relevant blog post, you simply drop them an e-mail to let them know, in the hope that they will blog about you and link to your website. Obviously, you should also reciprocate by writing about their own posts.
6) Discover which Internet forums deal with the area you work in or with real estate in general, and participate actively in them, answering questions and offering advice to other users. Resist the temptation to indulge in blatant self-promotion, as this is considered spam - your kickback will come from including links to your website and blog in your forum signature that will appear at the bottom of every forum post you write.
7) Linking from your own website to your blog and vice versa is also important for link building, both if they are in different domains or not. This one is not really networking, but it’s so often forgotten that it’s worth a mention here.
There you go! And remember, you don’t have to do it all at once. Set yourself a goal that you can manage, like getting 5 new links every day and bit by bit it will all add up.
Alternatively, contact us at Sorted Sites for help with your link building.
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