talkingDigital

Just about everyone has a blog or two these days, so it’s become a greater challenge to get yours noticed. It can be a lot of work keeping up with a blog, it’s time you got the attention you deserve.

With these tips, you can bring new life to your blog and build a buzz around your content. Here’s five tips for how to get your blog noticed.

1. Experiment with new formats

If you fear your blog may have plateaued and you’re not getting as much growth or even traffic as you used to, try something new. Give your blog a new look or try a different platform.

If you’ve mostly just been writing posts, try doing a weekly YouTube video or starting a podcast. Putting your voice out there in different ways will help you reach a larger audience than you would with just one format published to one site.

2. Collaborate

Collaborating with other blogs or setting up partnerships is a great way to expand your audience. Both blogs can benefit by sharing readers and you’ll likely get some great new content out of it.

3. Make your social media efforts count

The rules and behavior for social media are constantly changing, which means you need to be able to change with it. You don’t want to pour all your time and energy into a blog and then share it to social media platforms where your potential readers aren’t even active.

Staying on top of trends and knowing your audience will ensure that your shared content gets seen. The people over at Klout are experts in gauging social media success, and they can give you more tips on how to get the most out of social media.

4. Make your blog easy to follow

Don’t make your readers work to keep up with you. Keep it easy for readers to stay on track with your content by adding a mailing list and links to your social media profiles on the sidebar of your site or at the bottom of each post.

5. Blog about what you love

Above all else, you should be blogging about what you love. Find a new hobby and use your blog to help you explore it. When it’s clear that you’re passionate about the subject, it’s a lot easier for readers to relate to your content and want to interact and share what you’re posting.

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The real estate industry seemed to go an entire century with very little change to the way it fundamentally operated. If you wanted to get a new place, you found a real estate agent, drove to see apartments or houses, picked one, and sealed the deal.

If you wanted to sell that place later, the same agent helped you by putting it on a listing exchange. But times have changed … and they’re still changing.

Here are three technologies that are driving innovations that have occurred in the real estate industry, or are on their way here!

1. Smartphones

It would be hard to narrow down smartphone functions to one word, because the many ways that smartphones have disrupted the real estate market are vast. You can walk past a property, search for it with a mobile application, find photos of the interior, and dig up former sales prices, tax assessments, and sales contract status — all online.

You can call the agent as well, although in this app-crazed world, many people seem to have forgotten that functionality!

2. Digital signing

First there was the fax machine, which drastically reduced the time it took to conduct real-estate transactions. And though fax machines eventually achieved a network effect that drove high usage rates, they’re becoming obsolete, thanks to digitally signed documents.

Now it’s as easy as signing the screen of your smartphone to buy, sell, or lease a property.

3. Blogs and content

Blogs are hugely abundant and constantly growing, so content is becoming more focused. Thanks to blog frameworks that are easy to replicate, the time it takes to set up a blog has diminished to the point where it can be done in five minutes.

Content creation, as a result, has exploded. And when there’s more content, the nature of competition dictates that consumers will expect a higher quality and more relevant content from the blogs they choose to follow.

A great example of this can be found in the Clinton Hell’s Kitchen real estate website that’s operated by a local office of Keller Williams. On this site, you’ll find not only real estate listings for the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, but all kinds of specialized content that should be helpful to consumers who are considering a move to that neighborhood.

When websites were harder to build and information was less connected online, this type of content would be fairly rare. But today and tomorrow, we should expect this type of excellence in every real estate market in the developed world!

Related articles

• 5 Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Real Estate Agent
• Five Ways to Mobilize the Real Estate Business and Close More Sales
• 90,000 Keller Williams real estate agents go mobile with Google Apps

modify your avatar to bring people to the networks you prefer

You’re on Twitter. You’re on Facebook. You post comments to 10 blogs. You listen to music via Last.fm, Pandora, MySpace Music and Blip.fm. Your photos are on Picasa, Flickr and Photobucket – not to mention the old Fotki and Webshots accounts you setup and forgot about. Truth be told, you jumped into social media headfirst and began splashing around uncontrollably when you realized you couldn’t swim. Read the rest of this entry →