Dear friend,

This week, we are going to talk about the six biggest blogging blunders and how to fix them.  You have probably seen a lot of write-ups and a lot of information coming out about blogs.  They are almost everywhere and you by now certainly know what a blog is, and many of you probably have one, but every time that people give me their blogs for taking a look at, or giving them some recommendations, I see the same mistakes being made over and over and over again.  So I want to address some of these mistakes and see if we can clear some of this up right now and help you really get your blog in the best shape that it can be and get it creating some business for you.

So here we go, the first blogging blunder is,

1: Trying to build an audience for your blog, instead of a blog for your audience.

Now let me read that again, because it’s very subtle, but trying to build an audience for your blog, instead of a blog for your audience.  Now, the difference is that sometimes people put up their blog where it’s their, sort of a personal blog, their own whims, and whatever they want to write about they start writing about, they start putting up anything that comes to their mind, and then try and build an audience for their blog.  Now the most profitable thing that you can do if you are using your blog for business, and that’s what these are really, that’s what these tips are really about is how to really set up your blog so that it generates the most business for you.  The better thing that you can do is choose an audience first and build a blog for them.  What would they really like?  You know you can have your blog, you can have as many blogs as you want.  One size does not fit all, you can have as many as you like, you can serve as many different target markets as you want, but the very best blogs are focused on a single audience.

So the fix is to choose an audience and ask ‘what would be a dream come true for people looking for a townhouse in Georgetown?’  For instance, if you choose people looking for a townhouse in Georgetown as your audience, or ‘what would be a dream come true for people looking for a lakefront home in Winter Haven?’  Now when you start doing that, immediately when you pick your audience, it helps you get crystal clarity on the content for your blog because now you are looking through their eyes.  What would they be interested in consuming as a blog?  What kind of information are they looking for?  So that’s a good first step.

2: Using your blog as a lead generation tool instead of a lead conversion tool.

I should say trying to use your blog as a lead generation tool instead of a lead conversion tool, and do you know, the difference is that often a blog is not really set up to generate leads.  Most of the traditional blogs that you see if you come in, today you are kind of jumping into the middle of a conversation.  So the fix is to focus on lead generation first and separately.  Now it’s easier to find an audience and make them an offer that will help you identify them, or allow them to identify themselves to you so that you can then use your blog to build a relationship with them, to bond with them and to provide them with the valuable information that they are going to need between the time that they identify themselves and the time that they end up actually buying a townhouse in Georgetown, or a lake front home in Winter Haven.  So one of the things that can you use to focus on generating those leads is all of the things that we talk about on Marketing Monday, that are geared towards the specific purpose of getting a lead, and lead can be as simple as somebody giving you their name and their email address, just so that you have a way to communicate with them.  I often use things like the programs we use in our finding buyers program, findingbuyers.com, where we would set up a guide to townhouses in Georgetown to give people a sense of all of the townhouses that are available.  The pictures and profiles and price ranges of all of the different townhouse communities, to have all together in one guide that people can raise their hand and by virtue of asking for that guide, identify themselves as people who are looking for a townhouse in Georgetown.

Now you could use a free list of town homes, you could use a specific town home as a lead generator if you are doing ads on Craig’s List, but focus on generating the lead first, and then use your blog as a way to maintain a dialogue with them, to bond with them and give them information as they are moving forward.

3: Thinking they will come back on their own.

You know, often you think ‘I am just going to put up my blog, I am going to have all this information.  Hopefully I will use lots of keywords and I will put it up on ActiveRain, and I will put it on so that it gets indexed with the search engines, and I will get some visitors to my blog from there’, but if you have a great blog and great content, and it’s nice looking and it’s easily organised, they will still forget where it is.  They will still forget to come back.  So the fix for this is to make it easy for them to know when to come back, or/and to invite them to come back.  If you are focused on lead generating first, and you have got a way to get their permission to communicate with them by email before you send them to your blog, now you have got a way to go back and continue to invite them to your blog.

You can give people clues as to when to come back, if you were to have a blog like Townhouse Tuesday, or Marketing Monday, there’s clues in that as to when the content is updated.  If you have got a blog that offers daily real estate updates, that’s kind of letting people know when to come back for the new information and if you have got their email address, it doesn’t matter if they remember when to come back, because you can now send out to them an indication that your blog has been updated, or that this week’s updates are now available at Townhouse Tuesday.  So don’t just depend on them coming back.  Make it easy for them by sending them information, sending them updates of when your blog has been updated.

4: Not having a crystal clear next step.

You know sometimes we get caught up in just providing a lot of information, we just kind of continually update your blog.  You continually send new content up there, but information is not enough.  We can’t expect that our prospects are going to know what to do next unless we tell them what to do next.  People are silently begging to be lead, so we want to make it easy for them to take the next step.  So the fix for this is to make them an offer that they can take you up on.  If you invite somebody and you are promoting and letting people know on your blog prominently in the sidebar, at the top, in the content, to let them know that you are having a Saturday tour of homes this weekend, or you are having an open house this weekend, or you are having a homebuyer workshop.  Always something that will lead people to the next step, which is bringing them closer and closer to you.  So focus on ‘what is the next thing that somebody can do when they come to my blog, so that they can keep moving forward?’  Don’t let your blog be the end.  Don’t let it be this cul-de-sac that they get caught up in and just hang out there.  Have it be a through way, so that it’s leading people right to your doorstep.

5: Not using audio and video to bring your blog to life.

It’s so easy now to stream audio and it’s so easy to stream video using YouTube and embedding it in your blog, and having the added dimension of people hearing your voice, or seeing moving pictures, brings your blog to life.  It’s really what connects people to you.  If you are just reading something, you have to make up your kind of impression of what that voice is.  If you are hearing somebody, if you are hearing somebody talk, you get a sense that you know them a little bit better.  You can imagine what kind of a person they would be, you get a sense of are they friendly?  Are they somebody who you might like to hang out with?  But if you are hiding just behind the written word, then it’s a little bit more difficult to really bond with people.  So the fix for this is to get comfortable with creating compelling audio and video, and it’s not, you know the tools are the easy thing to overcome.  You can learn how to do audio, you can learn how to do video, it just takes a little bit of time but you are not going to be able to do that unless you block off the time to get comfortable and confident with the technology to do it.  Any blog that you use you can embed audio, you can put little players, just like the player I use here at Marketing Monday from Hipcast, where you can put it up and people just press play, or they can download an mp3 if they would like to, or if you are using video it’s easy to embed a YouTube video right into your blog so that they don’t have to go to YouTube to watch it.  You can put it right there on your blog for them.

6:  Not having a blog.

You know right now there’s no excuse to not have a blog.  It’s very easy to get started and it’s free.  You can get a wordpress.com blog for free.  You can get a blogger.com blog for free, you can get a free blog at ActiveRain, all of these places are making it very easy for you to get started.  Again, it’s just about taking the time to learn the moves, to learn about what tools are available, pick some tools and go for it.  It doesn’t have to be perfect.  It doesn’t have to be award-winning design.  It has to be clear, and it has to be valuable enough for your very specific audience.

So hopefully you have had a little bit of insight here, maybe you can look at your blog and see which of these six blogging blunders are you making right now?  And maybe you have got some ideas for how to fix it?  Leave me a comment in the comment section, let me know what you got out of this, and maybe leave me a link to your blog so that we can go and take a look at them, and maybe I will do a blog makeover, or a blog clinic and we might do that in upcoming Marketing Monday here.  So that’s it for this week, have a great week and tune in next time and we will have even more ideas for getting listings, finding buyers and converting leads.