Dear friend,

Today we’re going to talk about how to turn blog readers into buyers and often the mistake that a lot of people make is not really thinking through how people are going to go and make the transition from reading your blog into working with you and being a buyer.

Often the things that I see people focusing on with their blogs is focusing on getting ‘Google juice’ with their blogs or getting ranked on the first page or on the second page of Google and sometimes it’s not the very best thing when you start really thinking about the purpose of your blog and how it’s going to fit into your marketing mix and how it’s going to get you buyers, get people who are actually going to work with you to find a home.  So we want to focus your attention not so much on being on the front page when somebody searches for the term pumpkin festival photos or long tail key words like that where it’s kind of easy to get yourself up there but it’s not something that’s going to translate into somebody actually using your blog as a gateway into a relationship with you.

In a previous Marketing Monday we’ve talked about some of the big blogging blunders that people make and one of them is not really understanding how people are going to make that transition so we want to focus on that right from the beginning.  So I’ve got five tips for you, five ways that we can do that.

Number 1: be Specific.

A lot of times people think about a blog as this big general thing that they’re going to do and it’s all about the broad area that they cover.  Often this mindset comes from ‘Well I can only have one blog’ well guess what you can have a lot of different blogs, you can have as many blogs as you can think of but forcing yourself to be specific is going to help you narrow yourself to a target audience.  So if I was somebody who is looking to attract buyers I would choose a specific audience of buyer that I want to attracted.  Maybe I want to attract townhouse buyers or maybe I want to attract a specific type of buyer, somebody who is looking for golf course properties or somebody who is looking for lake front homes or somebody who is looking for, if you’re in a small town, specifically information about buying in that town.

The mistake that I see happening is that sometimes people choose areas that are very broad and very general, so we pick like Greater Toronto area or we pick the East Bay in northern California, things that are not very specific and they’re not very focused.  So when we are focused on a specific target audience like townhouse buyers or bank owned homer buyers or golf course home buyers it’s much easier for you to think through what would be valuable content for that specific audience.  We think about why people read blogs.  They go to blogs to get information about stuff that they’re interested in, about stuff that they’re fascinated by, stuff that they’re focused on, not just a general type of thing.  You look at the most popular blogs out there and they are all very specifically focused on a single audience.

Number 2: be the Definitive Source.

So if you’ve got a specific audience in mind, townhouse buyers for instance, you can aim to be the definitive source of information for people looking for townhouses in Georgetown or people looking for lake front homes in Winter Haven or people looking for bank owned homes in your specific area.  When you focus your attention like that, when you have the purpose of being the definitive source it gets back to those mindsets that Proctor and Gamble has of planning to dominate your market and it’s very easy to see yourself being the definitive source for townhouse buyers in your marketplace or a specific type of buyer because it’s very, very focused and it makes your content decisions a lot easier to make since you know who your audience is you know the kind of information that they would most be interested in.

Number 3: be Interesting.

You know a lot of times blogs are written in a format that is not very personality driven, there’s not much personality behind them, it’s almost as if it’s just basic information that’s being put out there but there’s not really any personality attached to it, not really any interesting character attached to it.

When you think about the most popular blogs, I think right now of Perezhilton.com and here’s Perez, a guy, one guy, with a small team of people helping him with research and doing the technical stuff of doing the blog, but he’s got a very, very interesting approach to providing celebrity news and his audience eats the stuff up.  You think about somebody like Gary Vaynerchuk who’s got a very specific audience of wine drinkers, he’s got a video blog called Winelibrarytv.com and every day Gary puts out information about three or four very specific wines where he’s tasting them and commenting on those wines and he’s built a very, very large following and a very large fortune from doing just that, focusing on a specific audience, being the definitive source for that type of information and being interesting.  When you combine those three, that’s really going to be a winning formula for you.

So if you think about it, if you were thinking about people who want to buy townhouses in Georgetown, you were being the definitive source for that where every single piece of information about every townhouse that comes on the market in Georgetown is available in an interesting way, that is going to be a winning combination, and even more powerful, if you add number 4.

Number 4: be Prolific.

Now if you’re prolific, and by prolific I mean being regular, being consistent, being the provider of this valuable information faster than they can get the information anywhere else.   If you have a very specific focus like this often your market can be the driver of you providing the information.  You don’t have to make stuff up, you don’t have to think about ‘What am I going to write on my blog,’ use shortcuts for this.  If you’ve got a very specific audience then you know that job number one is going to be, to provide all the information on that specific market, on that specific audience, what they’re interested in.  Every townhouse that comes on the market, every townhouse that sells, every new townhouse development, you can interlace that with expanding information about each of those townhouses.  You can add in news as it’s happening.

One of the very best things you can do is to pay attention to what’s going on in the news because that’s what people are going to be talking about.  I’ve created a very easy to use source of news for you for your blog at RealEstateBlogIdeas.com where we import all of the news headlines, the breaking stories, the real estate stories, the home and garden stories, there’s all types of valuable blog ideas for you there, you pick a headline, you get inspired about an article, you write a short little introduction to it on your blog, it maybe linked to that article, and intersperse that into your blog.  It’s a very, very easy way for you to continue to provide valuable content on a regular basis.  It’s got to be at least weekly, probably better, three or four times a week where you’re updating information and of course the very best would be to update that information every day.

Number 5: Always Lead to the Next Step.

So often I see people just continuing to blog and they blog and blog and blog and there’s no real purpose to it, there’s no invitation for people to take the next step.  If you’re choosing townhouses for instance, and when I’m saying townhouses, keep your own target market in mind, keep whoever you’re trying to attract in mind.  It could be lake front homes, it could be historic homes, it could be new homes, it could be bank owned homes, it could be foreclosed homes, it could be luxury homes, whatever that audience is, keep them in mind and keep the next step in mind.  What is it that you can offer that would lead people to the next step?  Could you have a Saturday tour of townhouses, could you have special invitations to an open house that you’re having in the townhouses, could you have a seminar, a home buyer workshop that people could come to.  Always think about how can I engage people in a dialogue, how can I engage them into taking that next step.

So there you have it, that’s five ways that you can turn blog readers into buyers and I hope to hear about and see some of the blogs that you’re working on so I can see some of the best applications of some of these ideas and use maybe your blog in an episode of Marketing Monday coming up so that we can see how other people are applying these ideas to their blogs.

So that’s it for this week.  Tune in next time and we’ll talk about even more ways to get listings, find buyers and convert leads.