It's amazing how quickly blogging has become important. Two years ago, if a real estate agency or a real estate agent had mentioned starting a real estate blog on a website, most people would have said, "Huh, what's that?" Now, if it gets mentioned the response may be, "Well, it's about time you caught up with the rest of the technological world."

A real estate blog offers several marketing advantages to real estate agents.

1. A blog drives traffic to your website by helping you place high on search engines. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo like to see new information on websites. Because a frequently updated blog places new content on your website, search engines will place you higher on searches. If you also tailor your blog for search engine optimization (SEO), you can place even higher.
   
   The point of SEO is to use certain keywords that search engines look for when doing a search. Say your real estate business is in Dallas, Texas. If you use words or phrases such as real estate, homes for sale, Dallas and Texas in each blog entry, you will place even higher on the search engine. The higher up your website is in the search engine listings, the more traffic will find it.
   
   
2. A blog can help you position yourself as an expert in the real estate market. You probably already are an expert, but there is something about being published that takes your credibility as an expert up a notch. If you publish your blog regularly, people will have access to your expertise any time day or night.
   
   
3. A blog helps you in personal brand building. Getting your name out there as a brand is more important in real estate now than ever before. A blog can help you establish your brand, your name, as a trusted local real estate source. Your blog allows customers to get familiar with who you are, how you operate, and what you know.
   
   
4. A blog helps you to generate leads. More and more people are turning to the Internet to find businesses including real estate agents. Very rarely do people open the yellow pages for this information anymore. Instead they search on the Internet for what they need. As already noted, a blog will help you get a higher ranking with the search engines, and that means more people will turn to you instead of your competitors who have a lower ranking.

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Another major advantage to having a Real Estate Blog is user subscriptions. Most blogging software available today allows users to subscribe to your RSS feed. An RSS feed is simply a way of delivering your content to your subscribers. When you add a new post to your blog your users will be nofied through their RSS aggregator (such as Bloglines, MyYahoo, MyMSN, etc.).

If you provide your users with something of value, such as new and interesting content, they will read you feeds. This will result in more website traffic because the links within your RSS feed will bring your users back to your website.

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