Writing content for your blog is just the first step in driving traffic and leads to your real estate website. Without great content promotion, you could be writing for no reason.
You should spend the same amount of time promoting your blog as you spend writing your posts. This strategy should always be changing and advancing as you try new things and see how your experiments affect your traffic.
1. Join Google Plus communities.
Google Plus has communities of hundreds of members for just about every topic. To start, you might want to join just the community relevant to your city. As learn the ropes, you can join communities relevant to a topic in your blog content and promote your posts there. Google Plus is the most lenient community for sharing content. In many of the groups I’ve joined, it seems like my fellow group members live to share content.
2. Leverage LinkedIn groups.
LinkedIn is more professional than other social networks. Because of this, the content you post to these groups will have to be very targeted.
If you join “Investors in X city” group, you should make sure that your content is directly related to investors in that city. Cover in-depth topics that you know will interest them. Posting about anything else will get you kicked out fast.
3. Use your Facebook groups.
Facebook groups are more casual than Google Plus and LinkedIn. They will contain local people that are somewhat tight-knit, and they have a no-spam policy.
Your content can be a lot less professional than LinkedIn content, but it should still be relevant to the community. For example, a Facebook group would be a good place to promote a blog about the best pizza joints in Orange County.
4. Start using Reddit
Reddit is a extremely tight-knit and active community of tech-savvy people who tend to be around millennial age — between 25 and 34 years old.
The most important rule for Reddit is that your content has to be interesting. This community does not welcome overt marketing, so the content you promote must be especially relevant and thought-provoking.
5. Find a forum.
Social media groups and communities — and Reddit — are growing and growing. Still, forums reign supreme when you’re hoping to reach large groups of people in one place.
After joining a forum, you should become active in the forum community. You need a history of contributing valuable insight before promoting your own content. This ensures that you don’t appear to be using the forum merely as a place to regurgitate content.
6. Pin on Pinterest.
This already massive social network is still expanding every day. A lot of marketers overlook it, and this is why it can be a gold mine.
Create a graphic for every post you write on Facebook and send it to one of your Pinterest boards.
Supercharge your Pinterest traffic even more by joining Pinterest groups. These are established communities on Pinterest, and using these will give every pin a boost with likes, repins and comments.
7. Tweet your content.
- You’re probably already on Twitter. Here are a few quick tips for using the platform to drive more traffic to your website:
- Use images in your tweets. Images attached to a tweet are proven to drive more clicks.
- Tweet your content more than once.
- Find out the best time to Tweet and add that to your schedule.
- Reach out to influencers on Twitter and see if they would help share your content. It always helps if they’re mentioned in the article you’re asking them to share.
- Use a tool such as Buffer to help make everything easier.
- Use relevant hashtags, including your city hashtag.
8. Answer questions at Q&A sites.
Sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers are filled with people asking questions. Some of those questions might be answered by something you’ve already written.
Browse these websites for questions related to the content that you’ve written. You can give a brief reply and a link to your article. Doing this gives someone a thorough answer and also drives traffic to your website. Everyone who visits that question afterward will also see your answer.
9. Ask your sources to spread the word.
As many as 90 percent of your articles will have opportunities for you to mention a local business or someone who’s influential. Take these opportunities to say something nice about them.
Mentioning influencers and local businesses in your content has awesome benefits:
- It gives you a reason to connect with people (networking and lead generation!).
- You can ask your sources to share the content with their newsletter list and social network, which also puts you in front of a new audience.
- It builds a relationship with someone who can help you out down the road. Today you share; tomorrow you guest post for them; one day you’re doing webinars together. It all starts with contacting them and asking them to share their expertise.
10. Master internal linking.
Internal linking is linking to one of your articles from another article. It’s basically just a link to yourself. You may have read about internal linking in a real estate SEO (search engine optimization) article. It’s known to boost your rankings a little bit, but that’s not why I’m mentioning it.
People do click links inside your article. For this reason alone, internal linking is worth the time it takes. If a visitor likes one article you wrote and clicks through to another that you wrote, that visitor is more likely to subscribe to your newsletters and updates.
You should use these ten quick wins for every blog post that you write. Google might drive long-term traffic, but you’re in control of everything else. Use this content promotion checklist as a starting point for building traffic.
Andrew Gale is the founder of FlyerCo.
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