Got a real estate blog post that rocks the Kasbah and you want to post it to all the top social networks and news aggregators?  Then you need to check out Social Poster .  All you do, is enter in your logins and passwords for your profile at the social sites you are a member of and then put your post url, title, descriptive text and tags in and viola- your post is populated across the wild wild web. 

Now, should you post every article you pen to this tool?  NO! By posting every article you can get seen as a spammer and devalue your profile on the various networks, so when selecting posts to scatter to the web, choose only your best and ones that will be applicable to the national market not just your little corner of the world.  That way you will build the value of your profile by only sending high quality content and increase the likelihood that your posts will do well on those networks. 

The key to getting lots of ‘Diggs’ or other types of votes on the  different networks is to build your sphere of influence by voting or commenting on other peoples posts on those networks.  Why would you want to do this?  One post on the front page of Digg is enough to generate the kind of traffic to your site that could conceivable overwhelm your server.  Now, unless you are on some junky hosted solution that would crash under this load, THIS IS A GOOD THING.  You want your site in the crosshairs of more eyeballs. 

So, the takeaway from this post is- step outside of the real estate space from time to time by using the big social networks and generate some new traffic and eyeballs from unexpected places.

I recently had the pleasure of sitting on the panel at RETech and a question about chasing the long tail of search traffic was asked.  It greatly surprised me because chasing the long tail of search traffic has been mostly discredited as a viable means of building transactional readership in the niche blogosphere for the past year.  Since it seems that the RE Net is slightly behind the eight ball here- lets see if I cant lay out the various arguments for why the long tail should not be targeted and instead should just be a bonus result of chasing the short tail.

Read also: The myth of the long tail and the true value of blogging

What is the long tail theory?

Back in 2004 when Chris Anderson came up with the long tail.  He theorized that the future of business is to sell less of more. Collectively, things that are in rather low demand can amount to quite large volumes. So, in the case of Amazon, they would on any given day sell more of all other books combined than they would of those on the bestsellers list.  Makes sense, right?

Why does this make sense?  Because we are talking about a very specific type of product- books- for which there can be many thousands of different individual products.  What happens when you translate the long tail theory of business to search traffic for niche service sites like real estate?  Things get a bit hairy because the types of things people might enter as search criteria to find your site are endless especially if you dont focus your content.  The rub there is that people that wind up on your real estate blog for a long tail search are most likely not transactional visitors.  For example, someone searching for ˜fishing el dorado is not likely to be someone in the market for a home.  Conversely, the short tail ˜long beach real estate or ˜foreclosures for sale in long beach ca search visitors are.  So, the question here is, where do you define the long tail and where do you define the Hail Mary Pass of search? 

(And Todd, yes, these examples are for you- they are real world examples taken from a real client site.  The link love is to a post Todd did interviewing Aaron wall of SEOBook where he basically says what I say about blogrolls- put them on a single page unto themselves not sitewide in your sdiebar.)

Read also: Does Google Hate Your Blogroll?

What is the long tail of search traffic?

When I hear people talking about targeting long tail search terms, I just shake my head.  If all you are after is traffic, then go for it, but if you are after real transactional visitors looking to buy and sell real estate, chase the short tail, your prime real estate related terms.  Seek to drive in traffic that is interested in your offering.  The interesting thing you will find is that by virtue of chasing the short tail with rich well written real estate focused content, you will attract long tail traffic as well.  And if that long tail traffic converts to leads great, if it doesnt you always have the tried and true short tail traffic to support you.

There seems to be a huge misconception as to what the long tail of search really is.  Many people seem to think long tail searches are searches with long strings of words.  While that can be true, the real definition should be any search that only results in one to two new visitors per month and/or is not directly related to your prime keywords.  The short tail of traffic for your blog is your prime terms and terms having to do with real estate. Another way to think about long tail search is that because people’s search habits vary based on age, race, region, linguistical patterns and even psychographics you have to look at the intent of the search not necessarily the words in the search.  If the search is for something related to real estate in your area, then it is a short tail search- if the intent of the search is to find non real estate or hyper local content then it is a longtail search.  Basically, if the searcher intended to land on a real estate site- then you have a short tail search, no matter how long the phrase was they used to get to your result in the SERP.

Lets head on over to SEO Fast Start for this answer to what long tail search traffic is for further clarification.  Over to SEO Fast Start for this answer (He just explains it so well):

˜The ˜long tail of search is very real. Half of the queries in a given month (more or less) are one-offs. One search query for that term. By one person. It should be obvious to those who have read the keyword strategy chapter in SEO Fast Start, that these search terms are:

1.       Not going to show up in any keyword database

2.       Not worth targeting individually

3.       Very easy to ˜target by writing keyword rich copy¦.

Read also: Keyword Strategy Long Tail Myth and Reality

*Notice the last statement about how the long tail search terms are ˜very easy to ˜target by writing keyword rich copy¦.  Hmmm¦ so, by always targeting your key terms and writing rich content, you would by default get long tail search traffic too.  Kind of blows the roof of targeting long tail traffic, doesnt it?

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OK, so you probably won't care a lick about the next couple of pieces I am writing.  But my sociology and marketing muscles need flexing, so here is a resource for those of you that want to understand the differences in home buyers/sellers from a demographics and psychographics standpoint and how you can use that data to craft real estate blog posts that resonate with your market.

Have you ever considered if you would write differently if you knew your primary audience was male?  Have you thought if you would take a different approach to your blog if you knew most of your readership was between the ages of 35 and 49?  No?  Well you should.  Knowing the demographics of your primary audience is essential to sculpting content that converts visitors to leads.  For example, if your primary readership is male between the ages of 25 and 34, you might want to consider writing more aggressively, injecting more humor and using more video whereas if your primary readership is female between the ages of 35 and 49, you might want to do more storytelling and pen more "how to" posts.

What are demographic profiles of real estate blog visitors?

Demographics looks at characteristics of people that include age, income, education, occupation, household size, home ownership and home value, among other factors.

Knowing your site's demographics is Marketing 101.  Fortune 500 companies hire high dollar marketing firms to analyze their demographics so they focus their marketing to appeal to their most viable customers.  Similarly, you should focus the content on your website to appeal to your primary readers.  Luckily for you, you don't have to spend beaucoup bucks to know what your demographics are. MSN's Ad Lab can give you a ball park estimation of what the demographics are for both your prime key terms and your real estate blog.

Tools: Statistics, Demographics and Psychographics Websites

*It may also be useful to compare the online data to the US Census data to understand your market's specific demographic landscape.

Resource: US Census Data

How to use MSN's Ad Lab to determine your current demographics and your target demographics

1.       What is the demographic profile of your site's visitors?

Use the Audience Intelligence Demographics Predictions tool by entering in your domain name and clicking the URL radio button, then press "Go."  This will return the current estimated demographics for your real estate blog.

EXAMPLE: Let's take the Miami Real Estate Blog  as an example: this blog's demographics are:

51% male, 49% female with 60% of traffic above the age of 34.

2.       What is the demographic profile of Internet users searching for your prime key words?

Use the Audience Intelligence Demographics Predictions tool by entering in your primary keyword and clicking the Query radio button, then press "Go."  This will return the current estimated demographics for your prime keyword.

EXAMPLE: Let's take the term "Miami Shores real estate" as an example: this term's demographics are:

57% female, 43% male with 60% of all traffic above the age of 34.

Resource: QuantCast (free): What are the demographics of people visiting similar sites? I love this site and highly recommend using it!

Resource: Geographic segmentation: Prizm (free).

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ORDER YOUR FREE GUIDE TO STARTING A REAL ESTATE BLOG TODAY

Thinking about starting a real estate blog, but not sure how to do it?  RSS Pieces put together this 58 page document on how to start a real estate blog, so you can have a step by step guide to starting a real estate blog the right way.  Learn the proven techniques that have helped us to put our real estate blogging clients on the first page in Google within 4-6 months and generate between 5-30 leads each day.  In this guide you will find out how to select a search engine friendly domain name, implement lead generation, use SEOed copywriting techniques to get to the top of the engines, build all important backlinks to your blog and even learn what to write about.  Simply click the link below, fill out the form and we will send you the complete guide in a Microsoft Word Document.

OK, you know I wouldn't have put up the 10 best Fortune 500 blogs if I wasn't willing to put up the 10 worst.  And let me tell you, the following blogs need to turn off the lights and say "Goodnight, John Boy."  When it comes to blogging mistakes, these blogs know how to bang them out- from truly boring content, to lack of expertise of the blogger, to missing blog features, to bad design, to... well, you name it, at least one of these blogs has got it!  So, if you think I've been harsh on real estate blogs, just wait till you see what I have to say about the Big Boy blogs...

Check out more Fortune 500 blogs at Search Marketing's Review of Fortune 500 Blogs. Again, a special thanks to Easton Ellsworth for keeping such a great list of corporate bloggers (The Fortune 500 Blog Project.)

1.       Kodak's a Thousand Words

Multiple author blog about photography and company products (tutorials)

OK, I'll give the authors mildly educational.  But come on, you are a company built on images and graphically your blog looks terrible.  The pictures used as examples look completely amateurish (and not in the Flickr good way).  If the purpose of the blog is to educate people on how to take better pictures or use the Kodak products, couldn't you have actually taken some good pictures, stylized the blog design, made me say "wow?"  Because I am a developer, I read tutorials all day long and these ones need serious work.  Send these bloggers back to remedial copyrighting school as well as a few photography classes.

How to Improve this Blog: Note to Kodak - go back to the drawing board on this one- you have great, useful products, don't let bad bloggers kill this project - get your design team to stylize the blog and replace your bloggers with some passionate photographers,  graphics designers and copyrighters. Stick with the tutorial strategy (use more video too)- that will work, but you need better experts and a more graphically intense site design to represent your brand.

Read also: How to write successful tutorial posts

2.       McDonald's: Open for Discussion

Multiple author blog about corporate responsibility

I expected so much better.  Visually it looks like my son made this in craft class.  Let's just get the obvious out of the way - they need to run on a real blogging platform like Diachronics, B2 or WordPress.  Currently this blog runs on something called "Awareness."  Awareness' corporate site is Flash. Nuf said. On the bright side, Bob Langert's concept is great- I love the idea of the corporate responsibility blog.  There is a lot they could have done with this blog; unfortunately it fell flat as a soufflé in cupboard with way too much boring content.  It feels like each of the authors is being forced to write chained to a desk in a basement.

How to Improve this Blog:  The bloggers have some great topics, but they need to learn the basics of copyrighting- # 1: write killer post titles- the current ones put me to sleep.  #2 break-up the text into scanable sections with bulleted/numbered lists and images.  While I am sure that these guys are excited about what they do- it doesn't come across that way.  Overall the writing is alright (if you are writing a term paper), it just has to loosen up and be more interesting and personable.

Read also: Killing me softly with your blog

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