There's no reason that your real estate blog has to be a drain on your finances or time.  Truth be told, monetizing your blog is a good idea.  It will boost your income when times are good and carry you when the real estate market lulls. 

Two of the most important things to a Realtor are money and time and your blog should make you money and save you time.

For example, if your blog makes $600 per month for you - you now have recouped whatever fees you are charged for hosting and can save time by hiring someone to blog for you.  Makes sense right? Well, let's look at the logistics of how to do it to ensure you end up a winner with the monetization programs you choose.

Can you make a decent income online?

Yes, according to Steve Pavlina, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal. His 19-month-old Web site generates a healthy $3,000 per month. Do I think a real estate blog will generate that much income? Probably not for a while, but a realistic goal is around $600/month. It may not pay your mortgage but $600 is a respectable IT budget that you can reinvest into your blog to grow traffic and leads.

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Hey, let’s face it, we’re all lazy in our own ways. For example, I don’t read books anymore, I listen to them on .mp3 now. That’s totally lazy. Truth is, we all have enough on our plates already and the last thing we want to do is add something new like real estate blogging to the mix, even if it will help to grow our businesses. So, we seek out the tips, tricks and shortcuts that make things like blogging easier.  These are a few ideas for the “lazy man” in all of us.

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Got Chiclets? Learn how to use social bookmarks and social news sites to promote your real estate blog.  Need a quick and easy way to promote your posts? Use Chiclets! Chiclets are those tiny social network bookmark icons on blogs that allow you and your users to easily submit your post to social news and network sites like Digg, Reddit, Furl and NewsVine. Want to see what they look like? Go to the bottom of this post and click the “i” icon. When that slides open you will see all our little social bookmarking chicklets. As you roll over each one it will indicate which social network it represents. If you click one, you can easily submit our article to that social site. Yep, it’s that easy. You may have to do a one time registration on each social mediasite, but it is well worth it since you will want to frequently submit your own best posts.

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Backlinks, according to wikipedia are incoming links to a website or web page. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web page, directory, website, or top level domain from another web page.  They are one of the pimary factors in  how search engines determine if they can trust a website.  You want to have tons of incomming links from trusted websites(page rank 6+ sites) to your site. These links will help your site to move up in the SERPS (search engine results pages) and increase in page rank.  So how you do acquire these incomming links?
 

There are 3 primary ways to acquire these "backlinks":

1. The best way to acquire these links is thorugh having quality content that others find interesting enough to link back to.  However, this is a slow and often frustrating process.
2. The next best way to aquire backlinks is to get in touch with other websites and see if you can exchange links.  The key to this one if that you must check to see if those pages have a page rank of 6 or more. 
3. However, the most effective and fastest way to grow your backlink network is to submit your site to free directories and even purchase links from related link farms.

Read also: Ultimate guide to building backlinks

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Real Estate Agents are moving more of their advertising budgets into Web Marketing.  With a staggering 81% (NAR 2005) of homebuyers using the Internet as their primary research tool, agents are starting to put their money where their market is.  According to a recent report published by Classified Intelligence, Real Estate Agents are diverting more of their budgets into online advertising, citing a continued movement away from traditional print media. ClickZ.com reports that the majority of spending is on the Realtors own website, adding additional capability such as MLS Search. A rapidly growing percentage is being spent on search marketing (Sponsored Listings aka Pay-Per-Click and SEO). The typical Realtor spends $1,150 a year on marketing. The top ten percent of Realtors spend $10,000 or more a year according to the NAR 2005 Member Profile.
 


ClickZ.com also reported the following ad-spend trends among Realtors.  Sixty-one percent said They did NOT advertise on local newspaper sites.  One-third said they spend 20% of their marketing budget on local online newspaper websites.  Fifty-Eight percent said they were not yet using local-search advertising.  One fourth said they put 20% of their budget into search marketing.

Online Ad Spend Expected to Reach $1.8 Billion This Year. Half of this $1.8 billion will be spent on third-party lead generators. Search Engines account for about 27 percent of real estate related online ad revenues with Google picking up the lions share, Yahoo! and MSN following the search giant. The remaining ad revenue will be captured by websites of local newspaper, radio, television, and magazines. 

eSourceAgent.com specializes in online advertising for Real Estate Agents.
Mark Sprenger
eSourceAgent.com
1-866-400-7710