Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
If you have a real estate blog, you already know that frequent posting is critical in order for that blog to be successful. And because you should be posting new real estate blogs every day, it doesn’t take long before each of your posts get buried behind newer content or archived into organized folders, usually by month.
Blogging tips
So what’s the best way for you to help readers find previous posts they may find relevant or interesting? Create blog categories. Most blogging platforms allow users to organize every post into specific categories that can easily be customized. Most often, blog categories are listed in the blog sidebar, which is easily viewable to all your readers. Depending on the purpose of your blog, examples of real estate categories may be New Construction Homes, Homes Just Listed, Downtown Real Estate, etc.
But in order for your categories to be useful to readers, it’s important you follow some guidelines. The purpose of blog categories is to keep all your blogs organized. Obviously there is little value to having categories that don’t make sense or have little organization themselves; so for instance, if you are a real estate agent who often blogs about homes or condos that recently sold, avoid having multiple categories relating to sold homes. Along with creating categories, bloggers also have the ability to create sub-categories, which more often than not, are not used enough on real estate blog sites. “Homes Recently Sold” is a category. “Waterfront Homes Recently Sold” is a sub-category—it’s that simple.
In addition, make sure that when you add each post to a category that it’s actually relate-able. Of course this sounds fairly obvious, but many bloggers will often put each blog into as many categories as possible as a way to get the most views as possible. Not only is this ineffective, but it makes you and your real estate blog look bad. If your readers can’t easily find the information they’re looking for, or even worse, are in the right place (or category) but quickly realize the wrong information is there, I can guarantee those readers won’t be following your blog much longer.
Joe Heath is a graduate of Indiana University and also holds a Graduate Certificate in Real Estate Development from Drexel University. After working in the market research sector and authoring published Market Snapshots for Hanley Wood Market Intelligence, Joe now works as a Web Marketing Specialist and co-owns Real Estate Web Creation with his partner, Ted Guarnero, a 25+ year real estate veteran.
Thanks for commenting, Pro Blogger.
Categories are important to any blog. Leave the tags alone and pick 7 or 8 categories and stick to them. Having the focus narrowed down to a category really improves the quality of all blogs, not just real estate blogs.