Are you tired yet? Marketing for real estate online has become a nightmare! You're told you need a website, a blog, a Facebook account, Google+ activity, Twitter accounts, and more. It's just too much unless you have a whole staff of online marketing consultants. Who can afford that?

photo credit: kevin dooley via photopin cc

Let's look at one amazing fact right now. Google+ has passed Twitter and is now second only to Facebook for active users in social media sites. Some predict that it will overtake Facebook by 2017 or sooner. It's logical, as Google has tied in many of its other products and services with Google+ and that brings users in now who may not have come along until much later.

In this short tutorial I'm going to show you how you can use Google+ as an alternative to blogging, but even better as a feed for auto cross-posting to a WordPress blog site. You can market till the cows come home and never reach the visitor traffic that a well thought out Google+ community can generate for you very quickly.

So, let's take a look at what a Google+ Community is and how to use it as a real estate marketing powerhouse.

Google+ Communities

Google+ came out quickly with Business Pages, and they have been very popular. However, a business page is a lot like a website, in that you're pushing out content for consumption. Sure, people can comment, but we know that it's not that easy to get people to comment on websites and blogs. They just don't perceive a business website (page) as a conversational medium.

Along came Communities and things changed for the better. You see, a Google+ Community is more like a meeting place where club members share a common interest. They "join" instead of just visiting, and they join to offer input and share information with other members. It's all about the "community."

In the image we see a partial screen shot of communities found with a search in Google+ for communities with keyword "Houston." We find real estate, sports, gaming, dancing, singles communities and more. In each of these the members join to talk about their common interest. It's not difficult to figure out what that is from the name and short description provided.

If you've stayed away from blogging, you're one of many real estate professionals who have done so. It's one more website, needs fresh new content, and there just aren't enough hours in the day.

Starting a Google+ Community that's all about your community could be a beginning for you, and maybe an ultimate solution. I have both a page and a community. The page has almost 300 followers, but some of those are real estate brokers. The community is relatively new, and I need to promote it.

The beauty of a community is that you can build not just an audience but also a group of people who want to exchange information and ideas about the area. It's not like the baseball movie though. If you build it, they won't just come. Some will, but you'll need to promote the community, put the URL in marketing and maybe even on your business cards.

If you have a website, it's easy to write a post to the community about something happening in the area and add a link back to your site. Google definitely indexes community posts right away, so you get a little SEO clout as well.
It only takes about 10 minutes to start a community, so why not give it a try.