Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Why is WordPress the best choice for realtors? What makes it stand out from other blogging platforms? There are several reasons why real estate professionals would be wise to choose a WordPress blog, ranging from the fact that it's one of the most cost-effective ways of establishing a web presence, to its SEO-friendly nature, and the almost limitless number of beautiful real estate themes available.
One of the great things about WordPress blogs is they're very inexpensive to set up. The WordPress software that makes your blog function, and gives you the design and posting features you need is absolutely free. You get an extremely powerful software solution for blogging that will cost you absolutely nothing.
By hosting your blog on a WordPress friendly host like GoDaddy, Yahoo, or Bluehost, you'll be able to choose from thousands of design themes and plugins to get a lot more out of your blog. This paid hosting is usually less than $100/year, so it's really not a big decision if you want the most from your web presence. You just set up a hosting account and choose their WordPress install option to drop in the free software.
You Don't Look Like a Template
WordPress allows great flexibility in design choices through "themes." Thousands are available for free, with more powerful ones at costs usually under $100. You can select a design and look to differentiate your blog, changing everything from fonts to colors to screen layout.
WordPress also allows the design of static pages with normal button navigation. So, there's really little need to discriminate against a blog simply because you want a different look for your site.
Content is Still King and Blogs Do Content Well
The reason the search engines like blogs so much is the regularity of posting and the way that they categorize content. WordPress allows you to set up your "permalinks" for better search engine optimization as well. Your permanent link to each post can have its category in the URL, and end with its title, as in:
http://yourdomain.com/neighborhoods/the-post-about-a-neighborhood/
This gives the search engine keywords that will help searchers to find your content. When you set up your categories for logical content filing, WordPress will keep your posts organized and present them to your visitors and the search engines for easy location.
Your Entire Web Presence Can Be a WordPress Blog
You do not need a website and a separate blog, nor do you really need a website with a blog as a sub-site, such as http://yoursite.com/blog. You can have a blog as your complete web presence if you use the power and flexibility of WordPress to its full advantage.
There are "plugins" and "widgets" designed for everything from displaying the local weather to comprehensive listing display with mapping, images and video. The real estate professional can present themselves and their listings professionally on the Web with WordPress.
The blogging platform allows you to spend your time writing about what you know, and positioning yourself as the local real estate expert.
In my next post, I'll present the Top Ten WordPress Real Estate Themes that professionals like yourself can choose from 😉
