Why Start a Real Estate Blog?

In my Introduction to Real Estate Blogging, I included a section entitled, "Why Blog". I want to expand on that, to give you a further understanding on why you start a real estate blog.Why Start a Real Estate Blog?The main reason is to increase your exposure. The better blogger you become, the more people will take notice of you.But instead of getting more people to notice you, how about getting more people to notice your real estate website? How about getting more people to notice your properties? It can be done.One thing that blogs tend to do better than standard websites is that they attract links, mainly other blogs. Getting links from other sites and blogs is the primary means of improving your position on Google, Yahoo, and all the other search engines.As your blog attracts incoming links and Google page rank, you'll want to distribute that value to your existing website, where you promote yourself and your properties.Why do blogs attract links?It's largely because the general public views blogs as personal, like an informal expression of one's thoughts, a diary if you will. Other bloggers and website users like to comment about someone else's thoughts by linking to that person's blog post, and then rambling on.Consider that there are millions of other blogs out there, many of them personal in nature. These bloggers love to write, and are always looking for something to inspire them. They often use blog search engines like Technorati to help them find interesting blog posts. When they find an interesting blog post, they write their own blog post in response to it, and provide a reference link.Think about your existing real estate website. Are there any pages on this website that other bloggers might something inspiring to write about? Probably not. I imagine your website is strictly business. But what if you added a blog that incorporated something more personal, or with some eye-opening insider information? Now you're giving other bloggers food for response, and reasons to write about you.Blogs as a selling pointA blog is also a great way to give your potential clients an inside look at who you really are. That is, people can read something about you beyond the typical website brochure you already have. By writing a blog, you're providing your clients with an informal resume of yourself.To make this effective, you'll have to put the blog on the homepage of your website. I'd recommend you do this for all the reasons we explained above. In fact, this is what I recommend in order to get the maximum benefit of blogging, put it right on the homepage of your main real estate website. I'll go into this further later on.Listing your properties through bloggingYou could actually publish the details of a property through a blog. You'd have to update this blog post whenever the details change, such as a reprice, or if it gets taken off the market. But, by doing this your properties will get indexed into Google, as well as all the blog search engines too.In fact, you could launch a dedicated blog just for your properties, and another one for your writings. You can have them linked together, or better yet, have them both hosted on your real estate website. A great way to draw more traffic to your site.