Blogging and Self Promotion

I have been blogging off and on now for about 7 years.   In the early days, I primarily started blogging because that was the advice being given by the National Association of Realtors.   I found that it could be quite time consuming and it was unclear to me how big the payoff was.   With literally millions of blogs, and perhaps tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of blogs on real estate, it was very unlikely that anyone would be finding me on-line. 

With that realization, I had a change of strategy.  Instead of writing to the public at large, I tried to write to a more focused audience.   My intended audience was commercial real estate in the Louisville, KY area.    This helped somewhat but again, it was very unlikely that someone would find my blog by googling anything associated with commercial real estate.   So I began to write pieces on commercial real estate in general, on my specific listings and on things in Louisville in general.   This allowed me to have marketing pieces available for people on-line which I could also print out for prospects when I had meetings with them.    There was some minimal action from search engines but I was able to direct my messages to my target audience.    

This year, I had a surprise when my readership surged in the Spring peaking in April with nearly 60 times the number of readers I had ever had.  I later discovered that Google had changed their search engine criteria to put more emphasis on blogs.   But I also discovered in looking at the numbers that my numbers increased noticably when the number of articles increased.  That may seem obvious but before this time, there was no consistency in the readership.

This led me to an experiment.  I decided to make more consistent efforts at adding blog entries and also began to make efforts to promote the blog.  I also decided to broaden my topics to include other issues that are at least tangential to commercial real estate and also began to include some more personal notes about topics of interest to me.   To my surprise, by doing this the readership of my blog has been increasing every month since August.  In November, I had nearly a 50% increase in readership over October. 

I still have to consider the cost / benefit ratio in the amount of time I dedicate to these efforts but for now the experiment will continue.   The next step will be to consider how this might translate into contributing toward the bottom line and determine how I can measure those results.

Anyway, thanks so much for reading.   Hope you have a great day!

BTW - Speaking of results, if would would like to discuss the best way to have results on your real estate issues, give me a call.  I specialize in Commercial Real Estate and work with Sellers, Buyers, Landlords, Tenants and Investors.   I handle Office, Industrial, Land, Retail and Investment properties.   Heck, I can even hook you up with someone if you need help in residential real estate.

David

David W. McCoy
Associate Broker
Commonwealth Commercial Real Estate
10444 Bluegrass Pkwy
Louisville, KY  40299