In this week’s Social Juice, learn about an awesome app to assist with your home remodeling, called Houzz and read about how to get more traffic to your blog-the eternal question!
Does Your Houzz Look This Good?
Your clients are ready to purchase that new home, but they are desperately searching for decorating and remodeling ideas! What do you recommend to them (besides your own expertise, of course)? Well, you could suggest using Houzz. Houzz is an iPad and iPhone app that helps homebuyers and homeowners search for remodeling tips. The app features over 150,000 inspiring photographs of every room imaginable in a house, so you can assemble ideas on how to remodel.
You can create what the app calls “Ideabooks”-batches of photos that you want to store for later use when you are ready to find someone to remodel and redecorate your home. As an additional source of inspiration, you can sift through over 500,000 ideabooks that have been created by other Houzz users!
Once you have found a design you really like and think would work in your home, tap into Houzz’s database of designers, filtered by local area. This is a wonderful app that is a must for anyone interested in remodeling a home! Check out Houzz’s YouTube video for more information. http://www.houzz.com/iphone
Tips for Getting More Traffic to Your Blog
It is an oft asked and oft answered (though not always correctly) question-how do I get more traffic to my blog? It is a well known fact that there is no elbow room online-everyone (especially those annoyingly tech-savvy 15 year olds!) is vying for top ranking on search engines. So how can you give all the thought provoking content you produce about the real estate market the exposure it deserves? Here are some tips:
1) Update your About page-this is really important, but often overlooked. The About page is one of the most trafficked sections of a blog or website. It is a reflection of the company and can help humanize its mission. Everyone wants to know the face behind the brilliant company or website you have a created, so give them a peek. Keep this short and simple, however. Use no more than 2 paragraphs to give an honest look into the company. In fact, you may want to opt for video-sit behind the camera and give a quick 2 minute overview of the purpose of your blog and company.
2) Link to Other Blogs-Link building is extremely valuable on the web. It is one of the best ways to give your site credibility and authority. If you link to a respected real estate blog, the blogger will be notified by what is known as a pingback. This opens the door for the blogger to link back to you …and the linking has begun! Google looks favorably on sites that are linked to by well known sites….example-imagine if the New York Times Real Estate section referenced your listing…that would be some pretty powerful exposure, right? If a well known blog links to your growing blog, this will automatically give it some SEO muscle.
3) Being Social-Your 4th grade teacher used to yell at you for disrupting class by doing this, but then again, she probably didn’t really understand you were practicing to be a future SEO ninja. It is extremely important to socialize your blog posts by making sure you place them on your facebook, twitter and linkedin pages, as these sites can help boost your placement in organic search. This is the domino effect at work. Do something once and have it multiply. Write a blog entry once and multiply its exposure by posting it on your social network accounts. If you have 100 blog readers, 250 facebook “Likes”, 300 twitter followers and 300 Linkedin followers, that’s 950 potentials to read your glorious thoughts. There are several tools out there that can streamline this process, such as Hootsuite and Publicize (if you’re a wordpress user). Check them out when you get a chance.
4) Get Ideas from Your Followers- I mentioned the word “humanize” in tip #1. I think this is one of social media’s greatest assets. In a world that has developed extreme distrust of businesses large and small, social media has given companies a carrot by offering a chance to humanize their image. As a business person, one of the best ways to put this phenomenon into practice is to ask your followers for advice. Ask your facebook and twitter followers what they would like to see on your blog…what they would recommend you write about this week! Once you take their suggestions, that will make them feel listened to and will guarantee repeat visitors to your blog.
How are you getting more traffic to your blog?