Remind your Visitors to Subscribe

With so many websites out there fighting for buyers and sellers attention, you want to make sure you make every effort to keep visitors coming back to your site. Don’t rely on your visitors to remember your website address or bookmark your site. Offer them a friendly reminder at the bottom of every post, that if they like what they are reading on your site, they should consider subscribing to your RSS feed. This way, anytime you add new information to your site, they will get notified of it immediately. The more you add information to your site, the more they will hopefully come back and remember you when it is time to buy or sell. Keep in mind, post information of value that visitors can benefit from or that will help them better connect with you. If you post a bunch of nonsense articles, they will probably lose interest and unsubscribe. One plugin that automatically adds a reminder at the bottom of every post is ‘Subscribe Remind’. You can find a link to this on our Top Plugins page.

For visitors who are not up to speed with RSS feeds, offer them an alternative to receive updates via email. There are a few different services that will allow visitors to sign up to receive your new posts by email. Two very popular and free services are Feedburner and Zookoda. Feedburner, which is owned by Google, manages your RSS feed and sends your visitors emails daily (if you have posted something new to your site). They also offer a wealth of stats on items such as who has subscribed to your feed, what articles they have clicked, etc.

Zookoda uses your blogs rss feed and gives you a little more flexibility by allowing you to choose which posts to send out, as well as when to send your ‘email newsletter’. The best option would be to have a Feedburner account to manage your feed and use Zookoda to have more control over the look and delivery of your email newsletter.

For more information on these services and what they can offer you, visit their respective ‘About’ pages:
About Feedburner
About Zookoda

Make it Easy for Visitors to Share Your Website

One of the best things you can hope for is that visitors to your site will find your content so helpful and informative they will want to share it with others. To make sharing as easy as possible, we recommend the ‘ShareThis’ plugin. The ‘ShareThis’ plugin allows visitors to easily share your content via different methods such as email, posting it to their blog, their favorite social bookmarking site and more. You can find a link for this on our Top Plugins page.

For an example, just look for the ‘ShareThis’ button at the end of this article.

Writing a Neighborhood Profile

Imagine if you were a future homebuyer purchasing in an area you were not familiar with. Being able to read different neighborhood profiles would give you a better understanding of the area and help you choose the location that meets your needs. Writing neighborhood profiles is an excellent way to give your audience an abundance of information they will want. From a search engine standpoint, it’s also an excellent way to incorporate keyword rich search term’s into your site to help in getting better rankings.

Looking for suggestions on what to write about? Take these items into consideration, but don’t feel like you have to do them all. Start with the basics and follow up with additional posts to give more information and fresh content.

Demographics:
Extremely helpful neighorhood information would be the local demographics i.e. unemployment figures, population, seasonal climate, and so on. Look to your local government office for this type of information or better yet, look for websites online that offer demographic information.

Market Data:
Include some basic information about the average cost of homes in a neighborhood. This will give visitors an idea of what homes typically sell for and helps give them a better idea of what to expect. For example: Homes in this neighborhood typically range from $250,000 to $500,000. Instantly a potential buyer would know if they see a home for sale at $800,000 – they may want to research it further as it appears that home is at the top of the market. For more information on the benefits of adding more complete market reports, visit our article on The Value of Writing Market Reports.

Informative Maps:
Adding graphical maps is also a great way of offering more information. If you can, include a small map showing the neighborhood in relationship to other places that your audience may or may not know about i.e. the beach, ski resorts, downtown, shopping etc. It is another great way of giving your audience perspective. Google Maps is a good source for mapping. Take a screenshot of the map once you are zoomed into your desired location. Save it to your desktop (using Print Screen). You can then resize, crop and dress up the image using Picnik, a great online photo editing web site. Another idea is to use Google or UMapper to create an interactive map that can be added to your page.

Include Photos:
Photos of homes, hot spots and landmarks will give your audience an even better idea of the neighborhood. Consider not just images of local homes, but also hot spots i.e. beaches, ski resorts, shopping centers etc. I recommend using The NextGen Gallery plugin that helps create a stylish photo gallery of images as demonstrated on our demo site: Heavenly Valley Neighborhood profile.

Don’t under estimate the value of neighborhood profiles. They are one of the best subjects you can write about. It is a great way to demonstrate your knowledge of the area, increase your visibility in the search engines and keep people coming back, as you continually provide fresh content that relates to the area.

SEO – Quick Start

As you add content to your site you will want to keep some key ideas in mind to help your site rank better in the search engine results pages. Your main goal should be to provide great content that will benefit your visitors and will be something they want to share with others. You also want your content to appeal to the search engine so others can find you as well. Read more

Where To Get Quality Photos

You have spent the money and time to get a website developed that gives you a professional appearance…so take the time and add photos that show your attention to detail and professionalism. Sure, you can surf the web for 20 minutes (or more) and try to find images you can legally use on your site for free, but we would suggest getting an account with iStockPhoto. iStockPhoto has a very large collection images that you can search by keywords and typically cost $1 for you to legally use on your site. The time you will save alone is worth the cost and the site is easy to use.

The following are stock photograpy sites that professional web and print designers say offer “the best selection” of images are :

• Getty Images – www.gettyimages.com
• iStockphoto – www.istockphoto.com
• Veer – www.veer.com
• Corbis – www.corbis.com
• Jupiterimages – www.jupiterimages.com

Other sites designers feel offer photos for “the best value” are :

• iStockphoto – www.istockphoto.com
• Shutterstock- www.shutterstock.com
• Photos.com – www.photos.com
• Dreamstime – www.dreamstime.com
• StockXpert – www.stockxpert.com

Once you have your photo, be sure to check out our tutorial on using Picnik to help put a professional drop shadow or edge effect on it to make it pop!

Keep in mind, you don’t want to just use any photo you find on the web without getting permission first. In general, using images from another website without permission is illegal.