I hope you are having a great New Year! I know I am!
Every year begins with resolutions, then turns to “I should be more active in pursuing my resolutions”, and eventually into “what happened there?”

If you have found yourself in similar circumstances, which most of us have, I urge you to make a plan and hold yourself accountable to doing those things on the plan. One of your first objectives should be to learn as much as you can. My promise to you is to teach what I can to help you be more successful this year. Will you do me the favor of telling your friends and co-workers about this newsletter?

Blogging and Commenting 101

If you took my advice and set up your blog and bought my book, Realty Blogging Basics, you should have a firm grasp of how your blog works, how to post, and how to get local traffic to your blog. What you may not understand is “Why you don’t have more comments”.

The ‘Blogosphere’ is vast and great and it seems like just about everyone has a personal blog these days so it really pains me to see that most real estate professionals do not. Back to the point though - why you don’t get more comments.

In the blogging community, you will notice that many of the same people will post on multiple sites to which are included in “the circle”, much like a high school clique. In order to break into that circle and get more comments on your blog, you have to initiate it. Think of High School and ask yourself - did you get in with your clique by having one of them come to you or did you go to one of them and make friends? Answers will vary but the truth is that it is MUCH FASTER to go to them. The best part of blogging is that there is a certain level of anonymity to the web so if you get flamed on one blog, you still have hope on another!

Commenting on other people’s blogs, as long as you keep it relevant and do not spam it, will help increase their awareness of you and your blog. After you show up on the same blogs a couple of times, the members will slowly trickle to your site and ultimately comment on your posts when they deem it appropriate.

SEO Value of Commenting

When you post a comment on another person’s blog, most will have a spot that says “website”. The reason for this is that they link your name to your website. If you go to Joe’s Gardening Blog and post a comment about his day lilies, you will have just created a one-way link back to your blog. This helps increase your in-bound links and ultimate your SEO value. Of course, one link is not going to do you any good but over the course of commenting on multiple blogs, you will increase your links tremendously.

That’s great, right? Yes, of course it is, but if you really want to take it a step further, change your name! Yes, you heard me right, do not put your name in the “Name” field because then your link will be posted as a relevant link to your name. If you were to put your name as “Denver Real Estate”, then you would have a link to your blog with the keywords Denver Real Estate instead of your name - after all, how many people are going to be searching for your name in the search engines?

Great - so you learned something new, right? Well, to be perfectly honest with you, I ran a little late this week getting this post together and I am throwing it together in about 20 minutes because I was running training all week and had a sick baby today (actually - she just had her flu shot so she is cranky). Because of this, I feel that I may have under-delivered in this newsletter, so I am offering some “EXTRAS” to make it up to you!

Extra Tip Number 1:
When you comment on another person’s blog, it gives you a little SEO value for the keywords you use as well as the keywords in close proximity to it, so the words in the comment you make could also play a role in your SEO Value.

Extra Tip Number 2
You want people to comment as much as possible on your blog. Even stirring up a little controversy may be helpful as long as it does not have a detriment effect on your readers (don’t get too controversial if you think you will offend the majority). The more comments you have on your blog - the better SEO value it gets because of additional and changing content, especially with Google. Keeping discussions going can jump you to the top of search results very quickly - but be careful what you are getting to the top of the results for

Extra #3
Yeah, I said two extra tips, right? Well, Since I am feeling extra generous, and I know there are some of you who (Special Offer to NewsLetter Subscribers only)

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