Marketing for Realtors

Matt Mullenweg is one of the most successful bloggers on the web. He is one of PC World’s Top 50 People on the Web, Inc.com’s 30 under 30, and Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

His blog is at http://ma.tt - Yes, that's right, it is not a .com and it is very easy to remember. The blog itself has been called various things over the years - PhotoMatt, The World of Matt Mullenweg, and now (apparently) The World of Matt, and it is currently a PR8.

Matt's analysis of his blogging activity 2002-2009 is informative. Here are some points worth noting:

1. Of his Top 10 posts for 2009, 4 were photo "galleries". Conclusion: people like to see photos in blog posts. (Yes, I know, he's a photography guy, so you would expect that.)

2. Number of posts for 2004-2009: 1,108, 703, 340, 360, 314, 182. Conclusion: post often, but once you're established frequency is probably not as important.

3. Average number of words in his posts (2004-2009) - 49, 43, 65, 56, 48, 80. Matt concludes from the increase in length in 2009 (80 words) that his posts are getting "meatier". Conclusion: At least one successful blogger writes pretty short posts. So why do the rest of us think we have to write a 500 word essay every time we make a blog post?

4. In the same time period his average number of comments/post have steadily gone up from 5 to 23.

5. He has a core of very faithful readers (including "Mom") who he corresponds with by email every 1-3 days. As he says, "Email is my most frequently used social network." Conclusion: Online social interaction, as well as blog readership can be greatly enhanced by regular communication with key individuals.

There's more, but this post is already way too long.

One of the often overlooked features of blogs is their ability to create an RSS feed that you can add to another web page or blog. This applies to AR blogs, as well as others such as Wordpress, Blogger, etc.

For example, if you have a Wordpress blog the blog itself automatically creates a "feed" which lists your last few posts. You can then take the simple code for that feed from Blog A and put it in the sidebar of Blog B.

That creates links pointing from Blog B back to Blog A. For example, here's a page where I have added three feeds - one of them my AR feed.

Why would you want to do that?

As always with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) there are two reasons. First, it gives your blog content exposure to more potential readers. If Blog B gets more traffic than Blog A, this might be a way to drive some traffic to Blog A.

The other advantage is that it creates more search engine exposure. I have always been impressed by the way Google picks up links in the sidebar of Wordpress blogs. This is probably because they assume the sidebar content is more attention-worthy since it appears on every page of your blog.

This was reinforced by a post I did last night about a new product we are just developing for real estate blogs called "BlogEasy SuperLinks". I created a short description of the program last night around 10pm, and posted it in four different blogs.

This morning at 8 am I checked Google to see if they had spidered any of these posts. I did a search for "BlogEasy SuperLink" - a term which did not exist until about 10pm last night.

Sure enough, Google had spidered four different entries and had picked up a fifth too - in less than 12 hours. It was the fifth entry that was most interesting. It was from the sidebar on another blog running the RSS feed from one of the original posts.

This may not seem like a big deal to most people. But the fact is, every little bit helps, and this technique is surprisingly simple.