From the Online Marketing Blog’s “25 Tips for Marketing Your Blog”, here is tip number one, perhaps my number one crazy-maker:
Decide on a stand alone domain name www.myblog.com or directory of existing site www.mysite.com/blog. Sub domain is also an option blog.mysite.com. Avoid hosted services that do not allow you to use your own domain name!
So many of the real estate weblogs I like, including some I will review, are in violation of this rule.
True hosting is fast, easy and cheap. WordPress will come free with the hosting package. There is no good reason not to do this, and one outstanding reason to do it now rather than later: The bigger your traffic base, the more readers you will lose when you make your move. As with the Chicken Pox, you’re better off living through the pain while you’re still young…
Technorati Tags: blogging, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing
Maureen Francis says:
I just made the switch from blogger.com to wordpress. I have to say, that the learning curver for many new real estate bloggers would be steep on wordpress. Steep enough to keep them from blogging. Most agents will not take the time to figure this out. Heck, I sent out 100 invitations to the agents in our office to ActiveRain, and I had to sit next to most of them to help them register. They are very good at selling homes, but not so great at figuring out new (to them) things on the web.
Yes, I felt like by blog grew up when I moved to my own domain, but its not for everyone. And I am still having some growing pains figuring out wordpress.
September 26, 2006 — 5:06 am
jf.sellsius says:
We love WordPress because it’s open source and there are always new goodies coming out.
September 26, 2006 — 8:22 am
Leanne Paynter - Florida Realtor says:
Greg, thanks for the wonderful information/tips. I’m curious as to what made *you* decide to use http://www.mysite.com/blog vs. a stand alone domain name (www.myblog.com)? Do you think your decision has resulted in more traffic to your website vs. had you chosen to go with http://www.myblog.com?
September 26, 2006 — 1:44 pm
John K says:
Words of advice – if you plan on blogging for a long time, never, never, never start with someone else hosting your site, such as typepad.com.
I did my six months of entries under johnakeith.typepad.com, then switched over to my own domain name, under bostonreb.com.
A year later, the search engines still bring up my old site. I lost a ton of traffic, because people just didn’t take the effort to click on the little “this site is now here” button.
September 26, 2006 — 6:31 pm
Greg Swann says:
> I’m curious as to what made *you* decide to use http://www.mysite.com/blog vs. a stand alone domain name (www.myblog.com)?
Because, even if you can’t find any of the wasy ways I’ve built to get you to our main website, all you have to so is chop away at the URL. That’s also why we didn’t do a third-level-domain (http://BloodhoundBlog.bloodhoundrealty.com/), because that’s not as easy to edit manually.
John K: Set up a 310 redirect on your old Typepad page. It will forward automatically.
September 30, 2006 — 1:31 pm