Learn To Be Rich

I run a network of about 50 real estate related blogs and do a good deal of promoting those blogs by writing real estate investing articles. In this article I will be teaching you the steps I take to market my real estate investing articles once I have written them to get some exposure for my blogs, actual real estate deals and real estate courses.

First, I usually publish the article that I wrote on the Learn To Be Rich blog. That is my starting point for just about every real estate investing article that I write.

Second, I immediately copy and paste the article into the publisher on EzineArticles.com. Why did I select EzineArticles.com? First, I like their interface, but more importantly if you go and check Alexa’s traffic reports you can see that their are the best in their category for traffic and reach.

Next, I take the article that I wrote and I add a link directly to it in my sequential auto responder series that my subscribers get. Since new subscribers come on to my e-mail list at all different times, what I usually do is make sure that I have plenty of scheduled e-mails to send to them over time and I use links to these articles to give them something of value in the e-mails. Since the articles I publish on my blog usually drop of the first few pages of the website in a day or two, having direct links deep into the site on these sequential auto-responder e-mails helps to keep those articles fresh and directs traffic to them.

Next, I make an announcement post on the other 50 or so blogs that I run that tell those blog visitors (which are mostly city specific blogs) that there is a great new article about real estate investing on my main blog. People reading that blog and its city specific content then can also get the more general real estate investing information that I write about in articles.

Finally, I see if I can add a link to the article in our deal analysis software that generates a fully detailed real estate deal analysis blog entry for real world real estate deals that we analyze on AnalyzeDeals.com. If I can add some variety to the blog post generator with a sentence referencing the article, I will add the article to the mix as well.

So, that is how I market my real estate investing articles to promote our blogs, actual real estate deals and real estate courses.

Until my next post,

James

Over the last couple of days I have been looking into some software that would help make my job of commenting on blogs a bit easier. Last night in particular I starting to read up and research using blog comment software.

Now before some of your get all worked up over what you think that is, I will explain to you what it is not… it is not software that goes to blogs and makes a comment like “Nice blog!” or “I like your blog!” It is not software that will automatically go out and write all sorts of stupid comments on the blog, but what it will do is help me find blogs that are related to the topic I enter and make a nice list of them for me to visit, read the blog posts and make an intelligent comment on.

The nice thing about the software is you can find blogs that will give you the biggest return for your time invested. If you wanted to, you could sort the list by popularity and therefore post comments on the blogs that are most likely to bring you the most traffic.

If it takes you the same amount of time to comment on a blog, wouldn’t you want to do the more popular ones rather than the less popular ones?

I had lunch with my mastermind partner today (read Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich for more info on what that is) and we were discussing commenting on blogs. He is trying to improve his search ranking for a particularly good keyword in his business and I mentioned using software that I have been looking at and he is going to test it as well.

So, I will be testing the blog comment software and, if it works well, probably creating a new job opportunity for the people we hire to help us to read the blog and write a good, appropriate comment on  the blog for us.

Until my next post,

James

One of the challenges I have with promoting my blogs is how to prioritize what to do based on all the different things I could be doing. I mean is it better for me to write content, find other related blogs and put meaningful comments on them linking back to my blog, optimizing pay per click advertising, creating new ads for classified websites or one of dozens of other things that I could be doing?

Well, today I am going to discuss one of those options and how I think about the value of it: commenting on blogs.

Commenting on blogs can be a really good way for you to get some traffic to your website or blog. Before I get started I want to emphasize that I am NOT telling you spam blogs with comments like “visit my blog” or “check out my website”. In fact, I am strongly discouraging you from doing that nonsense. Not only will it not work, you will certainly get yourself banned from posting comments on most blogs that use a centralized database of blog spammers to determine if your have been doing that type of commenting.

So, what am I talking about? Good, thoughtful and valuable comments on the actual blog post.

So, how do I value comments like that? Well, I look at several things:

First, the number of people that could possible click from that comment straight to the website. For extremely high traffic sites, you could get a some decent traffic, but don’t hold your breath for thousands of visitors to come. It probably won’t happen.  A more reasonable estimate is a few people a week from a decently popular post with a great comment from you.

Second, a bump in popularity from search engines because of an increase in links coming to your site. Without bogging you down with the whole “no follow” discussion, just realize that overall, search engines think you site is more important if other websites or blogs are linking to it. Consider a link to it a vote that your site has value. So, the more comments you have with links back to your website, the more likely your website will be to get higher rankings with search engines. This can mean a significant increase in traffic.

Third, more frequent spidering of your website for new content. Having links coming to your website often means that you will be searched by search engines more often to find new content. If you are writing lots of new content this is great and can further increase the amount of traffic you get from search engines by having more of your fresh content indexed and coming up in search results.

So, with these several ways of adding value for commenting on other blogs, you can see why commenting is relatively high on my list of things to do to promote my blogs.

Until my next post,

James