Kim Hughes

Providing solid solutions since 1999 specifically tailored for today’s real estate professional.

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Blog Tips for Real Estate Agents

Blog Tips for Real Estate AgentsAs a real estate agent, the importance of blogging fresh content regularly, can’t be stressed enough.

Blogs get picked up by search engines, drive traffic to your website, and eventually result in new leads. When people need information about your community or buying or selling a home, you want to be the one they turn to. Blogging can help establish you as an expert in your community. Provide great content on a regular basis, and your audience will keep coming back for more.

What makes up great content? We at Kim Hughes and Company research the latest trends for our clients, including information on local markets, in order to put together an effective blog strategy that gets results. We find that posting evergreen content that is informative, educational, entertaining or addresses problems and concerns really works to engage our real estate agents’ audiences. A blog article that utilizes keyword stuffing (overuse of keywords throughout the article) and too many links will come off as spam – this should definitely be avoided.

Blog Strategy

While it is important not to go overboard, your blogs should contain a few top keywords, active links, tags, alternative tags (alt tags), and your call-to-action. Include a high quality photo in your content that contains alt tags as well. There are several great royalty-free sites to find photos that can be used commercially.

Your blog should ideally be hosted on your website in order to drive traffic there. Share your blog articles on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. This is a great strategy to boost your blog and website visibility, and to improve your chances of reaching a wider audience through sharing.

Ideas for Blog Content

Here are a few topics that we post that really get results for Kim Hughes and Company clients. Consider posting 2-3 times per week. The important thing is to be consistent. This will help retain a devoted following for your blog and help it achieve a higher search engine rating.

  • Just listed and just sold properties
  • Listing price changes
  • Buyer topics such as first-time buyer information, mortgages, credit reporting
  • Seller topics such as how to boost value, timing the market, pricing, etc.
  • Homeowner topics such as renovations, home safety and maintenance
  • Current real estate market trends and local statistics
  • Community events and holiday information
  • Press releases for company changes and awards

Although blogging can be time-consuming and can require some strategizing to maximize its effectiveness, it is a proven strategy for boosting business that shouldn’t be overlooked. Hopefully you have gained a little insight and a few ideas to consider from the information above. Don’t have time to manage blogging? Contact me today for a consultation, and I will be happy to discuss how we can help.

Ready to create the changes that will help you move towards living the life you REALLY want? Now is the time to take control of your personal development by eliminating self-doubt. Give your confidence a boost so you can value the life as well as the business you have dreamed of. Contact Kim Hughes when you are ready to Bring Clarity, Balance, and Confidence to your business. Visit KimHughesCoaching.com for details!

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Social Networking – How Sociable Are You?


As you read this, more than 10,000 Tweets just went out. According to the Social Computing Journal, social media grew more in 2009 than all previous years combined. Social networking sites have rapidly evolved into much more than a way to connect with family and friends – social media has become the channel for interactive, digital marketing and communications that brings businesses, consumers and communities around the world together as collaborators.

A recent article on the web describes this amazing tool, HowSociable.com. This tool is fun, easy and informative. Just enter the brand name of any business you’d like to track (including your own) on the HowSociable? home page. The tool will query a number of the top social networking sites and then display the results for the number of times the brand or business name showed up on each site. To see more detail about the visibility on a specific site, like Facebook People, you can click on the results icon and get additional information, even specific posts or comments.

You can use the tools to measure where you are with your social media plan, or give you a beginning baseline for measurement if you are just getting started. It also provides an easy interface to see collective results. Give HowSociable? your email address and the brand you want to track, and they can email you the results on an ongoing basis.

You can also use the tool to study the success of highly rated brands and check in on how your competitors are faring in the social landscape. HowSociable? is fun, it’s free and it’s a way to measure your social success stories. Try it, we think you’ll like it.

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