The Internet is a strange place. Its so different from the Offline world but its so similar to it, as well!
Think about a magazine that you love to read – What attracts you towards that magazine? Is it the content? Is it their style of writing? Is it the information you gather? Is it the entertainment you get?
What exactly?
Also think about this – How much time would you spend reading an article and how much time would you spend glancing an advertisement?
That’s exactly where article marketing comes in.
No. Article marketing (in-spite of its name), is not a marketing technique to promote your service. That’s the most common misconception about article marketing, especially in the real estate niche.
Article marketing is more about giving information to people. And giving it in a way that appeals to them & satisfies their need by helping them solve an immediate concern that they are facing.
So, you become an informer and a problem solver.
Come to think of it, isn’t that the basic pretense of marketing? Isn’t that what marketing was always supposed to achieve? Somehow, marketing has become synonymous with ‘influencing people’, which it isn’t.
If you were the person wanting to buy a property or sell a property, what would your activities be on the Internet?
First thing you might want to do is to Google your question. Ah, the Omni-present, almighty Google!
Let’s say you Google ‘Houses for sale in Texas’. Sure, there are at-least dozens of websites that appear on the search results claiming to offer you the best house in the best location for the best price.
You don’t believe it, but you still skim through all those listings. Isn’t your time at a premium? Sure it is, so you keep moving from one property to another. Really Fast.
Somewhere, someone has written an informative article about ‘Do’s and Don’ts of buying a property in Texas’ and there it is right in the search results. Perhaps, they have gone through the whole experience themselves and have written about it. You feel that it could be very useful to you as you are going to go through the same experience, shortly.
Now you stop website hopping. You want to look at what else has been written by the same person on this site, provided the initial piece was informative. It can even be measured in terms of ‘Bounce Rate’, but let’s look at the technical terms a bit later.
Perhaps you might want to even leave a comment saying, “Excellent resource, I am sure it will help me during my house hunt”. And check the page after a couple of days.
The author has replied to your comment. Wow!
Now you know that there is some human face hiding behind all those 0’s and 1’s. It’s not a digital auto-content serving machine!
That’s called engagement. That’s the point when you might feel secure enough to sign up for the email newsletter/ email intimation of all the posts. Yes, you are confident enough that this blog won’t spam you.
So, basically you start following the blog. If you come to read useful posts, you’d definitely want to go and leave a comment on the post. The blog author / other community members (with similar interests as yours) might reply to them. So, reading becomes conversation.
We normally trust people who are willing to personally interact with us. That’s what article marketing enables real-estate website owners to do. Gain the trust of potential customers.
An investment in a house is a huge investment and no one would buy a house by just looking at a property listing. Of course, as a business person involved in the real-estate business, you’d know this more than anyone else.
Article marketing helps a real-estate businessman to gain more eye-balls on what they have to offer, whether the customers take it or not is a different thing altogether.
Article marketing is about developing long term relationship with your potential clients. By offering them value instead of trying to influence them. By gaining their trust, instead of pushing them. If this game is played right, customers would love to spread the word about your site/ services.
Stay tuned for follow up posts where I will explain some of the best article marketing techniques that have been helpful to myself and others. There is no reason why they can’t work for you!
