Time for another installment of our dissecting Aaron Wall’s authoritative article on link building strategies and applying them to the real estate marketing arena. We’ll be covering how to really use blogs to maximum effect in baiting links and flat-out creating them!

45. Start Your Blog Now! If you don’t have one, they are so easy to start (visit Blogger and in five minutes you’ll have something that works great - especially with Google Once you’ve set up the platform, get to work, updating it every business day with the latest useful news and opinions on the local real estate market, community issues, and home buying and selling resources. It doesn’t require re-inventing the wheel to keep your new blog full of current information - it only takes a half hour of your time writing from the heart on a topic you should know by heart if you’re in the real estate business. Oh, and if you’re really desperate for an idea to write about, it never hurts to just write a response to a blog post you find on another real estate website; in fact, those can be some of the best forms of social marketing. So post regularly, have fun with it, and make it the best blog it can be - there’s really no other point to having a blog in the first place.

46. Fill Up Your Blogroll. Once you have your blog site set up, fill your blogroll (link list typically situated on the right or left-hand side bar of your site) with all the relevant and useful blog sites you read. Don’t read any blogs? Start reading them by using Google Reader to subscribe to all the cool RSS feeds you find floating about in interspace. If you can’t find good blogs to add to your blogroll, just start adding websites that are related to real estate, local business, school system, etc. and categorize them so that it all makes sense to those visitors of yours that aren’t robots.

47. Comment On Other Blogs. Don’t just go to other blogs and say, "nice post!" That’s likely to get you booed, or even banned on some hardcore blogs. The best way to improve your own standing in the blogosphere is to become a genuine contributor. And one thing that demonstrates that to potential clients is seeing that you offer useful feedback to the information that’s out there. The more blogs you become involved in (commenting whenever you have something meaningful to say), the more possible people will come across your comments and curiously click on your URL (most blogs allow you to post with a URL attached to your name). Of course you’ll want to use your blog’s URL in that.

48. Tag Your Posts. It’s important to not only categorize your blog posts (into general categories that make it easy for people to find what they need info on - commercial property, residential property, waterfront property, etc), it’s also a big deal to tag your articles. Each post will have certain keywords that are most relevant to that post. For example, a blog post you put up about roofing would fit in the ‘home inspection’ category perhaps, but you would also tag that with ‘roofing’, ‘home inspection’, ‘passing grade’, ‘rot’, etc. so that the search engines and other social media sites like Technorati can identify relationships between your pages and keywords. So definitely tag each post with 4-5 of the most relevant keywords or phrases. It will help!

49. List Your Blog In Directories. Once you’ve got it set up, go out and see if anyone’s created a directory for real estate resources in your area. Or maybe there are some national real estate directories you’d like to be added to. It’s worth the time to check them out, because they could result in free links to your site. Just make sure that you have a quality blog site before submitting, otherwise you may be rejected for lack of quality content/coding. If you can’t find a specific directory, Yahoo has a great one you can join for a yearly fee that you should consider adding yourself to.