Over the past several years, our team at LuxuryProperty – led by Executive Blogger Mark Knowles – has built the world’s number one luxury real estate blog. Not to toot our horn, but at one point our blog alone was outranking the “primary” websites of four of our top six competitors in terms of unique visitors and pageviews. What does it take to achieve stats like this? Well, among many things, it takes content, really juicy content:
The more important question, however, is why we launched our blog in the first place. We found that the typical buyer of luxury real estate uses the internet to either (a) entertain and educate or (b) search for property. At any given time, more people usually fall into the former category, particularly during the struggling real estate market the past several years. Instead of limiting our audience to that smaller group of users searching for property, we launched the Luxury Property Blog to expand our user base and begin developing relationships with those who could eventually use our primary service – searching for luxury homes, condos, and vacation rentals – when the time was right for them. We focused on creating interesting content (that people just couldn’t get enough of) and promoting it across the internet to drive traffic to our blog. While our traffic of users searching for property didn’t grow at the same rate as our overall traffic, we laid the groundwork to grow our users searching for property over time, which is our number one priority with the Luxury Property service.
A lot of other great companies have used blogs to initiate and develop relationships with users, as well as retain existing users. One example is 37Signals, which publishes the blog Signal vs. Noise. The leaders of 37Signals have even gone a step further than blogging to engage and educate their audience. They recently published Rework, a book about starting, building, and growing a business. If you haven’t read it, you should.
At the end of the day, anyone can create a blog to promote a business. Some do it to further engage their existing users, while others – us included – do it to reach a new audience they’ll eventually convert to their primary service. Either way, to be successful, it’s critical to provide content that users either want or unknowingly need. Once you’ve got them hooked on your crack, they’ll keep coming back. And that’s good news for your business’ bottom line when they eventually look to you to make that purchase.
