You don't have to change your model or compensation structure to implement the suggestions in this article, but they will give you one more tool to help make it happen if that's your plan. It's also about agent retention. What can we do for our agents that will make them more successful, hopefully keeping them on board to continue with that success? Providing technology for more efficiency and better marketing can be very effective.
Let's talk about a Web presence for every agent, with a master brokerage presence that benefits from it. We're talking about a real estate blog for the brokerage and the agents. Now, many will immediately jump to the master blog with agents as contributing authors. It's a viable marketing model, but I'd like to propose a different approach.
What about a blog for each agent, then a master brokerage blog pulling content from the individual agent blogs? First, let's talk retention again. By creating a full-featured blog in WordPress for each agent, and instructing them in how to manage it and blog, you are giving them a big head start in their Internet marketing efforts. You can maintain whatever level of control that you want, including written agreements as to who owns the content. This example will be with complete brokerage control, meaning you set up their blog site and control their access with logins that you can kill if you desire.
1. Set up a FREE WordPress.com blog for each agent. You can control look and branding to a point, but the free blogs have a limited selection of themes available. The other option is to go to a host, such as GoDaddy, Yahoo or Bluehost to host multiple blogs for you. This will give you complete flexibility to choose and customize a theme that maintains look and branding across all of the blogs. You can do that with the free sites, but you'll only have about a dozen theme choices instead of hundreds.
2. Each blog will have its own identity and be an independent site for SEO, Search Engine Optimization. You train the agents in how to post to their blog, and encourage them, as the more they write the better.
3. Create the brokerage blog, and you can customize the home page if you desire. However, it would be best if the latest ten posts by any agents were to display there. It plays into the encouragement thing. You set up an RSS feed from each agent's blog to feed the brokerage blog. In other words, every time they post, an excerpt, or the full post (your choice) ends up on the brokerage site.
4. In the brokerage blog sidebar, you can get a plugin that will rank the agents by number of posts, with the most prolific on top, and have links with their name to their blog. There's that encouragement to post again. Your brokerage blog becomes a post aggregator, as well as letting your management post on their own, and custom page construction as well.
The expense is minimal to implement this multiple blog strategy, basically a few hundred dollars a year. And, the posting for the brokerage blog is automated from the agent entries in their blogs. You end up with multiple search engine magnets. And, you should place links between them in all of the sidebars as well.
It is possible that using one blog with multiple authors, or using WordPress MU (Multiple User Version) would work better for SEO, as all of the content will reside on one blog. However, the trade-off is that you can't offer your agents a presence unique to them, even if you do specify design format and branding. As agents become more tech-savvy and look at their options, you are providing them with a Web site of their own at no expense. I like the retention clout.
