Blogging for leads – install & set up your blog now

WordPress - the only platform you should consider using for your real estate blog.

That's not just our opinion, it's the collective thoughts of a lot of bloggers, programmers and techies and other real estate agents out there.

The WordPress platform is free, easy to install and configure, Google friendly and it's cheap to host.

As an added bonus many programmers have developed close to eight thousand  free "plugins" to add functionality to individual users blogs – that can be downloaded and easily installed on your real estate blog.

More importantly WordPress can be set up so that it looks more like a normal website with property search pages and blog attached to it.

This site was built entirely using WordPress

If you are really serious about creating an online real estate lead capture system, we are going show you, right here, how to set up your blog with a name of your choice and how to set it up with a hosting company.

This will give you a twofold advantage; you will own and have control of your real estate blog – and you will have a domain name that you can use for your professional email address (remember to stay away from your company email system).

So let's get started.

Step 1: Domain name suitable for your real estate blog

If you are not sure how to choose a suitable name for your business or niche then click over to advice we offer here on how to choose a domain name for real estate agents.

Step 2: Choosing a hosting company

Hosting. Your website and it's associated programs and files need to reside on a server connected to the internet provided by a hosting company. We recommend HostGator - their support is first class and their prices competitive, so click over and sign up for hosting with Hostgator.

Premium members recieve step by step lessons with screenshots showing each and every step to take in setting up your blog - signup or upgrade today and let’s get started!

Step 3: Setting up WordPress for your real estate blog.

Now that your hosting account is set up, you will sign into your sites dashboard. There is a program called Fantastico that will install WordPress for you in just a couple of clicks.

Tip: Premium members get fully illustrated step by step instructions on how to do this.

Out of the box WordPress will work just fine, but if you want to have any sort of traction in the search engines then you should click over for advice on search engine optimizatio for Realtors and get a good grasp of the basics before starting to write copy for your site.

Step 4: Layout and themes.

Lets talk about themes – the template for the site.There are thousands of Wordpress themes available, many good ones are free and some, usually with extra features cost anywhere from a few dollars up to around $100. WordPress makes it easy to upload themes and try them out on your site.

Explanation: When you change templates you are not changing pages in the normal sense of the word. WordPress is a CMS a content management system. All your pages and blog enties are actually stored in a database.

That's why they can appear as pages, excerpts or archives depending on your users selection. So when you change templates all you are doing is changing the look and feel of the site – not the content. How cool is that!

The free templates don't usually come with much or any support, so we strongly suggest paying for an adaptable theme that is well supported if you run into problems.

We really like the Agent Theme from Studiopress which has lots of options and is dead easy to configure. The designers have some great video tutorials to get you started too.

Here is one we set up for Joan Schultz of La Jolla. CA:

The framework supports a  magazine style approach which works really well for a real estate blog/website with a few tweaks to add your own logo and a few other other custom options. 

We also really like the Thesis theme from Diy themes.

It's a very clean theme that can be easily customized and tweaked to create a site that will be easy on the eyes and easy to navigate.

This site is based on the Thesis theme.

Thesis is literally anything you want it to be, a 3-column layout with your content in the middle, or a 2-column layout with content on the right. Absolutely your call as to which one you choose …

Premium members recieve step by step lessons with screenshots showing each and every step to take in setting up your blog - signup or upgrade today and let’s get started!

Here is a Thesis theme site we set up in Dallas for the Harrison Group:

Step 5: Uploading files to your site.

Themes and plugins are downloaded to your computer in ZIP format – condensed files that are smaller and quicker to download. You will need a program to "un-zip" these files before you load them onto you hosting companies server. WinZip is the standard for this software – download a free trial here.

In order to get your template and plugins onto your hosting companies server you will need an FTP program (stands for file transfer protocol). Many are available, however for ease of use we suggest FTP Commander Pro - the familiar interface and drag and drop capability should shorten the learning curve if you have not used this sort of program before. Download it and try it for free.

Step 6: WordPress plugins.

We touched on plugins earlier - here is a list of 14 essential plugins that you should install on your real estate blog site.

Unlike other website and blogging platforms these plugins are nearly always free.

1. Headspace2 – makes adding titles and descriptions easy
2. Akismet – checks to see if comments are spam and block them
3. Feedburner Feedsmith – directs all RSS feeds to Feedburner
4. Deans FCKEditor – replaces the default editor, big improvement
5. SEO friendly images – adds tags to photos, improves traffic
6. Wordpress related posts – keep visitors with a list of similar articles
7. Yoast breadcrumbs – shows the path to the current page, like this page does.
8. Google Analytics for WordPress. Makes it simple to add Google Analytics
9. iflickr. Easily add Creative Commons licensed images to your posts.
10. Psychic search. Secretly discover what your visitors want to read on your blog
11. Search everything. Better search functionality including searching pages
12. WP database backup. On-demand backup of your WordPress database.
13. Google XML sitemap. Will create a compliant XML sitemap for your blog
14. Let's Get Social. Social Bookmarking Tool

Almost all of these can be downloaded from the official WordPress Plugin Directory.

Our blog installation service will install and configure all these plugins for you as part of the "Get up and going" set up service. Tip. it's very easy to get carried away with plugins, there are so many! Bear in mind that every active plugin slows down the loading of your site – so be warned!

More real estate blog implementation suggestions:

If you really do not have the time and would rather pay to have someone else do all the work for you we can take care of that for you too. Premium members get a dedicated download of all our recommended plugins along with fully illustrated step by step instructions on how to do install and configure them.

Premium members recieve step by step lessons with screenshots showing each and every step to take in setting up your blog - signup or upgrade today and let’s get started!

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