BiggerPockets Founder's Blog

Improve Your Real Estate Marketing by Blogging on BiggerPockets

Many months ago, we launched our BiggerPockets.com blogging system as a way for real estate investors, professionals, and others in the business to share their thoughts, opinions, and knowledge. Of course, as a result of that participation, the goal was to help these bloggers get noticed.

BiggerPockets Blogs are fast and easy to set up, and now bring a new perk:

Top Bloggers and Blog Commenters are Highlighted to the Community

We felt that it was important to let everyone in the community know who those people were that contributed the most to the BiggerPockets blogging community, and have thus added the Top Participants this Month feature.

On the right side of the main blogs page, you'll see a box with the Top Participants this Month, which shows the five (5) most active bloggers and the five (5) most prolific commenters.

So What are the Perks for Being on the List?

If you're on the list (which looks back at the last 30 days, not the previous month), you'll get your name and personal avatar posted, which link back to your profile AND a link to your website will also appear in the list!

You can see that participation equals FREE PR for your profile and website link!

Are There Other Reasons to Blog on BiggerPockets?

1. BiggerPockets has a vast and captive audience.
2. SEO link back potential to help your offsite web properties.
3. Networking with others — Social Network isn't the future, it's here to stay. You have to be part of the conversation or you don't exist.
4. By providing helpful and meaningful content, members who blog actively on BiggerPockets will gain benefits including broad exposure for you and your business.
5. Do-follow links to your favorite websites
6. Make money! Our bloggers can make money by showing ads on their blog.

What Are You Waiting For? Jump on the BiggerPockets Blogs community and start posting your own blogs and engaging in conversation with others by commenting! You'll see the benefits yourself!

NOTE: If we feel that you are "gaming" the system by posting "junk" comments or blog posts to inflate your count, we will either remove your ability to participate, or we may remove you from the site completely.

BiggerPockets Blogs Improvements

We've made several new improvements to our blogging system this morning that I thought important to share:

1. Members can now post to their blogs using either our WYSIWYG (simple) formatting system, or select the ADVANCED tab and create their blog posts using HTML.  We added the ability to use HTML so our members can have more control over their design.
   

   
   
   

   
   

2. We upgraded our Blog Customizer color picker.  The old one was a bit disorganized and we figured we'd simplify the process.
   

   
   
   

   
   

Thanks to all of you who have started blogging.  There are some great new blogs on the site (a few that aren't so great, too) that are well worth checking out! 

Jump on our main blog page and check them out!

We've integrated trackbacks into our blogging system to help out members communicate with other bloggers -- on site and off.

According to Wikipedia:

A Trackback is one of three types of Linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking, and so referring, to their articles. Some weblog software programs, such as Wordpress, Movable Type, Typo and Community Server, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published. The term is used colloquially for any kind of Linkback.

Our trackbacks should work with all of the major blogging systems.

How Trackbacks work on BiggerPockets Blogs

All you have to do is link to another blog post within your post.  You could link to a blog on BiggerPockets or any blog offsite, and the post that you link to will be notified that you're linking to them .

Linking to other blogs is a great way to gain publicity for your own articles, and to communicate with other bloggers.

Of course, you should not abuse these trackbacks, for the purpose of SPAM. 

Here's a few great points courtesy of RSSPieces:

• Each TrackBack allows you to have a conversation between blogs
• It is seen by the search engines as an emphasized link
• It is a courtesy for other bloggers to see where they are getting traffic from
• It will allow readers to follow an article between multiple blogs

Some Additional Resources on Trackbacks:

• What Are Trackbacks and How Do I Use Them?

• How a Trackback after a Comment Can Start a Relationship