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.

Happy Holidays everyone!  We launched a few changes to the BiggerPockets site this afternoon that I thought worth sharing.

• Members can now share their real estate wants and needs on their profiles in the Currently Seeking section.  Whether you're looking for properties, partners, money, clients, etc. you can share these so others on the site can more easily connect and work with you.
• We've drastically sped up the Dashboard and other areas of the site!  Regular members will see a big change!
• We've upgraded the recent forum posts section of the Dashboard to make it easier to navigate.
• Corrected several problems in the BiggerPockets Blogging platform.  Users will no longer see blank trackbacks on their articles;  we've also fixed a few bugs in the comments.
• Improved pagination issues throughout the site.
• Fixed several bugs in the member password reset system.  

BiggerPockets is not only a community for sharing knowledge, for networking, and making deals, but it is also a marketing platform for people in the real estate space.

Here are several easy ways to use BiggerPockets to market yourself and your business:

• Create a Detailed, Professional Profile with Photo - BiggerPockets profiles have been designed to give you the opportunity to share information about yourself and your business with the rest of the community and the world.  Our profiles are search engine optimized and can be found on all the major search engines.  They give people a way to find out about your contact information, experience, goals, and of course, your activity on BiggerPockets.  Profiles that are not completely filled in do not appear in our networking page or site's front page.  A complete profile means one that includes an avatar or image.  If you don't want to share a photo of yourself, find a picture that matches and use it. Remember, profiles with photos get a TON more traffic!

• Create a signature and get active on the forums - Our forums are visited by thousands of people every day.  If you're an active forum participant, you can easily start building a good reputation among the community.  Those people who prove to be knowledgeable and helpful to others often get a TON of business from their participation on the forums. I know some people who became so flooded with business that sadly, they could no longer participate!

  Part of getting noticed is having a signature at the bottom of all of your posts.  You'll want to edit your profile and select the signature tab to create your sig.  Make sure your company name is accurate in your profile, and select the "Use my name and company in my forum signature" button.   Then use the blank space next to "Forum Signature" to enter your website URL, phone number, or email address (if you want people reading your posts to see this info).

• Create a Blog - BiggerPockets Blogs are easy to set up and use and require no programming knowledge.  We've essentailly created our own proprietary blogging platform that not only allows you to communicate with the world, but helps promote you.  BiggerPockets has implemented many search engine optimizing features to help you get your name out there by blogging.  The key to successful blogging, however, is not just having a blog, but having one that shares Quality content.  If your blog is just full of spammy crap, no one is going to visit your profile, website, or anything else.  Check out some more of the blog's features.

• Write some Articles - BiggerPockets has built a phenominal article directory for the benefit of both the average real estate consumer or investor and for the benefit of the articles' authors.  Since we're talking about marketing benefits here, we'll focus on the authors.  All articles on BiggerPockets give the author a place to create a byline/signature.  This is the perfect place to market yourself:  share links to your website, tell folks what you're up to, promote your latest book.  Our articles are viewed by tens of thousands of people every month both on site and through our articles feed.  Why wouldn't you want some added exposure?

• Participate in BiggerPockets Bulletin - BiggerPockets Bulletin is a real estate social bookmarking tool that allows members to post interesting real estate related news and other links to share.  Our members can then make comments on these articles or vote on those that they find most interesting.  Got an interesting article or story that you wrote?  Share it on the bulletin!  With participation comes visibility . . . with visibility comes just what you're looking for - free marketing.

• Join or Create a Group - Groups are a great way for people of similar interest to come together.  Being part of a group on BiggerPockets allows you to be seen by those people, and bring renewed exposure within your own, mini-community.

• Just Get Involved! - We've created an incentive system for those members who get involved on the site.  Our stats page highlights the most active members of the day, week, month, and all-time.  This page is visited my tons of members, and the search engines alike.  Show up on the stats page because you're active, and you're going to see more traffic to your profile!

BiggerPockets has established a blogging system so our users can communicate with one another and the rest of the world!

Posting is Fast and EASY!

 Formatting is a SNAP and so is inserting photos and movies.

 See!

So . . . jump in and create your own blog on BiggerPockets Today!