While the majority of our clients utilize the Point2 Agent platform to provide themselves with tools including websites, prospect incubation (drip email), lead capture, listing presentation, listings syndication and more, the question of should I use the (semi) integrated blog that Point2 provides or should I focus efforts on an external blog whether it be Wordpress, Blogger or a real estate platform such as Active Rain, and the answer to the question depends upon the time, energy and SEO needs of the individual agents website.

Creating a blog is a great way to constantly add new, relevant SEO content for your website. When deciding on where to create your blog however, you have several options:

An internal blog is a blog that is hosted directly on your website. This is a great opportunity to attract new visitors to your website through organic search engine results that feature your relevant keywords.

It also ensures the presence of new relevant content each time the search engines spider the website, in a market in which the competition level is high for the desirable traffic rich keywords this "freshness" indicating a highly active and current site may be the factor that puts your site above your competitors.

An external blog is a blog that is hosted outside of your website and stands alone. This type of blog is allows visitors to find your SEO content and direct them back to your website, which helps you build the kind of backlinks that add to your website's search engine ranking.

Ideally, both options are great online marketing strategies. Creating blogs both inside and outside of your website will help the overall effectiveness of your SEO content and linking strategies, if you have the resources (through your own staff or outsourced) to maintain blogs on a variety of subjects. 

For example, an internal blog on your website can generally cover the subjects that are relevant to your company overall such as local market trends, new listings, price changes, open houses, etc. while an external blog can go into detail about a specific practice area or regional focus, i.e. - local events, neighborhood profiles, local policy changes, zoning bylaws, local building codes etc.

Identifying which way to go for you and implementing the solution in a manner that results in an effective workflow can be daunting, if you need assistance consider the services of Effective Realty Sites