It has taken over two years. It has been a long time coming, indeed...
On February 15, 2008, I had been a member of Active Rain for less than a year. In the previous year, I had written exactly four posts. I didn't know anything about blogging or social media...
But for some reason (perhaps desperation?), I made a commitment that day that I would start participating more on Active Rain...
As luck would have it, Jason Crouch wrote a post that same day titled, "How to generate and track backlinks for your Active Rain profile - A few basic SEO tips".
It answered a basic question for me. Why blog?
The answer? To dominate the search engines. Google. Yahoo. Search engine optimization (SEO)...
But for two years I floundered between page 3 and page 6 of Google for two major search terms, "Naperville Realtor" and "Naperville Real Estate".
Oh, I was writing a lot of posts (I have written almost 600). But I wasn't dominating the search engines for the key "search terms" like I had hoped...
But then I wrote a couple local real estate market reports in January. Then I wrote some more...
Then I made a goal. A month of local real estate market reports focusing on subdivisions in and around Naperville, Illinois.
I wrote 33 local market reports, hoping to accomplish two things:
- Generate more leads
- Improve my ranking for real estate related search terms on Google
Those reports have already gnerated more leads then I had hoped...
And this week, I have achieved my second goal...
I have climbed my way to the first page on Google for my primary search terms...
Check it out. Google "Naperville Realtor" or "Naperville Real Estate".
There I am. On Google's first page. Pretty cool...
Will I stay atop the Google "leaderboard"? And how much business will all this Google juice really generate?
I don't know, but I will not get complacent.
I have just finished my first quarter 2010 market reports for those same 33 neighborhoods. It was a lot of work, but I am achieving my goals through blogging...
I don't intend to stop.
Ken
