Fact: Blogging is huge!

Fact: People pay attention to commercial real estate bloggers.

Fact: A blog is an extraordinary medium – really; who would have thought!

Fact: A Blog is not only easy to set up but it’s FREE

Just think about how blogs have changed the way people receive their news. Major news networks and papers were the only venues where people got their news – not anymore. . .Blogs have given everyday people with something to say the ability to become a reporter.

Traditional news sources have lost credibility and the New Media has taken its place. New Media consists of mediums such as blogs and satellite talk radio. Blogs are rapidly gaining the status of ‘trusted’ news outlets.

And we have already established that people believe what they see and read in writing. Blogs allow you a way to provide unbiased, useful, and informative information to the commercial real estate world. It will allow you to build a loyal following.

And here’s another fact: People will always remember you dared to voice an opinion – but generally won’t remember what that opinion was. The lesson? It is more valuable to have an opinion than not.

What can a blog do for you? A blog will give you a venue to build and establish an online presence, be viewed as an expert, generate leads, post resources, showcase listings, express opinions, receive comments and so on and so on.

The best place to start when building a blog is WordPress. WordPress is the premier blogging platform. It’s stable, secure and has thousands of templates and plug-ins and most are free. It’s also simple and fairly easy to delegate. Most of the major news outlets use WordPress, even the White House (www.whitehouse.gov).

So let’s get started — Strap yourself in for a ride because there is a lot of information that we have to go over. Before I start any project or business I always like having a mindset where I “commit to finish” (if that made sense). I can recall plenty of times in the past were I started a certain project and later gave up because I was no longer excited or interested.

Select a domain name from www.godaddy.com – $10.95 for a .com name. Try and avoid dashes. Lean towards buying a domain that ends with .com because they are more acceptable and their value will increase with your site.

Choose a host – I recommend www.Bluehost.com — It’s – $6.95/month. Another good one is www.hostgator.com; you can even host at www.godaddy.com. This is where you want your domain name to point to. Login to wherever you purchased your domain name and change your nameserver settings to match the ones you received from Bluehost, Hostgator; in other words, your hosting company. If you’re not sure where to change these setting, simply contact your domain registers support team. If you’re registered with GoDaddy or any of the TOP domain registrars out there they will normally have 24×7 technical support.

Install WordPress – You want to install WordPress now. Don’t worry this is NOT complicated at all!

Here’s the Step by Step:

1. Log into your cPanel by entering the following into your address bar. www.yourdomain.com/cpanel you will be prompted to enter you username and password. This should have come with the email your hosting company sent you.
2. Once your logged in you want to look for “Software / Services” and click on “WordPress”.
3. On the next page simply click “Install” then you will enter all the required information and follow the rest of the steps.
4. In the area called Step 2 click “Click here to display >” and make sure that the “Generate a random Administrator username and password for me.” and “Automatically create a new database.” Boxes are checked.
5. Click on the Complete button and YOUR DONE! The whole installation only takes about 2 minutes. Be sure to write down your administrator username and password.

That was too easy, right? There’s nothing complicated at all about setting up a blog, thanks to WordPress!

At this point you should have completed the following steps:

1. Purchased a Domain Name *if necessary
2. Hosted Your Blog
3. Installed WordPress

Now your blog is ready to receive traffic and generate commercial real estate leads!

Optimize Your Blog for SEO

Once you have your blog up and running, there are a few things that you want to do so that the search engines will simply love your site! Since you are using WordPress, it makes it easier to accomplish this because of the plugins you can install on your blog. Have fun and good luck with it.

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