Let’s say that you have a home builder blog or are thinking of starting one. Great! You’ve created an editorial calendar and have a list of topics or need to gather a few ideas.
You work hard to promote your blog and you’ve successfully increased traffic to your website. But how can you draw a direct line between blog visitors and actual sales?
The secret to creating a home builder blog as an effective home builder marketing strategy is in converting blog visitors to opt-in leads. This gives your sales team the opportunity to move online visitors to in person sales office visits (and sales).
There are four key ways to convert blog visitors to home builder leads:
1. Blog Subscription (by email or RSS)
2. Register email to respond to call to action (such as download brochure)
3. Become a fan of your Facebook page
4. Follow you on Twitter
Each of these opt-ins gives you the opportunity to continue to communicate with potential buyers and drive them to the next step in the sales process: the sales office visit.
The first rule of increasing conversion on your blog is to provide great content. The second rule is to ask for the conversion and make it easy for visitors to register. The third rule is to keep them on the page. If you link your visitors away to your Facebook page, Twitter feed, or other third party site your opportunity to convert visitors to leads decreases dramatically.
Fortunately, if you run your blog on WordPress there are several free plugins that are easy to install that can convert your blog to a conversion machine in a matter of minutes.
Here are a few that we like:
WP Greet Box Plugin
The WP Greet Box Plugin enables you to customize a message based on which website referred the visitor to your blog. WP Greet Box includes a long list of social networks and search engines that you can customize. Each customized message invites visitors to register or share your blog page. Another impressive feature of WP Greet Box is that it can identify which keywords visitors used to find you, and then it suggests related articles in your blog which draws visitors deeper into your site.
Facebook Fan Box Widget
The Facebook Fan Box Widget allows visitors to “Like” your Facebook page without ever leaving your blog. You can see a sample of this in our sidebar. Like us to see how it works for your blog visitors.
TweetMeMe Follow Button Plugin
There’s a few things that we like about the TweetMeMe Follow Button plugin. Most importantly, it enables you to build your Twitter followers without taking visitors away from your site. It also brings up an overview of your presence on Twitter for visitors to see including your followers, who you follow, and recent activity. There are a lot of Twitter plugins, but if they lead visitors away from your blog (even to your Twitter page) it decreases your conversion, and conversion of visitors to leads is one of the primary jobs of a home builder blog.
Feedburner Plugin
Feedburner is a free service from Google that enables visitors to subscribe easily by email or RSS (our subscription box at the top right of the page is a customized Feedburner form). When visitors subscribe through Feedburner they will receive your blog updates automatically. This works similar to an email campaign in that it can easily communicate new incentives, promotions, testimonials, positive market news, videos, and recent successes directly to your audience’s inbox (or reader).
Gravity Forms Plugin
To increase conversion on your blog, you may want to offer visitors something for registering, such a brochure download. For this you will want to be able to customize a registration form. There are a lot of ways to do this if you know a little HTML, but the easiest way is with Gravity Forms. There is a fee for this plugin, but after testing several free forms plugins we think the $39 price is worth every penny. Gravity Forms is incredibly easy to use while still offering flexibility. Gravity Forms also offers add-ons for integration with Constant Contact and MailChimp. The free report download at the bottom of this post was created with Gravity Forms. You can register for the download to see how flexible this is by redirecting visitors who register to a specific page and sending an auto-responder message.
For all of the plugins listed here there are many options to choose from, these are the ones we happen to like. The exact plugin that you choose is not as important as the strategy behind it – to attract, engage, and convert blog visitors to new leads.
One Comment on "How To Turn Your Home Builder Blog Into a Lead Conversion Machine"
These are absolutely amazing tips! Particularly I think Facebook has become a great platform recently for home builders to connect with people and promote their work. I have seen a Boston home builder really make it big with some simple strategies like blogging and social networking as mentioned above.