I was recently speaking with an agent in my area that wanted to set up a series of neighborhood-specific websites. He plans on setting up about 3-5 neighborhood sites with the hopes that they will drive qualified traffic back to his main site so he can get more leads. Sounds like a great idea… but my question was: How do you plan on writing all those articles while simultaneously building backlinks to each one? It seems easy, but its not.
Optimizing and building links for a single website can quickly become a full-time job depending on how ambitious you are. I cant imagine a full-time agent trying to launch and manage over 3 blogs at the same time when he/she doesn’t even have one going. Although local search is blowing up, and blogging is the new “thing” for all agents to get into. Sometimes you need to take baby-steps to get off the ground.
This isn’t the only agent I know that quickly made an ambitious plan to start a series of sites all at once. I can understand how, as an internet rookie, you can read an article or hear a seminar about blogging and feel like you have to become the master of your area overnight. You can do it, but not overnight.
Start with one site, and make categories for each subdivision if you want. Try to build your empire under one domain to start with. Every article you write will be just as likely to rank for your chosen neighborhood keywords as a “special URL” you set up… and it will help you FOCUS your SEO efforts on ONE site. Not five.
Don’t start a junk blog for every subdivision in your town thinking that you will eventually “find” people who want to write for your blog for dirt cheap. And don’t think you can drive traffic or get leads from a keyword-stuffed splog, because it does nothing but waste valuable time you could be using to write a good relevant article on your main site.
