Install & set up your WordPress real estate blog now

WordPress - the only platform you should consider using for your real estate blog.

That’s not just our opinion, it’s the collective thoughts of a lot of bloggers, programmers, techies and other real estate agents out there.

The WordPress platform is free, easy to install and configure, Google friendly and it’s cheap to host.

As an added bonus many programmers have developed close to eight thousand  free ”plugins” to add functionality to individual users blogs – that can be downloaded and easily installed on your WordPress real estate blog.

More importantly WordPress can be set up so that it looks more like a normal real estate website with property search pages and blog attached to it.

This site was built entirely using WordPress

If you are really serious about creating an online real estate lead capture system, we are going show you, right here, how to set up your blog with a name of your choice and how to set it up with a hosting company.

This will give you a twofold advantage; you will own and have control of your WordPress real estate blog – and you will have a domain name that you can use for your professional email address (remember to stay away from your company email system).

So let’s get started.

There are two types of WordPress blog – tutorial here to explain the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org

Step 1: Domain name suitable for your real estate blog

If you are not sure how to choose a suitable name for your business or niche then click over to advice we offer here on how to choose a domain name for real estate agents.

Step 2: Choosing a hosting company

Free Setup.

We can set up and do the initial tweaking for your blog for free!

Hosting. Your website and it’s associated programs and files need to reside on a server connected to the internet provided by a hosting company.

We recommend HostGator - their support is first class and their prices competitive, so click over and sign up for hosting with Hostgator.

Step 3: Setting up WordPress for your real estate blog.

Now that your hosting account is set up, you will sign into your sites hosting dashboard. There is a program called Fantastico that will install WordPress for you in just a couple of clicks.

Out of the box WordPress will work just fine, but if you want to have any sort of traction in the search engines then you should click over for advice on search engine optimization for Realtors and get a good grasp of the basics before starting to write copy for your site.

Step 4: Layout and themes.

Lets talk about themes – the template for the site.There are thousands of WordPress themes available, many good ones are free and some, usually with extra features cost anywhere from a few dollars up to around $100. WordPress makes it easy to upload themes and try them out on your site.

Explanation: When you change templates you are not changing pages in the normal sense of the word. WordPress is a CMS – a content management system. All your pages and blog entries are actually stored in a database.

That’s why they can appear as pages, excerpts or archives depending on your users selection. So when you change templates all you are doing is changing the look and feel of the site – not the content. How cool is that!

The free templates don’t usually come with much or any support, so we strongly suggest paying for an adaptable theme that is well supported if you run into problems.

The AgentPress theme from Studio Press is very popular with real estate agents for their personal site.

Here is an example of one we did for Bill Hall in Las Vegas

We also really like the Thesis theme from Diy themes. It’s a very clean theme that can be easily customized and tweaked to create a site that will be easy on the eyes and easy to navigate.

This site is also based on the Thesis theme.

Thesis is literally anything you want it to be, a 3-column layout with your content in the middle, or a 2-column layout with content on the right. Absolutely your call as to which one you choose …

This Thesis site shows just how versatile the template really is!

Step 5: Uploading files to your site.

Themes and plugins can be be imported into your WordPress blog withing the dashboard by selecting “Add Theme” or Add Plugin”.

Step 6: WordPress plugins.

We touched on plugins earlier - here is a list of top 10 essential plugins that you should install on your real estate blog site.

Unlike other website and blogging platforms these plugins are nearly always free.

1. WordPress SEO by Yoest – makes adding titles and descriptions easy (not needed with Thesis)
2. Akismet – checks to see if comments are spam and block them
3. Feedburner Feedsmith – directs all RSS feeds to Feedburner
4. Deans FCKEditor – replaces the default editor, big improvement
5. SEO friendly images – adds tags to photos, improves traffic
6. WordPress related posts – keep visitors with a list of similar articles
7. Google Analytics for WordPress. Makes it simple to add Google Analytics
8. WP database backup. On-demand backup of your WordPress database.
9. Google XML sitemap. Will create a compliant XML sitemap for your blog
10. Digg Digg. Social Bookmarking Tool

All of these can be downloaded from the official WordPress Plugin Directory.

More WordPress real estate blog implementation suggestions:

Our blog installation service will install and configure all these plugins for you as part of the “Get up and going” set up service.

Tip. it’s very easy to get carried away with plugins, there are so many! Bear in mind that every active plugin slows down the loading of your site – so be warned!