Real Estate is one thing that people always say appreciates in value. As a business owner, you realize that the land that your business is on is worth a certain amount of money as well as the physical building that your business is in is worth a certain amount of money. The reason that you know this is that you have invested money in buying the land as well as the building so that your business can survive and thrive.
The problem with buying real estate is that it is often expensive, very expensive. As a business owner, you are typically trying to keep your costs down and your profits up and if you are to be building your business and investing in your business, you can not possibly have the time to dabble in real estate, right?
WRONG!
I’d like to introduce you to something that I like to call virtual real estate. What is virtual real estate?
In simple terms, it is something that you own; such as a domain name, blog or a website that provides income for your business whether you are working or not. If you currently have an e-commerce store set up for your business, you already own some virtual real estate and may not have even been aware of it. Having an e-commerce store is just like having your store open 24/7 except you don’t need to be working in order to make sales. Cha-ching, I know you can hear the cash register ringing now. If you don’t have an e-commerce store set up yet, you need to get on the ball and hire someone to create a site for you. 
photo credit: David Boyle
Creating virtual assets is one of the greatest things you can invest your money in as a business owner, whether it’s buying a domain name and creating a blog that has adsense ads placed on it so that you are generating income from Google, or if you are using your website to sell affiliate products or products from your store, this is a very important thing to have.
A blog is an essential piece of virtual real estate that you must invest in. The reason for this is quite simple. Google loves fresh content, they love new things that are uploaded to the web and things that are relevant to what people are looking for. Blogs allow your business to post content that is relevant to your audience.
For example, if you are a chiropractor who is looking to gather more clients through the Internet, you need to be posting content that people are looking for online and base blog posts on what people are actively looking for. Why does this work? It builds trust and establishes you as a leader in the eyes of the person looking on Google for your services. Let’s take an example here. I’m currently living in Buffalo, NY so i’d type in “Buffalo, NY Chiropractor” if I was to be looking for a chiropractor in the area. This is what would show up:
Alright, so you see that there are a ton of results that show up. As a prospective customer, I realize that I’d like to get to know a little bit about the chiropractor I am going to see before I go into the office. I’d typically click on a few of the top results and check out their websites. Depending on how professional the web site looks I make a judgment right off the bat about this chiropractor. (We say we’re not judgmental, but we all are and people buy you with their eyes)
If there is a blog that I can visit on one of these results, I will typically look up what types of articles are on their blog and whether or not they have an article listed about the problem I currently have. Maybe it’s a sore neck from a car accident. Does this chiropractor have information for me explaining how chiropractic care could help fix my sore neck? If not I feel like checking out the next chiropractors site to see if they can help make my neck feel better. Remember people like free content and a blog often addresses a problem and provides a solution for the reader.
If you currently only have a static web page , you are missing out on the SEO benefits for your web site as well as the opportunity to let me know how chiropractic care can make my neck feel better. The problem with static web pages is that the content isn’t updated and this doesn’t give the search engines the opportunity to spider for new content. This is a huge missed opportunity for all businesses that currently have a site set up, but have ignored it for the past year or more.
Have you been doing this with your website?
It’s perfectly okay if you have been doing this and have a web site that has been the same for the past year. That’s how the web used to function and there has just been a slight adaption over the past 2-3 years that you may not have been alerted by from your web developer or IT guy. (They’re often busy playing with computers and stuff)
However, I’m here to let you know that you need to create a blog for your business if you are to continue doing business in this day and age as well as reap the benefits from this.
Investing in virtual real estate is something that will pay off for you as long as you take the time to find the right person or team for the job and communicate with them about what you want.
