The Art of Easter Egging To Gain Subscribers To Your Real Estate Blog
When it comes to readership on your real estate blog,
visitors are not nearly as important as Subscribers.
A subscriber is someone who recognizes the need to be notified as new content published to your real estate blog.
Traffic to your site that is generated by search engines and inbound links certainly has its value, but a returning visitor that is already convinced that they are impressed with your message, is a relationship.
Getting a visitor to make the decision to subscribe does not always happen in the context of the message of the blog’s articles. Often, your message is not unique, and it takes more than the article itself to convert visitors to subscribers.
Introducing the Blogging Easter Egg.
The Blogging Easter Egg is a hidden reward that adds extra dimension to the article. The dimension can be something such as humor, entertainment, innuendo, incentive, support or reference.
A little history…
The origin of the term Easter Egg is said to have come from an actual Easter Egg Hunt that took place on the set of the cult favorite movie, Rocky Horror Picture Show. Some of the eggs were left on the sets, and as a result, appeared in a few of the scenes.
Virtual Easter Eggs are hidden messages or treasures found in books, movies, video games, programs, songs, CDs, DVDs and now blogs and websites.
The intended effect of Easter Egging is to engage your audience to look beyond the obvious.
Nintendo’s Mario Bros. had me from the first discovery of their cleverly hidden rewards. Instead of growing bored with routine play, my friends and I invested 100’s of hours looking for secret levels, hidden power-ups and extra lives. We were hooked.
By including rewards and extras to your blog articles, you are engaging your audience beyond the obvious message, and enhancing their experience on your blog. It’s these details that can make or break a visitor’s decision to subscribe to your blog.
I have a saying: “In marketing, it’s overlooking the little things that gets you overlooked.”
Easter Egging is a perfect example of how to leverage the little things to make all the difference.
Adding Easter Eggs to your real estate blog is as easy as having something interesting and relevant to link to and something to engaging to say about it.
When you make the hyperlink in your blog’s text editor (WYSIWYG), you will have the option to add a ‘title’ to the link. There are SEO benefits by adding keyword rich text in the title, and as an Easter Egg, it’s your opportunity to be clever.
The enjoyment is in both the hidden message and the destination. To view the hidden message, you simply need to roll your mouse arrow over the link, and if there is a title tag added to the link, it will pop-up for you to read. You visitor will not always ‘find’ your eggs, but once they do, they will look for all of them.
Similarly, you can also add title tags to your images (rollover the images in this article). When your visitor rolls their mouse over the image, a similar pop-up, text message will appear. **Advanced Note: In most cases, when adding the “title tag” to your images, the HTML writes this as an “alt” tag and unfortunately, this does display on images in Firefox. In order to make the Easter Egg message appear in Firefox you will need to manually add the “title tag” to the anchor in the HTML.
How does this help your blog develop subscribers from your visits?
When you are engaging your audience with a dimension of entertainment beyond the blog article’s obvious message, you are illustrating to your readers that you care about their experience on your real estate blog, and in turn, they will see the value of this effort. These clever details can make your site stand out among those competing for the same audience.
This post was inspired by my addiction to reading Soxaholix.com. Hart Brachen (Heart Breaking), the site’s author is a master of weaving Easter Eggs into his strip: pop entertainment, literature, history, and of course Red Sox columns. I look forward to his characters dialogues as much as the destinations that his links send us.
