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. 

Ask if you need help. – Click for some video from Matt Cutts on this topic and its SEO value.

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.

Related Must Read
Another Easter Egg Hidden In The Real Estate Blog

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Tags: Easter+Eggs, Real+estate+blogging, blogging+advice, blog+subscribers

Comments

[Scoot]

Good post. I checked out the soxoholix site, thats a very cool place.

I really like your design here though. Good color, and someone knows how play with css.

Most importantly what you are saying is spot on. It's like when you're a kid and you go "exploring" in the woods. Not because you have a mission but b/c you are checking out whats out there, seeing new things, finding all kinds of animals.

[Deborah Burns]

Kind of like Cracker Jack's "Prize Inside"! I never thought of there being an opportunity to create a "prize" or verbal joke inside the hyperlink by writing a clever keyword phrase. Interesting idea.

[The Pink Couch- Sandi Bauman]

Jim- I'm glad you made a point of mentioning that the picture titles don't show up in Firefox-- I had no idea why I wasn't seeing them anymore! As a result, I've probably been a little lax in including them :(

[Jim Cronin]

This was a fun post. I've found when so many have such similar messages, sometimes it's the attention to details that gets me hooked.

[Clearwater Beach Real Estate]

Jim, I love the idea of an Easter Egg hunt - of course I am a huge fan of the hunt - it hooks me too. Glad to see you back and full of wisdom. I agree getting subcribers is important - I actually took a challenge with a friend for the next 30 days trying to grow my subcribership by 100 - we'll see what happens - I'll have to find some eggs to hide - hmmm. - Cyndee Haydon

[Sara]

Jim: another great "nugget" of information. I've missed your posts, glad to have you back.

[Jim Cronin]

Sara,

I too am glad to be back. We took a much needed vacation over the last couple of weeks and are fully charged and ready to rumble. Look for a lot of growth going into the end of the year!

[Brent]

Good to have you back in action. I look forward to hearing more about your trip. Talk to you soon.

[Brian Wilson]

This is great. Thanks for provoking me to think more about what exactly goes into my blogs and Web sites, especially about tagging/titling links. This might be kind of random, but a great Easter-Egg-filled site is homestarrunner.com, a very funny flash cartoon site. They have Easter Eggs everywhere, and I'm always moving my mouse around to try and find them all!

Brian Wilson, Zolve.com

[Athol Kay]

The majorty of my blog images have easter egg titles on my blog. I have no clue why hardly anyone else does this. Sometimes the image doesn't make sense without the easter egg.

Here's an example http://tinyurl.com/2kn4db

P.S. Screw Firefox users :-)

[Jim Cronin]

Athol,

Great use of the EE there! Didn't get one on the rollover of your pic... perhaps we can run a caption contest for you.

[cindy]

Ah more words of wisdom and learning to do!

[Brian LeBars]

Hey Jim...

Do you need the services of a good Loan Advisor? = ) I may know one who would love your referrals!!! = )

Great class today. Can't wait to hide some eggs on my site!

[Janis Gagliardi]

It's addicting.The hunt is on! I'm rolling over every link now to find a surprise!!! I Easter egg most of my pics usually with boring text. Might have to spice it up a bit. Thanks for the Easter egg lesson on adding title to links, Jim.

[Joanne Hanson]

thanks Jim, I have been titling links and images and thinking of SEO, but not making it fun! I think I have to start doing that...

[Christina Ward]

Great article, full of informative information. Thanks Jim

[David Small]

Great information! The Mario Bros analogy is awesome!!

[Ricardo Bueno]

And all this time I thought that adding a Title to the hyperlink was of no consequence. Tisk, tisk... Thanks for teaching me something new!

[Steve Winters]

With more and more internet users switching to Firefox and the importance of "titles", one would hope Firefox will implement this in a future release.