The Hub & Spoke Model, Pt. 2 – Establishing Your Spokes

In our previous post we introduced you to the Hub & Spoke model and how you can use it in establishing a great hub, or website, for your clients. For a quick refresher, we’ve placed a graphic below on how the model works. In this post, I’ll lay out  some additional strategies for setting up the spokes and leading traffic directly back to your hub.

Defining Your Spokes

So what exactly are the spokes in this model? Put simply, you won’t get as much value from your hub if you don’t have spokes, or links, leading people back to it. The spokes are the ways in which you amplify or share everything that’s located on your central hub. Very few people are going to know about that awesome blog post you just wrote, or the tour video you spent hours producing, if you don’t promote your content. Knowing the most effective way to get your content out and use it to drive people back to your site is critical to the success of the hub and spoke model.

• Email: Direct emails are a great way to send a message out to your client base that links directly back to your website. Make sure emails are timely and relevant otherwise your click-though rates won’t look to great and the content you shared won’t be engaged. Spread them out and make sure links back to your site are prominent throughout.

• Syndication: Do you subscribe to larger networks or websites within the real estate industry (i.e. RETechnology, Inman, Active Rain)? Networks like these are always looking for content to share through their daily or weekly emails to their members. Take the time to research and develop relationships with these networks in hopes that your content gets picked up!

• Guest Blogging: Not only is this a good way to lead people back to your hub, it’s just genuinely a valuable option when making connections in your market or industry. Offer to guest write for other industry related sites, it’ll help build your credibility and presence.

• Comments: Staying active doesn’t always mean you need to be the one creating the content. Providing valuable opinions, feedback and insights on other blogs, article etc. are a great way to increase your presence and web traffic as well. You don’t want to be that person that has tons of comments on your personal blog but never provides any feedback of your own!

• Social Media: This is probably one of the easiest ways to drive traffic back to your hub. Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are a great way to interact with your client base and amplify any existing content you may have.

While this only covers some of the major ways to create the spokes of your model, there are plenty of other opportunities such as YouTube videos, social advertising, search engine ads and more. Anything that leads directly back to your site or content hub is considered a spoke.

Learn how to use these spokes effectively to continue to drive traffic and potential leads back to your hub. The next question then becomes – you have all this traffic, now how do I manage it all? We’ll cover that in the final part of our Hub & Spoke Marketing series.