A real estate website has become standard for almost every real estate professional. Not nearly as many are blogging, however. The reason most often given is the time involved and the inability to create good content on a regular basis. If you can’t create new posts regularly, then a blog may not be for you. However, even if it’s just one each week, the search engines love blogs. Once they discover your posting frequency, they’ll be sending robots over to index your content regularly. A blog really isn’t difficult to pull off, and you can get help for the spelling and grammar if you need it. Here are five tips for successful real estate blogging.
1) Start with a Plan
Don’t just jump in and start writing blog posts. Put together a plan with specific goals for your blogging. For most real estate professionals, the major goals are to build traffic to their website/blog and generate leads for business. For this first step, break out your blog topics by category or tag to have your blog organized for visitor convenience. Most will have a tab/category/tag for Buyers, another for Sellers, possibly one for Investors, a Neighborhoods tab, and maybe one for Transaction Process.
2) Set Your Schedule-Editorial Calendar
This is a simple calendar with a schedule for when you want each post to be published live. This is where you begin to set out your suggested post titles. Have a title idea for each scheduled post. Where do you get these title ideas? This is what most real estate professionals consider the second most difficult task, but really it’s quite easy. All you have to do is begin to write down every question anyone asks you related to real estate. Go back through your emails and any other notes to find questions. Every question is a probable blog post, as the answer is what you write about.
3) Write Mostly Evergreen Content
Evergreen means content that’s good forever, or at least for long periods of time. It’s OK to have timely content and current events, even helpful in keeping visitors interested. However, over a long period of time, good content will begin to attract the search engines. You want your visitors who see you in their search results to be arriving at content that’s relevant whenever they arrive.
4) Have a Category for Market Statistics
The single biggest lead generator for your blog can be the statistics posts. You can create a number of highly informative reports out of the MLS system, and everything there is going to be of interest to buyers, sellers, and investors. Sold property reports by neighborhood, DOM, Days On Market reports, and others can be quickly converted to PDF files for email delivery. Some of the information can be in your blog posts, perhaps summaries with your commentary. Then you offer full reports for various reporting periods, monthly, quarterly, or annually by email to get the lead contact information.
5) Always Think Internal Linking
The more visitors stay on your site and the more they move around, the better the search engines like you. They see a visitor moving from one page to others on your site, and the assumption is that your site has useful information.
Use the tips and keep creating original blog content and you’ll begin to see results in more traffic and more leads.
