Categories: General

How-To Guide: Start Blogging about Local Real Estate

Blogging is the most effective way to land more deals; period!

Before any of your ideal prospects pick up the phone to call you or use your website’s “Contact Us” form; they would first consult Google. Most home buyers or sellers spend weeks, sometimes even months, before they reach out to a real estate agent.

When they have questions about how the home buying or selling process works, information about your community (an indication they want to live there) or general information about your market, they turn to Google for answers. Blogging provides the answers that Google provides in those search results.

This article will walk you through the steps a real estate agent needs to follow to start blogging about Real Estate in their Local Market:

Set up your website and choose a responsive blog template

Consider a well designed website where you can post your listings before you even consider setting up your blog. Your blog is meant to do three (3) things:

Drive traffic to your website to grow your audience
Engage and retain the attention of your audience
Build trust and credibility with your audience to motivate them to do business with you

On the other hand, your website allows you to put up your listings with picture galleries and catchy descriptions in ways that a blog simply can’t.

Once your website is up, do a quick Google search for “blog templates” and you will see many different options to choose from. Choose one that is mobile responsive

Pro Tip: Hosting your blog separately makes it easy to outsource your content marketing needs due to the large number of articles that will need written to attract leads.

Create SEO optimized, high value content for your ideal prospects

Content is the words and the images that you use to make each blog post. That is why content marketing is a very instrumental to the success of your blogging. Content marketing is the process of creating and optimizing high quality content to generate leads for a business.

Having a content marketing strategy is necessary if you want your blogging to yield results. The sheer amount of content you need to create to start seeing results is a lot which is why many real estate agents outsource their content marketing needs. If you decide to handle your content, you need to follow these steps:

Decide on what topics to write about. Make your blog titles catchy and have relevant keywords. If you’re struggling for blog tips you can read our article on <good blog topic ideas for real estate agent. Research Google for keywords that people using to search for real estate problems and write at least 3 blog articles for each keyword.
Make your content easy to read. Be careful with search engine optimization (SEO); don’t stuff your article with keywords. Instead, use them where they fit in naturally. Make your article easy to read by including section headings or lists where possible so that people can easily jump to the part of your post that interests them. Avoid typos and bad grammar. Consider hiring a proof reader and editor to brush up each article before posting online.
Use high quality images in your articles. You can design custom images or use free stock photos online. Make sure your listings have high quality pictures as well. Consider hiring a professional photographer to take photos of your listings.
Add a call to action (CTA) in your posts. Before writing your CTA, consider who your article is addressing first. Decide whether the post applies to either buyers or sellers; this way you can have a more directed CTA. Ensure that each CTA involves contacting you.

Pro Tip: Your CTA is the most important part of your content marketing strategy because it helps generate leads. It can be in many forms such as a free resource (e-book or whitepaper), a landing page form, or a request for a phone call for free consultation.

Promote your content

Good content drives traffic to your website and ultimately help you get deals. Good content helps you build trust and engage your audience so they keep coming back for more. But people must first see your content before they visit your website or come back for more. Promotion is the solution. Most real estate agents create a good piece of content and post it on their blog and expect traffic to come. It usually doesn’t. What you need to do is:

Post your blog articles on social media (Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin) – regularly. Don’t post once and forget about it. Promote each blog post for at least 3 months
Promote your best content through social media ads. Facebook allows you to boost your post while Linkedin and Twitter offer sponsored and promoted posts respectively
Post your blog articles on Facebook and Linkedin Groups that your ideal prospects are likely to hang out. But remember to be active on these groups and answer questions; not just spamming them with your new blog post.

Pro Tip: Use Linkedin’s blogging platform to post your blog articles as well and link back to other blog posts on your website. Consider a SlideShare version of your most popular blog posts as well. They will help with SEO.