Real estate blogs are certainly not unheard of, but they are not as common as real estate websites. A blog—especially embedded into your website—can give you an opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge, as well as your personality. Blogging quality content can help position you as an expert in your field and your community and can help you attract prospective home buyers.
In fact, attracting is the first step in this inbound marketing technique. Inbound marketing is a four-part process and has proven to be the most effective marketing method for doing business online since 2006, according to Hubspot. Instead of outbound marketing methods such as direct mail, cold calling, and knocking on doors, inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be. By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can then convert, close, and delight over time.
It’s all about bringing potential customers to you, rather than having your marketing efforts fight for their attention. Sharing is caring and inbound marketing is about creating and sharing content with the world. By writing blog posts and creating content specifically designed to appeal to your dream customers, inbound attracts qualified prospects to your business and keeps them coming back for more.
6 Blogging Tips To Help Realtors Attract Home Buyers:
Plan. Plan. Plan.
Planning should be your first step. As our friends at Coschedule tell us this does not have to be a daunting task or even a time-consuming one. Having a good plan will set each post up for a greater level of success as it will increase the likelihood of higher quality content.
Blog often while keeping in mind the need for quality content
Getting the frequency you post right, is a key factor in the success of your blog. Hub spot tells us, “Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5X more traffic than companies that published between 0 – 4 monthly posts.” That said it is possible to overdo it as well, more posts do not automatically equate to more visitors or more importantly more leads. Each post needs to bring value to the reader.
Include at least one image in each post
The power of a strong relevant image in your blog post should not be underestimated. Images help us engage our audience, and helps our audience retain more of the information that we are sharing with them. Hubspot wrote a great article on this very topic, check it out.
Keep your posts between 500 and 2500 words
Why the big range you ask? This point is often debated about across the web and ultimately it comes down to what your goals are. Longer posts are better for SEO and help you build credibility as a thought leader but they also take longer to write and longer to read. Short articles are easy to read and write and allow you to publish at a higher frequency. We believe that incorporating a healthy mix of the two is a good strategy. In our research for this post we came across a great post on this topic by ProBlogger see if it resonates with you.
Promote your blog posts through social media or newsletters you send out
If you write it they will not just come. You must promote each post, and one of the easiest ways to do this is through social distribution. Meaning once you complete a post share it across your social channels. One of our favorite tools for to help with this is Coschedule they make it incredibly easy to automate the distribution process. When distributing your post keep in mind that you need to be cognizant of which platform you are posting on and using it in the correct context. Here is a helpful post on this subject.
Read other real estate blogs and your local newspaper for topic ideas
Do you ever find yourself lacking ideas to write about? I know I do. This can be the cause of extreme frustration and often times can lead us to quit before we even get started. Staying up with trends and understanding who your competitors are in this space can be very helpful at getting over this hump. There are many posts on how or where to get inspiration for your writing, here is one of them. As the saying goes, “Leaders are readers” and I believe great writers are heavy readers as well.
Add a Call-to-Action at the end of your post
If you want the prospect to take the next step you have to ask, it is that simple. This is true online just as much as it is offline. If you want a referral ask, If you want to sell their house, ask, if you want to help them buy their next house, ask. This principal is not new, in Biblical times the says went “ask and you shall receive”. Sure there are acceptions but they are just that, acceptions. Bottom line you need to be using CTAs in all of your posts. Here is another great article to help you learn more about what makes a great CTA.
Please leave us a comment letting us know if this was helpful.