As part of your overall digital strategy, you probably have a lot of things you’re doing to keep yourself top-of-mind with your clients and ahead of your competitors. One of the things that most agents overlook is having a robust, informative blog. In my opinion, that’s a big mistake.
15+ years ago, there weren’t a lot of real estate agents investing in their blog strategy. So the ones that did, and continued to do so, have a huge advantage right now over the ones that didn’t.
Chances are, their websites are more authoritative, have more visitors, and show up in a lot more search results for various topics. In short, they’re winning the content race because they’ve had such a great head start.
The first thing to know about writing and keeping up with a blog is that it’s a lot of work; there’s no doubt about that. It takes a lot of time and effort to come up with ideas about what to write about in the first place and then set aside all the time necessary to write them in a high-quality, well-structured post. You know who else recognizes that blogging is a lot of work? Google.
That’s why Google gives preference in their search algorithms to websites that have a lot of content that is posted often and with consistency. The idea is that the more content you have, the more chances you have of showing up in search results, and the more ‘authoritative’ your site will be in the eyes of various search engines. But…
The most important thing about having a blog is understanding that when it comes to blogging, quality content is absolutely king. In fact, if your blog is full of low-quality content that’s irrelevant, written completely for SEO, and isn’t very well written, it can actually hurt your search rankings, no matter how much of it you have and how much of it you post.
If your real estate blog isn’t filled with high-quality, well-researched and well-written content, inline with your target audience and business, you probably shouldn’t even have a blog at all.
So how do you produce quality content? What do you even write about? How often do you post? Those are all important questions, but they have an easy answer: it’s all about your target audience, which is who you should be writing your blog for in the first place.
Ask yourself, what does my audience care about? How am I trying to position myself as an expert to them? A lot of agents simply post content that they’re interested in, like images of real estate market stats. The fact is, not everyone cares about those statistics. Some people do, of course, but if those people aren’t in your audience then you shouldn’t be writing about it.
When people ask me how often they should be posting on their blog, many don’t like the answer, which is: as often as you can write high-quality informative content that is relevant to your audience. I’d say for the average agent though, that’s about once a week.
Posting consistent, high-quality content on your blog is an important part of your strategy around reaching the people you want and building a connection with them. If you can’t write it, outsource it.
There are a ton of options out there for outsourcing content, but you should keep a few things in mind when looking to a third-party for help:
- Make sure they understand real estate, your target audience, and your goals.
- Make sure they know your voice. After all, the person writing your blog is effectively pretending to be you, so it should really, really sound like you.
- Make sure you know what they’re writing. There’s nothing worse than a potential client telling you that they loved the piece you wrote about on a topic, and you stare at them not knowing what they’re talking about.
- Make sure that they are only using the content they write on your website and nowhere else. There are services out there that resell content over and over, and content on your website that is duplicated elsewhere can really hurt your rankings. Your content should be original and authentic.
Full disclosure, Artifakt provides content services that meet all of the above, so if you want more info about it and about how we can build your blog strategy, click here to let us know.
Blogging isn’t anything new. It’s been around as long as the Internet itself, but just because it isn’t new doesn’t mean it should be ignored. There are a lot of successful agents out there that are completely crushing it, largely because they have a strong following around their blog and they’ve invested heavily in having a blog as part of their overall marketing strategy.
Want to plan your digital strategy on your own, and set your business up for success? Download our workbook: ‘The Digital Business Planning Workbook’. It’s a self-guided, interactive, strategic workbook where you answer questions about branding, SEO, content, design, and a lot more, so you can set goals for your website and your digital marketing efforts. And, it’s free to download.
